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More "Effeminate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was steaming full speed E.S.E. from Levuka. On the bridge was Commander Arness talking to the navigating lieutenant, a young and almost effeminate-looking officer. ...
— Officer And Man - 1901 • Louis Becke
... on the verandah awaiting her coming. Even though one was her brother, she could not restrain a feeling of contempt as she looked upon their white faces, soft hands, and immaculate clothes. Why should men, she asked herself, be so ready and willing to give themselves completely up to effeminate habits when their blood was hot within them, and the great Open was calling them with ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... of the piece. Occasionally the entire composition is morbid and unsatisfactory to a degree. These belong to the later period of his life, when he was in poor health. He is a woman's composer. In his strongest moments there is always an effeminate element. In this respect he is exactly opposite to Schumann and Beethoven, whose works, however delicate and refined, have always a manly strength. Chopin made the most important modifications in the current way of treating the piano. In this ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... their unrighteousness. Unreasonable brutes, Peter calls them, as though they had within them not a spark of anything that smacked of spirit, performed no spiritual duty that they should do, but lived like the fool, and became effeminate through a carnal life. But in that he says they are naturally born to be taken and destroyed, it may be understood in a two-fold manner: first, as of those that take and destroy, such as the wolf, lion, bear, the sparrow-hawk and eagle,—so these grasp to themselves, and tear away from ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... effeminate life, spiritual sloth, and criminal neglect are responsible for this kind ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... their ancestors, extending over nearly two centuries, did the most to make them the brave and proud people they are. It is through the effects of these chiefly that they have been kept from becoming indolent and effeminate. They are now strong, fearless, haughty, and independent. But the near future is to initiate a new epoch in their history, an era in which their career may be the reverse of what it has been. Man is becoming a factor of new importance ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley
... had that hardships which the site does not enforce, shall be enforced by the laws; and that the example of those wise nations be imitated, who, inhabiting most fruitful and delightful countries, and such as were likely to rear a listless and effeminate race, unfit for all manly exercises, in order to obviate the mischief wrought by the amenity and relaxing influence of the soil and climate, subjected all who were to serve as soldiers to the severest training; whence it came that better soldiers were raised in these countries ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... handsome primo tenore. Rather than such cockney sentimentality as this, as an education for the taste and sympathies, we prefer the most crapulous group of boors that Teniers ever painted. But even those among our painters who aim at giving the rustic type of features, who are far above the effeminate feebleness of the "Keepsake" style, treat their subjects under the influence of traditions and prepossessions rather than of direct observation. The notion that peasants are joyous, that the typical ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... rider met fully the gaze of the spectator. It was a countenance of singular loveliness and power. The lips and the moulding of the chin resembled the eager and impassioned tenderness of the shape of Antinous; but instead of the effeminate sullenness of the eye, and the narrow smoothness of the forehead, shone an expression of profound and piercing thought. On each side of the clear and open brow descended, even to the shoulders, the clustering locks of golden hair; while the eyes, large and yet deep, beamed with a spiritual energy, ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... than the gross insolence and brutality of the other. If a set of low-lived fellows are noisy, rude, and boisterous to show their disregard of the company, a set of fashionable coxcombs are, to a nauseous degree, finical and effeminate to show their thorough breeding. The one are governed by their feelings, however coarse and misguided, which is something; the others consult only appearances, which are nothing, either as a test of happiness or virtue. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... of medium stature, slender but very graceful, with almost effeminate hands and feet—the former scrupulously kept, the latter neatly shod—and with a certain air of fragility; very soft blue eyes with sleepy lids; a classically correct nose; short upper lip; rosy, moist lips. His clothes: a claret-coloured coat, neither dress nor frock, but ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... often at her house in Mount Street, and frequently met Lord Drumone's fair-haired and rather effeminate son there, Peggy's mother never dreamed they were in love. Both were extremely careful to conceal it, and in their efforts ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... first illuminators were the monks of Ireland. Ladies were the spinners, weavers, surgeons, and readers of the day; they were great at interpreting dreams, and dearly loved flowers. The gentlemen looked upon reading as an occupation quite as effeminate as sewing, war and hunting being the two main employments of the lords of creation, and gambling the chief amusement. Priests and monks were the exceptions to this rule, until Henry First introduced a taste for somewhat ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... O pity and shame, that they, who to live well Entered so fair, should turn aside to tread Paths indirect, or in the mid way faint! But still I see the tenour of Man's woe Holds on the same, from Woman to begin. From Man's effeminate slackness it begins, Said the Angel, who should better hold his place By wisdom, and superiour gifts received. But now prepare thee for another scene. He looked, and saw wide territory spread Before him, towns, and rural works between; Cities of men with lofty gates and towers, ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... fidelity to life as we find it—to existing conditions and types of society,—is wonderful. Its dramatic strength is none the less marked. But aside from and above all this, for me it has a far greater merit—utility. I have no sympathy with the flippant, effeminate, and senile cry, "Art for art's sake"; that is the echo of a decaying civilization, the voice of Greece and Rome in their decline. It is the shibboleth of a people drunken with pleasure; of a popular conscience anaesthetized; the cry of sensualism and selfishness popular with shallow minds and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... you euer cure any so? Ros. Yes one, and in this manner. Hee was to imagine me his Loue, his Mistris: and I set him euerie day to woe me. At which time would I, being but a moonish youth, greeue, be effeminate, changeable, longing, and liking, proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, ful of teares, full of smiles; for euerie passion something, and for no passion truly any thing, as boyes and women are for the most part, cattle of this colour: would now ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... none of this rough work in Pope. His Muse was on a peace-establishment, and grew somewhat effeminate by long ease and indulgence. He lived in the smiles of fortune, and basked in the favour of the great. In his smooth and polished verse we meet with no prodigies of nature, but with miracles of wit; the thunders of his pen are whispered flatteries; its forked lightnings ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... into one of his ringing laughs—the fine, deep Ho, ho! that would drown all our effeminate modern gigglings, the sound of which lingers amongst the memories of my boyhood. "He well deserves it—he well deserves it—the wretch! Ho, ho!"—and he shouted with laughter, and threw himself into all the rough unceremonious humour of the ballad, finishing off by relating his own ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... and beside him, on the bough of a tree, hung a long blue Spanish cloak. The countenance of this extraordinary man was handsome and youthful, but wild and somewhat haggard, as if from much recent suffering. His eye was black and piercing, his nose aquiline, and his forehead broad, but his mouth was effeminate, his chin small and beardless, his neck long, his shoulders narrow and sloping, and his black hair hung in long straight locks over his shoulders. A short sword, somewhat resembling that of the ancient Roman, lay on the sward beside him, and near to it a huge cavalry ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... knew Greek better than Marius knew Latin, was educated and dissipated, and showed the marks of a dissolute life in his face. When he rode into the camp of Marius at the head of the cavalry he had seen no service, and the rugged soldier looked with contempt on this effeminate pleasure-seeker who had been sent as his lieutenant. He soon learned his mistake, and before the campaign ended Sulla was his most ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... supernatural beings he was in constant though not direct communication. He studied them—their nature and their functions. But this tall, stately man, in his abominable garment which reached barely to his knees, with the white, effeminate forehead and unintelligible language, who was he? Was he a Philistine? a cruel Roman, or perhaps a Spaniard—one of those that murdered the famous Abrabanel family, and drove his ancestor Todros ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... [transcriber's note: the text appears to read "sins" but it is unclear] and excesses of their parents, especially their fathers, whilst the great majority are reaping the fruits of their own immorality in a dwarfed and ill-formed body, and effeminate appearance, weak and ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... poems could have suffered by this change, had written copies been preserved. If Chaucer's poetry, for instance, had not been written, it could only have come down to us in a softened form, more like the effeminate version of Dryden, than the rough, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... superfluities, and entertain an instinctive horror of effeminate luxuries, there are some things quite necessary. Food comes first. The view of angling taken by comic men in the papers, and satirists out of them, is that eating and drinking are the principal amusement of anglers. The citizen party in a Thames ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... melody—a quality for which Coleridge, who was not unreasonably proud of his musical gift, is said to have especially prized them; and they are noteworthy also as perhaps the fullest expression of the almost womanly softness of Coleridge's nature. To describe their tone as effeminate would be unfair and untrue, for effeminacy in the work of a male hand would necessarily imply something of falsity of sentiment, and from this they are entirely free. But it must certainly be admitted that for a man's description of his wooing the warmth of feeling which ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... a double one: how to commend poetry at all to a generation which thought it effeminate trifling,[298] and how he, Master Edmund Spenser, of imagination all compact, could commend his poetry to Master John Bull, the most practical of mankind in his habitual mood, but at that moment in a passion of religious anxiety about his soul. Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... next table, well known as the Pippin, young, flashily dressed, his almost effeminate features giving an added touch of viciousness, through incongruity, to his general appearance, twisted his head around and ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... his principal subjects, in order to present his sons Helge and Halfdan to the people as his chosen successors. The young heirs were very coldly received on this occasion, for Helge was of a sombre and taciturn disposition, and inclined to the life of a priest, and Halfdan was of a weak, effeminate nature, and noted for his love of pleasure rather than of war and the chase. Frithiof, who was present, and stood beside them, was the object of many admiring glances from ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... penchant for masculine roles, and her success as Rosalind and Viola leaves no room for doubt that she will give great satisfaction in the "Comedy of Errors." Mr. Robson has never liked female roles, but his falsetto voice, his slender figure, his smooth, rosy face, and his graceful, effeminate manners qualify him to a remarkable degree for the impersonation of feminine characters. Moreover, his long residence in Paris has given him a thorough appreciation and elaborate knowledge of those characteristics, which must be understood ere one can delineate and ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... this strange conjunction of minds far as the poles asunder. Plato and Carlyle are both possessed with the idea that they are living in a degenerate age, and they attribute its degeneracy to the same causes:—Laissez faire; the growth of luxury; the effeminate preference of Lydian to Dorian airs in music, education, and life; the decay of the Spartan and growth of the Corinthian spirit; the habit of lawlessness culminating in the excesses of Democracy, which they describe in language as nearly identical as the difference of ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... the decadent poets with their effeminate rhythms and their absurdities of speech.[238] He can mock the archaizer who goes to Accius and Pacuvius for his inspiration.[239] He can give an admirable summary of the genius of Lucilius ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... son had scarcely told his ninth year; and the soft, auburn ringlets, descending half-way down the shoulders; the rich and delicate bloom that exhibits at once the hardy health and the gentle fostering; the large deep-blue eyes; the flexile and almost effeminate contour of the harmonious features; altogether made such an ideal of childlike beauty as Lawrence had loved to paint or Chantrey model. And the daintiest cares of a mother, who, as yet, has her darling all to herself—her toy, her plaything—were visible in the ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Gascoigne, in a room above-stairs. There were at least a dozen others present, some also at play, others merely lounging. Of the latter was his Grace of Wharton. He was a slender, graceful gentleman, whose face, if slightly effeminate and markedly dissipated, was nevertheless of considerable beauty. He was very splendid in a suit of green camlett and silver lace, and he wore a ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... the frescoes on the walls and ceiling; the floor, which was polished, being adorned here and there with rugs which suggested dim reflections of the tint and tone above. It was a luxurious apartment, but not effeminate. The luxury was masculine luxury, refined and significant; there was no meaningless feminine fripperies about, nor was there any evidence of sensuous self-indulgence. It was the abode of a cultivated man, but of one ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... torment, who through the vista of years assumed the air of a tricksy elf rather than the little vixen he used to think her. His curiosity had been further stimulated by the sight of his rival, Narcisse, whose effeminate ornaments, small stature, and seat on horseback filled Sir Marmaduke's pupil with inquisitive disdain as to the woman who ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... not a meal much accounted of. It was reckoned effeminate to require more than two meals a day, though, just as in the verdurer's lodge at home, there was a barrel of ale on tap with drinking horns beside it in the hall, and on a small round table in the window a loaf of bread, to which city luxury ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... comprehend how the standing by in safety to see two men bruise each other almost to death could evince or inspire heroic sentiments or warlike dispositions. He observed, that the Romans were most eager for the fights of gladiators during the reigns of the most effeminate and cruel emperors, and in the decline of all public spirit and virtue. These arguments would have probably made but a feeble impression on an understanding like mine, unaccustomed to general reasoning, and on a temper habituated to pursue, without thought of consequences, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... perhaps of more than half our sorrows, give an elegance to our manner, and a relish to our pleasures. They soothe our afflictions, and soften our cares. Too much of their company will render us effeminate, and infallibly stamp upon us many signatures of the female nature. A rough and unpolished behavior, as well as slovenliness of person, will certainly be the consequence of an almost constant exclusion from it. By spending ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... remote forefathers were for countless generations reared in the stern precepts of the virile religion of the North. Whilst we may with justice deplore the excessive militarism of the Kaiser Wilhelm and his followers, we cannot rightly agree with those effeminate preachers of universal brotherhood who deny the virtue of that manly strength which maintains our great North European family in its position of undisputed superiority over the rest of mankind, and which in its purest form is today the bulwark of Old England. ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... change that the very graces of face and form that a while ago had pleased her in Kenneth, seemed now effeminate attributes, well-attuned to a vacillating, purposeless mind. Far greater beauty did her eyes behold in this grimfaced soldier of fortune; the man as firm of purpose as he was upright of carriage; gloomy, proud, and reckless; still young, yet past the callow age of adolescence. Since the day ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... it was unlucky for a clansman to learn any handicraft engaged in by Lowlanders. If a Highland youth left his native mountains and engaged in mercantile or mechanical pursuits, his friends thought he turned effeminate. For warfare he became unsuited, either as a leader or follower. The prowess of his ancestors forsook him, he became incapable of handling the bow or spear skilfully, and, what was worse, he carried ill luck with himself and ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... seem, therefore, that Cornish died with the last century, and no one now living can boast to have heard its sound when actually spoken for the sake of conversation. It seems to have been a melodious and yet by no means an effeminate language, and Scawen places it in this respect above most of the ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... well cared for, showed when he exposed the palms the callouses of ax handling. And his face was likable, she decided, full of character, intensely masculine. In her heart every woman despises any hint of the effeminate in man. Even though she may decry what she is pleased to term the brute in man, whenever he discards the dominant, overmastering characteristics of the male she will have none of him. Miss Hazel Weir was no ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... from so supreme a teacher.' What these men severally owed to fortune was but the occasion for the display of the greatness that was in them. Moses found the people of Israel enslaved in Egypt. Romulus was an exile from Alba. Cyrus had to deal with the Persian people tired of the empire of effeminate Medes. Theseus undertook to unite the scattered elements of the Athenian nation. Thus each of these founders had an opening provided for him, by making use of which he was able to bring his illustrious qualities into play. The achievement ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... skilfully on the flute. His earliest instructors had been French refugees, and they had awakened in him a strong passion for French literature and French society. Frederic William regarded these tastes as effeminate and contemptible, and, by abuse and persecution, made them still stronger. Things became worse when the Prince Royal attained that time of life at which the great revolution in the human mind and body takes place. He was guilty of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... other places, were of a middle size, and in general well-made, clean-limbed, and remarkably vigorous, active, and nimble: Their countenances were not altogether without expression, and their voices were remarkably soft and effeminate. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... chariots, pretty, heartless fools, started affrighted in their seats, and strove to draw back; their male companions, who were as pretty, effeminate fools themselves and of as little spirit, started also, and began to ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... higher would present, compared with the pictures now bequeathed to us, but an unfinished and truncated image of Humanity. Here, again, the semi-barbaric age described by Bede rendered the delineation more vivid. In ages of effeminate civilisation the Christian emotions, even more than those inherent in unassisted human nature, lose that ardour which belongs to them when in a healthy condition—an ardour which especially reveals itself during that great crisis, a nation's conversion, when, beside a throng of new feelings and ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... and shrugs his shoulders. "For instance," says he, "this Gerald Webb seems to be one of those highly sensitive, delicately organized persons; somewhat effeminate in fact. He ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... he called, in a high, almost falsetto voice. "I thought you would have eight or nine. Blessed hot, isn't it?" He had a smart though somewhat effeminate manner, and Cowperwood at once wrote him down as an ass. Berenice took the mail with an engaging smile. She sauntered past him reading, without so much as a glance. Presently he ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... death. I am astonished that the Sheikh of Bornou permits such barbarity, but imagine that the Sheikh is still afraid of his vassal, and shrinks from endeavouring to deprive him of this awful power. Here, then, we have a specimen of the negro character, with all its contradictions; soft and effeminate in its ordinary moods; cheerful, and pleasant, and simple, to appearance; but capable of acting, as it were without transition, the most terrible deeds of atrocity. Say what you will of the barbarism ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... the tailor is stereotyped from generation to generation; his goose is a perennial pun; and his habitual melancholy is derived to this day from the flatulent diet on which he will persist in living—cabbage. He is effeminate, cowardly, dishonest—a mere fraction of a man both in soul and body. He is represented by the thinnest fellow in the company; his starved person and frightened look are the unfailing signals for a laugh; and he is never spoken to but in a ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... acclimatisation of the cigarette in England only dates from the "seventies." As a child I remember that the only form of tobacco indulged in by the people that I knew was the cigar. A cigarette was considered an effeminate foreign importation; a pipe ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... deterred not Artavan de Hautlieu. He approached the entrance, when the doors, like those of the great entrance to the Castle, made themselves instantly accessible to him. A guard-room of the same effeminate soldiers received him, nor could the strictest examination have discovered to him whether it was sleep or death which arrested the eyes that seemed to look upon and prohibit his advance. Unheeding the presence of these ghastly sentinels, Artavan pressed forward into an inner apartment, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... puts the stamina of endurance into a man. 13. The west wind is hopeful, and has promise and adventure in it. 14. The east wind is peevishness and mental rheumatism and grumbling, and curls one up in the chimney-corner. 15. The south wind is full of longing and unrest and effeminate ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... writes: "No painter of our time could so well recall the bright and happy creations of Veronese." The difference between them is more one of period than of temperament. Paolo Veronese represented the opulence of a rich, strong society, full of noble life, while Tiepolo's lot was cast among effeminate men and frivolous women, and full of the modern spirit himself, he adapts his genius to his time and devotes himself to satisfy the theatrical, sentimental vein of the Venice of the decadence. Full of enthusiasm for his work, he was ready ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... told that in battle man looked upon the vanquished as unfit to bear the name of man, looking upon the weakness or want of skill which contributed to their defeat as something effeminate. The victor then proceeded by a very summary and effective mode, done in the most primitive and expeditious manner, to render his victim as much like a female as possible to all outward appearances; this was accomplished by a removal at one sweep of all the organs of generation, the ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... pillars he inscribed words after the same tenor as he did for the nations which had shown themselves courageous, and in addition he drew upon them the hidden parts of a woman, desiring to signify by this that the people were cowards and effeminate. ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... teach the accomplishments of a gentleman, stifle, in their birth, the virtues of a man. Thus brought into company when they ought to be seriously employed, and treated like men when they are still boys, they become vain and effeminate. ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... this. But I will not be severe, for I love my Friend. Religion out of the Question for the present. It was asked in the Reign of Charles the 2d of England, HOW shall we turn the Minds of the People from an Attention to their Liberties? The Answer was, by making them extravagant, luxurious, effeminate. Hutchinson advisd the Abridgment of what our People called English Liberties, by the same Means. We shall never subdue them, said Bernard, but by eradicating their Manners & the Principles of their Education. Will the judicious Citizens of Boston ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... winged, open nostrils, so perpetually a-quiver. The soft, sparse, forked beard which closely followed the line of the lower jaw and pointed chin. The moustache, lightly shading the upper lip, while wholly exposing the fretful and rather sensuous mouth. The long, effeminate, and restless hands. The tall, slight figure. The clothes, of a material and pattern fondly supposed by their wearer to present the last word of English fashion in relation to foreign travel, the colour of them accurately matched to the ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... mercenary soldiers from the continent, with whom he especially loved to surround himself, and whose licensed plunderings added greatly to the burden and tyranny of his reign. But the ordinary doings of a tyrant were not the worst things about William Rufus. Effeminate fashions, vices horrible and unheard-of in England, flourished at his court and threatened to corrupt the nation. The fearful profanity of the king, his open and blasphemous defiance of God, made men tremble, and those who were nearest ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... Society and bad Society had become invisible. Racial suicide and sexual licence most hideously prevailed, spreading like some vile disease from rank to rank, and class to class. Woman had become less womanly, man more effeminate. Home was a word that had no longer any meaning. Religion had decayed; the fear of God had been forgotten. But Socialism was springing up, a rank and lusty weed, in crude neglected soil that might have been tilled to good purpose; and a cheap and rowdy form of patriotism was in a very healthy ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... expressed without the preliminary unmanning of aestheticism; and his distinction lies in the fact that he uttered them with vehemence and intensity. In Victorian times the average citizen thought of poetry as a somewhat weak-minded, effeminate pursuit—as very often it was. The poet who might be persuaded of the sublimity of his calling had necessarily to steel himself against the abuse of the matter-of-fact persons who have no traffic ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... once undertaken, whether pleasant or otherwise. As he poured the contents of the bucket into the radiator's spout, he took stock of the automobile party. His face hardened with a slight contempt when he considered the effeminate-appearing young Mexican who had bade him bring water and the girl talking with him; which she must have noticed and taken to herself, for when their eyes met he saw that a flush dyed her cheeks and that ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... a life of extreme temperance and toil, and where it was often to be sought, sword in hand, from an enemy far superior in numbers. Whatever may have been the vices of the Spaniards, they cannot have been those of effeminate sloth. Thus a sober, hardy, and independent race was gradually formed, prepared to assert their ancient inheritance, and to lay the foundations of far more liberal and equitable forms of government, than were known ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... well," objected the cure, "that there are good works, good authors. However, if it were only those persons of different sexes united in a bewitching apartment, decorated rouge, those lights, those effeminate voices, all this must, in the long-run, engender a certain mental libertinage, give rise to immodest thoughts and impure temptations. Such, at any rate, is the opinion of all the Fathers. Finally," he added, suddenly assuming ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... youth Prince Louis Napoleon has despised the habits of an effeminate life. Although his mother allowed him a considerable sum for his amusements, these were the last things he thought of. All this money was spent in acts of beneficence, in founding schools or houses of refuge, in printing his military or political works, or in making scientific experiments. ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... general, and to describe him you must take the unit, with all his incidents and his organic qualities as they are. Take then, for instance, one naughty child in the reality of his life. He is but six years old, slender and masculine, and not wronged by long hair, curls, or effeminate dress. His face is delicate and too often haggard with tears of penitence that Justice herself would be glad to spare him. Some beauty he has, and his mouth especially is so lovely as to seem not only angelic but itself an angel. He has absolutely ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... fie upon this weak, effeminate age, fit for nothing but to ponder over the deeds of former times, and torture the heroes of antiquity with commentaries, or mangle them in tragedies. The vigor of its loins is dried up, and the propagation of the human species has become dependent ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... state are all embodied in him. And as the king-god is far above the landlord-god in power, he is infinitely removed from him in character also. The chief gods of Sidon and Tyre have nothing luxurious or effeminate about them. They are strict and awful beings, and must not be incautiously approached. They retain their primitive character as sources of life, but they are destroyers of life as well. Pure and holy themselves, ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... faith in the North; how kings and queens became the foster-fathers and nursing- mothers of the Church; how the great chiefs, each a little king in himself, scorned and derided the whole scheme as altogether weak and effeminate; how the bulk of the people were sullen and suspicious, and often broke out into heathen mutiny; how kings rose and kings fell, just as they took one or the other side; and how, finally, after a contest which had lasted altogether more than three centuries, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... the mighty Mother of Nations? Ah, no! If even the worst of them were thrust away into some region where life was hard for him, he would show something like nobility and manliness; it is the mephitic airs of ease and luxury that breed selfishness and scorn in his soul. At any rate, those effeminate people are not typical specimens of our steadfast friendly race. When the folk in the colliery village hear that deadly thud and feel the shudder of the earth which tell of disaster, Jack the hewer rushes to the pit's mouth and joins the search-party. ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... quite an unusual fellow, a good servant I believe, but rather effeminate and a kind of ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... leap, when a chair happening to pass, he laid hold on the opportunity, and by an exertion of his muscles, pitched upon the top of the carriage, which was immediately overturned in the kennel, to the grievous annoyance of the fare, which happened to be a certain effeminate beau, in full dress, on his way to ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... Shelley's by the reformer, so Keats's work suffers by the opposite extreme of aloofness from every human interest; so much so, that he is often accused of being indifferent to humanity. His work is also criticised as being too effeminate for ordinary readers. Three things should be remembered in this connection. First, that Keats sought to express beauty for its own sake; that beauty is as essential to normal humanity as is government ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... would come to attack them were no braver, nor better armed than those whom they had defeated at Marathon, but that they had the same bows and arrows, the same embroidered robes and gold ornaments on their effeminate bodies, while we, they said, have arms and bodies such as we had then, and greater confidence because of our victories. We also fight, not merely as other Greeks do, in defence of our city and ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... which hath ornaments, which height, what is beautifully translated, where figures are fit, which gentle, which strong, to show the composition manly; and how he hath avoided faint, obscure, obscene, sordid, humble, improper, or effeminate phrase; which is not only praised of the most, but commended (which is worse), especially for that it ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... Lombards, with the costly stuffs, the rich jewelry, and the perfumes of Byzantium; and held a great annual fair at the imperial city of Pavia, where they sold the Franks the manufactures of the polished and effeminate Greeks, and whence in return they carried back to the East the grain, wine, wool, iron, lumber, and excellent ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... friends and mutual admirers of each other's productions. In June, 1817, "Lalla Rookh" was just from the press, and Irving writes to Brevoort: "Moore's new poem is just out. I have not sent it to you, for it is dear and worthless. It is written in the most effeminate taste, and fit only to delight boarding-school girls and lads of nineteen just in their first loves. Moore should have kept to songs and epigrammatic conceits. His stream of intellect is too small to bear expansion—it spreads ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... to the Landing is considered something of a road up North; and the natives are apt to stare pityingly at the effeminate stranger who complains of the holes. It is something of a road compared to what comes after; but Natalie, hitherto accustomed to cushions and springs in her drives, could not conceive of anything worse. As the ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... and the cursings." We must let the Lord brace us with His severities. We must gaze steadily upon the appalling fearfulness of sin, and upon its terrific issues. At all costs we must get rid of the spurious gentleness that holds compromise with uncleanness, that effeminate affection which is destitute of holy fire. We must seek the love which burns everlastingly against all sin; we must seek the gentleness which can fiercely grip a poisonous growth and tear it out to ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... "Love in all Their Marriages," False Facts Regarding Hottentots Effeminate Men and Masculine Women How the Hottentot Woman "Rules at Home," "Regard for Women" Capacity for Refined Love Hottentot Coarseness Fat versus Sentiment South African Love-Poems A Hottentot Flirt Kaffir Morals Individual Preference for—Cows, Bargaining for Brides Amorous Preferences ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... in particular, have always at the back of their minds a notion that there is something effeminate about the sense for beauty. That is reserved for decadent Southern nations. Tu regere imperio populos, Romane memento they would say, if they knew the tag; and translate it "Britain rules the waves"! But history gives the lie to this complacent theory. No nations were ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... l. 30, squall.]—probably, poor effeminate creature. Taylor, the water-poet, describes the rich foolish gallant calling ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp
... vin[Fr]. Adj. weak, feeble, debile|; impotent &c. 158; relaxed, unnerved, &c. v.; sapless, strengthless[obs3], powerless; weakly, unstrung, flaccid, adynamic[obs3], asthenic[obs3]; nervous. soft, effeminate, feminate[obs3], womanly. frail, fragile, shattery[obs3]; flimsy, unsubstantial, insubstantial, gimcrack, gingerbread; rickety, creaky, creaking, cranky; craichy[obs3]; drooping, tottering &c. v.. broken, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... a man of thirty-seven, so effeminate in appearance that it was hard to believe he had seen famous fields and once bidden fair to be a great Captain, was nursing a dog on his lap, the while he listened with a weary air to the whispers of the beautiful woman who sat next him. Apparently he had a niggard ear even ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... to a jardiniere, saying: "You are fond of hyacinths and tuberoses; their perfume overpowered me for a moment. I fear you think me very effeminate." ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... (Kratzbuersten) of the West do an important work. They discipline thousands of Germans ecclesiastically, as otherwise only Catholic priests are able to do. Most of them lead a rough, self-denying life. They defy effeminate, sentimental, hazy ecclesiastical Americanism. There is a firm character here. They will not always remain as rugged as they are now. The coming generation will be English and milder in many respects. The Missourians are a power in the West, where the Germans generally are ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... 'prates to me about the legions of Ravenna and the dangers of an assault! Think you, renegade, that your city could have resisted me had I chosen to storm it on the first day when I encamped before its walls? Know you that your effeminate soldiery have laid aside the armour of their ancestors, because their puny bodies are too feeble to bear its weight, and that the half of my army here trebles the whole number of the guards of Rome? Now, while you stand before me, I have but to command, and the city shall be annihilated ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... Dame was a very homely, hard-featured lady, deaf, and extremely fat and heavy, one of the old uncultivated rustic gentry who had lagged far behind the general civilisation of the country, and regarded all refinements as effeminate French vanities. She believed, likewise, all that was said against Queen Mary, whom she looked on as barely restrained from plunging a dagger into Elizabeth's heart, and letting Parma's hell-hounds loose upon Tixall. To have such a guest imposed ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... men not to be daunted by the sublime, yet terrible prospect before them. Many of them were of that ancient race of Highlanders, who not only willingly made their couch in the snow, but considered it as effeminate luxury to use a snowball for a pillow. Plunder and revenge lay beyond the frozen mountains which they beheld, and they did not permit themselves to be daunted by the difficulty of traversing them. Montrose did not allow their spirits time to subside. He ordered the pipes to play in the van the ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... Dalton?" demanded this immaculate youth, in a soft, rather effeminate voice that made Halstead regard him with a ...
— The Motor Boat Club and The Wireless - The Dot, Dash and Dare Cruise • H. Irving Hancock
... flaccid, from Khansbending inwards, i.e. the mouth of a water-skin before drinking. Like Mukhannas, it is also used for an effeminate man, a passive sodomite and even for a eunuch. Easterns still believe in what Westerns know to be an impossibility, human beings with the parts and proportions of both sexes equally developed and capable of reproduction; and Al-Islam even provides special rules for them (Pilgrimage ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... bed and board compel their husbands to end the war; (2) The 'Thesmophoriazusae' or Women's Festival of Demeter, a licentious but irresistibly funny assault upon Euripides. The tragedian, learning that the women in council assembled are debating on the punishment due to his misogyny, implores the effeminate poet Agathon to intercede for him. That failing, he dispatches his kinsman Mnesilochus, disguised with singed beard and woman's robes, a sight to shake the midriff of despair with laughter, to plead ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... fancied that it was Die Vernon riding up the mountain side, gaily chatting as she went with the handsome cavalier who walked by her stirrup, and who might have been Frank Osbaldistone, only that he was too manly-looking for Scott's somewhat effeminate hero. How beautifully moulded was the form which her dark-green habit set off to such advantage; how fairy-like the foot that pressed the clumsy stirrup; how slender the fingers that grasped the rein! She had discarded the heavy riding-hat ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... was really extraordinary. Luxurious as he was to the root, and effeminate; hating as he did cold water, cold food, the cold shoulder; one and all of these shuddering things he had schooled himself to bear without a blink. He grew even to take a stern pleasure in the bitterness ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... the authorities here render the hieroglyphics." She indicated a fragment of a coloured relief labelled: "Portion of a painted stone tablet with a portrait figure of Amen-hetep IV," and we stopped to look at the frail, effeminate figure of the great king, with his large cranium, his queer, pointed chin and the Aten rays stretching out their weird ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... state, and was wearing out my suits of velvet, and had neither visit nor letter from my father, I was in tolerable bliss. Julia's kisses were showered on me for almost anything I said or did, but her admiration of heroism and daring was so fervent that I was in no greater danger of becoming effeminate than Achilles when he wore girl's clothes. She was seventeen, an age bewitching for boys to look up to and men to look down on. The puzzle of the school was how to account for her close relationship to old Rippenger. Such an apple on such a crab-tree seemed monstrous. Heriot said that ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Italy in the eighth century, they began to supply that people, more luxurious than the Lombards, with the costly stuffs, the rich jewelry, and the perfumes of Byzantium; and held a great annual fair at the imperial city of Pavia, where they sold the Franks the manufactures of the polished and effeminate Greeks, and whence in return they carried back to the East the grain, wine, wool, iron, lumber, and excellent ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... we have said, by no means an effeminate youth, he was at that age when the male creature shrinks from the slightest imputation of a lack of manliness. He coloured, therefore, as he laughingly replied that in his humble opinion his present walk involved the manly exercise of moral courage in withstanding shafts of sarcasm, ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... her coming. Even though one was her brother, she could not restrain a feeling of contempt as she looked upon their white faces, soft hands, and immaculate clothes. Why should men, she asked herself, be so ready and willing to give themselves completely up to effeminate habits when their blood was hot within them, and the great Open was calling them with such a ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... gentlemanly, Pickle, my boy; quite the nobleman, I might say, and I am not at all surprised that you helped that poor lad to escape. A little effeminate, but certainly a very nice lad. But I have been thinking about them ever since I came on board this afternoon, and I can't quite make out that Count. What's he doing here, my boy? On some mission, and connected with some jealousy and a stop being put to his ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... monuments Ingrauen in the eyes and hearts of men. Although the oppression of distressed Rome And our owne ouerthrow, might well drawe forth, Distilling teares from faynting cowards eyes, Yet should no weake effeminate passion sease Vpon that man, the greatnesse of whose minde And not his Fortune made him term'd the Great. Pom. Oh I did neuer tast mine Honours sweete Nor now can iudge of this my sharpest sowre. 130 Fifty eight yeares in Fortunes sweete ...
— The Tragedy Of Caesar's Revenge • Anonymous
... satire is mainly derived from its surpassing distinction in two domains—in the comico-satiric drama of Aristophanes, and in the Beast Fables of 'AEsop'. In later Greek literature it lost its robustness and became trivial and effeminate through ...
— English Satires • Various
... vulgar judge good manners. He neither insists on these from any, nor does he anxiously force them on others whether at meetings or at entertainments, although he knows them well enough, should he choose to indulge in them; but he considers it effeminate and not becoming masculine dignity to waste a good part of ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... before, Ever a good way on before; and this I charge thee, on thy duty as a wife, Whatever happens, not to speak to me, No, not a word!' and Enid was aghast; And forth they rode, but scarce three paces on, When crying out, 'Effeminate as I am, I will not fight my way with gilded arms, All shall be iron;' he loosed a mighty purse, Hung at his belt, and hurled it toward the squire. So the last sight that Enid had of home Was all the marble threshold flashing, strown With gold and scattered coinage, and the squire Chafing his ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... wear anything instead of the philibeg, Duncan would have plaited himself one with his own blind fingers out of an old sack. Indeed, although the trews were never at any time unknown in the Highlands, Duncan had always regarded them as effeminate, and especially in his lowland exile would have looked upon the wearing of them as a disgrace to his ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... A very conceited, effeminate, and absurd man coming into a room where she was one evening, and beginning to comb his hair, she exclaimed, "La! what's that! ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... almost forgotten what danger is; so if you really think you can find a place where we may once more come within hail of it, pray take us there without loss of time. For my part, I am becoming positively effeminate, and unless I can speedily have a chance of getting my head broken I shall be utterly ruined for 'the service' when I ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... "We effeminate women of the nineteenth century are afraid of broken heads," said Fanny. "But Mary Damer seems quite to enjoy your accident, Mr. Wade, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... This was their daily Practice for a considerable space, 'till at last a Confident of Theodora's who was sometimes admitted as variety in these Brutal Enjoyments, for a large Sum of Money reveal'd their Intrigues to Philetus, a Youth of a very comly Person, but a little Effeminate, who passionately admir'd the beautiful Theodora, and who had made several Attempts on her ...
— Tractus de Hermaphrodites • Giles Jacob
... Yonson, a man of the heavy Scandinavian type, ceased chafing me, and arose awkwardly to his feet. The man who had spoken to him was clearly a Cockney, with the clean lines and weakly pretty, almost effeminate, face of the man who has absorbed the sound of Bow Bells with his mother's milk. A draggled muslin cap on his head and a dirty gunny-sack about his slim hips proclaimed him cook of the decidedly dirty ship's galley ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... we consider only the martial exploits of the celebrated Duke de Vendome, we have the idea of an Heroe full of spirit and impetuosity; but this idea would be very imperfect as a representation of his character, if we did not know likewise that he was slovenly, voluptuous, effeminate, and profuse[81]. ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... imperforate penis, and on the inferior face near the root an opening for the passage of urine. No traces of nymphae, vagina, testicles, nor beard were seen. The stature was small, the form debilitated, and the voice effeminate. Marc came to the conclusion that it was impossible for any man to determine either one sex or the other. Everard Home dissected a dog with apparent external organs of the female, but discovered that neither sex was sufficiently pronounced to admit of classification. Home also saw at the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... mode of swallowing could be called reading; his father would have got more pleasure out of the poorest of them than Cornelius could from a dozen. And now in this day's dreariness, he had not one left unread, and was too lazy or effeminate or prudent to encounter the wind and rain that beset the path betwixt him and the nearest bookshop. None of his father's books had any attraction for him. Neither science, philosophy, history, nor poetry held for him any interest. A drearier soul ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... I should be ashamed if I had such a son; so effeminate, and so given to drinking; tying up his hair in a ribbon, indeed! and spending most of his time among mad women, himself as much a woman as any of them; dancing to flute and drum and cymbal! He resembles any one rather than ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... every young man has got muscle, and knows how to use it, and then there will be fewer outrages. If a respectable citizen has a daughter that is the pride of his heart, he had rather she would go to a theatre or a party with a man who can protect her with his strong arm than with an effeminate curiosity that has his brain parted in the middle, and who would be afraid to meet a dwarf in ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... under his sheet after a rub-down, the true significance of the affair for Orde came out. Since the fight, Gerald's customary lassitude of manner seemed quite to have left him. His eye was bright, a colour mounted beneath the pale olive of his skin, the almost effeminate beauty of his countenance had animated. He looked across at Orde several times, hesitated, and ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... society is organized on a basis of division between laboring classes and leisure classes. The intelligence of those who do things becomes hard in the unremitting struggle with things; that of those freed from the discipline of occupation becomes luxurious and effeminate. Moreover, the majority of human beings still lack economic freedom. Their pursuits are fixed by accident and necessity of circumstance; they are not the normal expression of their own powers interacting with the needs and resources of the environment. Our economic conditions ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... Like every officer in the Indian Army he loved his sepoys and regarded them as his children. Their troubles, their welfare, were his. He respected the men of those gallant warrior races that once had faced the British valiantly in battle and fought as loyally beside them since. But for the effeminate and cowardly peoples of India, that ever crawled to kiss the feet of each conqueror of the peninsula in turn and then stabbed him in the back if they could, he had the contempt that every member of the martial races of the land, every Sikh, Rajput, ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... warehouse. Pate Brown used to make fun of me about my scanty hirsute appendages, and many a time caused me to blush before sundry members of the Druids when he emphatically declared that I was one of those effeminate individuals who shaved, not because they had whiskers, but because they hadn't. This was in September, and a more open year for the respective chances of the clubs in the Cup ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... him far less than justice in insisting upon one aspect of his character disproportionately with another. They speak of him as the "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild "; they tend to describe him as almost or wholly effeminate; and the representations of him in art, with small, feminine and conspicuously un-Jewish features, with long feminine hair and the hands of a consumptive woman, join with sacred poetry in furthering this impression. Nothing can be truer than that he was tender, and that he had a passion ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... the tent. The blankets and knapsacks are at night used to eke out the appointments for sleep,—the first to soften the floor to the bones of the sleepers, the second to serve for pillows. These, especially the former, are looked upon by the genuine soldier as effeminate; while the greenhorn bitterly complains of them as a very satire on ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... and now remain, where they are. Take away this hope, by making slavery the distinctive bond of union of a new government, and you drive them to the North. These persons are not among the rich, the voluptuous, the effeminate; nor are they the despised, the indigent, the thriftless—they are men of moderate property, of intelligence, of conscience—in every way the "bone and sinew" ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... and well cared for, showed when he exposed the palms the callouses of ax handling. And his face was likable, she decided, full of character, intensely masculine. In her heart every woman despises any hint of the effeminate in man. Even though she may decry what she is pleased to term the brute in man, whenever he discards the dominant, overmastering characteristics of the male she will have none of him. Miss Hazel Weir was ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... FRIBBLE. An effeminate fop; a name borrowed from a celebrated character of that kind, in the farce of Miss in her Teens, written by ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... receiving was clearly of a piece with the rest of him. He was tall, slim and alert, with the quick, soft movements of some wild animal. His face, brown with sunburn and pink with brisk-going blood, was exceedingly handsome in a boyish and almost effeminate manner, and though he was only eighteen months younger than his cousin, he looked as if nine or ten years ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... wrote to Temple on July 28, 1763:—'My departure fills me with a kind of gloom that quite overshadows my mind. I could almost weep to think of leaving dear London, and the calm retirement of the Inner Temple. This is very effeminate and very young, but I cannot help it.' Letters of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... manhood was to be confined to those who could drain great tankards of ale or to peasants whose hands were hard with holding the plough. He disdains the implied charge of prudery, and indeed his language is what could not have been used by an effeminate or a coward. No braver man ever held a pen. Wood says {32} that "his deportment was affable, his gait erect, bespeaking courage and undauntedness," and he himself tells us that "he did not neglect daily ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... the exterior graces of his person were such, that nature perhaps never formed anything more complete: His face was extremely handsome; and yet it was a manly face, neither inanimate nor effeminate; each feature having its beauty and peculiar delicacy: He had a wonderful genius for every sort of exercise, an engaging aspect, and an air of grandeur: in a word, he possessed every personal advantage; but then he was greatly deficient in mental ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... the cultivation of art—which usually ministers to luxury—has done so much for human progress as is generally supposed. It is even possible that its too exclusive culture may effeminate rather than strengthen the character, by laying it more open to the temptations of the senses. "It is the nature of the imaginative temperament cultivated by the arts," says Sir Henry Taylor, "to undermine ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... neighboring nations about commercial privileges, no local strife which cannot be settled by Arete. The poet has as nearly as possible succeeded in eliminating the negative element out of this society. An unwarlike folk, but not effeminate, happy in peace, with a childlike delight in play, which is the starting-point of art, and remains its substrate, according to Schiller; truly idyllic it must be regarded, a land on the way between nature and civilization, where life is a perpetual ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... place at Belvoir, and Brummell was one of the distinguished party there, among whom were the Prince of Wales, the late Duke of Argyll, the Marquis of Lorn, and the other chief fashionable people of the day. This fete was memorable, for it was said to have cost L.60,000. Brummell was not altogether effeminate; he could both shoot and ride, but he liked neither: he was never a Melton man. He said that he could not bear to have his tops and leathers splashed by the greasy galloping farmers. The Duke of Rutland raised a corps of volunteers ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... morals, and