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More "Facility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ample justice to the gallantry of the Patriarch Jacob. He offers to serve Laban, seven years for Rachel. "Nothing is too much," cries the venerable novelist, "when one really loves;" and this admirable observation he confirms by the facility with which the obliging Rachel allows Leah for one night to her husband! In this manner the patriarchs are made to speak in the tone of the tenderest lovers; Judith is a Parisian coquette, Holofernes is rude as a German baron; and their dialogues ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... no one was more clearly aware than Coombe himself, and the finished facility—even felicity—of his evasion of any attempt at delicately valued cross examination was felt to ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and inexplicable experiments relative to the strength of the human frame, which you have yourself seen and admired, is that in which a heavy man is raised with the greatest facility, when he is lifted up the instant that his own lungs and those of the persons who raise him are inflated with air. This experiment was, I believe, first shown in England a few years ago by Major H., ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 560, August 4, 1832 • Various
... apparent manoeuvring, to see more of De Vayne at various men's rooms, and he generally made a point of sitting next to him when he could. He had naturally a most insinuating address and a suppleness of manner which enabled him to adapt himself with facility to the tastes and temperaments of the men among whom he was thrown. There were few who could make themselves more pleasant and plausible when it ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... regard to Venetian matters. That painting in oil was known long prior to Van Eyck, no one who has read the documents upon the subject can for a moment doubt; but it was, in the common way, so inferior in brilliancy, and probably in facility of use to other methods, that it ceased to be in use. It seems pretty clear that this "perfect method" came from Flanders, first to Naples, then to Venice; and probably by means of Antonello da Messina, (however some dates may disagree, or it may be possible there were two of that name ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... more thoroughly to test her skill several of them bought stacks of chips and began to play in earnest; they played their bets open, they coppered, they split, they strung them, and at the finish they called the turn. Rouletta paid and took; she measured stacks of counters with unerring facility, she overlooked no bets. She ran out the cards, upset the box, and began ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... functions of destruction, on the other hand, as an affirmative or constructive work, the long treatise of Van Dale is most unsatisfactory. It leaves us with a hollow sound ringing in the ear, of malicious laughter from gnomes and imps grinning over the weaknesses of man—his paralytic facility in believing—his fraudulent villany in abusing this facility—but in no point accounting for those real effects of diffusive social benefits from the Oracle machinery, which must arrest the attention of candid students, amidst some opposite ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Siegfried, impatient to go on, smashes the Spear and ascends the path to where we see the distant glow of the flames. The music is supremely noble and touching, with just a hint here and there of over-facility: I mean chiefly that the vocal phrases are not tense and full of character as are those in the Valkyrie: they seem to have been put in to fit the orchestral web. In an earlier chapter I spoke of this weakness in the Ring; and from this point onward ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... for The Churchman, afterwards gathered in a charming volume called "The Knighting of the Twins, and Ten Other Tales" (1891). Previous to this, he had attempted "A Wave of Life"—a novel whose chief value is autobiographic. Then he showed his clever facility at dialogue in a collection of "Six Conversations and Some Correspondence;" also in "The Smart Set." But, after the success of "Brummell," followed by "Frederic Lemaitre" (December 1, 1890) for Henry Miller, a dramatic season hardly passed that Fitch was ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch
... an excellent judge of position; and not only knew, but could point out the localities of the whole country through which he passed. His facility of communicating the information he had acquired, was thus displayed before a concourse of spectators. Previously to general Brock's crossing over to Detroit, he asked him what sort of a country he should have to pass through, in case of ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake
... to the various humours of the successive pontiffs, the papal capital drew within its walls eminent scholars from all the states of the Italian peninsula. Rome was the world-city, a centre from which radiated honours, distinctions, and fortune. Gifts of oratory, facility in debate, ability in the conduct of diplomatic negotiations, a masterly style in Latin composition, and even perfection in penmanship, were all marketable accomplishments, for which Rome was the highest bidder. If classical learning and the graces of literature received but intermittent ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... was that of a poet. He called himself a practical poet, because he made a regular business of it, turning his poetic inspirations into salable verse with the facility and success, as he himself expressed it, of a man who makes boxes out of wood. Moreover, he sold these poems as readily as any carpenter sold his boxes. Like himself, Claude Locker's poems were always short, always in request, and ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... and screamed: "Ha! ha! methinks I hear our German-Italians or our Italian-Germans struggling with an aria from Pucitta, [Footnote: Vincenzo Pucitta (1778-1861) was an Italian opera composer, whose music "shows great facility, but no invention." He also wrote several songs.] or Portogallo, [Footnote: Il Portogallo was the Italian sobriquet of a Portuguese musician named Mark Anthony Simao (1763-1829). He lived alternately in Italy and Portugal, and wrote several operas.] ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... any tiling that might defeat the plans and obscure the glory of Columbus; and it may be added that he always showed himself more disposed to patronize mercenary adventurers than upright and high-minded men. He granted Ojeda every facility; furnishing him with copies of the papers and charts of Columbus, by which to direct himself in his course, and a letter of license signed with his own name, though not with that of the sovereigns. In this, it was stipulated that he should not touch at any land belonging to ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... French had, as early as the end of September, expressed the wish to see his army resume its initial place on the left of the allied armies. He explained this wish on the ground of the greater facility of which his communications would have the advantage in this new position, and also of the impending arrival of two divisions of infantry from home and of two infantry divisions and a cavalry division from India, which would be able to deploy more easily ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... one hears more, than of the readiness and facility with which an Italian learns a new art or a new trade, adapts himself to the use of new tools, and acquires a dexterity in the ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... instance, no one would dare to assume personal responsibility for the debts of a railroad, nor could such an enterprise be managed if every transfer of interest dissolved the company. The desired limitation of responsibility and facility of transfer of interest are secured ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary
... many of us have learnt from experience that the fair sex, with all its charm, is not always averse to "broder" the simple truth, especially when a prospect of scandal is concerned. Bath, we may feel sure, would have offered in those days every facility of this nature, if required; and it may be fairly assumed that the mise-en-scene for this print was the same as that of the "Long Minuet." From "Dear me! You don't say so!" we proceed through the stages of "Heigh ho!" "O fye!" "Indeed!" "There now!" to that lively dandy who ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... Mis' Molly would have preferred; but any deficiency in this regard, or in the matter of the stranger's features, which, while not unpleasing, leaned toward the broad mulatto type, was more than compensated in her eyes by very straight black hair, and, as soon appeared, a great facility of complimentary speech. On his introduction Mr. Wain bowed low, assumed an air of great admiration, and expressed his extreme delight in making the acquaintance ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... facility of the whole chest is the measure of the health, strength, grace and normal actions of a human being. It is of ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... extending into the temples, where the front and middle lobes unite. "A great diameter in this direction," he says, "is always a favorable augury for the memory of words. I have seen persons who with an ordinary conformation of the eyes yet learned by heart with great facility. But in these cases the diameter from one temple to the other is ordinarily very considerable, and sometimes even the inferior part of the temples is projecting, which attests a great development of ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... does the Utopian child, with his eyes always fixed on desirable ends, find a pleasure in doing things which other children are wont to regard as drudgery, but he has the further advantage of being able to master with comparative facility what other children find difficult as well as distasteful. From first to last, the training given in Utopia makes, as we have seen, for the development of faculty. In my last chapter I set forth in detail some of the ways and means by which Egeria tries to cultivate the expansive instincts of her ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... libretto with as great a perfection as the music to Don Giovanni, which had a good one. The same inspiration was there, always apt to the occasion. Swinburne is ready to write in any known form of verse, with an equal facility and (this is the all-important point) the same inspiration. Loving the form of the drama, and capable of turning it to his uses, not of bending it to its own, he has filled play after play with music, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Hodgson's literary facility was extraordinary. He rhymed with an ease which almost rivals that of Byron, and from 1807 to 1818 he poured out quantities of verse, English and Latin, original and translated, besides writing articles for the 'Quarterly', ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... Cremorne: she talked with me while she finished her letter, and then read it to me, exactly as in old times. She writes with admirable facility, and peculiar elegance of expression, as ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... Verner, had by this time sufficiently mastered the art of penmanship to enter the events of the day in my journal with facility, which I seldom failed to do. My notes are, however, far too numerous to be copied. I therefore write out only such as I deem most likely to ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... became settled that the policy of the central Government was to take possession of the border states by force, the people of Virginia decided that the battle was to be fought on her soil. Her nearness to Washington, the facility of land communication, and the availability of her waterways for transportation purposes, all pointed to this; and the southern Government also became aware that the Potomac boundary of the Confederacy was the ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... run of great popularity. There was an excellent dark room, with every facility for developing and washing, and this term the members had subscribed for an enlarging apparatus, with which they hoped to do great things. As well as these recognized school pursuits, the girls had all kinds of minor waves of ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... receive Christianity with more facility when they saw the rites and ceremonies to which they were accustomed adopted in the church. So the religion of the Christians was made to conform very nearly to that of the Pagans in ...
