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More "Fastidious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in nothing else, in us there is A sense fastidious hardly reconciled To the poor makeshifts of life's scenery, Where the same slide must double all its parts, Shoved in for Tarsus and hitched back for Tyre, I blame not in the soul this daintiness, Rasher of surfeit than a humming-bird, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... off this morning," said Lady Mabel in a gay tone. "A summons to Alcantara breaks the monotony of their life here, and they were eager to meet Sir Rowland. I hear that these conferences with his officers always conclude with a capital dinner. That sallow Major Conway, with his fastidious appetite, and his Calcutta liver, will appreciate the excellence of the cuisine. I have heard Colonel Bradshawe dilate, with enthusiasm, on Sir Rowland's choice selection of wines. Papa, too, will meet some new people there, which will give him an opportunity of once more undergoing his ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... people abode in communion, with little change but that of age. In seeking a field, the youth just launched into his profession 'candidated' among vacant churches, and was heard with solemn attention by the selectmen and bench of deacons. Notes were taken by the more fastidious for subsequent criticism, and the matter was discussed with all the importance of a national treaty. When the call had been accepted, the stipend was generally fixed at one hundred pounds, and a rude parsonage opened ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... in these proceedings, unquestionably; but those who feel disposed to object to them must bear in mind, first, that backwoodsmen are addicted to precipitancy at times; and, secondly, that facts cannot be altered in order to please the fastidious taste of the ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... needs some slight reverberation to keep the brain behind it still. A perfume of violets, and the more dainty scent of primroses, pervaded the garden. It seemed incredible that any man should be allowed to live in such a spot; but then Captain Carey was almost as gentle and fastidious as ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... simple enough. Primarily he was always aware of the cord which shackled him to a restless, butterfly woman who played at life out in India, and secondly, although he was undoubtedly attracted by Nan, he was not the type of man to fall headlong in love. He was too fastidious, too critical, altogether too much master of himself. Few women caused him a single quickened heart-beat. But it is to such men as this that when at last love grips them, binding them slowly and secretly with its clinging tendrils, it comes as an irresistible force to be reckoned with throughout ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... supervision of Mrs. Doty. The mess-basket was stowed with good things of every description—ham and tongue—biscuit and plum-cake—not to mention the substantiate of crackers, bread, and boiled pork, the latter of which, however, a lady was supposed to be too fastidious to think of touching, even ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... taste everything,—that is not the best taste! I honour the refractory, fastidious tongues and stomachs, which have learned to say ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Forget-Me-Not.' I am however still L2 in your debt, L7 being the sum I have set apart for you. How shall I forward you the remaining L2?" Mr. Alaric Watts frequently importuned Clare for contributions for the "Literary Souvenir" and the "Literary Magnet," but he was exceedingly fastidious and plain-spoken, and although he sent Clare presents of books he never said in his letters anything about payment. At length Clare hinted to him that some acknowledgment of that kind would be acceptable, and ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... greatly, perhaps," Iglesias replied, with a soberly humorous expression. "For I have always been very exacting and have asked very much. I am culpably fastidious. My tastes are far beyond my means, my desires out of all reasonable relation to my station and my merits. And it should be remembered that my circle of acquaintances has been a very limited one, until quite recently—I do not wish to appear more glaringly arrogant or discourteous ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... children and Kitty were put all together in one great nursery, an arrangement of which Kitty, with the fastidious delicacy of a strict Catholic, did ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... had travelled a reasonable amount for an Addington man, but always he had been able to believe that Eden is what it was when there was but one man in it and one woman. There was, of course, too, the serpent. But Alston was fastidious, and he kept his mind as far away from the serpent as possible. He thought of his mother and sister, and instantly ceased thinking of them, because to them Esther was probably a sweet person, and he knew they would not have recognised the Esther he saw to-night. ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... know, as I have pointed out, that there were mad people in Bethlem at that date. One statement is that the sovereign was Henry IV., and that is not improbable, but it may have been Richard II. Whoever the king was, he appears to have been rather fastidious, considering the proximity is not very close between Charing Cross and any of the Royal Palaces. Possibly, as the Royal "Mewse" was at Charing Cross, his Majesty, whenever he visited his falcons, which were "mewed" or confined here—long before the same ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... oilskin, a mosquito net, a plate, knife, and fork apiece, as well as a "change of duds" and a bite of tucker for all: the bite of tucker to be replenished with a killer when necessary, the change of duds to be washed by the boys also when necessary, and the plate to serve for all courses, the fastidious turning it over for the ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... should be of the deepest black, the finest quality, the most fashionable cut; to all of which the bereaved child—a silent undemonstrative mourner—was supremely indifferent. Her mother noted it with surprise, for Evelyn was a child of decided opinions and wont to be fastidious about ...