exhibiting in its adherents, who were many and important, all the varieties of a great and far-descended school, which claimed for itself rightful possession of the ground which it held. There was nothing effeminate about it, as there was nothing fanatical; there was nothing extreme or foolish about it; it was a manly school, distrustful of high-wrought feelings and professions, cultivating self-command and shy of display, and setting up ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... grief she and her husband had experienced was the loss of two young children. Edouard, though delicate from his birth, had nevertheless passed the trying years of infancy and early adolescence; he was them nearly fourteen. With a sweet and rather effeminate expression, blue eyes and a pleasant smile, he was a striking likeness of his mother. His father's affection exaggerated the dangers which threatened the boy, and in his eyes the slightest indisposition became a serious malady; ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... changed, and that a frivolous effeminacy was become the national character. Nothing could be more popular than that work. It was thought a great consolation to us, the light people of this country (who were and are light, but who were not and are not effeminate), that we had found the causes of our misfortunes in our vices. Pythagoras could not be more pleased with his leading discovery. But whilst in that splenetic mood we amused ourselves in a sour, critical speculation, of which we were ourselves the objects, and in which every man lost his ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... replied the stranger, staring at Coronado as a Lombard or Frankish warrior might have stared at an effeminate and ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... or two straggling barns and cottages indicated their approach to the outskirts of a country town or settlement. Here the team halted, as if the belligerent-looking teamster had felt his appearance was inconsistent with an effeminate civilization, and the oxen were turned into an open waste opposite a nondescript wooden tenement, half farmhouse and half cabin, evidently of the rudest Western origin. He may have recognized the fact that these "shanties" ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... the infantine simplicity of those dear little children of the Della Cruscan school, who, "lisp in numbers." Do not let them lisp in any number of your publication. No sir, like sir Peter Teazle, I say, "curse your sentiments;" for the man whose effeminate ideas, expressed in effeminate accents, would contribute to lessen the manly character of the English nation, deserves to be lost in a labyrinth, as I am now, and left in the lurch for a finish to each ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... to the noblest heights of self-renunciation. It is natural that the most masculine and the most vigorous and the most intellectual of all our poets should devote his powers mainly to the representation of love. For love is the essence of force, and does not spring from effeminate weakness or febrile delicacy. Any painter can cover a huge canvas, but, as has been observed, only the strong hand can do the fine and tender work. To discuss at length the love-poems of Browning would take us far beyond ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... young gentlemen are to be found when they are required to grace a rich man's feast. They are generally accompanied by a guardian, and usually nothing very serious takes place, for they know their value, and money will not always buy their expensive favors. They are very effeminate, luxuriously dressed and perfumed, and they seldom go on foot. There are, however, lower orders ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Khu-en-aten, as the authorities here render the hieroglyphics." She indicated a fragment of a coloured relief labelled: "Portion of a painted stone tablet with a portrait figure of Amen-hetep IV," and we stopped to look at the frail, effeminate figure of the great king, with his large cranium, his queer, pointed chin and the Aten rays stretching out their weird ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... half-closed, she sang an Italian melody; she sang and smiled, and at the same time her face wore an expression of gravity, almost of sternness ... a token of perfect rapture! She smiled ... and Praxiteles' Faun, indolent, youthful as she, effeminate, and voluptuous, seemed to smile back at her from a corner, under the branches of an oleander, across the delicate smoke that curled upwards from a bronze censer on an antique tripod. The beautiful singer was alone. Spell-bound by the music, her beauty, the splendour and sweet fragrance ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... possibility be construed as mincing, foppish or effeminate are not recommended; but a gentleman who says "Good morning" to his employees and who invariably treats all women as "ladies," does not half so much flatter their vanity as win their respect for himself as a gentleman. ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... would be small. Those which are physical are often caused by a hardening or an effeminate life; those of the mind, by education, which not only divides men into the rude and the cultivated, but increases the natural differences which nature has allowed among the latter; for if a giant and ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... now professed the religion of peace, mercy, and forgiveness, were called to wrestle with a race whose religion was one of blood, and whose beatitude was to be in proportion to the slaughter they made while on earth. The Northman hated Christianity as a rival religion, and despised it as an effeminate one. He was the soldier of Odin, the elect of Valhalla; and he felt that the offering most acceptable to his sanguinary gods was the blood of those religionists who denied their existence and execrated their revelation. The points of attack, therefore, were ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... cold. Bobby dragged forth a pair of skates. They were shining and beautiful, and when Bobby, with the knowledge of the expert, went hastily into details, he found them all heart could wish for. No effeminate straps about these! but toe-clamps to tighten with a key and a projecting heel lock to insert in a metal socket in the boot's heel. This was the piece de resistance of the stocking. Bobby felt perfunctorily along the outside to assure himself that the usual two oranges ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... fittings, that had all made their appearance with her. Levin smiled at his own thoughts, and shook his head disapprovingly at those thoughts; a feeling akin to remorse fretted him. There was something shameful, effeminate, Capuan, as he called it to himself, in his present mode of life. "It's not right to go on like this," he thought. "It'll soon be three months, and I'm doing next to nothing. Today, almost for the first time, I set to work seriously, and what happened? I did nothing but begin and throw it ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... a smallish man, with a suggestion of something dapper about him even in his present unkempt disorder; he might have been handsome, in a weakly effeminate way, had not Nature or some mishap given his face a twist that skewed it all to one side, drawing all of his features out of focus, like a reflection viewed in a flawed mirror. He was no heavier than the woman and hardly as tall. She, however, looked less than her real height, ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... temptations in the way, I am afraid you will be led astray by them, and forget your errand. For the people whom you will see in that country do nothing but amuse themselves. They are very idle, gay, and effeminate, and I am fearful they will lead you astray. Your journey is beset with difficulties. I will mention one or two things, which you must be on your guard against. In the course of your journey, you will come to a large grape-vine ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... like about that Donohue," a rangy scout of the high school was saying to a companion wearing glasses, and looking a bit effeminate, though evidently quite fond of sport; "he acts as though he might be as cool as a cucumber. Those Harmony fellows in the crowd will do their level best to faze him, if ever he gets in a tight corner, and lots of things are liable to happen through ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton
... her gaze. There could be no doubt that the two faces thus confronting one another belonged to brother and sister, yet of the two his was the more effeminate, and its very beauty (he was an excessively handsome lad, albeit diminutively built) seemed to oppose itself to hers and caricature it, being so like yet so ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... Anthony as a cold-blooded, highly schooled person, absolutely devoid of sentiment. His face was stony, his eyes were cool, even his linen partook of his own unruffled calm. He seemed by no means effeminate, yet he was one of those immaculate beings upon whom one can scarcely imagine a speck of dust or a bead of perspiration. His hair—what was left of it—was parted to a nicety, his clothes were faultless, and he had an ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... fantastical taxation, levying tolls upon the bare necessities of life, and drying up the founts of national well-being at their sources; the devil of petty-princedom, wallowing in sloth and cruelty upon a pinchbeck throne; the devil of effeminate hidalgoism, ruinous in expenditure, mean and grasping, corrupt in private life, in public ostentatious, vain of titles, cringing to its masters, arrogant to its inferiors. In their train these brought with them seven other devils, their pernicious offspring: ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... "He that thinketh himself to stand, let him take heed lest he fall;"(1208) but expressly designates certain mortal sins as a bar to Heaven: "Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor liers with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor railers, nor extortioners, shall possess the kingdom ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... which is like to it. The manners of the wrestling-ground and of the stage are sometimes odious; but let us see the actor or the wrestler walking simple and upright, and we praise him. Let him use a befitting neatness, not verging toward the effeminate, but just avoiding a rustic harshness. The same measure is to be taken with your clothes as with other matters in which ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... was found in the PF. of a young Englishman, who died on his passage from Leghorn to the Levant. He had bought one of the Sporades] He was accompanied by a lady [who might have been] supposed to be his wife, & an effeminate looking youth, to whom he shewed an [attachment] so [singular] excessive an attachment as to give rise to the suspicion, that she was a woman—At his death this suspicion was confirmed;...object speedily found a refuge both from the taunts of the brute multitude, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... it may be said, they were badly born and ill-developed. Many of these are, to some extent, bearing the penalty of the sins and excesses of their parents, especially their fathers, whilst the great majority are reaping the fruits of their own immorality in a dwarfed and ill-formed body, and effeminate appearance, weak and ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... too," she said, and the man overlooked the inflection which, as plainly as words, was intended to convey the impression that his ways were effeminate. "If every man used up his time gentling his string he'd never have a day off to work ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... wears the pointed beard which we see so often in the portraits by Rubens' scholar, Van Dyck. The great flapping hat, worn alike by men and women, slightly cocked to one side, is the perfection of picturesque head gear. Equally picturesque, and not in the slightest degree effeminate on a man like Rubens, is the falling collar of pointed mechlin, just seen above the cloak ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... squall.]—probably, poor effeminate creature. Taylor, the water-poet, describes the rich foolish gallant calling ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp
... bergerie-berquinade-conte-de-fees, is no doubt La Petite Fadette, the history of two twin-boys and a little girl—this last, of course, the heroine. The boys are devoted to each other and as like as two peas in person, but very different in character, one being manly, and the other, if not exactly effeminate, something like it. As for Fadette, she, though never exactly like the other girl of the saying "horrid," but only (and with very considerable excuses) naughty and untidy and rude, becomes "so very, very good when she is good" as to awake slight recalcitrances ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... muddy boots (Lincoln as a Westerner always stuck to leg-boots, and was never seen in the effeminate "Congress gaiters," by the bye), he added: "I have always heard of 'Washington mud,' and now I shall take home ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... Enarean (Vol. ix., p.101.).—A. C. M. has no other authority for calling the cassock and girdle of the clergy "effeminate," or "a relique of the ancient priestly predilection for female attire," than the contrast to the close-fitting skin-tight fashion adopted by modern European tailors; the same might be said of any flowing kind of robe, such as the Eastern costume, or that of the English ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 232, April 8, 1854 • Various
... sentiment they desired to convey did not exist in the new feature;—in a round spire, on the other hand, they found that this distinction of light and shade was too little marked; it was vapid and effeminate, and quite without that delicious crispiness of effect which they at once obtained by cutting off the corners of the square spire, and reducing it to an octagon. With very rare exceptions, as in the southwest spire of Chartres Cathedral, this form was always used. Now it will be ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... cruel, and in peace it had been selfish and stern. The lust of rule became stronger as its arm became weaker. The degradation of slavery and the heavy hand of the tax-gatherer were extending even to Wales. The barbarian invader found the effeminate, luxurious empire an easy prey. In 410 Alaric and his host of Goths appeared before the city of Rome itself; and a horde of barbarians, thirsting for blood and spoil, surged into it. The fall of the great city ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... Scots divines, whose "damnatory creed" Louis objected to so strongly, in their studies, we read, reserved a corner for rod and gun. In his library there was never a sign of sporting tools, not even a golf-club. He was not effeminate; in fact, if "the man had been dowered with better health, we would have lost the author," says one speaker of him; but he simply never let go the pen, and, doubtless, his singleness of purpose, his want of toil-resting hobbies, was hampering to his health. Walking-tours, during ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... which I had stopped, not having followed De Quelus into the little open space. My interest in the encounter was naturally the greater for having learned the names of the antagonists. At La Tournoire I had heard enough of the court to know that the Marquis de Quelus was the chief of the King's effeminate chamberlains, whom he called his minions, and that Bussy d'Amboise was the most redoubtable of the rufflers attached to the King's discontented brother, the Duke of Anjou; and that between the dainty gentlemen ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... shrugs his shoulders. "For instance," says he, "this Gerald Webb seems to be one of those highly sensitive, delicately organized persons; somewhat effeminate in fact. He ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... enemy, appears. She comes from the extreme East, this wild dancer, with odorous hair, provocative glance and effeminate voice; she stands in a magnificent chariot drawn by four horses; she scatters violet and rose leaves; they are her weapons; their insidious perfumes destroy courage and will, and the army, headed by the virtues, ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... having with his own eyes seen Sardanapalus in the midst of his infamous seraglio; enraged at such a spectacle, and not able to endure that so many brave men should be subject to a prince more soft and effeminate than the women themselves, immediately formed a conspiracy against him. Belesis, governor of Babylon, and several others, entered into it. On the first rumour of this revolt, the king hid himself in the inmost part of his palace. Being obliged ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... at reasoning as he sought sleep that was far away. Again and again there rose before him the vision of two men in an open buggy, with a singing, apparently maudlin person between them whom Ohadi believed to be an effeminate-voiced Swede; in reality, only a woman. And why had they adopted the expedient? Why had not Larsen been with them in reality? Fairchild avoided the obvious conclusion and turned to other thoughts, to Rodaine with his squint eyes, to Crazy Laura, gathering herbs at midnight in the ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... never occur, nevertheless they are exercised in military tactics and in hunting, lest perchance they should become effeminate and unprepared for any emergency. Besides, there are four kingdoms in the island, which are very envious of their prosperity, for this reason that the people desire to live after the manner of the inhabitants of the City of the Sun, and to be under ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... lustrations, and public processions, as must have employed the people almost constantly from one end of the year to the other. This continual dissipation must have been a great enemy to industry; and the people must have been idle and effeminate. I think it would be no difficult matter to prove, that there is very little difference, in point of character, between the antient and modern inhabitants of Rome; and that the great figure which this empire made of old, was not so much owing to the intrinsic virtue of its ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... blessings and the cursings." We must let the Lord brace us with His severities. We must gaze steadily upon the appalling fearfulness of sin, and upon its terrific issues. At all costs we must get rid of the spurious gentleness that holds compromise with uncleanness, that effeminate affection which is destitute of holy fire. We must seek the love which burns everlastingly against all sin; we must seek the gentleness which can fiercely grip a poisonous growth and tear it out to its last hidden root. We must seek that holy love which ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... feet nor lie down. Never have these wandering eyes of mine looked upon a figure more pathetic. For an instant I stood there, swaying upon my feet as though from sickness, staring at him incredulously. His thin, pale, effeminate face was rendered wonderfully piteous by the depth of suffering so plainly revealed within the great, black, appealing eyes. So peculiarly delicate were the features, so slender the fragile form, about which a frayed and rusty ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... ever blown on the haughty races and withered their roots. The prosperity of the impious has never passed to their descendants. Thrones themselves, and royal succession have failed, to effeminate and worthless princes; and the history of the crimes and excess of the great is, at the same time, the history of their misfortunes and of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... and remarkably handsome. He had that curious combination of rather fair hair and very dark eyes and brows. His face was clean-shaven, and the features were refined and delicate without being in the least effeminate; for the cruel strength of the lower jaw and firmly shut lips showed at a glance that this man had a will of iron. His voice was exceedingly smooth ...
— Sue, A Little Heroine • L. T. Meade
... and placed all their happiness in corporeal pleasure. When Paul was at Athens, he had conferences with the Epicurean philosophers. (Acts 17:18) The word Epicurean is used, at present, for an indolent, effeminate, and voluptuous person, who only consults his private ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... inhabitants of Sulu are a tall, thin, and effeminate-looking race: I do not recollect to have seen one corpulent person among them. Their faces are peculiar for length, particularly in the lower jaw and chin, with high cheek-bones, sunken, lack-lustre eyes, and narrow ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... hands of the Egyptian, it is sublime; in those of the Greek, pure; in those of the Roman, rich; and in those of the Renaissance builder, effeminate. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... the big brothers respected him less than ever. To them flower-hunting, as an occupation, seemed trivial and effeminate. Flowers, though they were well enough in their proper places,—the front garden or the grass,—were usually a nuisance that crept through the crops and choked their growth, until descended upon and tediously jerked up, one after another, by the roots. And a man who could ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... Impromptu, have only a remote reference to the nature of the piece. Occasionally the entire composition is morbid and unsatisfactory to a degree. These belong to the later period of his life, when he was in poor health. He is a woman's composer. In his strongest moments there is always an effeminate element. In this respect he is exactly opposite to Schumann and Beethoven, whose works, however delicate and refined, have always a manly strength. Chopin made the most important modifications in the current way of treating the piano. In this part of his activity he seemed to ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... Scotchman, and Tom's special friend; a man of excellent principles, thoroughly reliable, and held in high respect by all though not possessed of popular manners. On the other side was Lawrence Peabody, a young Boston clerk, who had spent several years behind a dry-goods counter. He was soft and effeminate, with no talent for "roughing it," and wholly unfitted for the hard work which he had undertaken. He was deeply disappointed in his first work at gold-hunting, having come out with the vague idea that he should pick up a big nugget within a ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... ever seen, wearing only a girdle of leaves around their waists, and all armed with Snider carbines and short stabbing knives made from cutlasses broken in halves. But, although they bullied the weak and effeminate Strong's Islanders, they were yet very obedient to their white masters, to whom they were all more or less related through the native wives whom the traders had married. The women were very tall and ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... too little in flesh. Paint and polish them with feminine cosmetics, and admiration ceases; the very pains taken to make them appear more beautiful add to the dislike we conceive for them. Yet a magnificent, and suitable, dress adds authority to man; but an effeminate dress, the garb of luxury and softness, lays open the corruption of the heart without adding to the ornament of the body. In like manner, translucent and flashy elocution weakens the things it clothes. I would, therefore, ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... me with thine admonitions as vainly as [thou mightest] a billow.[79] Never let it enter your thoughts that I, affrighted by the purpose of Jupiter, shall become womanish, and shall importune the object whom I greatly loathe, with effeminate upliftings of my hands, to release me from these shackles: I want much ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... venture to approach. This threat deterred not Artavan de Hautlieu. He approached the entrance, when the doors, like those of the great entrance to the Castle, made themselves instantly accessible to him. A guard-room of the same effeminate soldiers received him, nor could the strictest examination have discovered to him whether it was sleep or death which arrested the eyes that seemed to look upon and prohibit his advance. Unheeding the presence of these ghastly sentinels, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... tone of heedless gayety, which contrasted so horribly with his position. For the rest, he was unanimously conceded to be kind, generous, humane, lenient toward the weak, while with the strong he loved to display a vigor truly athletic which his somewhat effeminate features were far from indicating. He boasted that he had never been without money, and had no enemies. That was his sole reply to the charges of theft and assassination. He was twenty-two ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... themselves during winter in their camp of cars, or in some fortified place, sold their services to the highest bidder, changed masters according to interest or inclination, and by their bravery became the terror of these effeminate populations and the arbiters of these ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... fresco by Correggio, he is a beautiful youth, with the curling hair, the oval face and the regular features we associate with the person of Jesus. Though the beardless face is so refined, there is nothing weak or effeminate about it. The whole figure is indeed very manly. The head is well set on a full throat and the shoulders are broad. Rising to his feet St. John would be a tall, athletic young man, capable of lending a strong hand at ...
— Correggio - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... German. Our epic poems are of German origin, and the Table Round is of Celtic origin. Sensual and light, witty and delicate, descriptive and charming, these pleasing romances are never masculine, and become too often effeminate and effeminating. They sing always, or nearly so, the same theme. By lovely pasturages clothed with beautiful flowers, the air full of birds, a young knight proceeds in search of the unknown, and through a series of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... weight of any well-dressed, white-handed young men, who should presume to insult her. In imagination, he had done it times without number; and had contrived a private method to double up a number of effeminate antagonists in succession. But, in all his reveries, he had never anticipated peril to Miss Minford from a falling board; nor had it occurred to him that the supreme felicity of saving her from death or injury would ever be the ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... infinitely harder. Though only eight years old when he entered the Temple, he was by nature and education extremely precocious; "his memory retained everything, and his sensitiveness comprehended everything." His features "recalled the somewhat effeminate look of Louis XV., and the Austrian hauteur of Maria Theresa; his blue eyes, aquiline nose, elevated nostrils, well-defined mouth, pouting lips, chestnut hair parted in the middle and falling in thick curls on his shoulders, resembled his mother ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... Northwest. Such misfits are pitiable, as well as laughable. When you consider that in some of these northern parishes a man can reach his different missions only by canoe or dog-train, that the missions are forty miles apart, that the canoe must run rapids and the dog-train dare blizzards—an effeminate type of man is more of a tragedy than a comedy. I think of one mission where the circuit is four hundred miles and the distance to railroad, doctor, post-office, fifty-five miles. This little curate had had a hard time, ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... festivity at Carlsruhe, among all our new fashionable friends there, I bade good-by for ever to my dear old father. I had begged my husband to take me by way of Heidelberg to his old castle in the Vosges; but I found an amount of determination, under that effeminate appearance and manner, for which I was not prepared, and he refused my first request so decidedly that I dared not urge it. "Henceforth, Anna," said he, "you will move in a different sphere of life; and though it is possible that you may have the power of showing favour to your relations from ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... in these somewhat fragmentary observations, was to protest against the reasoning which would divest punishment of its proper and distinctive character, which, spreading about weak and effeminate scruples, would paralyse the arm which bears the sword of justice. One writer would impugn the right of society to put its arch-criminals to death; another controverts its right to inflict any penalty whatever, which has not for its direct object the reformation ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... together, and to take care not to leave an impression of the person for their lovers. And no boy used in those days to anoint himself below the navel; so that their bodies wore the appearance of blooming health. Nor used he to go to his lover, having made up his voice in an effeminate tone, prostituting himself with his eyes. Nor used it to be allowed when one was dining to take the head of the radish, or to snatch from their seniors dill or parsley, or to eat fish, or to giggle, or ...