— Water Baptism • James H. Moon
... hollies in clothing the streets with shadow. Several citizens, as Mr. Richard Wright and Mr. Thomas C. Hand, whose handsome cottages are tasteful specimens of our seaside architecture, have been tempted by this facility of vegetable life at Atlantic City to lay out elaborate gardens, which with suitable culture are successful. Fine avenues of the best construction lead off to Shell Beach or to the single hill boasted by the locality. Finally, remembering the claims of the great democracy to a wash-basin, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... earth understood him. The consequence was that he was forthwith enrolled in her train. It soothed him to be near a woman. Did she venture her guess as to the cause of his conduct, she blotted it out with a facility women have, and cast on it a melancholy hue he was taught to participate in. She spoke of sorrows, personal sorrows, much as he might speak of his—vaguely, and with self-blame. And she understood him. How the dark unfathomed wealth within us gleams to a woman's eye! We are at compound interest ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to try making him work, to see if he would, or was accustomed to it. He was sufficiently accustomed to it that he could do whatever she suggested with facility that indicated practice, and there was no question of his willingness. He urged her to make suggestions as to what else he could do, after he had made all the needed repairs about the house and premises. Kate was enjoying herself immensely, ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... honorable Mr.——- in a day or two again. In the mean while, I am staying, incognita, at the house of our friend, Mr. Blocque, who has afforded me every facility in return for the safeguard I brought him, to protect his property when we occupy Richmond. The city is in a terrible state. Mr. Blocque has just come in, and informs me that he has been garroted near the capitol, and robbed of ten thousand dollars in ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... take a wrong direction, when they conflict with the welfare of the community. When these energies, these human impulses to act, are right, when they aim at useful results, then they must have every facility, every possible channel opened to their outflow. And the very first and most essential condition of this free outflow of life among multitudes is, that there be order among them—that there be some system, some methodical arrangement ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... never been fairly tried. For, owing to his prodigious superiority in weight, strength, and skill, his victories had always been certain and easy; and in proportion to the facility with which he uniformly smashed an antagonist, his pugnacity and insolence were inflamed. He thus became an odious nuisance in the neighbourhood, and the terror of every mother who had a son, and ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... Greene and his compeers; but the attacks which Nash directed against the Puritans and his rivals were the first English works which shook utterly off the pedantry and extravagance of Euphuism. In his lightness, his facility, his vivacity, his directness of speech, we have the beginning of popular literature. It had descended from the closet to the street, and the very change implied that the street was ready to receive it. ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... stoutly opposed the legend of "medium-size game." The dachshunds may look like bologna sausages on legs, ran the gist of her argument; and they may progress like rather lively measuring worms; and the usefulness of their structure may seem to limit itself to a facility for getting under furniture without stooping, but—Mrs. Kitty's eloquence always ended by convincing herself, and she became very serious—but that is not the dogs' fault. Rather it is the fault of ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... portrait of RUBENS is of great life and beauty, and Rembrandt, who was not less masterly in engraving than in painting, as appears sufficiently in his portraits of the BURGOMASTER SIX, the two COPPENOLS, the ADVOCATE TOLLING, the goldsmith LUTMA, all showing singular facility and originality. Contemporary with Rembrandt was Cornelis Visscher, also designer and engraver, whose portraits were unsurpassed in boldness and picturesque effect. At least one authority has accorded to this artist ...
— The Best Portraits in Engraving • Charles Sumner
... business to understand the quippus, keep in memory the historical poems, give attention to the science and practice of medicine, and train their pupils in knowledge. These were not priests; they were the "learned men" of Peru, and the government allowed them every facility for study and for communicating instruction. How much they knew of astronomy it is not easy to say. They had knowledge of some of the planets, and it is claimed that there is some reason to believe they used aids to eyesight in studying the heavens, such as some ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... to which girls take almost as naturally as to dancing is that of rowing, an accomplishment thoroughly feminine, learned with great facility, and on the whole safer than most other sports. Yet until within a few years no one thought of it in connection with women, unless with semi-mythical beings, like Ellen Douglas or Grace Darling. Even now it is chiefly a city accomplishment, and you rarely ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... African residing in Virginia, did not know how to read or write, but had great facility in arithmetical calculations. He was once asked, how many seconds has an individual lived when he is seventy years, seven months, and seven days old? In a minute and a half he answered the question. One of the company took a pen, ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... augment the Army at once, and by at least thirty thousand men. Considerations of home policy make this also advisable; the country is eager for War at this moment, and ready to grant men and money. It will be a great facility hereafter to have obtained what is most needed at first. If the force should finally not be wanted, retrenchments may very easily be made. The Crown should at least have the power of raising the men without the necessity for further application ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... Holmes's favorite measure, in his longer poems, is the heroic couplet which Pope's example seems to have consecrated forever to satiric and didactic verse. He writes as easily in this {490} meter as if it were prose, and with much of Pope's epigrammatic neatness. He also manages with facility the anapaestics of Moore and the ballad stanza which Hood had made the vehicle for his drolleries. It cannot be expected that verses manufactured to pop with the corks and fizz with the champagne at academic banquets should much outlive the occasion; or that the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... he said, "just tell the Office of Works that it is the Prime Minister's wish that I should have every facility, and as to staff, look at these." As he spoke he touched a bundle of papers which lay on the table. "You have ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... bear confinement, that they have been known to live ten years in captivity, continuing in song the greater part of each year. This tendency to sing and call make them valuable as brace-birds, decoy-birds, and call-birds, to be used by the birdcatcher with his ground nets, while the facility with which others are captured, the numbers to be obtained, and the constant demand for them by the public, render the goldfinch one of the most important species ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... apparent to Judge Custis, from this and other silent things, that a light-hearted, affectionate, strong, yet womanly, engine of energy constituted the young Delaware lawyer-politician. Keen, cunning, impulsive, hopeful, his feet provincial, his head among the birds, he combined facility and earnestness in almost mercurial relations to each other, and the Judge saw that these must ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... their leaving Salamanca before they arrived at Cadiz. Terence had, during the journey, greatly improved his knowledge of Spanish by his conversation with the muleteers and, as the language was so similar to the Portuguese, he soon acquired facility in speaking it. They put up at a small fonda, or inn, frequented by muleteers; and Terence at once made his way to the house where he heard that the British agent resided. The latter, on hearing his story, ...
— Under Wellington's Command - A Tale of the Peninsular War • G. A. Henty
... 2. Facility and certainty of action when submerged. 3. Speed when running on the surface. 4. Speed when submerged. 5. Endurance, both submerged and on the surface. 6. Stability. 7. Visibility of object to ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... scholars there. I attended the examination of the school to which he was attached," said Mrs. Bird, "and I was very much surprised at the acquirements of the pupils; this lad was distinguished above all the rest—he answered questions that would have puzzled older heads, with the greatest facility. I am exceedingly anxious to get him admitted to the academy, as I am confident he will do honour to the interest I ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... congenial,—popular impression to the contrary notwithstanding. Minds of a feather flock together; but minds of gold are apt to remain apart, each sufficient unto itself. It is in sports, pastimes, business, politics, that men congregate with facility; in literary and intellectual pursuits the leaders are anti-pathetic in proportion to their true greatness. Now and then two, and more rarely three, are united by bonds of quick understanding and sympathy, but men of profound convictions ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... retained his instructions, and converse with wonderful facility on the characteristics and customs ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... invalid, Alfred brushing, picking and pinching the white and greenish bumps from face and night-shirt, indulging in language not proper even on a Texas ranch, he slowly worked his way to the watering trough (the only bathing facility), followed by the invalid, who was parting his whiskers to free them from the hidden lumps, meanwhile endeavoring to console Alfred: "Never mindt, Alfred. Never mindt. Your shirt vill vash all right, und my viskers, too," parting his whiskers and dumping ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... fullfill then as kill those birds, that thought not of such a thunder bolt. There are yett more countreys as fruitfull and as beautifull as the Spaniards to conquer, which may be done with as much ease & facility, and prove as rich, if not richer, for bread & wine; and all other things are as plentifull as in any part of Europ. This I have seene, which am sure the Spaniards have not in such plenty. Now I come backe with my victory, which was to us more then tenne thousand pistoles. We lived by it 5 ...
— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson
... especially as the shore was covered with pebbles and large stones; yet, in the midst of these breakers, were ten or twelve Indians swimming for their amusement: Whenever a surf broke near them, they dived under it, and, to all appearance with infinite facility, rose again on the other side. This diversion was greatly improved by the stern of an old canoe, which they happened to find upon the spot; they took this before them, and swam out with it as far as the outermost breach, then two or three of them ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... the destruction of their religion. From the outbreak at Vellore in 1806, on to the great mutiny of 1857, this charge was persistently made. The Sepoys were allowed all the religious liberty compatible with military obedience; they had every facility for following their religious customs; they were fenced off from Christian influences as no other part of the community was; they were solemnly assured again and again their religion would be scrupulously ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... they confess that they understand the queer utterings of this newest claimant for the palm of musical eccentricity. With Debussy, Strauss and others it is different, for the skilled musician at once recognizes an astonishing facility to produce effects altogether new and often wonderfully fascinating. With Reger one seems to be impressed with tremendous effort and little result. Strauss, however, is really a very great master; so great that it is difficult to get the proper perspective ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... the facility of humanity, at times. Moreover, we do not know all the circumstances yet. But let us examine the facts we have discovered. We believe that the girl visited her father's house on the night of his death, and has since disappeared. ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... attached like them to Government in this Colony at present but it will ever be maintained by such a regular military force as this established in it that will constantly reunite itself with the utmost facility and consequently may be always maintained upon the most ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... at the watering-place. Dick accordingly piloted his morose companion to the spot, and pointed out how excellently it was adapted to the purpose of watering ships, drawing his attention to the deep-water immediately beneath the low cascade, and dilating upon the facility with which boats could be brought alongside. But it was clearly apparent to him that Turnbull was absolutely uninterested in the subject; and he was by no means sorry when, upon the return to the camp, the latter declined his invitation to remain on shore to dinner, and curtly requested ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... there to converse in tongues and then giving way to others through failures of persistence—whether in pupils or preceptors I know not. There hovers even Count Adam Gurowski, Polish, patriotic, exiled, temporarily famous, with the vision of his being invoked for facility and then relinquished for difficulty; though I scarce guess on which of his battle-grounds—he was so polyglot that he even had a rich command of ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... In slow movements he played with a breadth and beauty of tone, and a delicacy and refinement of expression almost unequalled. His hands were of exceptional size and strength, and enabled him to execute the most difficult double stops and stretches with the greatest facility. Even in quick passages he preserved a broad, full tone, and his staccato was brilliant and effective. He disliked the use of the "springing bow," which came with the modern ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... remedied, as it was impossible, except in the case of intentional fraud, to go behind parliamentary titles.[44] In cases in which the land was let at low rents, and in cases where tenants held under leases which would soon expire, the facility of raising the rents was constantly specified by the authority of the Court ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... gracious, and affable, discussing with politicians, jurists, financiers, economic and sociological questions with a brilliancy and insight that fairly astonished them. With literary men and musicians, she chatted intelligently of the latest novels and pictures and operas with the facility and expertness of a connoisseur. Other men, drawn by her exceptional beauty, fascinated by the spell of her soulful eyes, her tall graceful figure, and delicate classic face, framed in Grecian head dress, ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... jealousies of its inhabitants, their hereditary barbarism, obstinate ferocity, and above all, an uncongenial climate. To surmount these difficulties, commerce is the most certain medium to inspire its Chiefs and Natives with confidence, and to obtain a facility of intercourse with the Interior country. Sanctioned by that pursuit, I have been favoured with information from a large circle of Native Chiefs, and Tribes, relative to their customs, their habits, localities, predilections, and the existing state ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... been touched—yea, and possessed—with an extreme wonder at those your virtues and faculties, which the philosophers call intellectual; the largeness of your capacity, the faithfulness of your memory, the swiftness of your apprehension, the penetration of your judgment, and the facility and order of your elocution: and I have often thought that of all the persons living that I have known, your Majesty were the best instance to make a man of Plato's opinion, that all knowledge is but remembrance, and that the mind of man by Nature knoweth all things, and ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... thirty leagues to the east-south-east, and where, they said, the people gathered gold out of the sand with candles at night, and afterwards made bars of it with a hammer. They told him this by signs; and we have only one more instance of the Admiral's facility in interpreting signs in favour of his own beliefs. It is only a few days later that in the same Journal he says, "The people of these lands do not understand me, nor do I nor any other person I have with me understand them; and these Indians ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... even to us to see the extreme facility with which an arrow can interrupt the essential physiological processes of life and destroy it. We have come to the belief that no beast is too tough or too large to be slain by an arrow. With especially constructed heads sharpened to the utmost nicety, I have shot through a double thickness ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... extent to which savings banks have been used, even by the humblest classes, proves that he was as much mistaken in this as he was in many of the views which he maintained. There are thousands of persons who would probably never have thought of laying by a penny, but for the facility of the savings bank: it would have seemed so useless to try. The small hoard in the cupboard was too ready at hand, and would have become dissipated before it accumulated to any amount; but no sooner was a place of deposit provided, where ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... food, has risen greatly with the introduction of steam-vessels. When I arrived in 1850, a middle-sized one could be bought pretty readily for ninepence, but when I left in 1859, they were with difficulty obtained at eight and nine shillings each. The abundance of turtles, or rather the facility with which they can be found and caught, varies with the amount of annual subsidence of the waters. When the river sinks less than the average, they are scarce; but when more, they can be caught in plenty, the bays and shallow lagoons in the forest ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... unsystematic way—ought, one would say, to be very systematically considered and dealt with by the modern States. For a nation to plant out large bodies of colonists on comparatively unoccupied lands, as in Africa or Australia or Canada, in a deliberate and organized fashion, with every facility towards co-operation and success, and yet on the principle of leaving, each colonial unit plenty of freedom and autonomy, would not be a very difficult task, nor a very expensive one, considering the end in view. And in such a case there would really be no adequate reason for ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... loves mystery. She wants a dark retreat, hidden from the eye. I would like, nevertheless, to watch her in the privacy of her home and to witness her work with the same facility as if she were nest-building in the open air. Perhaps there are some interesting characteristics to be picked up in the depths of her retreats. It remains to be seen whether my wish ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... short, he is what the world calls a good father; that is, he wants to spoil his children, and, in order to do this easily, he thinks fit to retain his present instructor, who is not very learned, but who takes part in their games and joyous sports with wonderful facility, who points out the letters of the alphabet to the little girl, who takes the little boys to mass, and who, no less obliging than the worthy Abbe P. of our acquaintance, would readily dance for Madame's amusement. Such a profession would not suit you, you who ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... her room, she saw again the look of her lover, that cruel and dolorous look. She knew with what facility he fell into despair, the promptness of his will not to will. She had seen him run away thus on the shore of the Arno. Happy then in her sadness and in her anguish, she could run after him and say, "Come." Now, again surrounded, watched, she should have ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... many such discussions, some ending well, others ill. But I never yet witnessed one in which such arrangements were (as in this case) presented crudely, to be accepted or refused, without any previous discussion as to the mode of shaping them, or any facility offered, or even intimated, for softening down such difficulties as such proposals are always more or less ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... this plant a more valuable acquisition to the green-house, is its hardiness, its readiness to flower, and the facility with which it may ...
— The Botanical Magazine v 2 - or Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... let on leases for terms varying from twenty to thirty years, and in farms of sufficient size to employ at the least two or three ploughs. The unlimited issues of government paper and the security afforded by these leases induced the Scottish banks to afford every facility to landlords and tenants to embark capital in the improvement of the land. The substantial education supplied by the parish schools, of which nearly the whole population could then avail themselves, had diffused through all ranks such a measure of intelligence ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... to say I'm going to sell Denby Hall. Messrs. Spooner and Smithson's people are coming in this afternoon. So give them every facility. Also tea, or beer, or whisky, or whatever they want. About what's going to happen to you and Mrs. Peddle, don't worry a bit. I'll look after that. You've been jolly good friends of mine all my life, and I'll see that everything's as right ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... more than the men, for they are instructed in the art of crying, that is, to have their tears ready on all occasions: but this is attained very easily by most. Some indeed arrive at the utmost perfection in this art with incredible facility. ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... anxious. desde since, after, from. desdicha misfortune. desear to desire. desembarcar to disembark. desembocar to empty, pour. desencajar to force from its place, socket, etc. desencanto disenchantment, disillusion. desenfado facility, boldness. desenganar to undeceive. desengano undeceiving, disillusion. desenojar to appease, placate. desenterrar to disinter. desentumecer to relieve of numbness or swelling. desenvolver to unfold. deseo ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... gladden his heart by looking on them. What else is the significance of statues and portraits produced by the various arts? You will scarcely maintain the paradox that what is worthy of admiration when produced by art is blameworthy when produced by nature; for nature has an even greater facility and truth than art. Long labour is expended over all the portraits wrought by the hand of man, yet they never attain to such truth as is revealed by a mirror. Clay is lacking in life, marble in colour, painting in solidity, and all three in motion, which is the most convincing element in a ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... think, little doubt that Chesterton is a far more important man than Shaw. He has the facility for getting hold of the things that matter; he is never ill-natured; he does not make fun of other people. Much as the writer admires the wit and brilliancy of Shaw, he cannot help feeling that ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... on slavery brought into Charleston from some of our sister States within the last four years (and once from Sierra Leone), and distributed amongst the colored population of the city, for which there was a great facility, in consequence of the unrestricted intercourse allowed to persons of color between the different States in the Union, and the speeches in Congress of those opposed to the admission of Missouri into the Union, perhaps garbled and misrepresented, furnished ...