— The Clouds • Aristophanes
... though dowered to the full with his mother's beauty, had yet been effectually preserved from the misfortune of being an effeminate repetition of her. In him, Elisabeth's glowing auburn colouring had sobered to a steady brown—evidenced in the crisp, curly hair and sun-tanned skin; and the misty hyacinth-blue of her eyes had hardened in the eyes of her son into the clear, bright azure of the sea, whist the beautiful contours ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... statue of Cos among them, and several statues of Eros, representing tender, effeminate youths, illustrate further the departure which Praxiteles marks from the restraint of Pheidias. Another of his masculine figures is the graceful Apollo with the Lizard. The god, strong in his youthful suppleness, is leaning against a tree threatening ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... the soldier's best and staunchest friend. Nor were the officers easy to distinguish from the men. A shade cleaner, perhaps; but they, too, were rough-bearded, hard bitten by long exposure and responsibility. How different from the exquisites of popular fancy! Gone the beauties of effeminate adornment. Gone the studied insolence of puppyhood—that arrogance of bearing traditional with the British officer in times of peace. These were the men who had been eyes and ears to French's magnificent cavalry, who had ridden unflinchingly to the relief of Kimberley, who had more than ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... was being made ready for burial. George Prince was still in his stateroom. Glutz, effeminate little hairdresser, who waxed rich acting as beauty doctor for the women passengers, and who, in his youth, had been an undertaker, had gone with Dr. Frank ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... about thirty years old, blonde, a little effeminate, wistful. A curious appurtenance in the military household of so vigorous a general). "Natacha, there is not an hour that I can call truly good if I spend it away from ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... the gross insolence and brutality of the other. If a set of low-lived fellows are noisy, rude, and boisterous to show their disregard of the company, a set of fashionable coxcombs are, to a nauseous degree, finical and effeminate to show their thorough breeding. The one are governed by their feelings, however coarse and misguided, which is something; the others consult only appearances, which are nothing, either as a test of happiness or virtue. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... saints seated, arrayed in pure pink, and blue and lilac, in an atmosphere of liquid gold, in glory. And thus Fra Angelico worked on, content with the dearly purchased science of his masters, placid, beatic, effeminate, in an aesthetical paradise of his own, a paradise of sloth and sweetness, a paradise for weak souls, weak hearts, and weak eyes; patiently repeating the same fleshless angels, the same boneless saints, the same ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... now, that we did it in two days, but such is my recollection. I no longer mention that we walked back in a single day, it makes me so furious to see doubt in the face of the hearer. Men were men in those old times. Think of one of the puerile organisms in this effeminate age attempting ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... had brought him up, and with many tears tried to prevent his going there. Again, it often happens that important business makes it necessary to part from friends: the man who tries to baulk it, because he thinks that he cannot endure the separation, is of a weak and effeminate nature, and on that very account makes but a poor friend. There are, of course, limits to what you ought to expect from a friend and to what you should allow him to demand of you. And these you must take into ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... bronze-colored class: gracefully formed, with effeminate features, small hands and feet, long fingers, intelligent minds, courteous and polished manners. Such are the Mpongwe of the Gaboon, the Angolese, the Fanti of the Gold Coast, and most probably the Haoussa of the Niger, a tribe with which ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... for Mars, some ten days away. Suspicious interplanetary passengers were aboard: Miko and Moa, a brother and a sister of Mars; Sir Arthur Coniston, a mysterious Englishman; Ob Hahn, a Venus mystic. And small, effeminate George Prince and his sister, Anita. Love, I think, was born instantly between Anita and me. I found all too soon that Miko, the sinister giant from Mars, also ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... mesmerising, table-turning, spirit-rapping, spiritualising, Romanising generation, who read Shelley in secret, and delight in his bad taste, mysticism, extravagance, and vague and pompous sentimentalism. The age is an effeminate one, and it can well afford to pardon the lewdness of the gentle and sensitive vegetarian, while it has no mercy for that of the sturdy peer proud of his bull neck and his boxing, who kept bears and bull-dogs, drilled Greek ruffians at Missoloughi, and "had no objection to a pot of beer;" and ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... means so diversified as those of boys. It would be considered a trifle too effeminate were the little men to amuse themselves with their sisters' game of Chucks—an enchanting amusement, played with a large-sized marble and four octagonal pieces of chalk. Beds, another girlish game, is also played ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... young are no longer to be nourished on sago, rice, or maize? Alas! if it has come to that, I myself will gnaw the beard from the old curmudgeon who thinks he sleeps here safely. Is the degradation of effeminate land rats, cheese-eaters, wharf robbers, stable vermin, to come upon us? Fates forbid it! Soon, perhaps, some fierce tabby may come to make our once brave hearts tremble. Then, then,"—but I imagined the eloquence broken off there and giving place ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... which are great lets and impediments to the act of generation. Hence it is that Bacchus, the god of bibbers, tipplers, and drunkards, is most commonly painted beardless and clad in a woman's habit, as a person altogether effeminate, or like a libbed eunuch. Wine, nevertheless, taken moderately worketh quite contrary effects, as is implied by the old proverb, which saith,—That Venus taketh cold, when not accompanied by Ceres and Bacchus.[221] This opinion is of great ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... banish for ever from our minds, my countrymen, all such unworthy ideas of the K—g, his Ministry, and Parliament. Let us not suppose, that all are become luxurious, effeminate and unreasonable, on the other side the water, as many designing persons would insinuate. Let us presume, what is in fact true, that the spirit of liberty is as ardent as ever among the body of the nation, though a few individuals may be corrupted.—Let us take it for granted, that the same great ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... tire me? Indeed no—you never did. And do understand that I am not to be tired 'in that way,' though as Mr. Boyd said once of his daughter, one may be so 'far too effeminate.' No—if I were put into a crowd I should be tired soon—or, apart from the crowd, if you made me discourse orations De Corona ... concerning your bag even ... I should be tired soon—though peradventure not very much ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... consummate taste. The vicomte had inherited from his parents a taste for Oriental things, and his study looked like a costly tent, while his bedroom was furnished with the simplicity of a convent cell. The Count of Monte-Cristo had taught his son to be strict to himself and not become effeminate in any way. Nice pictures and statues were in the parlors, the bookcase was filled with selected volumes and he spent many hours each day in serious studies. Spero was a master in all physical accomplishments. His father's iron muscles were his legacy, and the count ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... clumsiness in them, which it is impossible for them to shake off, so as to represent with justness the sprightly graces and delicacy of the female sex. The very idea of seeing men effeminated by such a dress, invincibly disgusts. An effeminate man appears even ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... considered the 121st Mikado of the race of Jimmu Tenno, the members of which have reigned uninterruptedly in Japan for nearly two thousand years, with varying fates and with varying power—now as wise lawgivers and mighty warriors, now for long periods as weak and effeminate rulers, emperors only in seeming, to whom almost divine homage was paid, but who were carefully freed from the burden of government and from all actual power. In comparison with this race, whose first ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... seemed absolutely unconcerned, and after having washed himself leisurely, proceeded to discharges his devotions, looking around all the while with a certain self-satisfied composure, before returning to his cell. His appearance was puny, undergrown, and effeminate, and his small, narrow, and elongated head markedly prognathous, but he exercised over some of his companions a passionate, if unnatural, fascination which, I have been told by one who was present ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... Jasper was dark and effeminate in appearance, not strong and sturdy, nor had he the look of self-reliance and calm power which characterized our hero, who was his cousin. He was smooth, deceitful, and vain, running to dissipation, as far as he ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger
... as yet there is little sign of it. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century painting and sculpture have passed through several phases, representatives of each naturally surviving after the next had appeared. Romanticism, half lurid, half effeminate, yielded to a brutal pursuit of material truth, and a pious preference for modern and humble sentiment. This realism had a romantic vein in it, and studied vice and crime, tedium and despair, with a very genuine horrified ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... poetry being "imitation" colors the well-known section of the third book of the Republic, which warns against the influence of certain effeminate types of ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... which were common to them with the Greeks. According to Herodotus, they were the first who made a livelihood by shop-keeping. They were skilful in the use of musical instruments, and had their own peculiar musical mode or style, which was in much favor among the Greeks, though condemned as effeminate by some of the philosophers. At the same time the Lydians were not wanting in courage or manliness. They fought chiefly on horseback, and were excellent riders, carrying long spears, which they managed with great skill. Nicolas of Damascus tells us that even under the Heraclido kings, they could ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... be expected; first, the cause of God may be advanced by the preaching of the gospel to many Indian tribes; and, secondly, great conquests may be effected for the glory of the king, by the seizure of provinces rich in silver mines, and defended only by a few indolent and effeminate Spaniards. The Sieur de la Salle, pursues the memorial, binds himself to accomplish this enterprise within one year after his arrival on the spot; and he asks for this purpose only one vessel and two hundred men, with their arms, munitions, pay, and maintenance. When Monseigneur ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... rustic apparel, the plain but firm demeanor, the free and direct language, of the envoys, whose antique simplicity of dress and appearance seemed to have introduced within our walls, in the midst of the effeminate and servile refinement of the eighteenth century, some sages contemporary with Plato, or republicans of the age of Cato and of Fabius. This unexpected apparition produced upon us a greater effect in consequence of its novelty, and of its occurring precisely at the period when literature ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... two had seated themselves in soft, low easy-chairs, and the host had noted with pleasure that his guest had no effeminate qualms in the matter of large rich cigars, a ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... I saw that he was handsome in an effeminate sort of way, with a slight lady-like sort of figure, a blond mustache, so light in color as to be almost invisible at a distance, and fine girlish eyes of a light blue. As he saw me in turn he gave me a good-morning ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... themselves in any clothes but those made of leather, wool, or cloth; for had they, on such occasions, made their appearance dressed in silk and ornaments, he would have sharply reproved them and have treated them as cowards, or as effeminate, and consequently unfit for the work in which he was about ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... however, knows that, at the Papal Court, the time and money of the public are not frittered away in parties and fetes and dances. Everybody knows too that women are not admitted to the Vatican, and therefore the habits of the court are not effeminate, while the whole of its time is spent in transacting state affairs; and the due course of justice is not disturbed by certain feminine passions." After this statement, startling to any one with a knowledge of the past, ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... entire pavement, so that it was impossible to precede them without getting into the carriage-way, thus greatly obstructing and inconveniencing all other passengers. Lounging at a funeral pace, and leaving not the smallest opening, it was evident that 325 these effeminate animals had purposely united themselves for public annoyance. Sir Felix, irritated by this palpable outrage on decorum, stepped forward, with hasty determined stride, and coming unexpectedly and irresistibly in contact, broke at once the concatenated barrier, to ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... they had not the privilege to eat at home, and so to come without appetite to the public repast: they made a point of it to observe any one that did not eat and drink with them, and to reproach him as an intemperate and effeminate person that was sick ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... almost entirely, and metre as generally understood. And in his treatment of certain passions and appetites, and of unadulterated human nature, he is at war with what he considered the conventions of an effeminate society, in which, however, he adopts a mode of utterance which many people consider equally objectionable, overlooking, as he does, the existence through all the processes of nature of a principle of reserve and concealment. Amid ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... Anglo-Saxons in particular, have always at the back of their minds a notion that there is something effeminate about the sense for beauty. That is reserved for decadent Southern nations. Tu regere imperio populos, Romane memento they would say, if they knew the tag; and translate it "Britain rules the waves"! But history gives the lie to this complacent theory. No ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... the paternal patience as well as his own. Wesley, however, had a large fund of the philosophy that comes from a high estimate of one's self. He was well favored in looks and build, though somewhat effeminate, with his small hands and carefully shod feet. He would have been called a "dude" had the word been known in its present significance; as it was, he was regarded as a coxcomb by the derisive group hostile to the father's social pretensions. He ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... fine-looking, noble head covered with curly brown hair. He was always exquisitely clean and orderly, both about his person and the books and things that belonged to him in his rooms, where there was an atmosphere of almost feminine refinement, though their occupant was by no means effeminate in his thoughts or bearing. We understood that he had left Italy in consequence of some political difficulty, and we knew that he had still relations there. One day, as we were engaged with our lesson ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... the wicked betrayer and which the skull of the innocent betrayed. And who is unacquainted with the statement in Herodotus that it was possible on the field of battle to distinguish the skulls of the effeminate Medes from the skulls of the manly Persians? Each nation, indeed, ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... undisguised astonishment. There was nothing at all Amazonian or horsey in her manners, nor was there even the robust physical contour that might have been developed through such experiences. On the contrary, she seemed to be lazily effeminate in body and mind. Heedless of his critical survey of her, she beckoned him to draw his chair nearer, and, looking into ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... is true, and a little effeminate also, that is, lacking energy, letting himself be carried away by goodness and tenderness. This weakness made him commit a fault before his departure for America. I have kept it from you until this moment, ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot
... lip was a shade or two lighter than the rest of his face, and spoke of a moustache recently removed. The other man had also an outdoor look, but he had not been hardened by long service as his companion had. He was softer, more effeminate. He seemed to be not over twenty-one or two, was tall, a little too much inclined to plumpness, but with an open and ingenuous countenance, lighted by a ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... grace in Charlotte, In Eleanor a state, An elegance in Isabel, A haughtiness in Kate; And Sarah is sedate and neat, And Ellen innocent and sweet Matilda has a sickly sound, Fit for a nurse's trade; Sophie is effeminate, And Esther sage and staid; Elizabeth's a matchless name, Fit for a queen to wear In castle, cottage, hut, or hall— A name beyond compare; And Bess, and Bessie follow well, But Betsy is detestable. Maria is too forward, And Gertrude is too gruff, Yet, coupled with a pretty face, Is pretty ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... extremely neat in his dress, and from the cravat to the well-polished boot, his costume was perfect. An effeminate, solemn-looking dandy outwardly—within, as ferocious and hard a human biped as ever ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... determination is not among my virtues," Challoner replied. "It's as much to the purpose that you don't know my father very well. Though he's fond of pictures, he looks upon artists and poets as a rather effeminate and irresponsible set, and I must own that he has met one or two unfavourable specimens. Then he couldn't imagine the possibility of a son of his not being anxious to follow the family profession, and, knowing how my ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... where Lysia had just silently made her appearance,— and springing from their seats they broke into a boisterous shout of acclamation and welcome. One young man whose flushed face had all the joyous, wanton, effeminate beauty of a pictured Dionysius, reeled forward, goblet in hand, and tossing the wine in air so that it splashed down again at his feet, staining his white garments as it fell with a stain as of blood, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... important respects a contrast to his contemporaries Ghiberti and Donatello, and still more to their immediate followers. He made his art as true to life as it is possible to be, without the rugged realism of Donatello or the somewhat effeminate graces of Ghiberti. The charm of his work is never impaired by scientific mannerism—that stumbling-block to critics like De Stendhal in the art of Florence; nor does it suffer from the picturesqueness of a sentimental style. ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... or the manifestation in me of that heart at once so haughty and so tender, of that effeminate and yet unconquerable character which, ever vacillating between courage and weakness, between virtue and yielding to temptation, has all along set me in contradiction to myself, and has resulted ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... "Away then with this effeminate cant about maintaining order and decorum, by the suppression of the public exhibitions of manly exercises. To them the individual Englishman owes his superiority to the individual of every other country, in courage, strength, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... with chestnut, while Bertha's shone with unmingled gold; but, like Bertha's, his recreant locks had a strong tendency to curl, and lay in rich clusters upon his brow, distressing him by a propensity which he deemed effeminate. His mouth was as ripely red as hers, but somewhat larger, firmer, and less bland in its character. His eyebrows, too, were more darkly traced, supplying a want only too obvious in her countenance. The resemblance, however, disappeared in the forehead and classic nose, for the brow of Maurice was ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... animal, not suggesting any great love of work, and rather loutish in his manners. But, he knew his engine, said Charlie. And that was the main thing. The deck-hand proved to be a shackly, rather silly effeminate fellow, suggesting idiocy, but doubtless wiry and ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... been based on even the peculiar color of the eyes. Thus, it is said that dark blue eyes are found chiefly in persons of delicate, refined or effeminate mental character; light blue eyes, and more particularly gray eyes, in the hardy and active; hazel eyes, in the masculine, vigorous, and profound; black eyes, in those whose energy is of a desultory or remittent ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... fellow Naaman," said he, "after what he'd seen and felt, going back and bowing himself down in the house of Rimmon, because his effeminate scoundrel of a master did it. I wonder Elisha took the trouble to heal him. How he must ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... whips, stirrups, and side-saddles. The table in the middle is piled up with heaps of dark-colored cloth and hats with green, brown, and blue veils. At one end is a life-size wooden horse, and presiding over this room is a blonde effeminate young man, whose business it is to offer his clasped hands as a mounting-stone to help the ladies to jump on to the back of the wooden steed, while the tailor arranges the folds ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... prone to indulge in effeminate demonstration, but I am not ashamed to confess that when I gazed on the weather-beaten though ruddy countenance of my old companion, and observed the eager glance of his bright blue eyes, I was quite overcome, and rushed violently into his arms. I may also ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... and casks. In a corner three ancient amphorae leaned Against the wall, like ships careened. There was dusky blue of Wedgewood ware, The carved, white figures fluttering there Like leaves adrift upon the air. Classic in touch, but emasculate, The Greek soul grown effeminate. The factory of Sevres had lent Elegant boxes with ornament Culled from gardens where fountains splashed And golden carp in the shadows flashed, Nuzzling for crumbs under lily-pads, Which ladies threw as the last of fads. Eggshell trays where gay ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... generations of art. Spite of its complications, many an offshoot can be followed up directly to the parent stock. Taking, for example, the mediaeval architecture of Spain, the brilliant 'Moresco,' we find it to be a combination of the vigorous Gothic of the North with the beautiful though effeminate Saracenic—the exotic of the South. And of these latter, each is traceable, though by different lines, to the same great prototype, the Roman. For when Rome was divided, the Dome fell to the inheritance of the Eastern ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... the want. It partakes something of the attributes of its people; and I think that I better understand the proud, hardy, frugal, and abstemious Spaniard, his manly defiance of hardships, and contempt of effeminate indulgences, since I have seen ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 547, May 19, 1832 • Various
... action of mine! He is a rebel, a traitor. He dares to think of the time when I will be gone—of the time when he or his children will wear this crown! I feel that I hate him as my father hated me because I was his heir, and because the sight of me always reminded him of his death! Yes, I hate him! The effeminate boy will disturb the great work which I am endeavoring to perform. Under his weak hands, this Prussia, which I would make great and powerful, will fail to pieces, and all my battles and conquests will be in vain. He will ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... enemy alighted on the ground; nor an effeminate man, nor one who sues for life with closed palms, nor one whose hair is loose, nor one who sits down, nor one who says, 'I ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... of an Eminent Attorney of the City of London" sounds like something manufactured out of whole cloth by a compiler who in fact had no idea whose son Baker was. The Biographia Dramatica had "heard" that the effeminate Maiden in Tunbridge-Walks ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... material and moderate proportions of the Greek works, there appears in the Etruscan an ostentatious stress laid upon the size and costliness, or even the mere singularity, of the work. Etruscan art cannot imitate without exaggerating; the chaste in its hands becomes harsh, the graceful effeminate, the terrible hideous, and the voluptuous obscene; and these features become more prominent, the more the original stimulus falls into the background and Etruscan art finds itself left to its own resources. Still more surprising is ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... effect, Achilles, have I mov'd you. A woman impudent and mannish grown Is not more loath'd than an effeminate man In time of action. I stand condemn'd for this; They think my little stomach to the war And your great love to me restrains you thus. Sweet, rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold, And, like a ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... the yoke of foreign dominion, nor having ever had experience of that most miserable and detested condition of living in slavery; no long descent having as yet invested the Assyrian with a right, nor any other title being for him pretended than a strong hand; the foolish and effeminate son of a tyrannous and hated mother could very ill hold so many great princes and nations his vassals, with a power less mastering, and a mind less industrious, than his father and mother ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... face," Ideala answered, dreamily—"a face for a bust in white marble; a face from out of the long ago—not Greek, but Roman —of the time when men were passing from a strong, simple, manly, into a luxuriously effeminate, self-indulgent stage; the face of a man who is midway between the two extremes, and a prey to the desires of both. I wish I had ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... Petersburgh have observed that, among the lower orders of the people in Russia, milk in the breasts of men is much more frequent than among the more southern nations: yet the Russians have never been deemed weak and effeminate. There is among the varieties of the human species a race of men whose breasts at the age of puberty acquire a considerable bulk. Lozano did not belong to that race; and he often repeated to us his conviction, that it was only ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... from Weihaiwei, and the German Legation is consequently somewhat irate. It was noticed at our club, for instance, which, by the way, is a humble affair, that the German military attache, a gentleman who wears bracelets, is somewhat effeminate, and plays vile tennis and worse billiards, had a "hostile attitude" towards the British Legation—that is, such of the British Legation as gather together each day at the "ice-shed"—which happens to be the club's peculiar Chinese name. The military ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... taut. But No. 2 doubled up as had No. 1, while she was still held captive by a line; falling into a tree hurt the balloon, but the aeronaut escaped unscratched. Santos-Dumont, in spite of his quiet ways and almost effeminate speech, his diminutive body, and wealth that permitted him to enjoy every luxury, persisted in his work with rare courage and determination. The difficulties were great and the available information meager to the last degree. The young inventor had to experiment and find out for himself the ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... That descendant, however effeminate, of the ancient union between Song and Drama, when, after long obscurity and dethronement, it regained a punier sceptre, though a gaudier purple, by the banks of the Etrurian Arno, or amidst the lagunes of Venice, had chosen all its primary inspirations ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... taboo rules depend on this conception:[1019] the flesh of timid animals is avoided, that of courageous animals is eaten, under the belief that the man partakes of the character of the food he eats; association with women is sometimes supposed to make a man or a boy effeminate. It is to be expected that in the immense number of taboo prohibitions and precautions some should be found in which the association of ideas is the determining factor. But for the majority of taboo regulations this explanation does ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... Corea, even the stronger ones who survive, are extremely delicate until a certain age is attained, when they seem to pick up and become stronger. This weakness is hereditary, especially among the upper classes, of whom very few powerful men are to be found, owing to their dissolute and effeminate life. ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... common observation, that the more solicitous any people are about dress, the more effeminate they are. I attribute it entirely to this idle adventitious passion for finery, that these people are become so over and above careful of their persons; they are for ever, and on every occasion, putting one another on their guard against catching cold; "you'll certainly catch ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... already existed within his splendid make-up. As for Roswell Palmer and Frank Mansley, their excellent home training, not denying credit to the grim old miner for his wise counsel, had held them free from the bad habits which too often make boys effeminate and weak and old before their time. Gifted by nature with the best of constitutions, they had strengthened rather than undermined them. Neither had known an hour's illness throughout the long, laborious journey, and they were in the ...