— Black Rebellion - Five Slave Revolts • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... expense of importing fresh immigrants. I am assured that the only expense to the colony is the fee for survey, amounting to eighteen dollars for a ten-acre allotment, as the Coolie prefers the thinly-wooded and comparatively poor lands, from the greater facility of clearing them; and these lands are quite unsaleable to other customers. Therefore, for less than 4 pounds, an acclimatised Indian labourer with his family (and it must be remembered that, while the Negro families increase very ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... a special facility offered her by a power external to herself in the circumstance that Mr. Swancourt had proposed to leave home the night previous to her wished-for day. Her father seldom took long journeys; seldom slept from home except perhaps on the night following a ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... and too broad a man not to know that, while by doing the same thing, or bearing the same thing, many times,—by experience, that is,—one acquires a facility not otherwise communicable, in a novel situation a man is abler to act, the more he has availed himself of the knowledge and the suggestions of others. Absorbed with the duties of his station, it was of the first importance that he should ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... spontaneous and luxuriant cultivation of all that captivates the fancy and enlivens the leisure. If there were something pedantic in their affectation of philosophy, it was so graced and vivified by a brilliancy of conversation, a charm of manner carried almost to a science, a womanly facility of softening all that comes within their circle, of suiting yet refining each complexity and discord of character admitted to their intercourse, that it had at least nothing masculine or harsh. Wisdom, taken lightly or easily, seemed but another shape ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... was in the best taste: viands excellent—wine superb; never did I sip racier Madeira, and the Champagne trickled down one's throat with the same facility that man ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 20, 1841 • Various
... breaking into the house every night did not afford me the facility I wished. For I wanted to see Lady Alice during the day, or at least in the evening before she went to sleep; as otherwise I could not thoroughly judge of her condition. So I got Wood to pack up a small stock of provisions for me in his haversack, ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... to examine the favourite amusement of later royalty, do we find that the interludes brought forward in the pauses of the banquets of Henry VIII. have a claim to any refinement upon those old miracle-plays. They have gained in facility and wit; they have lost in poetry. They have lost pathos too, and have gathered grossness. In the comedies which soon appear, there is far more of fun than of art; and although the historical play had existed for some time, and the ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... of them fit for the grand company to which his merits, unappreciated at home, had introduced him. He began to take private lessons in dancing and singing, and as he possessed a certain natural grace, invisible when he was out of humor, but always appearing when he wanted to please, and a certain facility of imitation as well, he was soon able to dance excellently, and sing with more or less dullness a few songs of the sort fashionable at the time. But he took so little delight in music or singing for its own sake that in any allusion to his sister's practicing ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... fervour of execution. He is the painter of great, blue rivers curving towards the horizon; of blossoming orchards; of bright hills with red-roofed hamlets scattered about; he is, beyond all, the painter of French skies which he presents with admirable vivacity and facility. He has the feeling for the transparency of atmosphere, and if his technique allies him directly with Impressionism, one can well feel, that he painted spontaneously and that this technique happened to be adapted to his nature, ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... Pliny and dabbling in chemistry, Shelley was not wholly neglectful of Etonian studies. He acquired a fluent, if not a correct, knowledge of both Greek and Latin, and astonished his contemporaries by the facility with which he produced verses in the latter language. His powers of memory were extraordinary, and the rapidity with which he read a book, taking in seven or eight lines at a glance, and seizing the sense upon the ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... is all one to me," said the unhappy Mr. Hornblower, proceeding with fatal facility to make a bad matter worse. "They're all too kind of flashy. Now, my mother used to have a dress," he continued, meeting Persis' sympathetic gaze, "that suited me down to the ground. Satin, it was, or maybe 'twas silk or velvet. Anyhow, it looked rich. And ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... who speaks with such facility and who is always in good humor could not have such ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... Had he not sought refuge where no human being would think of seeking refuge, namely, in that old, dilapidated ruin, where, when his pursuers were so close upon his track, he had succeeded in eluding their grasp with a facility which looked as if he had vanished into thin air, or as if the very earth had opened to receive him bodily within its ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... all. She's a most accomplished creature is Constance. Sings, they tell me,—for it's not in English, so I don't understand it,—divinely; plays ditto; draws ditto. Speaks every language (except English) with equal facility ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... was gradually growing smooth before me. I, in a few weeks, conquered the teasing difficulties inseparable from the commencement of almost every career. Ere long I had acquired as much facility in speaking French as set me at my ease with my pupils; and as I had encountered them on a right footing at the very beginning, and continued tenaciously to retain the advantage I had early gained, they never ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... Dialogues, gives a striking example of the facility with which devils insinuate themselves into women. He tells how a nun, being in the garden, saw a lettuce which she thought looked tender. She plucked it, and, neglecting to bless it by making the ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... bad or good; he no doubt wanted a lyric facility and technical skill; but he had the source of poetry in his spiritual perception. He was a good reader and critic, and his judgment on poetry was to the ground of it. He could not be deceived as to the presence or absence of the poetic element in any composition, and his ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... transcriptions, furnishes good evidence of the genuineness and authenticity of the original manuscripts, though it is not now known where they are, if still in existence. In making a new copy for the press every facility was granted by the Librarians of the Advocates' Library, with their well-known courtesy and liberality; and much aid was rendered by David Laing, Esq., a gentleman thoroughly conversant with Scottish ecclesiastical literature, and generously ready to communicate ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... books many of the now flourishing ports on the south coast are described as "creeks under Exeter". From ancient records it seems certain that an arm of the sea extended to the very walls of the city, and from the facility thus afforded to commerce, Exeter, at a very early period, became the great trading port of the West Country. Of the various trades carried on here those of the woollen and its allied industries were the most numerous. It was also one of those favoured ...
— Exeter • Sidney Heath
... renewed the charge made two years earlier that Sumner had violated his oath of office. This attack called forth from Sumner another attempt to defend the one weak point in his speech of 1852, for he was always irritated by reference to this subject, and at the same time he enjoyed a fine facility in the use of language which ...
— The Anti-Slavery Crusade - Volume 28 In The Chronicles Of America Series • Jesse Macy
... Quito, where, after long separation, he met Sucre, and found in the loyal friendship of the Great Marshal of Ayacucho some comfort in the midst of all the bitterness which filled his soul. On that occasion, for the first time, Bolivar's facility and felicity of language failed him, and his tears were the only expression of his feelings. He received in Quito a manifesto issued by Paez regarding the murderous attempt of the 25th of September, once more protesting that he was loyal to Bolivar. Again mentioning ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... engine; it has gone through worlds of fancy and reflection, dragging me behind it; and long experience has given it so great facility, that I have only to fire up, whistle, and fix my couplings, and away goes my locomotive with no end ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... faculties were concentrated upon the ground. With a swinging gait the human bloodhound traveled swiftly and silently along the edge of the crevasse, noting every bunch of moss, fragment of stone, drift of snow or bit of moist earth, reading the shorthand notes of Nature with facility which far excelled the ability of my own stenographer to read her own notes when the latter are a few hours old. But a short time had elapsed before I heard a shout, and, hurrying to the place where my big friend was seated, ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... fleet. The most valuable lesson of the war was that such victories required working for, and particularly in cases where the belligerents face each other from either side of a narrow sea. In such conditions it was proved that owing to the facility of retreat and the restricted possibilities of pursuit a complete decision is not to be looked for without very special strategical preparation. The new doctrine in fact gave that new direction to strategy which has been already referred to. It was no longer a question of whether to ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... "Cherasvwechiano khorasho pakornashae vass blagadoroo," and the distinguished American retired with a proud consciousness of having done his duty. I was not very much enlightened as to the state of the bride's health; but, judging from the facility with which she rattled off this tremendous sentence, we concluded that she must be well. Nothing but a robust constitution and the most excellent health would have enabled her to do it. Convulsed with laughter, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... course, of his countrymen, whom he would most cordially have welcomed, from seeking his acquaintance. But as it was, no "English gentleman ever approached him, with the common forms of introduction, that did not come away at once surprised and charmed by the kind courtesy and facility of his manners, the unpretending play of his conversation, and, on a nearer intercourse, the frank youthful spirits, to the flow of which he gave way with such a zest as even to deceive some of those who best ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... more formal schooling than this, was too poor to enter college, but had what he modestly called a "knack at rhyming," and much facility in prose. He turned to journalism and politics, for which he possessed a notable instinct. For a while he thought he had "done with poetry and literature." Then in 1833, at twenty-six, came Garrison's stirring letter ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... difference in the two forms of Linum is really wonderful. I assure you I quite long to see you and a few others in London; it is not so much the eczema which has taken the epidermis a dozen times clean off; but I have been knocked up of late with extraordinary facility, and when I shall be able to come up I know not. I particularly wish to hear about the wondrous bird: the case has delighted me, because no group is so isolated as Birds. I much wish to hear when we meet which digits are developed; when examining ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... of leaving Europe for the first time is attended with a solemn feeling. We in vain summon to our minds the frequency of the communication between the two worlds; we in vain reflect on the great facility with which, from the improved state of navigation, we traverse the Atlantic, which compared to the Pacific is but a larger arm of the sea; the sentiment we feel when we first undertake so distant a voyage is not the less accompanied by a deep emotion, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... subsequent period under the Hanoverian princes. The House of Commons made no indignant resistance; it sent up but few spirited remonstrances; but tamely acquiesced in the measures of Charles and his ministers. Its members were bought and sold with unblushing facility, and even were corrupted by the agents of the French king. One member received six thousand pounds for his vote. Twenty-nine of the members received from five hundred to twelve hundred pounds a year. Charles I. attempted ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... permitted him to begin the attack ere it was completed. The Englishman remained firm, however, until the Swiss, displaying his bright brand to the morning sun, made three or four flourishes as if to prove its weight, and the facility with which he wielded it—then stood firm within sword-stroke of his adversary, grasping his weapon with both hands, and advancing it a little before his body, with the blade pointed straight upwards. The ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 373, Supplementary Number • Various