— Klondike Nuggets - and How Two Boys Secured Them • E. S. Ellis
... features of the people of England have been totally changed, and that a frivolous effeminacy was become the national character. Nothing could be more popular than that work. It was thought a great consolation to us, the light people of this country (who were and are light, but who were not and are not effeminate), that we had found the causes of our misfortunes in our vices. Pythagoras could not be more pleased with his leading discovery. But whilst in that splenetic mood we amused ourselves in a sour, critical speculation, of which ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... principal writers of amorous tales. Heliodorus has treated the subject with due gravity and decorum. Iamblichus is not so unexceptionable on these points; and Achilles Tatius is still worse, in his eight books of Clitophon and Leucippe, the very diction of which is soft and effeminate, as if intended to relax the vigour of the reader's mind." This last denunciation of the patriarch, however, is somewhat too sweeping and indiscriminate, since, though some passages are certainly indefensible, they appear rather as interpolations, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... weak, it is true, and a little effeminate also, that is, lacking energy, letting himself be carried away by goodness and tenderness. This weakness made him commit a fault before his departure for America. I have kept it from you until this moment, but you must know it now. Loving a woman who controlled him and made him do what she wished, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... forget your hospitality, friends all," said he, in his slightly swaggering and yet withal effeminate way; "and see, in some measure of return for it, we leave you our Sherwood free from pestilent robbers and evil defiers of the law. When we came to Nottingham there were these and others; but now they are all driven out of our Royal forest—many slain with the ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... of the corvette. He had a smooth face with pink cheeks, whiskers curled to a nicety, and hair carefully brushed. His figure was slight and refined, and he wore lilac kid gloves, his appearance being certainly somewhat effeminate; indeed, he looked as if he had just come ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... allow men to make the laws, as God and nature planned. I think women should keep to the sphere God made them for—the home. Said Gladstone, 'Woman is the most perfect when most womanly.' There is nothing, I think, more despicable than a masculine, mannish woman, unless it be an effeminate, sissy man. Dr. Clarke voiced my sentiments when he said: 'Man is not superior to woman, nor woman to man. The relation of the sexes is one of equality, not of better or worse, of higher and lower. The loftiest ideal of humanity demands that each ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... figure and of middling height. Their features are strongly marked, their complexions fair and pale, and their hair is of the darkest black. The men are feeble and look prematurely old. Their countenances, though not devoid of dignity, have a sort of sensual expression. They are effeminate, and disinclined to any kind of active exertion. If they ride the distance of ten miles, they think they have performed a feat of heroism worthy to be recorded in the state archives. If the white Creoles are ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... looked into the far distance, while his face lost its changing expressions of cynicism, severity, gracious courtesy and keen scrutiny, and showed a nobility which Jean had never seen before. She noticed how it invested his somewhat effeminate ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... than that of either Persians or Greeks. It probably resembled that of Queen Esther more than that of Aspasia, in that dark richness and voluptuousness which to some have such attractions; but in grace and vivacity she was purely Grecian,—not like a "blooming Eastern bride," languid and passive and effeminate, but bright, witty, and intellectual. Shakspeare paints her as full of lively sallies, with the power of adapting herself to circumstances with tact and good nature, like a Madame Recamier or a Maintenon, rather than like a Montespan or a Pompadour, although ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... A budding painter, a sculptor, a musician, may be the boast of a proud family circle, but to give a youth the reputation of writing verses is at once to call down upon his head a storm of ridicule and patronising disdain! He is credited with being effeminate, sentimental, and feeble-minded; his failure is taken as a preordained fact; he becomes ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... little heart would impel him to the most active pity; and he liberally gave away whatever he had by him and thought he could dispense with. The Father, who, as above indicated, never could approve or even endure such unreasonable giving-up of one's feelings to effeminate impressions, was apt to intervene on these occasions, even with manual punishment,—unless the Mother were at hand to ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... walking-suit, over which he wore a long scarlet mantle. A gold cross was suspended from his neck by a massive chain of gold. He was delicately featured, with a little pointed beard, tiny mustachios, and long, fair hair that fell in waves about his effeminate face. He had the whitest of hands, very delicately veined in blue, and it was—as I soon observed—his habit to carry them raised, so that the blood might not flow into them to coarsen their beauty. ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... among them that might not have served as a model for a Hercules. Their huge bodies presented an appearance of massiveness and immense strength; and the enormous muscles had even more than the prominence we find in some statues, but so seldom meet with in men of these effeminate times. These particulars were the more easily noted, as their style of costume, in the daytime at least, approached very closely to nudity. But their size was as nothing to their appetites; and deep and vasty as their internal accommodations must have been, it remains a matter of perplexity ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... the elegant and effeminate clubman, in this corsair with broad shoulders, a skin the color of tan, with very red lips, who rolled a little in his walk; who seemed to be stifled in his black dress-coat, but who still retained the distinguished manners and bearing of a nobleman of the last century, one of those ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... of them— millions supplied their place. The only thing, in fact, that can protect one during the night (nothing can during the day) is a net of gauze hung over the bed; but as this was looked upon by the young men as somewhat effeminate, it was seldom resorted to. The best thing for their destruction, we found, was to fill our rooms with smoke, either by burning damp moss or by letting off large puffs of gunpowder, and then throwing the doors and windows open to allow them to fly out. This, however, did not put them ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... a handsome primo tenore. Rather than such cockney sentimentality as this as an education for the taste and sympathies, we prefer the most crapulous group of boors that Teniers ever painted. But even those among our painters who aim at giving the rustic type of features, who are far above the effeminate feebleness of the "Keepsake" style, treat their subjects under the influence of traditions and prepossessions rather than of direct observation. The notion that peasants are joyous, that the typical moment to represent a man in a smock-frock is when he is ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... said Riley. "Five or six of the men you met to-night were loath to come. When I pinned them down to their reason, it was I thought: they regard you as an effeminate ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... meeting anybody, literally anybody, who comes from "the old place." It may not last, neither does a flash of lightning, but it is very real while it lasts. And what if foreigners exhibit their emotions in ways that may seem effeminate to our phlegmatic temperaments? Are we always right—ordained by Providence to set the fashion to all the world in everything? How often does Virgil make the brave Trojans and others "weep"? Nevertheless, it would look funny to see a row of stalwart Grenadiers, each one mopping his ...
— The French Prisoners of Norman Cross - A Tale • Arthur Brown
... which still disappointed me, because from Raphael I asked and expected more. I wished to feel his hand on my soul with a stronger grasp; these were too passionless in their serenity, and almost effeminate in ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... touches. It is like a bee going from flower to flower, a teasing, plundering, wayward zephyr, an aeolian harp, a ray of furtive light stealing through the leaves. Taken as a whole, there is something impalpable and immaterial about him, which I will not venture to call effeminate, but which is scarcely manly. He wants bone and body: timid, dreamy, and clairvoyant, he hovers far above reality. He is rather a soul, a breath, than a man. It is the mind of a woman in the character ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... perpetually a-quiver. The soft, sparse, forked beard which closely followed the line of the lower jaw and pointed chin. The moustache, lightly shading the upper lip, while wholly exposing the fretful and rather sensuous mouth. The long, effeminate, and restless hands. The tall, slight figure. The clothes, of a material and pattern fondly supposed by their wearer to present the last word of English fashion in relation to foreign travel, the colour of them accurately ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... force of arms. The name of the Promaucians, which signifies free-dancers[56], had been given them on account of their fondness for every kind of amusement, and their peculiar attachment to dancing; yet the love of pleasure had not rendered them effeminate. With the assistance of their allies, they drew together a formidable army and fought the Peruvians with such heroic valour as to defeat them in a battle, which, according to Garcilasso, was ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... and sewing-silk—may be an expression of their patriotism and their religion. A noble-hearted woman puts a noble meaning into even the commonplace details of life. The women of America can, if they choose, hold back their country from following in the wake of old, corrupt, worn-out, effeminate European society, and make America the leader of the world in all ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... Corregidor at its entrance without a shot being fired to prevent them. And the same effects caused but a feeble resistance to be opposed to their arms, and the speedy surrender of Manilla by its priest-ridden and effeminate defenders. ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... to Moreau, the Emperor talked a great deal respecting that general. "Moreau," he said, "possesses many good qualities; his bravery is undoubted; but he has more courage than energy; he is indolent and effeminate. When with the army he lived like a pasha; he smoked, was almost constantly in bed, and gave himself up to the pleasures of the table. His dispositions are naturally good; but he is too indolent for study; he does not read, and since ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... had had enough of the seal-hunt it took him all the next day to cleanse the clothes he had worn from the smell of the fat, and he felt himself to be effeminate in the fastidiousness that made ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... count on a reasonable profit on your investment. Besides, keeping the books and attending to the correspondence would supply you with a proper occupation. What might develop later on, we'll not discuss at present. But you would have to change, for I hate effeminate men.' I had jumped up and seized my hat. 'What's the matter? Where are you going?' she asked. 'To countermand everything!' I said breathlessly. 'Countermand what?' I then told her of my plan for the establishment of a copying ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... IV., King of Bohemia, was now emperor. It will be remembered that by marrying Mary, the eldest daughter of Louis, King of Hungary and Poland, he received Hungary as the dower of his bride. By intrigue he also succeeded in deposing his effeminate and dissolute brother, Wenceslaus, from the throne of Bohemia, and succeeded, by a new election, in placing the crown upon his own brow. Thus Sigismond wielded a three-fold scepter. He was Emperor of Germany, and King of Hungary and ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... Mauki had a nice face. It was really a pretty face, viewed by any standard, and for a Melanesian it was a remarkably good-looking face. Its one fault was its lack of strength. It was softly effeminate, almost girlish. The features were small, regular, and delicate. The chin was weak, and the mouth was weak. There was no strength nor character in the jaws, forehead, and nose. In the eyes only could be caught any hint of the unknown quantities ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... hard at the Count, and noted with sarcastic amusement the other's appearance—so foppish, so effeminate to English eyes; particularly did he gaze with scorn at the Count's yellow silk socks, which matched his lemon-coloured tie and silk pocket handkerchief. Fancy starting for a long night journey in such a "get-up." Well! Perhaps women liked ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... of Montrose were men not to be daunted by the sublime, yet terrible prospect before them. Many of them were of that ancient race of Highlanders, who not only willingly made their couch in the snow, but considered it as effeminate luxury to use a snowball for a pillow. Plunder and revenge lay beyond the frozen mountains which they beheld, and they did not permit themselves to be daunted by the difficulty of traversing them. ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... manner that the prisoner could neither rise to his feet nor lie down. Never have these wandering eyes of mine looked upon a figure more pathetic. For an instant I stood there, swaying upon my feet as though from sickness, staring at him incredulously. His thin, pale, effeminate face was rendered wonderfully piteous by the depth of suffering so plainly revealed within the great, black, appealing eyes. So peculiarly delicate were the features, so slender the fragile form, about which a ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... you a handsome suit of clothes: A woman's, true; but then there is a cause Why you should wear them.'—'What, though my soul loathes The effeminate garb?'—thus, after a short pause, Sigh'd Juan, muttering also some slight oaths, 'What the devil shall I do with all this gauze?' Thus he profanely term'd the finest lace Which e'er set off a ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... Algonquins, inhabiting the immense and fertile territory extending westward to the Great Lake, from which they take their name: they occupied themselves with a rude husbandry, which the fertile soil of the west repaid, by affording them an abundant subsistence; but they were more effeminate and luxurious than their neighbors, and inferior in savage virtue and independence. The above-named nations were those principally connected with the events of ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... straggling barns and cottages indicated their approach to the outskirts of a country town or settlement. Here the team halted, as if the belligerent-looking teamster had felt his appearance was inconsistent with an effeminate civilization, and the oxen were turned into an open waste opposite a nondescript wooden tenement, half farmhouse and half cabin, evidently of the rudest Western origin. He may have recognized the ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... two authors became warm friends and mutual admirers of each other's productions. In June, 1817, "Lalla Rookh" was just from the press, and Irving writes to Brevoort: "Moore's new poem is just out. I have not sent it to you, for it is dear and worthless. It is written in the most effeminate taste, and fit only to delight boarding-school girls and lads of nineteen just in their first loves. Moore should have kept to songs and epigrammatic conceits. His stream of intellect is too small to bear expansion—it spreads ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... pacts and compromises with them, and to befriend them with gifts so as to keep them out of the Imperial territories, had been the role of a palatinate on the western frontier, the duchy of Chou, while the court of China with its vicious emperor gave itself up to effeminate luxury. Chou-sin's evil practices had aroused the indignation of the palatine, subsequently known as Woen-wang, who in vain remonstrated with the emperor's criminal treatment of his subjects. The strength and integrity of Woen-wang's character had made him the corner-stone ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... it is unanimous; is too narrow, because it is too impossibly broad. Lamb, however, though it was often hard to say whether he were not secretly laughing, swore to the truth of all these old fables, and treated the liberalities of the present generation on such points as mere fantastic and effeminate affectations, which, no doubt, they often are as regards the sincerity of those who profess them. The bigotry, which it pleased his fancy to assume, he used like a sword against the Jew, as the official weapon of the Christian, upon the same principle that a Capulet would have drawn ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... the ceremonious and magisterial dignity, the natural yet elaborate majesty, which are essential parts of their character. The cadences are marked by chords, which fall upon the ear like the rattling of swords drawn from their scabbards. The soft, warm, effeminate pleadings of love give place to the murmuring of deep, fall, bass voices, proceeding from manly breasts used to command; we may almost hear, in reply, the wild and distant neighings of the steeds of the desert, as they toss the long manes around their haughty heads, impatiently pawing the ground, ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... philosophers, and those, too, of various sects; the head of whom, both in authority and antiquity, was Aristippus, the pupil of Socrates, who hesitated not to say that pain was the greatest of all evils. And after him Epicurus easily gave in to this effeminate and enervated doctrine. After him Hieronymus the Rhodian said, that to be without pain was the chief good, so great an evil did pain appear to him to be. The rest, with the exceptions of Zeno, Aristo, Pyrrho, were ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... not! But wherefore waste I precious hours with thee! Thou art her darling mischief, her chief engine, Antony's other fate. Go, tell thy queen, Ventidius is arrived, to end her charms. Let your Egyptian timbrels play alone, Nor mix effeminate sounds with Roman trumpets, You dare not fight for Antony; go pray And keep your cowards' holiday in ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... this for various reasons" replied Zeppa, in a soft musical voice, that one scarcely expected to issue from such a capacious chest. There was about the man an air of gentle urbanity and tenderness which might have induced a stranger to suppose him effeminate, had not his manly looks and commanding stature rendered the idea absurd. "In the first place," he continued, "my wife and I had hoped to show you some hospitality. You know we seldom have visitors to ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... whom Cannae, did not crush, what line of battle could crush? In truth, even should events have been favourable to him at first, he would have often wished for the Persians, the Indians, and the effeminate tribes of Asia, as opponents; and would have acknowledged, that his wars had been waged with women, as we are told was said by Alexander, king of Epirus, after receiving his mortal wound, when comparing ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... than his lost ward. His epistle, though I never read it, affected me most painfully. I seemed to see the Puritanic figure of my guardian standing among the fripperies of the theatre and pointing to the players,—the fantastic and effeminate men, the painted women, the giddy girl in boy's clothes, merrier than modest,—pointing to these with solemn ridicule, and eying me with stern rebuke. His image was a type of the austere duty, and they of the vanities ...
— Passages From a Relinquised Work (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... driveling Silenus, the god of abstruse mysteries. He resembles the whole family of them, however, in being a blackguard, and perhaps this is what is meant. To even the little manliness his classical prototypes possessed, though, he can lay no claim whatever, being a listless effeminate noodle, on the shady side of forty. But oh! the depth and strength of this elderly party's emotion for some bread-and-butter school-girl! Hide your heads, ye young Romeos and Leanders! this blase old beau loves with an hysterical fervor that requires four adjectives to every noun ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... rich man's feast. They are generally accompanied by a guardian, and usually nothing very serious takes place, for they know their value, and money will not always buy their expensive favors. They are very effeminate, luxuriously dressed and perfumed, and they seldom go on foot. There are, however, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... oratory could not effect, nor the arguments of sound and deliberate reason accomplish, was achieved in a moment by the administration of a small quantity of spirituous liquid, giving bravery to the coward, and daring to the effeminate. ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... ancient amphorae leaned Against the wall, like ships careened. There was dusky blue of Wedgewood ware, The carved, white figures fluttering there Like leaves adrift upon the air. Classic in touch, but emasculate, The Greek soul grown effeminate. The factory of Sevres had lent Elegant boxes with ornament Culled from gardens where fountains splashed And golden carp in the shadows flashed, Nuzzling for crumbs under lily-pads, Which ladies threw as the last of fads. Eggshell trays where gay beaux knelt, Hand on heart, ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... people that shall have a tangible, separate existence of its own; and where am I to look for it? Not in Hayti; for in Hayti they had nothing to start with. A stream cannot rise above its fountain. The race that formed the character of the Haytiens was a worn-out, effeminate one; and, of course, the subject race will be centuries ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... incredible elsewhere; and yet it is this lawlessness which has come to be accepted as part and parcel of what is called "policy" in China because in the fifty years preceding the establishment of the Republic a weak and effeminate mandarinate consistently sought safety in surrenders. It is this lawlessness which must at all costs be suppressed if we are to have a happy future. The Chinese people have so far contented themselves ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... and arch feminine ways receded to the background of his mind, replaced by her power and strength which had for him all the charm of masculinity. Compared with her, Des Esseintes seemed to himself a frail, effeminate creature, and he began to desire her as ardently as an anaemic young girl might desire some loutish Hercules whose arms could crush her in ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... refinements of the older nations, his uncouthness was softened: the rough barbarian cub was gradually mollified into the civil courtier. And as for giving one prudence and patience, never was such a mentor as travel. The tender, the effeminate, the cowardly, were hardened by contention with unwonted cold or rain or sun, with hard seats, stony pillows, thieves, and highwaymen. Any simple, improvident, and foolish youth would be stirred up to vigilancy by a few ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... galled with the yoke of foreign dominion, nor having ever had experience of that most miserable and detested condition of living in slavery; no long descent having as yet invested the Assyrian with a right, nor any other title being for him pretended than a strong hand; the foolish and effeminate son of a tyrannous and hated mother could very ill hold so many great princes and nations his vassals, with a power less mastering, and a mind less industrious, than his father and mother had ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... log," was seen to be true in Sparta alone of all cities under heaven. Men were not even allowed to dine previously at home, and then come to the public table, but the others, watching him who did not eat or drink with them, would reproach him as a sensual person, too effeminate to eat ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... Worm Vermicular Whale Cutaceous Wife Uxorious Word Verbal, verbose Weak Hebdomadal Wall Mural Will Voluntary, spontaneous Winter Brumal Wound Vulnerary West Occidental War Martial Women Feminine, female, effeminate ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... the most masculine and the most vigorous and the most intellectual of all our poets should devote his powers mainly to the representation of love. For love is the essence of force, and does not spring from effeminate weakness or febrile delicacy. Any painter can cover a huge canvas, but, as has been observed, only the strong hand can do the fine and tender work. To discuss at length the love-poems of Browning would take us far beyond the limits of this volume; but certain ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... and gentleman were walking on the sands at Coney Island beach. The lady was very handsomely attired, and by her side walked a young man, a perfect type in appearance of an effeminate dude. Three rough-looking men had been following the lady and gentleman at a distance, and when the latter stopped at a remote part of the beach far from any hotel the three men held a consultation, and one of them uttered the declaration with which ...