... new settlements beyond the boundaries of Pennsylvania and Virginia, upon wild lands belonging to the United States, made formal application to the Government of the United States at Washington, who, being bound to afford all possible facility, thereupon take steps to have the land surveyed and laid out into counties, townships, parishes. The roads are also indicated, and at once the law exists; and security, guarantied by the authority ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... being the son of a watchmaker; was sickly, miserable, and morbid from a child; was poorly educated, but a great devourer of novels (which his father—sentimental as he—read with him), poetry, and gushing biographies; although a little later he became, with impartial facility, equally delighted with the sturdy Plutarch. His nature was passionate and inconstant, his sensibilities morbidly acute, and his imagination lively. He hated all rules, precedents, and authority. He was lazy, listless, deceitful, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... justice and other Government affairs. Where a European prince would require a hundred different employes, here five or six clerks suffice. Besides the celerity and economy resulting from such a system, a third no less important advantage is derived, viz., the facility with which the Bey is able to superintend the conduct of the ministers, being so few in number, and immediately detect and punish those in whom any act of embezzlement or fraud has been detected; and punishment in ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... instances are entirely confined to the married women. These are, in their conversation and conduct, indulged, by a kind of general consent, with every possible freedom, and, by the extraordinary state of manners, are presented by their husbands with every possible facility they could desire. A husband and wife in France have generally separate apartments, or rather inhabit separate wings of their hotel. The lady's bed-room is appropriated to herself alone. Its walls would be esteemed polluted by any intrusion of the husband. ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... taking advantage of the concealment afforded by a small inlet on the northern side. Skreene says he did this at her request, because she expressed a wish to taste some of the oysters from that side of the river, which he, with his usual facility, believed to be the only reason for getting into this unobserved harbor; and, merely to gratify this wish, he did as ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... become a more realistic option along the lines of Israel's strikes against Syria's nuclear reactors in 1982. It is, however, a responsible state's worst nightmare to have successfully struck a chemical, biological, or nuclear production facility with precision only to learn the next day that hundreds of civilians have been killed due to the inadvertent release of ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... court information even upon a question of his own profession? As to his credulity with respect to the somewhat harmless forgeries of Psalmanazer, and with respect to the villainous imposture of Lander, we imagine that other causes co-operated to those errors beyond mere facility of assenting. In the latter case we fear that jealousy of Milton as a scholar, a feeling from which he never cleansed himself, had been the chief cause of his so readily delivering himself a dupe to allegations not specious, backed by forgeries that were anything but ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... "The First Navigator," supplied Sestini with the Story, in all its details; but he versified it with surprizing facility: and, as far as I could judge, with great spirit and elegance. He added, too, some trifling circumstances, and several little traits, the naivete of which afforded considerable amusement. When an accurate rhyme, or apt expression, did not offer itself on the instant ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... and died in Newgate after having become a jew. When the lords, who adjourned on the 6th, again assembled, the great jurist Mansfield, who in his seventy-sixth year retained his mastery of constitutional law and his facility of expression, authoritatively declared that soldiers equally with civil persons might, and if required by a magistrate must, assist in suppressing riots and preventing acts of treason and felony, and that the red coat of a soldier neither disqualified him from performing ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... penitential readings, or as their representatives of the present day, chiefly of the female sex, read "screeds of good books," which they have not "the presumption" to understand. The literary Bohemian is sometimes to be pitied when his facility of character exposes him to have a modification of this infliction forced upon him. This will occur when he happens to be living in a house frequented by "a good reader," who solemnly devotes certain hours to the reading of passages from the English or French classics for the benefit of ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... bore of his generation. He is really a person of very small abilities; of very little information, considering the opportunities presented by his travels; and the "learned blacksmith" has no learning at all. He had, indeed, an unusual facility in acquiring words, but he knows nothing of languages; not having in any a particle of scholarship; of the philosophy, even of his mother tongue, being as ignorant as the bellows-hand in his smithy at Worcester. But because of this not uncommon faculty of acquiring words—acquiring them as Zerah ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... winter was far advanced, it is actually on record that Emmy took a night and received company with great propriety and modesty. She had a French master, who complimented her upon the purity of her accent and her facility of learning; the fact is she had learned long ago and grounded herself subsequently in the grammar so as to be able to teach it to George; and Madam Strumpff came to give her lessons in singing, which she performed so well and with such a true voice that the Major's windows, who ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... force is employed in South African mines. Manufacturing depends largely on farm products which support the milling, canning, leather, and jute industries. Although drought has decreased agricultural activity over the past few years, improvement of a major hydropower facility will permit the sale of water to South Africa and will support the economy's ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... seems to have been supported with advantage. How far this will operate admits of a doubt, which prudence directs us not to rely upon. Money, the great support of modern wars, has been raised with more facility in England, than in any country in the world; and we find the minority last year censuring Lord North for giving the advantage of lending to his friends. Their losses may indeed render subscriptions more expensive to the public; but there is ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various
... way of thinking we are placed in a kind of middle station betwixt the past and future; and as our imagination finds a kind of difficulty in running along the former, and a facility in following the course of the latter, the difficulty conveys the notion of ascent, and the facility of the contrary. Hence we imagine our ancestors to be, in a manner, mounted above us, and our posterity to lie below us. Our fancy arrives not at the one without effort, but easily reaches ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... any internal concretion that may impair its transparency; and the construction of the sockets in which the tube is inserted should be such, that, even when there is steam in the boiler, a broken tube may be replaced with facility. ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... of his versification are facility and sweetness; that ease which is, in fact, the result of unremitted labour, and one of the most valuable acquisitions of litterature. It displays occasionally likewise a vigour and a brilliancy of polish that might endure comparison with the high-wrought texture ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... composing it, she would desire him to make it on the slate, and he would do so with tolerable accuracy: she was not very severe about the spelling, if only it was plain he knew the word. Ere long he began to devise short ways of making the letters, and soon wrote with remarkable facility in a character modified from the printed letters. When at length Janet saw him take the book by himself, and sit pondering over it, she had not a doubt he was understanding it, and her heart leapt for joy. He had to ask her a good many words at first, and often the meaning of one and another; ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... distrust do not mean that our fundamental ideas about language are unsound. Beneath our wholesome dislike for shallow facility and insincerity of speech, we have a conviction that the mastery of words is a good thing, not a bad. We are therefore unwilling to take the vow of linguistic poverty. If we lack the ability to bend words to our use, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Autumn, here stared in indignant amazement, at the premature presumption of snowy regal camellias, audaciously advancing to crown the icy brows of Winter. All latitudes, all seasons have become bound vassals to the great God Gold; and his necromancy furnishes with equal facility the dewy wreaths of orange flowers that perfume the filmy veils of December brides—and the blue bells of spicy hyacinths which ring "Rest" over the lily pillows, set as tribute on the graves of babies, who wilt ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... skill, skillfulness, address; dexterity, dexterousness; adroitness, expertness &c. adj.; proficiency, competence, technical competence, craft, callidity[obs3], facility, knack, trick, sleight; mastery, mastership, excellence, panurgy[obs3]; ambidexterity, ambidextrousness[obs3]; sleight of hand &c. (deception) 545. seamanship, airmanship, marksmanship, horsemanship; rope-dancing. accomplishment, acquirement, attainment; art, science; technicality, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... lucky," sighed the witch, "plenty of room and every facility. I myself am so dreadfully cramped and hampered. I often have to boil my incantations over a spirit lamp, and even that is ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... imagination of the Indians. Love of story telling. Appreciation of style. Power and resources of their languages. Facility in acquiring foreign languages. Native writers in the English tongue. In Latin. In Spanish. Ancient books of Aztecs. Of Mayas, etc. ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... unseen before, cast over the earth. It is, as it were, transfigured before them, and made radiant with celestial light. This is the poet's work. With a keener perception of the beautiful and sublime than other men; with a greater facility of association, and with the power to give to language the hue and intensity of his own feelings, he clothes lifeless nature with the attributes of humanity, making it instinct with human sentiment and passion. Like Burns, he pours forth his lament over ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... traditional type, echoing faintly the battle-hymns of the War of Liberation. For the great liberal movement of the thirties and forties he had neither sympathy nor comprehension.—FRIEDRICH RUeCKERT (1788-1866), endowed with a fatal facility of lyric expression, a virtuoso for whom no tour-de-force was too difficult, lived most of his life aloof from the political and social movements of his time. In his youth his Sonnets in Armor had done sturdy service in the national awakening against Napoleon, but his maturer years were ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... worth his salt who did not know every head of his cattle. Suppose his herd breaks into a field where there are others of the same breed, or he collides with another drove, or there is a tremendous mix at a tavern. The facility with which a cattle man learns to recognise every steer in a drove of hundreds is an eighth wonder of the world to a stranger. Anyone of us could ride through a drove of cattle, and when he reached the end know every steer that followed ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... with the life of Scott as to need no chronicle here. The young advocate, with many of the qualities essential to the making of a great lawyer, lacked one most needful to his branch of the profession, facility as a public speaker; his extreme shyness would account for this. As he said at the farewell dinner given to him by his friends in Edinburgh: "You know as well as I, that if I had ever been able to make a speech, there would have been no cause for our present meeting." So ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... interesting figure, especially to women, and his remarkable gifts were recognised as soon as circumstances began to give him fair play. All modern things were of interest to him, and his knowledge, acquired with astonishing facility, formed the fund of talk which had singular charm alike for those who did and those who did not understand it. Undeniably shy, he yet, when warmed to a subject, spoke with nerve and confidence. In days of jabber, more or less impolite, this appearance of an articulate mortal, with soft manners ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... rest, and crushing delicate coverings with his big body and his great black head, had the same brute selfishness at the bottom of it. The softly moving hands that were so busy among the dishes had the old wicked facility of the hands that had clung to the bars. And when he could eat no more, and sat sucking his delicate fingers one by one and wiping them on a cloth, there wanted nothing but the substitution of vine-leaves to finish ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... servir," materials to assist some future inquirer in the formation of a more detailed and systematic account of the fauna of the island. My design has been to point out to others the extreme richness and variety of the field, the facility of exploring it, and the charms and attractions of the undertaking. I am eager to show how much remains to do