— Cad Metti, The Female Detective Strategist - Dudie Dunne Again in the Field • Harlan Page Halsey
... means keep your hair adjusted," his wife continued sarcastically. "The women are all in love with that blond hair. And it is so effective in the pulpit. If you were not six feet four it might be effeminate, but I assure you it is the secret of your strength. I trust you will be wiser ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... pursuing his victories over the effeminate people of Asia, a still more brilliant career in the West marked the rising fortunes of Julius Caesar. I need not dwell on the steps by which he arose to become the formidable rival of the conqueror of the East. He bears the most august name of antiquity. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... Percival himself, every hour in the day. "My good Percival! how I like your rough English humour!"—"My good Percival! how I enjoy your solid English sense!" He puts the rudest remarks Sir Percival can make on his effeminate tastes and amusements quietly away from him in that manner—always calling the baronet by his Christian name, smiling at him with the calmest superiority, patting him on the shoulder, and bearing with him benignantly, as a good-humoured father bears ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... that could the Sakai look into some of our houses and palaces he would make haste to return to his own forest and if he were obliged or knew how to write his impressions he would certainly commence: "The men of the West are effeminate, lazy and indolent". ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... beginning I declared myself in favour of German opera; my choice was determined by the tremendous impression made on me by the two figures of Sassaroli and Weber. The Italian male-soprano, a huge pot-bellied giant, horrified me with his high effeminate voice, his astonishing volubility, and his incessant screeching laughter. In spite of his boundless good-nature and amiability, particularly to my family, I took an uncanny dislike to him. On account of this dreadful person, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Effects of Tea are not all the Mischiefs it occasions. Did it cause none of them, but were it entirely wholesome, as Balm or Mint, it were yet Mischief enough to have our whole Populace used to sip warm Water in a mincing, effeminate Manner, once or twice every Day; which hot Water must be supped out of a nice Tea-Cup, sweatened with Sugar, biting a Bit of nice thin Bread and Butter between Whiles. This mocks the strong Appetite, relaxes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... that the hair was thrown back from the high, narrow forehead, just as my great-grandfather's grey hairs were combed away from his brow. Children are great admirers of beauty too, especially, I think, of an effeminate style of good looks, and are very susceptible to the power of expression in faces. I had a romantic admiration for "the handsome man by the door," and his eyes haunted me ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... artificial simpering, and affected form; the one in the habit of a heroic youth, wearing a glittering helmet, the other tricked up in curls and ribbons like a wanton minx; he will then look upon his own affection as brave and masculine, when he shall choose quite contrary to that effeminate shepherd of Phrygia. ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... contend. We are charged with the undue luxury of supporting a town and country house for a public functionary; and, disproving the fact, our opponents turn upon us, with a pernicious subtlety, and show, to such a condensing point has the effeminate spirit reached among us, that we have compressed the essence of two such establishments into one! Mr. Harris might have carried out his argument, and shown also that to such a pass of self-indulgence have we reached, that Washington itself is so ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... commercial privileges, no local strife which cannot be settled by Arete. The poet has as nearly as possible succeeded in eliminating the negative element out of this society. An unwarlike folk, but not effeminate, happy in peace, with a childlike delight in play, which is the starting-point of art, and remains its substrate, according to Schiller; truly idyllic it must be regarded, a land on the way between nature and civilization, where life ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... to the parent stock. Taking, for example, the mediaeval architecture of Spain, the brilliant 'Moresco,' we find it to be a combination of the vigorous Gothic of the North with the beautiful though effeminate Saracenic—the exotic of the South. And of these latter, each is traceable, though by different lines, to the same great prototype, the Roman. For when Rome was divided, the Dome fell to the inheritance of the Eastern ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... the corpse, when organized life had gone. A great historical novel dealing with this time,—one not unworthy, it is said, of Scott,—remains to be translated. Then, by way of reaction, came another half-cycle (roughly) of reunion: an unwarlike period of timid politics and a super-refined effeminate court; it was, says Professor Harper Parker, "a great age of calligraphy, belles lettres, fans, chess, wine-bibbing and poetry-making." Then, early in the fourth century, China split up again: crafty ladylike Chinese houses ruling in the ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... indulge in it to excess; and effeminate dances, or extraordinary gesticulation, were deemed indecent in men of character and wisdom. Indeed, Herodotus tells a story of Hippoclides, the Athenian, who had been preferred before all the nobles of Greece, as a husband for the daughter of Clisthenes, king of Argos, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... various aspersions of an infamous character were heaped upon him. Sextus Pompey reproached him with being an effeminate fellow; and M. Antony, with earning his adoption from his uncle by prostitution. Lucius Antony, likewise Mark's brother, charges him with pollution by Caesar; and that, for a gratification of three hundred thousand ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... introduce such a number of ceremonies, shews, sacrifices, lustrations, and public processions, as must have employed the people almost constantly from one end of the year to the other. This continual dissipation must have been a great enemy to industry; and the people must have been idle and effeminate. I think it would be no difficult matter to prove, that there is very little difference, in point of character, between the antient and modern inhabitants of Rome; and that the great figure which this ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... 1526 there appeared a new lecturer on the platform at the University at Basel—a small, beardless, effeminate-looking person—who had already inflamed all Christendom with his peculiar philosophy, his revolutionary methods of treating diseases, and his unparalleled success in curing them. A man who was to be remembered in after-time by some as ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... believes, or claims, that two wrongs make a right. She does not believe that a man could, or should, take the place of a mother in dealing with children. She does not believe that he should become soft and effeminate, for the tender training of infants, but on the contrary, should be energetic and manly, for the ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... consequence a cuckold. The goddess, whom you shall not find propitious nor favourable unto you, is Minerva, a most redoubtable and dreadful virgin, a powerful and fulminating goddess, an enemy to cuckolds and effeminate youngsters, to cuckold-makers and adulterers. The god is Jupiter, a terrible and thunder-striking god from heaven. And withal it is to be remarked, that, conform to the doctrine of the ancient Etrurians, the manubes, for so did they call the darting hurls or slinging ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... hour upon her own resources, though in situations which scarcely seemed to admit of any occasion for taxing those resources; and often I have felt anger towards myself for what appeared to be an irrational or effeminate timidity, and have struggled with my own mind upon occasions like the present, when I knew that I could not have acknowledged my tremors to a friend without something like shame, and a fear to excite his ridicule. No; if in anything I ran into excess, it was ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... binds an only sister to an only brother, when they have been permitted to grow up together untrammelled by the heartless forms of fashion; unrivalled by alien claimants in their confiding affection; undivided in study, in sport, and in interest. Some object, that such union renders the boy too effeminate and the girl too masculine. In our case it did neither. He was the manliest, the hardiest, most decided, most intrepid character imaginable; but in manners sweet, gentle, and courteous, as they will be who are accustomed to look with protecting tenderness on ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... the brave, the noble-minded, the virtuous Messalla; you, whom I remember, my son-in-law Brutus has frequently extolled as the most promising youth in Rome, tutored by philosophy, trained up in arms, scorning all those soft, effeminate pleasures that reconcile men to an easy and indolent servitude, fit for all the roughest tasks of honour and virtue, fit to live or to die a ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... face, though somewhat sharp of feature. She possessed a powerful will, a shrill voice and a vigorous frame, and was afflicted with a short, violent temper. She was decidedly a masculine woman. We know not which is the more disagreeable of the two—a masculine woman or an effeminate man. ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... take the unit, with all his incidents and his organic qualities as they are. Take then, for instance, one naughty child in the reality of his life. He is but six years old, slender and masculine, and not wronged by long hair, curls, or effeminate dress. His face is delicate and too often haggard with tears of penitence that Justice herself would be glad to spare him. Some beauty he has, and his mouth especially is so lovely as to seem not only angelic but itself an angel. He has absolutely no self-control and his passions find ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... was now a handsome man of twenty-seven. The effeminate blush of youth had given place to an open and engaging animation that made him doubly attractive. Turning his gaze upon ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... Phantastes, so effeminate! for shame, leave off. Visus, your objects I must needs say, are admirable, if the house and instrument be answerable. Let's hear therefore in brief ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... rather bald," he replied. "You see, few people really understand Bones. I thought, the first time I saw him, that he was a fool. I was wrong. Then I thought he was effeminate. I was wrong again, for he has played the man whenever he was called upon to do so. Bones is one of those rare creatures—a man with all the moral ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... vice which I propose," said the third demon who came forward, "is involved in the general cultivation of music, which I contend would render men effeminate, indolent, voluptuous, and finally vicious and corrupt, so that whole nations might eventually be kept out of heaven and secured for hell through its ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... investigation of their property. At this investigation was present a wicked and merciless Jew, who rebuked the Christians for their tenderness to his brethren, and reproached the King's officers as gentle and effeminate. He gnashed his teeth, and, as each Jew appeared, declared that he could afford to pay twice as much as was exacted. Though he lied, he was useful in betraying their secret hoards to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... about upon his yacht, Or drove out with his footman through the park, His mamma, it was generally thought, Ought to have him in her keeping after dark! Oh, we ridiculed him then, We impaled him on the pen, We thought he was effeminate, we dubbed him "Sissy," too; But he nobly marched away, He is eating pork to-day, And heroically proving that the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... Mildmay. "This craft of yours is so confoundedly safe, Sir Reginald, that upon my word I have almost forgotten what danger is; so if you really think you can find a place where we may once more come within hail of it, pray take us there without loss of time. For my part, I am becoming positively effeminate, and unless I can speedily have a chance of getting my head broken I shall be utterly ruined for 'the service' when I go ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... describe the long struggle between the new and the old faith in the North; how kings and queens became the foster-fathers and nursing- mothers of the Church; how the great chiefs, each a little king in himself, scorned and derided the whole scheme as altogether weak and effeminate; how the bulk of the people were sullen and suspicious, and often broke out into heathen mutiny; how kings rose and kings fell, just as they took one or the other side; and how, finally, after a contest ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... and her pleasant voice, O fortunate youth, now recognize, And how much nobler than effeminate sloth Are manhood's tested energies. Take heed, O generous champion, take heed, If thou thy name by worthy thought or deed, From Time's all-sweeping current couldst redeem; Take heed, and lift thy heart to high desires! The amphitheatre's applause, the public voice, Now ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... going on, was chiefly divided between the pen and the baby. I have fed them and put them to sleep hundreds of times, though there were servants to whom the task might have been transferred. Yet, I have not been effeminate; I have not been idle; I have not been a waster of time; but I should have been all these if I had disliked babies, and had liked the porter pot and ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... touched the bell. Shortly the maid showed in a slim young fellow of a somewhat effeminate type. He was clean-shaven and wonderfully pale, with large dark eyes and curly black hair, worn rather long. He was dressed in a grey suit and wore a red scarf tied loosely in a bow. There was something foreign ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... outside. Oh, follow yer Dad to the Upper House, an' look sharp about it." He mumbles. I well recollect the youthful Member, so criticised, labouring through his maiden speech. The eldest son of a Peer, with a rather effeminate face, Saxon fairness of complexion, and with an apology for a moustache, it struck me that if petrified he would do very well as a dummy outside a tailor's establishment. Yet this youthful scion of a ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... commences the easy task of preaching. They collect a few ragged urchins of natives, whom they teach to read and write their own language—the English tongue being forbidden; and when these children return to their families, they are despised by them, as being effeminate and useless. ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... came to pay his respects to his old comrade in arms. Lawrence had travelled so much that it never took him long to settle down. Even at Wanhope he managed within a few hours to make himself at home. A trap sent over to Countisford brought back his manservant and an effeminate quantity of luggage, and by teatime his room was strewn from end to end with a litter of expensive trifles more proper to a pretty woman than to a man. Mrs. Clowes, slipping in to cast a housewifely glance to his comfort, held up her hands in mock dismay. "You ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... war, in storm and in battle,—for heroism and prowess unsurpassed. He shrinks from no danger, he dreads no foe, he yields to no superior. No shoals are too dangerous, no seas too boisterous, no climate too rigorous for him. The burning sun of the tropic cannot make him effeminate, nor can the eternal winter of the polar seas paralyze his ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... Nabopolassar, the work of breaking down the Assyrian empire (p. 48). He brought under his rule the Bactrians, and the Persians about Pasargadae and Persepolis, and made the Halys, dividing Asia Minor, the limit of his kingdom. His effeminate son, Astyages, lost what his father had won. The Persian branch of the Iranians gained the supremacy. Cyrus, the leader of the Persian revolt, by whom Astyages was defeated, is described as related to him; but this story, as well as ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... are beginning to be developed: or, if not, no discipline will better aid in their developement than the bracing intercourse of a great English classical school. Even the selfish are forced into accommodating themselves to a public standard of generosity, and the effeminate into conforming to a rule of manliness. I was myself at two public schools; and I think with gratitude of the benefit which I reaped from both; as also I think with gratitude of the upright guardian in whose quiet household I learned ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... and in her girdle there were gems for all to see. There were but a half-dozen men in the room. Two of these had a venerable air—they may have been traders journeying to Milan—whilst a third, who sat apart, was a slender, effeminate-looking youth. The remaining three were fellows of rough aspect, and when one of them—a black-browed ruffian—raised his eyes and fastened them upon the riches that Madonna Paola with such indifference displayed, I ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... life, he was obliged to admit that all the virtues of a good, industrious, and modest youth could not easily be so happily united in another as they were in Jonathan, albeit his handsome expressive face bore the impress of traits which were perhaps a little too soft, and almost effeminate, and his diminutive and weak but elegant bodily frame bespoke a tender intellectual spirit. When he reflected further that the two children had always been together, and how evident had been their mutual liking for ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... finds within me a nobility, That spurns the idle pratings of the great, And their mean boast of what their fathers were, While they themselves are fools effeminate, The scorn of all who know the worth ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... appreciate floral beauty is to be pitied, like any other man who is born imperfect. It is a misfortune not unlike blindness. But men who reject flowers as effeminate and unworthy of manhood ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... philosophic inquiry, since the reaction against the French Sensualism of the last century, and the application of more profound and religious theories to Literature, Society, and Art in recent times. With no effeminate yearnings for the return of the "inexorable Past," and with a masculine faith in the designs of Providence for the destiny of Humanity, Mr. Washburn is alive to the dangers incident to a condition of progress, and describes them with honest boldness and fidelity. Without pretending ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... Bornou permits such barbarity, but imagine that the Sheikh is still afraid of his vassal, and shrinks from endeavouring to deprive him of this awful power. Here, then, we have a specimen of the negro character, with all its contradictions; soft and effeminate in its ordinary moods; cheerful, and pleasant, and simple, to appearance; but capable of acting, as it were without transition, the most terrible deeds of atrocity. Say what you will of the barbarism of the Tuaricks, such a mode of inflicting capital punishment is ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... first to arrive, bringing with her her brother, an effeminate-looking young man, who played the violin moderately well, and her mother, who informed me that she never allowed her daughter to dine out without herself and ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... When thus, at last, bold Diomede began. Atrides! foremost of the Chiefs I rise To contravert thy purpose ill-conceived, And with such freedom as the laws, O King! Of consultation and debate allow. 40 Hear patient. Thou hast been thyself the first Who e'er reproach'd me in the public ear As one effeminate and slow to fight; How truly, let both young and old decide. The son of wily Saturn hath to thee 45 Given, and refused; he placed thee high in power, Gave thee to sway the sceptre o'er us all, But courage gave thee not, his noblest gift.[2] Art thou ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... in the Cold," "Grandfather's Struggle for a Homestead," "The William Henry Letters," and a dozen others like them were first-class, good healthy stories, interesting in the first place, and in the next place teaching manliness, decency, and good conduct. At the cost of being deemed effeminate, I will add that I greatly liked the girls' stories—"Pussy Willow" and "A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life," just as I worshiped "Little Men" and "Little Women" and "An ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... fyery, as I have known, but the flame of it kept downe, for the most part, or soon allayed with thos moral endowments he had. He was naturally compassionate towards objects in distresse, even to an effeminate measure; though God had made him a heart, wherein was left little roume for any fear, but what was due to himselfe, of which there was a large proportion, yet did he exceed in tendernesse towards sufferers. A larger soul, I thinke, hath seldome dwelt in a house of clay than his ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... The countenance of its intended rider met fully the gaze of the spectator. It was a countenance of singular loveliness and power. The lips and the moulding of the chin resembled the eager and impassioned tenderness of the shape of Antinous; but instead of the effeminate sullenness of the eye, and the narrow smoothness of the forehead, shone an expression of profound and piercing thought. On each side of the clear and open brow descended, even to the shoulders, the clustering locks of golden hair; while the ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... at marriages, also a "night-cap" drunk before bed and lastly an effeminate; one who perambulavit omnium cubilia (Catullus). See Encolpius' pun upon the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... stairs come a fluting dwarf and an effeminate-looking slave playing a lute, preceded by others with lights; then SHALNASSAR, leaning on GUeLISTANE; finally a eunuch with a whip stuck in his belt. GUeLISTANE frees herself and comes forward, seeming to search the floor for something; the others come ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... vicomte had inherited from his parents a taste for Oriental things, and his study looked like a costly tent, while his bedroom was furnished with the simplicity of a convent cell. The Count of Monte-Cristo had taught his son to be strict to himself and not become effeminate in any way. Nice pictures and statues were in the parlors, the bookcase was filled with selected volumes and he spent many hours each day in serious studies. Spero was a master in all physical accomplishments. His father's iron muscles were his legacy, and the count often proudly ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... boy, frail-looking and slightly built, but with a handsome, rather effeminate-looking face, tried ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... rassled catch-as-catch-can, and you know it," declared Harding. "I suppose you think just because I do nothing but build railroads and things that I've grown effeminate since you tackled me the last time. Come on; ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... were. The vast continent then thrown open to the advance of civilisation, may be divided into two portions, the south and the north. The former was inhabited by a harmless effeminate race, who enjoyed many of the refinements of civilisation; their knowledge of the arts, for instance, as shewn to us in the ruins of their cities, was considerable; they possessed extensive buildings in a bold and ornate style of architecture; they made a lavish use of the ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... gave him no pleasure. The chase was his favourite recreation; and he loved it most when it was most hazardous. His leaps were sometimes such that his boldest companions did not like to follow him. He seems even to have thought the most hardy field sports of England effeminate, and to have pined in the Great Park of Windsor for the game which he had been used to drive to bay in the forests of Guelders, wolves, and wild boars, and huge stags ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... understood, gentle reader, the youth was of a tender and fair complexion, with little beard, save a slight blush on his upper lip. He was not ill-favoured, but there was altogether something boyish and effeminate throughout his appearance, which seemed not of the hue to win a lady's love. He could twang the guitar, and had at times made scraps of verse, which he trolled to many a damsel's ear, but to ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... worship of Astarte the prostitution of women, and of effeminate men, played the same part that child murder did in the worship of Baal. "This practice," says Dr. Doellinger,[11128] "so widely spread in the world of old, the delusion that no service more acceptable could be rendered a deity than ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... you expect your builder or constructor to design colored patterns in stone and brick, and your china-ware merchant to keep a separate body of workwomen who can paint china, but nothing else. By this division of labor, you ruin all the arts at once. The work of the Academician becomes mean and effeminate, because he is not used to treat color on a grand scale and in rough materials; and your manufactures become base, because no well-educated person sets hand to them. And therefore it is necessary to understand, not merely as a logical statement, but as a practical necessity, ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... sich ez they and the employers shel mutually agree; but that the negroes may not become luxurious and effeminate, wich two things is vices wich goes to sap the simplicity and strength uv a people, the sum shel never exceed $5 per month, but not less than enuff in all cases to buy him one soot uv close per annum, wich the employer ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... little girl-friends one of whom more particularly has left a profound impression upon me. From an early age I preferred the society of girls to boys, and the latter did not like me, as I was too effeminate for them. We could not play together, as they called me "Mademoiselle," and teased me in a variety of ways. On the other hand, I got on very well with girls of my own age, and they found me very sensible and steady. I was about twelve or thirteen, and I could not account for ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... that all his labors and savings would go for naught, for he was supremely disappointed in his son, the crown-prince Frederick. The stern father had no sympathy for the literary, musical, artistic tastes of his son, whom he thought effeminate, and whom he abused roundly with a quick and violent temper. When Prince Frederick tried to run away, the king arrested him and for punishment put him through such an arduous, slave- like training in the civil and military administration, from the lowest grades ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... Ireland. Ladies were the spinners, weavers, surgeons, and readers of the day; they were great at interpreting dreams, and dearly loved flowers. The gentlemen looked upon reading as an occupation quite as effeminate as sewing, war and hunting being the two main employments of the lords of creation, and gambling the chief amusement. Priests and monks were the exceptions to this rule, until Henry First introduced ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... slightly, took a measured pace or two right and left, and gave a furtive glance at his handsome, effeminate face and slight form in the glass. Then ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... is stereotyped from generation to generation; his goose is a perennial pun; and his habitual melancholy is derived to this day from the flatulent diet on which he will persist in living—cabbage. He is effeminate, cowardly, dishonest—a mere fraction of a man both in soul and body. He is represented by the thinnest fellow in the company; his starved person and frightened look are the unfailing signals for a laugh; and he is never spoken to but in ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... Petrovna's little dressing-table, Lavretsky found a small packet, tied up with black ribbon, sealed with black sealing wax, and thrust away in the very farthest corner of the drawer. In the parcel there lay face to face a portrait, in pastel, of his father in his youth, with effeminate curls straying over his brow, with almond-shaped languid eyes and parted lips, and a portrait, almost effaced, of a pale woman in a white dress with a white rose in her hand—his mother. Of herself, Glafira Petrovna had never allowed a portrait to be taken. "I, myself, little ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... side, her hand clasped in his. If Dick had been told a week earlier that he would ever go to sleep clinging to his mother's hand, he would have scouted the idea with indignation and scorn; and he remembered the act later with a blush as something shamefully effeminate or infantile, betraying a weakness in his character hitherto ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... backgammon or for field sports. He had an exquisite ear, and performed skilfully on the flute. His earliest instructors had been French refugees, and they had awakened in him a strong passion for French literature and French society. Frederic William regarded these tastes as effeminate and contemptible, and, by abuse and persecution, made them still stronger. Things became worse when the Prince Royal attained that time of life at which the great revolution in the human mind and body takes place. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... magnetic spell, they all turned their heads toward the platform where Lysia had just silently made her appearance,— and springing from their seats they broke into a boisterous shout of acclamation and welcome. One young man whose flushed face had all the joyous, wanton, effeminate beauty of a pictured Dionysius, reeled forward, goblet in hand, and tossing the wine in air so that it splashed down again at his feet, staining his white garments as it fell with a stain as ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... small and old as he passed into Victoria Street. There the Stores by night made him smile at the contrast, but in Ashley Gardens Westminster Cathedral made him frown. If he hated anything, it was that for which it stood. Romanism meant to him something effeminate, sneaking, monstrous.... That there should be Englishmen to build such a place positively angered him. He was not exactly a bigot or a fanatic; he would not have repealed the Emancipation Acts; and he would have said that if anyone wanted to be a Romanist, he had better be one. But he would not have ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... Hercules with the lion's-skin, "will teach him how to overcome Vice and quell evil passions, those poisonous monsters which like Hydras[15] are ever reborn in the heart. A foe to effeminate pleasures, he shall learn from me those too seldom trodden paths that lead to honour along the ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... is rapine under a beautiful name, but however perfect humanity may become, patriotism will always be a virtue among oppressed peoples, because it will at all times mean love of justice, of liberty, of personal dignity—nothing of chimerical dreams, of effeminate idyls! The greatness of a man is not in living before his time, a thing almost impossible, but in understanding its desires, in responding to its needs, and in guiding it on its forward way. The geniuses ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... solitude became intolerable—I placed my hand on the beating heart of Idris, I bent my head to catch the sound of her breath, to assure myself that she still existed—for a moment I doubted whether I should not awake her; so effeminate an horror ran through my frame.—Great God! would it one day be thus? One day all extinct, save myself, should I walk the earth alone? Were these warning voices, whose inarticulate and oracular sense forced belief ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... zeal of every knowing man Opprest with hills of tyranny, cast on virtue By the light fancies of fools, thus transported. Cannot but vent the Aetna of his fires, T'inflame best bosoms with much worthier love Than of these outward and effeminate shades; That these vain joys, in which their wills consume Such powers of wit and soul as are of force To raise their beings to eternity, May be converted on works fitting men: And, for the practice of a forced look, An antic gesture, or a fustian phrase, Study ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... once meant foolish, ignorant, weak, effeminate. It has now come to mean exact, fine, finished, exciting admiration on account of skill or exactness; as nice proportions, nice workmanship, a nice distinction in philosophy. It is loosely and colloquially used in application ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... themselves even after they became free. But slowly as the recovery came, it did come; and the more you see of us, the clearer it will be to you that we are happy. That we live amidst beauty without any fear of becoming effeminate; that we have plenty to do, and on the whole enjoy doing it. What more can ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... old man, "and doubtless his adventure is of a nature in line with thy puerile and effeminate teachings. Had he followed my training, without thy accurst priestly interference, he had made an iron-barred nest in Torn for many of the doves of thy damned English nobility. An' thou leave him not alone, he will soon be seeking service in ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the Connecticut giant overtook him on the road. Warner was a fine-looking man, younger even than Ethan Allen and idolized by the women and children of the community as Allen was by the men. But there was nothing effeminate about Warner. He was of the better class of borderers, possessing more education than most of his neighbors and with that measure of refinement and cultivation which placed George Washington above ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... tears must weep. To whom thus Adam, of short joy bereft. O pity and shame, that they, who to live well Entered so fair, should turn aside to tread Paths indirect, or in the mid way faint! But still I see the tenour of Man's woe Holds on the same, from Woman to begin. From Man's effeminate slackness it begins, Said the Angel, who should better hold his place By wisdom, and superiour gifts received. But now prepare thee for another scene. He looked, and saw wide territory spread Before him, towns, and ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... always, springs from early and habitual intercourse with the most polished female society,—Colonel Legard, at the age of eight and twenty, had acquired a reputation for beauty almost as popular and as well known as that which men usually acquire by mental qualifications. Yet there was nothing effeminate in his countenance, the symmetrical features of which were made masculine and expressive by the rich olive of the complexion, and the close jetty curls of the ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... make them all prisoners without presuming to make the smallest resistance. One of the caciques had sent to inform Atahualpa not to stand in any awe of the Spaniards, as they were not only few in number, but so effeminate and lazy that they were unable to march on foot without being tired by a very short distance, for which reason they travelled on the backs of large sheep, by which name ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... sought the love of Olivia, a rich countess; but Olivia gave no encouragement to his suit, and the duke moped and pined, leaving manly sports for music and other effeminate employments. Viola entered the duke's service as a page, and soon became a great favorite. When Olivia married Sebastian (Viola's brother), and the sex of Viola became known, the duke married her, and made her duchess of ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... never a thought of his to show any tender feelings. His susceptibilities would have been much offended could he have been presented with the idea that he had a soft place anywhere in his heart. This reluctance to be supposed effeminate was a characteristic of the age which caused many acts of injustice to be committed in order that the reputation for stern, slashing, devil-may-careness should be established, and many a fine fellow did ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... men would be small. Those which are physical are often caused by a hardening or an effeminate life; those of the mind, by education, which not only divides men into the rude and the cultivated, but increases the natural differences which nature has allowed among the latter; for if a giant and ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... the 3rd November, 1850. He is considered the 121st Mikado of the race of Jimmu Tenno, the members of which have reigned uninterruptedly in Japan for nearly two thousand years, with varying fates and with varying power—now as wise lawgivers and mighty warriors, now for long periods as weak and effeminate rulers, emperors only in seeming, to whom almost divine homage was paid, but who were carefully freed from the burden of government and from all actual power. In comparison with this race, whose first ancestor lived during the first ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... on the evening of the day of Sheil's speech, Lord Ballindine and his friend, Walter Blake, were lounging on different sofas in a room at Morrison's Hotel, before they went up to dress for dinner. Walter Blake was an effeminate-looking, slight-made man, about thirty or thirty-three years of age; good looking, and gentlemanlike, but presenting quite a contrast in his appearance to his friend Lord Ballindine. He had a cold quiet grey eye, and a thin lip; and, though he was in reality a much cleverer, he ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... a man believes in the soul—that is to say in his conscious immortality, personal and concrete—the more he will exaggerate the worth of this poor transitory life. This is the source from which springs all that effeminate, sentimental ebullition against war. True, a man ought not to wish to die, but the death to be renounced is the death of the soul. "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it," says the Gospel; but it does not say "whosoever will save his soul," ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... his enemy alighted on the ground; nor an effeminate man, nor one who sues for life with closed palms, nor one whose hair is loose, nor one who sits down, nor one who says, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... his conquests. Two engagements, [481] the one near the Hellespont, the other in the narrow defiles of Cilicia, decided the fate of his Syrian competitor; and the troops of Europe asserted their usual ascendant over the effeminate natives of Asia. [49] The battle of Lyons, where one hundred and fifty thousand Romans [50] were engaged, was equally fatal to Albinus. The valor of the British army maintained, indeed, a sharp and doubtful contest, with the hardy discipline of the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... Lamottes for six months. His good humour and piety won all hearts. The village priest especially derived great satisfaction from the society of so devout a companion. He entertained his good friends, the merry little man, by dressing up as a woman, a role his smooth face and effeminate features well fitted him to play. If business were alluded to, the merry gentleman railed at the delay and chicanery of lawyers; it was that alone that postponed the liquidation of the Duplessis inheritance; as ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... innocent, life flows in the isle from day to day as in a model plantation under a model planter. It is impossible to doubt the beneficence of that stern rule. A curious politeness, a soft and gracious manner, something effeminate and courtly, distinguishes the islanders of Apemama; it is talked of by all the traders, it was felt even by residents so little beloved as ourselves, and noticeable even in the cook, and even in that scoundrel's hours of insolence. The ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is a money-making country, and money-making is an effeminate pursuit, therefore all sedentary and spoony sins, like covetousness, slander, bigotry, and self-conceit, are to be cockered and plastered over, while the more masculine vices, and no- vices also, are mercilessly hunted down by your cold-blooded, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... of Astarte the prostitution of women, and of effeminate men, played the same part that child murder did in the worship of Baal. "This practice," says Dr. Doellinger,[11128] "so widely spread in the world of old, the delusion that no service more acceptable could be rendered a deity than that of unchastity, ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... interest, no doubt, and their truth was not seriously questioned, but this was not life, and they knew it. There was red blood in their veins, the heartbeat was quick and strong, and love had charmed them all. It must not be supposed, however, that this was a weakly and effeminate age, that all were carpet knights, and that strong and virile men no longer could be found, for such was not the case. All was movement and action, the interests of life were many, and warfare was the masculine vocation, but in the very ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... began. Atrides! foremost of the Chiefs I rise To contravert thy purpose ill-conceived, And with such freedom as the laws, O King! Of consultation and debate allow. 40 Hear patient. Thou hast been thyself the first Who e'er reproach'd me in the public ear As one effeminate and slow to fight; How truly, let both young and old decide. The son of wily Saturn hath to thee 45 Given, and refused; he placed thee high in power, Gave thee to sway the sceptre o'er us all, But courage ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... education complete if they could spell phthisis and Constantinople, our hero was reading Virgil and Shakespeare, and was learning to think for himself. The knowledge obtained from Billy Little the boy tried to impart to Rita. Tom held learning and books to be effeminate and wasteful of time; but Rita drank in Dic's teaching, with now and then a helpful draught from Billy Little, and the result soon began to show upon ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... lady—the beautiful Annette—compelled Charles to think seriously; with her perfumed hand among his curls, she talked to him of his future position; as she rearranged his locks, she taught him lessons of worldly prudence; she made him effeminate and materialized him,—a double corruption, but a delicate and elegant corruption, ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... do not seek nor like to be dependent upon others for what you can yourself supply; and keep down as much as you can the standard of your wants, for in this lies a great secret of manliness, true wealth, and happiness; as, on the other hand, the multiplication of our wants makes us effeminate and ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... M.P., goes spouting about, His flatulent madness and malice; When SLUDGE, after years of dogmatical doubt, Finds Faith's Wonderland worthy of Alice; When POPINJAY airs his effeminate Art, And DOBBS sputters dirt in choice diction, Ye gods, there'd be joy in Church, Forum, and Mart, If the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 5, 1891 • Various
... John a reposeful spirit. He was content to be lowly. He knew how to trust. His spirit was gentle. He was of a deeply spiritual nature. Yet we must not think of him as weak or effeminate. Perhaps painters have helped to give this impression of him; but it is one that is not only untrue, but dishonoring. John was a man of noble strength. In his soul, under his quietness and sweetness of spirit, dwelt a mighty energy. But he was a man of love, and ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... suggested that I could not love such a 'scrap of a woman as Belle Upton was; and if she was in love with me, it was without a cause.' I have paid her some attention, but only to please mother and Helen. She's too effeminate, if she is so very aristocratic-not half so handsome as 'ma belle Juive.' Oh! those dreamy eyes! They haunt me day and night. I believe I am ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... their once white smocks smeared and spattered with blood, brought back the picture of the savage old priests of the religion of Montezuma. The scene made more comprehensible the preconquest customs of the land, as the antithesis of the drunken and excited Indian to the almost effeminate fear of the same being sober makes more clear that inexplicable piece of romance, the Conquest ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... made it difficult to decide at first whether a man or a woman was represented. Mariette, while pronouncing him to be a man, thought that he had perhaps been taken prisoner in the Sudan and mutilated, which would have explained his effeminate appearance, almost like that of an eunuch. Recent attempts have been made to prove that Amenothes IV. and Khuniaton were two distinct persons, or that Khuniaton was a queen; but they have ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... right. Eric learnt a great deal of harm from Upton, and the misapplied hero-worship led to bad results. But he was too manly a little fellow, and had too much self-respect, to sink into the effeminate condition which usually grows on the young delectables who have the ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... written a tract called "Sedition and Defamation displayed, in a Letter to the Author of the Craftsman;" and this led to a new outburst of passion on both sides. Pulteney stigmatized Hervey, on account of his effeminate appearance, as a thing that was half man, half woman, and a duel took place in which Hervey was wounded. Hervey was a remarkable man. His physical frame was as feeble as that of Voltaire. He suffered from epilepsy and a variety of other ailments. He had to live mainly on a dietary of ass's ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... think they were. The vast continent then thrown open to the advance of civilisation, may be divided into two portions, the south and the north. The former was inhabited by a harmless effeminate race, who enjoyed many of the refinements of civilisation; their knowledge of the arts, for instance, as shewn to us in the ruins of their cities, was considerable; they possessed extensive buildings in a bold and ornate style of architecture; they made a lavish use of the precious ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... abolish the means and habitudes of war, had effected a disastrous change in his character. The hardy and heroic qualities which had conducted him to the throne, were softened in the lap of indulgence. Surrounded by the pleasures of an idle and effeminate court, and beguiled by the example of his degenerate nobles, he gave way to a fatal sensuality that had lain dormant in his nature during the virtuous days of his adversity. The mere love of female beauty had first enamoured him of Exilona; and the ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... said, 'If even you had loved your neighbour, you would have known me, neighbour to the deepest and best in you.' If the Lord were to appear this day in England as once in Palestine, he would not come in the halo of the painters, or with that wintry shine of effeminate beauty, of sweet weakness, in which it is their helpless custom to represent him. Neither would he probably come as carpenter, or mason, or gardener. He would come in such form and condition as might bear to the present England, Scotland, ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... to Florence see outside the Florence Club effeminate elegants in English-made suits of blue serge, and brown boots, and they sigh to think that such specimens of humanity are the representatives of a noble race. Disguise it as you may, poor Italy is sadly decadent. ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... merely for speech. Forgot the harsh quality of the triangular redness on either cheek, fixed and feverish. Ceased to remark how the angle of the jaw stood away from and beyond the sinewy, meagre neck, or note the rise and fall of Adam's apple so prominent in his throat.—No longer were annoyed by the effeminate character of the hands, their retracted nails and pink, upturned finger-tips, offering so queer a contrast to the rather inordinate ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... one of his ringing laughs—the fine, deep Ho, ho! that would drown all our effeminate modern gigglings, the sound of which lingers amongst the memories of my boyhood. "He well deserves it—he well deserves it—the wretch! Ho, ho!"—and he shouted with laughter, and threw himself into all the rough unceremonious humour of the ballad, finishing off by relating his own dire experience ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... them in any other way superior to them. These are they who trade in women, who inhabit the first island met with in going from Spain to the Indies, in which there are no men whatever. They have no effeminate exercise, but bows and arrows, as before said, of cane, with which they arm themselves, and use shields of copper, of which ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... the charm of her grace and beauty had influenced even him, and failed utterly to estimate their effect upon others. He said to himself that Mr. Percy was a mere selfish fop, who, tired of the amusements of Europe and too effeminate for the hardier enjoyments of a new country, was driven by mere emptiness of head to occupy himself with the pursuit of the prettiest ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... affairs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were but weak and effeminate counterparts of the rude and hazardous encounters of ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... at her house in Mount Street, and frequently met Lord Drumone's fair-haired and rather effeminate son there, Peggy's mother never dreamed they were in love. Both were extremely careful to conceal it, and in their efforts ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... men, and they were dressed in the usual style of the country, which had probably existed for many hundred years. Their features are generally delicate, and as many of them have no beards they have often a very effeminate appearance. The women dress much in the same way, and wear a loose white muslin jacket which covers the body, and they seem to delight in loading themselves with jewels. The children, though dark coloured, are especially handsome. Even the principal houses, I observed, consisted ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... petitions because local malcontents "got at" the soldiery in the taverns, and brought home to them their grievances, namely, poor pay, insufficient allowance for food at its enhanced prices, and the severities of discipline exercised by "effeminate puppies" drawn from aristocratic circles. In particular they circulated a pamphlet—"The Soldiers' Friend: or Considerations on the late pretended Augmentation of the Subsistence of the Private Soldiers"—pointing ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... "So-so; an effeminate humorist; says the most absurd things, and fancies them wise. Never mind him. You wanted to speak to ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... this particular contemplation is largely absent from modern religious life, and I know the nature of the recoil in which our present impoverishment began. "Let us hear less about the mansions of the blest and more about the housing of the poor!" Men revolted against an effeminate contemplation, which had run to seed, in favor of an active philanthropy which sought the enrichment of the common life. But, my brethren, pulling a plant up is not the only way of saving it from running to seed. You can accomplish by a wise restriction what is wastefully done ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... developed: or, if not, no discipline will better aid in their developement than the bracing intercourse of a great English classical school. Even the selfish are forced into accommodating themselves to a public standard of generosity, and the effeminate into conforming to a rule of manliness. I was myself at two public schools; and I think with gratitude of the benefit which I reaped from both; as also I think with gratitude of the upright guardian in whose quiet household I learned Latin so effectually. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... his elocution to behold what word is proper, which hath ornaments, which height, what is beautifully translated, where figures are fit, which gentle, which strong, to show the composition manly; and how he hath avoided faint, obscure, obscene, sordid, humble, improper, or effeminate phrase; which is not only praised of the most, but commended (which is worse), especially for that ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... he is a very good-natured Husband, and never fell out with me in his Life but once, upon the over-roasting of a Dish of Wild-Fowl: At the same time I must own I would rather he was a Man of a rough Temper, that would treat me harshly sometimes, than of such an effeminate busy Nature in a Province that does not belong to him. Since you have given us the Character of a Wife who wears the Breeches, pray say something of a Husband that wears the Petticoat. Why should not a Female Character be as ridiculous in a Man, as a Male ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... weight, Amber on pipes from Stamboul glows, And, joy of souls effeminate, Phials of crystal scents enclose. Combs of all sizes, files of steel, Scissors both straight and curved as well, Of thirty different sorts, lo! brushes Both for the nails and for the tushes. Rousseau, I would remark in passing,(12) Could not conceive ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... murmured in an effeminate voice, after which he laid his head back in an attitude of exhaustion against the chair, and gazed up at ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... settlement we picked up many curious and interesting facts. Like most of the wild tribes of Mindanao, that of the Mandayas is athletic and robust. The faces of the men are somewhat girlish and effeminate, while the expressions of the warriors are unique. Upon their countenances cunning, cruelty, and diabolical resource are stamped indelibly. In front of every house a wooden idol stands, while inside, on a little table, is a smaller image overwhelmed by ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... damned Radical' like my father. Cyril had very little affection for him, and was only too glad to spend most of his holidays with us in Scotland. They never really got on together at all. Cyril thought him a bear, and he thought Cyril effeminate. He was effeminate, I suppose, in some things, though he was a very good rider and a capital fencer. In fact he got the foils before he left Eton. But he was very languid in his manner, and not a little vain of his good looks, and had a strong objection to football. ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... ever travelled ten miles in fairy-land, she must be wondrous content with the person and qualifications of her knight, who in future story will be read of thus: Elmedorus was tall and perfectly well made, his face oval, and features regularly handsome, but not effeminate; his complexion sentimentally brown, with not much colour; his teeth fine, and forehead agreeably low, round which his black hair curled naturally and beautifully. His eyes were black too, but had nothing of fierce or insolent; on the contrary, a ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... the upper part of their right ears. Bengalis, unlike the rest of the Hindus, do not paint sectarian signs on their foreheads. The only trinket they do not completely despise is an expensive necklace; but even this is not common. Contrary to all expectations, the Mahrattis, with all their little effeminate ways, are the bravest tribe of India, gallant and experienced soldiers, a fact which has been demonstrated by centuries of fighting; but Bengal has never as yet produced a single soldier out of its sixty-five million inhabitants. Not a single Bengali is ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... to arrive, bringing with her her brother, an effeminate-looking young man, who played the violin moderately well, and her mother, who informed me that she never allowed her daughter to dine out without ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... think so,' replied Josephine, removing his hand—'but you greatly err. The fact is, my appearance is naturally very effeminate, and sometimes it is my whim to encourage the belief that I am a female. I came here to-night, resolved to produce that impression; and you see with what a successful result—you yourself imagined ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... come nearer. Behind him came four or five supporters, in cloth white as his. Behind them came a ruck of Syrian youths, effeminate, vicious. Came a croud of donkey-boys, impish, black. The wrestler walked more slowly as he approached to pass the iron doors. And Shane was startled into a sudden smile at the sight of his face—a girl's face, with a girl's eyes. And in his hand was ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... another. Why not rather suffer injustice? why not rather be defrauded? [6:8]But you injure and defraud, and that your brothers. [6:9]Know you not that the unjust shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor sodomites, [6:10]nor thieves, nor covetous persons, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor the rapacious, shall inherit the kingdom of God. [6:11]And such were some of you; but you are washed, you are sanctified, ...
— The New Testament • Various
... my Friend. Religion out of the Question for the present. It was asked in the Reign of Charles the 2d of England, HOW shall we turn the Minds of the People from an Attention to their Liberties? The Answer was, by making them extravagant, luxurious, effeminate. Hutchinson advisd the Abridgment of what our People called English Liberties, by the same Means. We shall never subdue them, said Bernard, but by eradicating their Manners & the Principles of their Education. Will the judicious Citizens ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... author of John Halifax, who took a great fancy to me, used to carry me off to her little nest on Hampstead Heath, and lend me all her books. At Hampstead, too, I foregathered with Sydney Dobell, a strangely beautiful soul, with (what seemed to me then) very effeminate manners. Dobell's mouth was ever full of very pretty Latinity, for the most part Virgilian. He was fond of quoting, as an example of perfect expression, sound conveying absolute sense of the ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... two straggling barns and cottages indicated their approach to the outskirts of a country town or settlement. Here the team halted, as if the belligerent-looking teamster had felt his appearance was inconsistent with an effeminate civilization, and the oxen were turned into an open waste opposite a nondescript wooden tenement, half farmhouse and half cabin, evidently of the rudest Western origin. He may have recognized the fact that these "shanties" were not, as the ordinary traveler ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... she added with a smile, "and you know we Bretons do nothing by halves. Our sportsmen are fierce and strong in the chase, and know nothing of the effeminate pastimes of those who live in more ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... it would change the duties of the sexes, is a retrograde.—["It has been frequently observed that among declining nations the social differences between the two sexes are first obliterated, and afterwards even the intellectual differences. The more masculine the women become, the more effeminate become the men. It is no good symptom when there are almost as many female writers and female rulers as there are male. Such was the case, for instance, in the Hellenistic kingdoms, and in the age of the Caesars. What today is called by many the emancipation ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Did you euer cure any so? Ros. Yes one, and in this manner. Hee was to imagine me his Loue, his Mistris: and I set him euerie day to woe me. At which time would I, being but a moonish youth, greeue, be effeminate, changeable, longing, and liking, proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, ful of teares, full of smiles; for euerie passion something, and for no passion truly any thing, as boyes and women are for ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... the formation or the manifestation in me of that heart at once so haughty and so tender, of that effeminate and yet unconquerable character which, ever vacillating between courage and weakness, between virtue and yielding to temptation, has all along set me in contradiction to myself, and has resulted in my failing both of abstinence and enjoyment, ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... contact in this strange conjunction of minds far as the poles asunder. Plato and Carlyle are both possessed with the idea that they are living in a degenerate age, and they attribute its degeneracy to the same causes:—Laissez faire; the growth of luxury; the effeminate preference of Lydian to Dorian airs in music, education, and life; the decay of the Spartan and growth of the Corinthian spirit; the habit of lawlessness culminating in the excesses of Democracy, which they describe ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... nor having ever had experience of that most miserable and detested condition of living in slavery; no long descent having as yet invested the Assyrian with a right, nor any other title being for him pretended than a strong hand; the foolish and effeminate son of a tyrannous and hated mother could very ill hold so many great princes and nations his vassals, with a power less mastering, and a mind less industrious, than his father and ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... sake do not suppose me to be so effeminate a character!' I cried. 'An old soldier of Napoleon is certainly beyond suspicion. But, dear lady, to what end? and how is the society of these excellent gentlemen ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... handsome, clear-cut features, above all, that slow and alluring smile, appealed to the husband of the wilful Pat rather as evidences of Oriental, half-effeminate devilry than as passports to decent society. Oxford had veneered him, but scratch the veneer and one found the sandal-wood of the East, perfumed, seductive, appealing, but something to be shunned ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... that in battle man looked upon the vanquished as unfit to bear the name of man, looking upon the weakness or want of skill which contributed to their defeat as something effeminate. The victor then proceeded by a very summary and effective mode, done in the most primitive and expeditious manner, to render his victim as much like a female as possible to all outward appearances; this was accomplished by a removal ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... say, the fountains of domestic happiness within themselves, and send out plentiful streams of happiness over almost the whole world, these bear to be tributary to the Romans, and derive their prosperous condition from them; and they undergo this, not because they are of effeminate minds, or because they are of an ignoble stock, as having borne a war of eighty years in order to preserve their liberty; but by reason of the great regard they have to the power of the Romans, and their good fortune, which is of ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... made to her on the subject the compliments of an expert. She thought that men were capable of feeling only the effect of a gown, without understanding the ingenious details of it. Some men who knew gowns disgusted her by their effeminate air. She was resigned to the appreciation of women only, and these had in their appreciation narrowness of mind, malignity, and envy. The artistic admiration of Dechartre astonished and pleased her. She received agreeably the praise he gave her, without thinking that perhaps ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... out of what Commonwealth Plato doth banish them? In sooth, thence where he himself alloweth community of women. So, as belike this banishment grew not for effeminate wantonness, since little should poetical sonnets be hurtful, when a man might have what woman he listed. But I honour philosophical instructions, and bless the wits which bred them, so as they be not abused, which is likewise stretched to poetry. Saint Paul himself sets a watchword upon philosophy, ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... hospitality, friends all," said he, in his slightly swaggering and yet withal effeminate way; "and see, in some measure of return for it, we leave you our Sherwood free from pestilent robbers and evil defiers of the law. When we came to Nottingham there were these and others; but now they are all driven out of our Royal forest—many slain with ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... become the national character. Nothing could be more popular than that work. It was thought a great consolation to us, the light people of this country (who were and are light, but who were not and are not effeminate), that we had found the causes of our misfortunes in our vices. Pythagoras could not be more pleased with his leading discovery. But whilst in that splenetic mood we amused ourselves in a sour, critical speculation, of which we were ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... smallish man, with a suggestion of something dapper about him even in his present unkempt disorder; he might have been handsome, in a weakly effeminate way, had not Nature or some mishap given his face a twist that skewed it all to one side, drawing all of his features out of focus, like a reflection viewed in a flawed mirror. He was no heavier than the woman and hardly as tall. She, however, looked less than ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... regarding it always as an opportunity for winning success. The difficulties of work, like the difficulties of a mathematical problem called out the athletic qualities of an otherwise shy and almost effeminate nature. He loved to pit his brains against other men, rejoiced to discover obstacles in his path, never despaired when things went against him, and infinitely preferred the battle for success to the success itself. In this, too, he ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... is too impossibly broad. Lamb, however, though it was often hard to say whether he were not secretly laughing, swore to the truth of all these old fables, and treated the liberalities of the present generation on such points as mere fantastic and effeminate affectations, which, no doubt, they often are as regards the sincerity of those who profess them. The bigotry, which it pleased his fancy to assume, he used like a sword against the Jew, as the official weapon of the Christian, upon the same principle that a Capulet would ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... elegant style; and Parini, the great satirist of the eighteenth century, founded a school of satire, which proved most beneficial to the country. His poem, "The Day," is distinguished by fine irony and by the severity with which he attacks the effeminate habits of his age. He lashes the affectations and vices of the Milanese aristocracy with a sarcasm worthy of Juvenal. The satires of D'Elei, Guadagnali, and others are characterized by wit and beauty of versification. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... step into it. But something within him, something that seemed obscure, hesitated, was perhaps afraid. In his restless mood, in his strong excitement, he wanted to crush that thing down, to stifle its voice. Caution seemed to him almost effeminate just then. He remembered how one day Charmian had said to him, after an argument about psychology: "Really, Mr. Heath, whatever you may say, your strongest instinct is a selfish one, ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... ambitious grown Of triumph, that insulting vanity; Then cruel, by their sports to blood inured Of fighting beasts, and men to beasts exposed, Luxurious by their wealth, and greedier still, And from the daily scene effeminate. What wise and valient men would seek to free These thus degenerate, by themselves enslaved; Or could of inward slaves make outward free?" MILTON, Paradise ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... found in the PF. of a young Englishman, who died on his passage from Leghorn to the Levant. He had bought one of the Sporades] He was accompanied by a lady [who might have been] supposed to be his wife, & an effeminate looking youth, to whom he shewed an [attachment] so [singular] excessive an attachment as to give rise to the suspicion, that she was a woman—At his death this suspicion was confirmed;...object speedily found a refuge both ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... size, now the most enterprising trading centre of Persia, it is mostly due to the Guebres living there. Although held in contempt by the Mullahs and by the Mahommedans in general, these Guebres are manly fellows, sound in body and brain, instead of lascivious, demoralized, effeminate creatures like their tyrants. Hundreds of years of oppression have had little effect on the moral and physical condition of the Guebres. They are still as hardy and proud as when the whole country belonged to them; nor has the demoralizing contact of the present race, to whom they are subject, had ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... sneak; flinch, shy, fight shy, slink, turn tail; run away &c. (avoid) 623; show, the white feather. Adj. coward, cowardly; fearful, shy; timid, timorous; skittish; poor- spirited, spiritless, soft, effeminate. weak-minded; infirm of purpose &c. 605; weak-hearted, fainthearted, chickenhearted, henhearted[obs3], lilyhearted, pigeon-hearted; white- livered[obs3], lily-livered, milk-livered[obs3]; milksop, smock-faced; unable to say "bo" to a goose. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... British and Continental alike, whose remote forefathers were for countless generations reared in the stern precepts of the virile religion of the North. Whilst we may with justice deplore the excessive militarism of the Kaiser Wilhelm and his followers, we cannot rightly agree with those effeminate preachers of universal brotherhood who deny the virtue of that manly strength which maintains our great North European family in its position of undisputed superiority over the rest of mankind, and which ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... to—' The dragoons charged down upon us again. We were all borne backwards, fighting desperately, and when we could look round the Baronet was gone for ever. We heard afterwards that the King's troops found upon the field a body which they mistook for that of Monmouth, on account of the effeminate grace of the features and the richness of the attire. No doubt it was that of our undaunted friend, Sir Gervas Jerome, a name which shall ever be dear to my heart. When, ten years afterwards, we heard much of the gallantry of the young courtiers of the ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... formed, with effeminate features, small hands and feet, long fingers, intelligent minds, courteous and polished manners. Such are the Mpongwe of the Gaboon, the Angolese, the Fanti of the Gold Coast, and most probably the Haoussa of the Niger, a tribe with which I ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... stripped of all clothing save the remnant of a mantel, scarcely able to stand, and his countenance totally disfigured from the blows he had received, and from the mud and missiles which the rabble had flung at his head, the luxurious and effeminate prince turned away in disgust, uttered the name of God, and said to the priests in a tone of mingled pity and contempt, 'Take him hence, and bring him not back into my presence in such a deplorable state.' The guards took Jesus into the outer court, and procured some water in a basin, ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... man rather than with nature. The wars of their ancestors, extending over nearly two centuries, did the most to make them the brave and proud people they are. It is through the effects of these chiefly that they have been kept from becoming indolent and effeminate. They are now strong, fearless, haughty, and independent. But the near future is to initiate a new epoch in their history, an era in which their career may be the reverse of what it has been. Man is becoming a factor of new importance in their environment. The moving lines of the white population ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley
... Collis and Stapleton and Major Gascoigne, in a room above-stairs. There were at least a dozen others present, some also at play, others merely lounging. Of the latter was his Grace of Wharton. He was a slender, graceful gentleman, whose face, if slightly effeminate and markedly dissipated, was nevertheless of considerable beauty. He was very splendid in a suit of green camlett and silver lace, and he wore a flaxen ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... below his head. The wrath of the ancient chief was awakened by a symptom of what he conceived to be degenerate luxury. 'Out upon thee,' said he, kicking the frozen bolster from the head which it supported, 'art thou so effeminate as to need a pillow?' The officer of engineers, whose curious Letters from the Highlands have been more than once quoted, tells a similar story of Macdonald of Keppoch, and subjoins the following remarks: 'This and many other stories are romantick; but there ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... and thought a great deal about myself. Often I entertained the effeminate notion that people were talking about me, when I ought to have known that they could easily find some more interesting topic of conversation. I always went to extremes. I was up on a mountain of enthusiasm ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... would have been less appalled: with supernatural beings he was in constant though not direct communication. He studied them—their nature and their functions. But this tall, stately man, in his abominable garment which reached barely to his knees, with the white, effeminate forehead and unintelligible language, who was he? Was he a Philistine? a cruel Roman, or perhaps a Spaniard—one of those that murdered the famous Abrabanel family, and drove his ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... homely, hard-featured lady, deaf, and extremely fat and heavy, one of the old uncultivated rustic gentry who had lagged far behind the general civilisation of the country, and regarded all refinements as effeminate French vanities. She believed, likewise, all that was said against Queen Mary, whom she looked on as barely restrained from plunging a dagger into Elizabeth's heart, and letting Parma's hell-hounds loose upon Tixall. To have such a guest imposed on her was no small grievance, ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... queen dowager of Babylon, [for she is distinguished from his queen, Daniel 5:10, 13,] seems to have been the famous Nitocris, who fortified Babylon against the Medes and Persians, and, in all probability governed under Baltasar, who seems to be a weak and effeminate prince. ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... Mr. Dalton?" demanded this immaculate youth, in a soft, rather effeminate voice that made Halstead regard him ...
— The Motor Boat Club and The Wireless - The Dot, Dash and Dare Cruise • H. Irving Hancock
... fatal. The times demanded men of vigorous spirit, who dared to face the general decline, and cry out in strong tones against it. The age needed moral warriors, with the old Roman courage and love of sacrifice; martyrs willing to rot in prison or shed their blood in the street, not effeminate men, toying with fancy table-covers and tiptoeing across a sprinkled road. "And as a background," says Kingsley, "to all this seething heap of corruption, misrule and misery, hung the black cloud of the barbarians, the Teutonic tribes from whom we derive our best blood, ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... discharged from all that he owes to it? What more would they have him do? Must he practice it himself? He has no part to play, he is not a comedian."—The sciences, the fine arts, the arts of luxury, philosophy, literature, all this serve only to effeminate and distract the mind; all that is only made for the small crowd of brilliant and noisy insects buzzing around the summits of society and sucking away all public substance.—As regards the sciences, but one is important, that of our duties, and, without so many subtleties and so much study, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... others put on the heads of beasts, rejoicing and exulting that they have so transformed themselves into the shapes of animals that they no longer appear to be men.... How vile, further, it is that those who have been born men are clothed in women's dresses, and by the vilest change effeminate their manly strength by taking on the forms of girls, blushing not to clothe their warlike arms in women's garments; they have bearded faces, and yet they wish to appear women.... There are some who on the Kalends of January practise auguries, and do not allow fire out of their houses or ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... cruelty, And plague such peasants [204] as resist in [205] me The power of Heaven's eternal majesty.— Theridamas, Techelles, and Casane, [206] Ransack the tents and the pavilions Of these proud Turks, and take their concubines, Making them bury this effeminate brat; For not a common soldier shall defile His manly fingers with so faint a boy: Then bring those Turkish harlots to my tent, And I'll dispose them as it likes me best.— Meanwhile, ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part II. • Christopher Marlowe
... thirty years old, blonde, a little effeminate, wistful. A curious appurtenance in the military household of so vigorous a general). "Natacha, there is not an hour that I can call truly good if I spend it away from you, dear, ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... firelock was the soldier's best and staunchest friend. Nor were the officers easy to distinguish from the men. A shade cleaner, perhaps; but they, too, were rough-bearded, hard bitten by long exposure and responsibility. How different from the exquisites of popular fancy! Gone the beauties of effeminate adornment. Gone the studied insolence of puppyhood—that arrogance of bearing traditional with the British officer in times of peace. These were the men who had been eyes and ears to French's magnificent cavalry, who had ridden unflinchingly to the relief of ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... unconsciously maintained the same character. It is true that he was a quiet, sensitive boy, with an almost feminine affectionateness and tenderness of heart,—and that keen, exquisite appreciation both of the joyful and the painful, which is a feminine characteristic, too. Yet he was far enough from being effeminate. He was thoughtful, naturally, yet he could be active and take pleasure in action. He was always ready to work, and feared neither hardship nor fatigue. When the great flood came and caused such terror and distress in the village, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... Mistress of Charles Grandet before his father's death. Towards the close of 1819, a prey to suspicion, she must needs sacrifice her happiness for the time being, so she made a weary journey with her husband into Scotland. She made her lover effeminate and materialistic, advising with him about everything. He returned from the Indies in 1827, when she quickly brought about his engagement ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... straight, thin nose, and winged, open nostrils, so perpetually a-quiver. The soft, sparse, forked beard which closely followed the line of the lower jaw and pointed chin. The moustache, lightly shading the upper lip, while wholly exposing the fretful and rather sensuous mouth. The long, effeminate, and restless hands. The tall, slight figure. The clothes, of a material and pattern fondly supposed by their wearer to present the last word of English fashion in relation to foreign travel, the colour of them accurately matched to the pale, brown hair ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... desires having been turned toward femininity early in life, she will escape the horrors of complete viraginity or gynandry. The victim of effemination, however, is saved by no such accidental forethought. The ignorant mother fosters feminine inclinations and desires in her effeminate son until his psychic being becomes entirely changed, and not even the establishment of vita sexualis ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... a cold-blooded, highly schooled person, absolutely devoid of sentiment. His face was stony, his eyes were cool, even his linen partook of his own unruffled calm. He seemed by no means effeminate, yet he was one of those immaculate beings upon whom one can scarcely imagine a speck of dust or a bead of perspiration. His hair—what was left of it—was parted to a nicety, his clothes were faultless, and he had ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... well-clad gentleman with a pointed and slightly effeminate grey beard, unimpeachable gloves, and formal but agreeable manners. He was the type of the over-civilized, as Professor Chadd was of the uncivilized pedant. His formality and agreeableness did him some credit under the circumstances. He had a vast experience ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... hath the apostle remoued them from the office of teachinge, which is an euident proof that in vertue they farre differ frome man. Let the reasons of this writer be marked, for further he yet procedeth: after that he hath in many wordes lamented the effeminate maners of men, who were so farre degenerate to the weaknes of women, that some might haue demanded: why may not women teache amongest suche a sorte of men, who in wisdome and godlines are becomen inferior vnto women? ...
— The First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous regiment - of Women • John Knox
... be given of the force of these effeminate prejudices; and it is to be remarked with regret that they are specially injurious in a department where he otherwise had eminent merits, that, namely, of literary criticism. Any man who lived in the eighteenth century was prima facie a fool; if a free thinker, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... many an attempt at reasoning as he sought sleep that was far away. Again and again there rose before him the vision of two men in an open buggy, with a singing, apparently maudlin person between them whom Ohadi believed to be an effeminate-voiced Swede; in reality, only a woman. And why had they adopted the expedient? Why had not Larsen been with them in reality? Fairchild avoided the obvious conclusion and turned to other thoughts, to Rodaine with his squint eyes, to Crazy Laura, gathering ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... the Netherlands, urging the point with much fervid eloquence and solid argument. Henry for a moment had seemed impressed, but such a vigorous proceeding was of course entirely beyond his strength, and he had sunk back into his effeminate languor so soon as the bold bishop's ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Rebu several times drove back their forces, and man for man are more than a match for their soldiers. Our people are taller than they by half a head. We have not so much luxury, nor did we want it. All this must make people effeminate." ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... as well as laughable. When you consider that in some of these northern parishes a man can reach his different missions only by canoe or dog-train, that the missions are forty miles apart, that the canoe must run rapids and the dog-train dare blizzards—an effeminate type of man is more of a tragedy than a comedy. I think of one mission where the circuit is four hundred miles and the distance to railroad, doctor, post-office, fifty-five miles. This little curate had had a hard time, though his mission was an easy one. When ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... a defiance: it was as if he said, Scoff if you dare! And yet in the little heap of interwoven, fine steel rings there was nothing to move either laughter or contempt, and if the quaint velvet mask which lay beside the coat of mail was effeminate in the tinsel of its gold embroidery, it was at least no child's toy to raise a ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... flowerets of Paradise; of assemblies of saints seated, arrayed in pure pink, and blue and lilac, in an atmosphere of liquid gold, in glory. And thus Fra Angelico worked on, content with the dearly purchased science of his masters, placid, beatic, effeminate, in an aesthetical paradise of his own, a paradise of sloth and sweetness, a paradise for weak souls, weak hearts, and weak eyes; patiently repeating the same fleshless angels, the same boneless saints, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... so many trills and quavers upon his harpsichord, and their guest watched him, wondering, perhaps, that a gentleman of George's condition could set himself to such an effeminate business. Then the Colonel took out his watch, saying that his Excellency's coach would be here almost immediately, and asking leave to retire to his apartment, and put himself in a fit condition to appear before ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... elevated the expression of beauty so much as literature,' and that 'young things, like many of the present company, would not look as well in ten years!' Mr. Bulwer was certainly pronounced by the ladies the handsomest youth in the room. The gentlemen endeavored to put him down as 'effeminate,' but all in vain. They called him 'a fair, delicate, very, very young man,'—'a boy,' in fact. I remember wondering at the searching expression of his large, wandering, bluish eyes, that seemed looking in and out at everybody and at everything. The lady ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... originally goat, now cow; made throughout the Rhone Valley. Fat, golden-yellow and "relished by financiers" according to Victor Meusy. Between Brie and Pont l'Eveque but more delicate than either, though not effeminate. Alpin and Riola are similar. The best is still turned out at Mont d'Or, with runners-up in St. ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... gloves, his complexion covered with milk of roses, essence of May-dew, and lily of the valley water. This does honour to creation; this {13}disgraces it. And so far have these things femalized themselves, by effeminate affections, that, if a lady's cap was put on this head, Master Jacky might be taken for Miss Jenny [puts a lady's cap on the head of Master Jacky]; therefore grammarians can neither rank them as masculine or ...
— A Lecture On Heads • Geo. Alex. Stevens
... almost as effeminate in appearance as in voice. First, he was very much overgrown and fleshy. He probably weighed 150 pounds. His face was round and very pale, and his eyes were not over-endowed with expression. He wore a "peaches-and-cream" ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis
... crime in a tyrannical people, because then it is rapine under a beautiful name, but however perfect humanity may become, patriotism will always be a virtue among oppressed peoples, because it will at all times mean love of justice, of liberty, of personal dignity—nothing of chimerical dreams, of effeminate idyls! The greatness of a man is not in living before his time, a thing almost impossible, but in understanding its desires, in responding to its needs, and in guiding it on its forward way. The geniuses that are commonly believed to have existed before their ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... Dick had been told a week earlier that he would ever go to sleep clinging to his mother's hand, he would have scouted the idea with indignation and scorn; and he remembered the act later with a blush as something shamefully effeminate or infantile, betraying a weakness in ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... been a place of burial for the lower orders. This the hypochondriacal invalid Mcenas bought, and there he laid out a garden and erected a lofty house surmounted by a tower commanding a view of the city and vicinity. Effeminate and addicted to every sort of luxury, Mcenas calmed his sometimes excited nerves by the sweet sound of distant symphonies, gratified himself by comforting baths, adorned his clothing with expensive gems, tickled ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... primo tenore. Rather than such cockney sentimentality as this, as an education for the taste and sympathies, we prefer the most crapulous group of boors that Teniers ever painted. But even those among our painters who aim at giving the rustic type of features, who are far above the effeminate feebleness of the "Keepsake" style, treat their subjects under the influence of traditions and prepossessions rather than of direct observation. The notion that peasants are joyous, that the typical moment to represent ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... the real needs. But, especially in a State which is so wholly based on war as the German Empire, the old manly principle of keeping all our forces on the stretch must never be abandoned out of deference to the effeminate philosophy of the day. Fichte taught us that there is only one virtue—to forget the claims of one's personality; and only one vice—to think of self. Ultimately the State is the transmitter of all culture, ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
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