by exhibiting the little that has as ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... had been but meagre. In an age when all kings and noblemen possessed many languages, he spoke not a word of any tongue but Spanish,—although he had a slender knowledge of French and Italian, which he afterwards learned to read with comparative facility. He had studied a little history and geography, and he had a taste for sculpture, painting, and architecture. Certainly if he had not possessed a feeling for art, he would have been a monster. To have been born in the earlier part of the sixteenth century, to have been a ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... an instrument, in the hand of a practised native, as they would be in ours. We know the effect of habit in all mechanical operations, and the Spaniards bear constant testimony to the adroitness and accuracy of the Peruvians in this. Their skill is not more surprising than the facility with which habit enables us to master the contents of a printed page, comprehending thousands of separate characters, by a single glance, as it were, though each character must require a distinct recognition ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... say that, with the exception of the occasional necessity or seeming-necessity for taking one side or the other in a matter of dispute, I have avoided the facility of bandying highly moral verdicts and labelling these victors or victims of life with tags marking their destinations in the next world. He who gets into another's heart with understanding, will find it impossible to indulge in wholesale blame—"tout comprendre, c'est ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... of a second and revised edition of this Part affords the author an opportunity of expressing his sense of the general kindliness of his reviewers, and the help they have him in improving this maiden effort. To no one is there vouchsafed such a facility in the discovery of errors in a book as to its author, so soon as it has passed beyond his power of correction. Hence the general tone of encouragement (and in some cases the decided approval) of the members of this termination to a period of considerable ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... already furnished with most of the machinery necessary for shipbuilding, will be competent to the supply of the two selected by the Board as the best for the concentration of materials, and, from the facility and certainty of communication between them, it will be useless to incur at those depots the expense of similar machinery, especially that used in preparing the usual metallic ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... of witnesses may prove anything they like, but my friend has started with an entirely erroneous view of the situation. The compensation for disturbance of a business must depend a great deal on the nature of the business. If you can carry it on elsewhere with the same facility and profit, the compensation you are entitled to is very little. I will illustrate my meaning. Let us suppose that in this thoroughfare there is a good public-house—for such a business it would indeed be an excellent situation; you may easily ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... side of the enemy, let the hero of the book be opposed to them, and we have perforce to believe, whether we like it or not, that the said knight wins the victory by the single might of his strong arm. And then, what shall we say of the facility with which a born queen or empress will give herself over into the arms of some unknown wandering knight? What mind, that is not wholly barbarous and uncultured, can find pleasure in reading of how a great tower full of knights sails away across the sea like a ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... of 55 islands; Diego Garcia, largest and southernmost island, occupies strategic location in central Indian Ocean; island is site of joint US-UK military facility ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... he proved to be an unusually bright scholar. He dropped his faulty accent with astonishing rapidity, and gained knowledge with great facility. His teacher liked him, as did all the boys and girls, and when he was occasionally absent he was missed more than half a dozen other ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... things on the islands, and was fain at last, after a hard struggle, to retire for ever from the unequal contest. But often enough, too, he made a gallant fight for it, and, adapting himself rapidly to his new environment, changed his form and habits with surprising facility. For natural selection, I found, is a hard schoolmaster. If you happen to fit your place in the world, you live and thrive, but if you don't happen to fit it, to the wall with you without quarter. Thus sometimes I would see a small canary beetle quickly take to ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... the first wants of an incipient antiquary is the facility of comparison, and here it is furnished him at one glance. The places, indeed, form the most valuable part of the book, both by their number and the judicious selection of types and examples which they contain. It is a book which we can, on this ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 30. Saturday, May 25, 1850 • Various
... seven. Philip had agreed to wait outside from a quarter past seven onwards. He looked forward to the occasion with painful eagerness, for in the cab on the way from the theatre to the station he thought she would let him kiss her. The vehicle gave every facility for a man to put his arm round a girl's waist (an advantage which the hansom had over the taxi of the present day), and the delight of that was worth the cost of ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... might be bad or good; he no doubt wanted a lyric facility and technical skill; but he had the source of poetry in his spiritual perception. He was a good reader and critic, and his judgment on poetry was to the ground of it. He could not be deceived as to the presence ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... frontier opposed to it; it is moderate in length; and, from the rapidity of transfer from end to end afforded by the railroad, it permits movements on one flank or the other to be combined with comparative facility. Add to this the convergence upon it of the several lines of supply from Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and East London, and it is evident that the line would present particular advantages for the assembling of ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... is easy and graceful, sweeping with facility over the loftiest trees of their native forests, their strangely developed bills being no encumbrance to them, replete as they are with a tissue of air-filled cells rendering them very ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [January, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... attention of American inventors toward this country, that to-day offers a wide field for every new practical invention, but I am sorry to see that, with the exception of Edison and a few others, the Americans have not yet availed themselves of the easy facility for taking patents for Spain, where new inventions and new industries are now eagerly accepted and adopted. And while the Americans are thus careless as to their own interests, the French take out and negotiate, in Spain, American patents with ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... also been on the watch, suddenly appeared with three pair of handcuffs, and applied them with a degree of prompt facility that surprised himself and ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... establishment which had been erected as a public benefit to relieve the City of Chicago of its offal.[25] In fine, whenever pressure has reached a given intensity, on one pretext or another, courts have enforced or dispensed with constitutional limitations with quite as much facility as have legislatures, and for the same reasons. The only difference has been that the pressure which has operated most directly upon courts has not always been the pressure which has swayed legislatures, though sometimes both influences ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... Claudet's offer, when the name of Reine Vincart produced an immediate change in his resolution. It just crossed his mind that perhaps Claudet had thrown out her name as a bait and an argument in favor of his theories on the facility of love-affairs in the country. However that might be, the allusion to the probable presence of Mademoiselle Vincart at the coming fete, rendered young Buxieres more tractable, and he made no further difficulties ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... supplied with ministerial labors, and others formed and organized. Indeed, the same end may also be obtained by individual ministers and churches; nevertheless, as it frequently becomes necessary for such to receive cooperation from their brethren, this end may be obtained with more facility by the meeting of a Synod." (1853, 25.) According to Tennessee, then, the organization of, and connection with, a synod is a matter of Christian liberty, wisdom, and expediency. But, while not opposed to synods as such, Tennessee most strenuously objected to any kind of human autocracy within ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... their accomplishment. For instance, no one would dare to assume personal responsibility for the debts of a railroad, nor could such an enterprise be managed if every transfer of interest dissolved the company. The desired limitation of responsibility and facility of transfer of interest are secured by the ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary
... just alluded to is a very important influence among those which tend to produce insubordination and other serious faults among servants. Every housekeeper must have observed that a marvellous facility of intercommunication exists among the servant classes, and more particularly among the Irish. There seems to be some mysterious method at work, whereby the troubles and bickerings of each mistress with her 'help' are made ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... case of M'Neal, were, perhaps, more characteristically grouped than in any other case which has been recorded in this country, so it has also in all probability occurred, that more individuals had been in contact with him during his illness and after his death, as the facility in obtaining persons to attend the sick, rub their bodies, &c., must be vastly greater in the army than in ordinary life; so that in such cases it is not a question of one or two escaping, but of many, which is always ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... women: he has done so since his childhood, and is likely to do so to the last. His disrelish for any other society has become inveterate: he cannot keep awake in any other. In spite of average natural capacity, and more than average facility in the cultivation of light literature, or at least "de faire des petits vers de sa focon," his understanding has become so emasculated, that he is altogether unfit for the conduct of his domestic, much less his public, affairs. He sees occasionally his prime minister, ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... commission was granted to the Earl of Northumberland, Sir Ralph Sadler, and Sir James Crofts. The ostensible object was the settlement of some Border disputes, which were arranged on the 22d September; but by remaining at Berwick, they were able, with greater facility and secrecy, to hold communication with the Protestant party in Scotland, without apparently infringing the Treaty of Peace which had previously been concluded. Sadler's private instructions to this effect are dated 8th August 1559, and he was empowered to treat with any persons he thought ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... their different parts are made movable, according to the effect intended to be produced by their shadows, when moved backward and forward behind the frames, at a small distance from them. To make them act with more facility, small wires, fixed to their movable parts, are bent backward and made to terminate in rings, through which the fingers of the hand are put, while the figure is supported on the left by means of another iron wire. In this manner they may be made to advance or recede and ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... her feverish unrest a fear lingered; she imagined that her husband knew everything. He had come home the night before trembling with agitation. She overwhelmed Helene with questions; and Helene, with a hardihood and facility at which she herself was amazed, poured into her ears a story, every detail of which she invented offhand. She vowed to Juliette that her husband doubted her in nothing. It was she, Helene, who had become acquainted with everything, and, wishing to save her, ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... on record in which there was still greater facility of ghost-production than Nicolai evinced. One patient could, for instance, by thinking of a person, summon his apparition to join the others. He could not, however, having done this, subsequently banish him. The sight is the sense ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... have an opinion, and a strong one, and that I hope this fresh favour [may not be regarded] as padlocking my lips at a time when it would otherwise be proper to me to speak or write. I am shocked to find that I have not the faculty of delivering myself with facility—an embarrassment which may be fanciful, but is altogether as ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... lofty strains of a Milton or a Dante. Occasionally a lecture before some literary association brought his name into the newspapers in connection with remarks that kindled his vanity into a flame. Debating clubs afforded another field for display, and he made liberal use of the facility. So much for ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... decent lie, he could depend upon making a respectable brassy shot. He will find unsuspected difficulties in the brassy, and in doing his best to overcome them he will probably lose to some extent the facility for driving which he had acquired. Therefore, when he has become a player with his brassy, he should devote a short space of time to getting back on to his drive. It will not take him long, and then he should take out both the ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... than every tradesman does; but then as they pay no rent or taxes to the State, the principal objection to them lies in the mode of operation, and an overstrained recommendation of their goods, which are always, according to their account, of the most superior quality; and they have a peculiar facility of discovering the novice or the silly, to whom walking up with a serious countenance and interesting air, they broach the pleasing intelligence, that they have on sale an excellent article well worth their ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... to apply myself to portrait. Of course I know what that means.—"My good fellow, your attempts at the historic and poetic are simply pitiable. Your brush is just that of a successful portrait-painter—it has a little truth and a great facility in falsehood—your idealism will never do for gods and goddesses and heroic story, but it may fetch a high price as flattery. Fate, my friend, has made you the hinder wheel—rota posterior curras, et in axe secundo—run behind, because you can't ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... both families was found near Lerici, on the east side of the Bay of Spezzia. It was a lonely, wind-swept place, with its feet in the waves. The natives were half-savage; there was no furniture, and no facility for getting provisions. The omens opened badly. At the moment of moving in, news of Allegra's death came; Shelley was shaken and saw visions, and Mary disliked the place at first sight. Still, there was the sea washing their terrace, and Shelley loved the sea (there is scarcely one of his poems ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... a wonderful invention," said Mr. Yollop, who had approached to within four or five feet of the speaker and was bending over to afford him every facility for planting his words squarely upon the disc. "Speak in the same tone of voice that you would employ if I were about thirty feet away and perfectly sound of hearing. Just imagine, if you can, that I am out in the hall, with the door open, ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon
... figures accompanying the text of this work are only reproductions of this chart affected by such or such a particular organ. A knowledge of this criterion gives to our studies not only simplicity, clearness and facility, but ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... elephant-hunters. If not, then they would be helpless indeed. It would be a tedious business spooring the game afoot, after it had once been fired upon. In such cases the elephant usually travels many miles before halting again; and only mounted men can with any facility overtake him. ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... of inadequacy and inexpressiveness increased. The boy was not insensitive, he knew; but he had the facility and self-confidence that came of looking at fate not as a master but as an equal. "That's it: they feel equal to things—they know their way about," he mused, thinking of his son as the spokesman of the new generation which had swept away all the old landmarks, and with ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... the union of contingents might retard their movements, but this is not so. The Arabs, whether they number ten or a hundred thousand, move with equal facility. They go where they wish and as they wish upon a campaign; the place of rendezvous merely is ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... not to have lost his facility. "But my ear is getting slower," I said. "For instance, I eavesdropped a while ago when you were talking about your Huron soldiers, and I got most of what you said because you spoke English. I doubt if I could ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... lends itself with equal facility to rationalization. His desire to go to his "mother's land" instead of obeying his father and ruling the "sea-plain" (unabara)—an appellation believed by some learned commentators to apply to Korea—may easily be interpreted to mean that he threw in his lot ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... the liberty of dividing this long-continued dialogue into chapters, for the greater facility of reference, and as periods in the history, where the reader may conveniently rest in his progress through ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... prevent him? If he had for his mistress every woman he might single out from among his captives, why not his sister? If he have the force to carry out a plan, why should a man stand in his way? The complete facility in the commission of all actions quickly brings such a man to the limits of the legitimate: there is no universal cry to tell him where those limits are, no universal arm to pull him back. He pooh-poohs, pushes them a little further, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... progress. What will not habit make easy to us, whether it be for good or for evil? And what an incentive we have to renewed effort in finding that we are making actual progress,—that we can do with comparative facility to-day what we could do only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... was twenty-six—an age which has something in common with almost every one of the seven celebrated by Shakespeare. Like most men in their twenties, he had the character of a chameleon, and adapted himself to his surroundings with almost uncanny facility. At college he had been an ardent member of a dozen cliques, even falling under the egotism of the men who dabbled in Spiritualism, but a clarity of thought and a strain of Dutch ancestry kept his feet on the earth when the rest of him showed ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... the field, camp, post or general hospitals, her vigorous arm was ever ready to lift the wounded soldier as tenderly as his own mother could have done, and her ready skill was exerted with equal facility in dressing his wounds, or in preparing such nourishment for him as should call back his fleeting strength or tempt his fickle and failing appetite. She was a capital forager, and for the sake of a sick soldier she would undergo any peril or danger, and violate military rules without the least ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... were made of a vast increasing amount with great facility, and generally at a low interest, by which the nation were enabled to resist their enemies. The French wondered at the prodigious efforts that were made by so small a power, and the abundance with which money was poured into its treasury... Books were written, projects drawn up, edicts prepared, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... back to Cambridge and finished his course with the greatest distinction. He then began contributing to the Athenaeum, and planning to write books. "A History of Radicalism," for example. "The Effects Upon Radicalism of Increased Facility of Communication." "Development of the Principle of Love of Country Into That of Love of Man." In politics he took the Irish Catholic side of the Irish Question; he wrote strongly in favor of removing the political disabilities of women, and he criticized ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... contribution to a newspaper, which was like the stone of Sisyphus, and which came every Monday, crashing down on to the feather of his pen, Etienne worked for three or four literary magazines. Still, do not be alarmed; he put no artistic conscientiousness into his work. This man of Sancerre had a facility, a carelessness, if you call it so, which ranked him with those writers who are mere scriveners, literary hacks. In Paris, in our day, hack-work cuts a man off from every pretension to a literary position. When he can do no more, or no longer cares for advancement, the man who can write ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... exaggeration in this, and that a marriage cannot actually be celebrated at midnight, over a champagne-and-lobster supper, by a clergyman who happened to drop in. But there can be no doubt that whatever the social merits or demerits of the system, facility of divorce and remarriage is an immense boon to the dramatist. It places within his reach an inexhaustible store of situations and complications which are barred to the English playwright, to whom divorce always means an ugly and painful scandal. The moralist may insist that this ought always ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... at the first trial with a sudden facility of expression, which, surprising him as he went on, ended in rousing in him some vague suspicion of himself. He left the table, and bathed his head and face in water, and came back to read what he had ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... this man had murdered before in the city of Leontini; the truth of which was attested by several there present, who could not choose but wonder too at the strange dexterity of fortune's operations, the facility with which she makes one event the spring and motion to something wholly different, uniting every scattered accident and lose particular and remote action, and interweaving them together to serve her purposes; ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... without sayin' by yer lave, too," added Briant, who had a happy facility of changing his opinion on the shortest notice to ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... time you meet in this work the terms virtue or virtuous, let us understand that virtue means a certain labored facility by which a wife keeps her heart for her husband; at any rate, that the word is not used in a general sense, and I leave this distinction to the natural ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... each under the thraldom of some fatal and master passion, so long will the impulse never be wanting to drive men into danger. Hope also and cupidity, the one leading and the other following, the one conceiving the attempt, the other suggesting the facility of succeeding, cause the widest ruin, and, although invisible agents, are far stronger than the dangers that are seen. Fortune, too, powerfully helps the delusion and, by the unexpected aid that she sometimes lends, tempts men to venture with inferior means; and this ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... conversation, as both parties could speak, with equal apparent facility, the Spanish and the English. There was a young gentleman from Massachusetts, a graduate from a New England college, who was private tutor in the family. After breakfast the stranger was conducted around the farm, and to ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... the simple-minded Doctor with all the grace of a young neophyte come to sit at the feet of superior truth. There are some people who receive from Nature as a gift a sort of graceful facility of sympathy, by which they incline to take on, for the time being, the sentiments and opinions of those with whom they converse, as the chameleon was fabled to change its hue with every surrounding. Such are often supposed to be wilfully acting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... physical and mental dreams in the loom of a girl's face, in her glance, in the curves of her mouth. Deliberately, owing chiefly to his morbid consciousness of his own physical defects, he had long been accustomed to check the instincts natural to a young man in this regard. He had seen too often the facility with which others, more fortunate than he, get delightedly lost in that golden haze; he had experienced too often the absence of attractiveness in himself. How could any girl of the London ballroom, he had so frequently asked himself, tolerate dancing or sitting ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... Maston, and, as he had done the day before, he made his calculations with marvellous facility, and said at ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... he had the technique at his fingers' ends; and so he gave more and more time to the amassment of material. For he had made a magnificent boast, and he never had much idea of permitting it to turn out empty, for all his nights of torturing misgivings. He read enormously with expert facility and a beautifully trained memory; read history, biography, memoirs, war records, old newspapers, old speeches, councilmanic proceedings, departmental reports—everything he could lay his hands on that promised ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... part of every dancer's daily work, while Magda, holding his other hand in hers, essayed to instruct him in the principle of "turning out"—that flexible turning of the knees towards the side which gives so much facility of movement. ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... read and write, and was instructed with the same facility in all the sciences that became a prince of ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... outside the passing episode. So he can, at least, in general; for in Anna Karenina, as I said, his method seems to break down very conspicuously at a certain juncture. But before I come to that, I would dwell further upon this peculiar skill of Tolstoy's, this facility which explains, I think, the curious flaw in his beautiful novel. He would appear to have trusted his method too far, trusted it not only to carry him through the development and the climax of his story, ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... literary and forensic culture. Oratorical and literary accomplishments are a prerequisite to the highest success and usefulness. The student who improves the opportunities of these societies need not neglect his regular college work, but in them can train himself to think consecutively, and gain facility of expression and an acquaintance with parliamentary law. If he makes faithful preparation, he will escape bombast and loose thinking and expression, and will become familiar with public movements, political questions, and social ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... the residence of herdsmen; and at the same time that herds of deer were permitted to range at large as heretofore, lawnds, by which are meant parks within a forest, were inclosed, in order to chase them with greater facility, or, by confinement, to produce fatter venison. Of these lawnds Pendle had new and old lawnd, with ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... so much grace, and rationalised so skilfully, that though one might not be convinced it was impossible to help being attracted. I have never seen any theologian who could treat the most difficult points with so much facility, eloquence, and real dignity, and at dinner she completed her conquest of myself. M. Tronchin, who had never heard her speak before, thanked me a hundred times for having procured him this pleasure, and being obliged to leave ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... for repose after her simple repast; the dame was so affable and entertaining that we soon became great friends. I caused her some amusement by my efforts to understand and pronounce her language—these folk speak Albanian and Italian with equal facility—which seemed to my unpractised ears as hopeless as Finnish. Very patiently, she gave me a long lesson during which I thought to pick up a few words and phrases, but the upshot of ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... attained by reading writers who possess it: be it, for example, persuasiveness, imagination, the gift of drawing comparisons, boldness or bitterness, brevity or grace, facility of expression or wit, unexpected contrasts, a laconic manner, naivete, and the like. But if we are already gifted with these qualities—that is to say, if we possess them potentia—we can call them forth and bring them to consciousness; we can discern to what uses ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... when physical force or brute strength gave pre- eminence. The savage chief occupied his position by virtue of his muscle, of his courage, on account of the facility with which he wielded a club. As long as nations depend simply upon brute force, the man, in time of war, is, of necessity, of more importance to the nation than woman, and as the dispute is to be settled by strength, by force, those who have the strength and force naturally settle ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... a man when he says, "I never loved like this before." Each time a man falls in love with so much more ease and facility that he doesn't recognize it as the same old emotion ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... out of Roman—and perhaps pre-Roman—times, of the conception of a commonwealth, a community of men with joint and mutual interests apart from any superimposed dependence on a joint feudal superior. The French people therefore became a nation, with unobtrusive facility, so soon as circumstances permitted, and they are today the oldest "nation" in Europe. They therefore were prepared from long beforehand, with an adequate principle (habit of thought) of national cohesion and patriotic sentiment, to make the shift from a dynastic State to a national commonwealth ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... all those that can be urged on either side. I have confined myself to the chief ones simply because by merely stating them, their utter weakness must be admitted by every one who can read Shakespeare, by every one who understands his impulsive sensitiveness, and the facility with which affectionate expressions came to his lips. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that while the sonnets were being written he was in rivalry with Chapman for this very patron's favour, and this rivalry alone would explain a good deal of the fervour, or, should I say, the affected fervour ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... railways from Jaffa to Jerusalem, from Mount Carmel to the Sea of Galilee, from Beirut to Damascus,—with macadamized roads to Shechem and Nazareth and Tiberias,—with hotels at all the "principal points of interest,"—and with every facility for doing Palestine in ten days, without getting away from the market-reports, the gossip of the table d'hote, and all that queer little complex of distracting habits ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... curiosity had led to the utmost confusion in human knowledge; all things were still mere personal experience; the nomenclatures of theory did not exist; printing was done at enormous cost; scientific communication had little or no facility; the Church persecuted science and all research which was based on the analysis of natural phenomena. Persecution begat mystery. So, to the people as well as to the nobles, physician and alchemist, mathematician and astronomer, astrologer and necromancer ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... silent at his best passages, he went home satisfied, and slept the next night well. He did not trouble himself about Voltaire's criticisms. He was willing to take advantage of the ignorance of the age in many things; and if his plays pleased others, not to quarrel with them himself. His very facility of production would make him set less value on his own excellences, and not care to distinguish nicely between what he did well or ill. His blunders in chronology and geography do not amount to above half a dozen, and they are offences against chronology and geography, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... replied in the same tongue—slowly, it is true, and haltingly; but none the less in excellent French, such, though, as a little child might use. Thereafter they spoke a little French each day, and My Dear often marveled that the girl learned this language with a facility that was at times almost uncanny. At first Meriem had puckered her narrow, arched, little eye brows as though trying to force recollection of something all but forgotten which the new words suggested, and then, ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a struggling storekeeper living in White Water; Sally taught school; but the others were all still at home, and all, except Austin, too young to be self-supporting—Thomas, Molly, Katherine, and Edith. They had all caught their father's facility for correct speech, rare in northern New England; most of them his love of books, his formless and unfulfilled ambitions; more than one the shiftlessness and incompetence that come partly from natural bent and partly from hopelessness; while Sally and Thomas alone possessed ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... other, but rather to show the language in which adverse opinions are expressed. It is taken from the columns of the The Liberator:—"We have been in the editorial harness for more than a quarter of a century, and, during that period, have had every facility to ascertain the character of the American Press, in regard to every form that has struggled for the ascendency during that period; and we soberly aver, as our conviction, that a majority of the proprietors and editors of public journals ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... I told him that the hunger strike would not be abandoned. But they had by no means exhausted every possible facility ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... prevailed throughout as much of the universe as is accessible to our research. They have taught us that for the deciphering of the past and the predicting of the future, no hypotheses are admissible which are not based upon the actual behaviour of things in the present. Once there was unlimited facility for guessing as to how the solar system might have come into existence; now the origin of the sun and planets is adequately explained when we have unfolded all that is implied in the processes which are still ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... from the fragment before us that Boethius also wrote a 'Bucolic Poem.' This is an interesting fact, and helps to explain the facility with which he breaks into song in the midst of the 'Consolation.' It may have been to this effort of the imagination that he alluded when he said at the beginning of ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... 347 B.C., when five per cent, was fixed as a maximum. In 342 B.C. interest was forbidden altogether by the Genucian Law; but this law, though never repealed, was in practice quite inoperative owing to the facility with which it could be evaded; and consequently the oppression of borrowers was prevented by the enactment, or perhaps it would be more correct to say the general recognition, of a maximum rate of interest of twelve per cent. per annum. This maximum rate—the Centesima—remained ...
— An Essay on Mediaeval Economic Teaching • George O'Brien
... weigh 4 lbs. per ft. B. M., so that a panel 102 ft. made of 2-in. plank and three 24-in. battens will weigh some 225 lbs. In form work where the panels are removed and re-erected in succession facility in handling is an important matter. When one figures that he may handle both the concrete and the form panels with it a cableway or a locomotive crane becomes a tool well worth considering in heavy ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... little real intellect. Consequently, when the pony was faced with conditions different from those to which he was accustomed, he showed but little adaptability; and when you add to this frozen harness and rugs, with all their straps and buckles and lashings, an incredible facility for eating anything within reach including his own tethering ropes and the headstalls, fringes and whatnots of his companions, together with our own scanty provisions and a general wish to do anything except the job of the ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... there was more, the crossbow was proof enough of that, and he had every intention of finding out where it came from. In order to do that he was going to have to change his slave status when the proper time came. He was developing a certain facility in dodging Ch'aka's heavy boot, the work was never hard and there was ample food. Being a slave left him with no responsibilities other than obeying orders and he had ample opportunity to discover what he could about this planet, so that ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... scarcely be attained by any other means. The slightest adulteration of spirits, or any other liquid of known quality, may be instantly detected by it; and it is recommended by its cheapness, the great facility of its manipulation, and the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various
... and altering a wheel there, not knowing or remembering that the best mounted machine is the one which requires the least attention from the man who sets it in motion. The great advantage which I enjoy here is the remarkable facility afforded me for work which has become a prime necessity to me, and which, considering my internal condition, is also a duty. The lectures on morals are excellent, but I cannot say as much of those on dogma, as the professor is a novice. This, coupled with ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... low-bred men are now the dominant power. Instead of tranquillising the people, which I hold to be the duty of the clergy, they have done all they could to awaken and keep alive their most dangerous passions. And to rouse the Irish, especially the Southern Irish, is a matter of the greatest facility. I hold that the clergy by degenerating into mere political agents are strangely short-sighted. Their spiritual influence will in time be dangerously undermined, and in the long run they will take nothing by their motion. The Parnellite ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... after the North Cave Estates, at a salary of L1 10s. Repairs to the School became more extensive, Vincent Hallpike was required to make a "box for the Charter," and the Governors made more frequent journeys to their estates, no doubt as a result of the increased facility and diminished expense of travelling, which was a notable feature of the latter part of the eighteenth century. Further they had engaged a third Master, but whether this was due to a slight decrease of attention paid to the School by the Master—and it is well to remember that he was ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... had for sometime past been at war with the Arabs of Djebel Belka and the government of Damascus, and who were now extending their plundering incursions all over the mountain. The name of the Beni Szakher is generally dreaded in these parts; and the greater or less facility with which the traveller can visit them, depends entirely upon the good or bad terms existing between those Arabs and the Pasha; if they are friends, one of the tribe may easily be found to serve as a guide; but ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... of the ills of life, we never sufficiently take into our consideration the wonderful elasticity of our moral frame, the unlooked for, the startling facility with which the human mind accommodates itself to all change of circumstance, making an object and even a joy from the hardest and seemingly the least redeemed conditions of fate. The man who watched the spider in his cell, may have taken, at least, as much interest in the watch, ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... some degree. It made him cultivate every talent which he felt that he possessed, and an accurate eye and a musical ear were not neglected as far as he could obtain instruction. He not only acquired much knowledge, but also much facility in acquiring; and his eager and anxious zeal did not pass unnoticed by those who taught him, so that others contributed to his first success, as well as his ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... instances a painful undertaking. Every movement was a work of deliberation. Having by much care, and with some anxiety, made good our descent to the top of the secondary hills, we took our way down one of the steepest banks, and slid forward with great facility in a sitting posture. Towards the foot of the hill, an expanse of snow stretched across the line of descent. This being loose and soft, we entered upon it without fear; but on reaching the middle of it, we came to a surface of solid ice, perhaps a hundred yards across, over which ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
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