— The Two Elsies - A Sequel to Elsie at Nantucket, Book 10 • Martha Finley
... Livia, and she, previously echoing his disgust, corrected him sharply, and said: 'I begin to be of Russett's opinion, that his fault is his honesty.' The rascal had won or partly won the empress of her sex! This Lady Livia, haughtiest and most fastidious of our younger great dames, had become the indulgent critic of the tramp's borrowed plumes! Nay, she would not listen to a depreciatory word on him from her ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... power to furnish the matter for such a definition, and Coleridge all his philosophic subtlety (but in this instance, I think, with a most infelicitous result) to furnish its form. But both have been too fastidious in their admission of bulls. Thus, for example, Miss Edgeworth rejects, as no true bull, the common Joe Miller story, that, upon two Irishmen reaching Barnet, and being told that it was still twelve miles to London, one of them remarked, "Ah! just ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... should at some future period attain the same rank, it should not obtain the same privilege. It was not probable, however, that the principle could ever be applied to more than four or five towns in the whole realm. Parliament, moreover, had not always been so fastidious in regard to the extension of a principle. It had not refused, for instance, the disfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholders. But the present bill would not even add permanently to the members of the house; he proposed that in future cases of disfranchisement, the franchise should be allowed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... a cheap one, not far from the railway station, and though comfortable, was not patronized by fastidious travelers. ...
— Luke Walton • Horatio Alger
... black serge dress: the pearl hoop that had been my mother's keeper was my sole adornment. I daresay she thought me extremely dowdy. I once heard her say, in a pointed manner, that 'her cousin Giles liked to see his women-folk well dressed; he was very fastidious on that point, and ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... showed her to be young, fair-haired, and smartly attired in the plainest and coolest of white; the second, not so young, but very charming, with a demure downcast look, and a deft control of her spoon that, to Rudolph's eyes, was splendidly fastidious; at the third, he was shocked to encounter the last flitting light of a counter-glance, from large, dark-blue eyes, not ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... he was, the youth could not help smiling at his new friend's idea of "good" water, but he was not in a condition to be fastidious. Jumping out of the saddle, he lay down on his breast, dipped his lips into the muddy liquid, and drank with as much enjoyment as if the beverage had been nectar—or Bass. Rob Roy also stood, in a state of ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... Gauls, the northern nations, the Tartars, and the peasants of Europe, for many a long century wore a modified cap—sometimes swelling out into ornamental proportions, at others shrinking into the primitive simplicity of the Phrygian or Greek cap. Shall we confess it, fastidious reader?—we strongly suspect the cap worn by that idle fellow Paris, when he so impudently ogled the goddesses on Mount Ida, to have been very similar to the good old bonnet de nuit of our grandfathers—(shall we whisper it, of ourselves?) Yes, that little ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... scrutinised him sternly. Long afterwards he read how some admirer of Lord Hartington had said that what he liked most about him was his "You-be-damnedness." The phrase, Eloquent felt, exactly described Mr Ffolliot; aloof, detached, a fastidious, fine gentleman to his finger tips, entirely careless as to what the common people thought of him; not willingly conscious, unless rudely reminded of their existence, that there were any common people: such, Eloquent ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... Oxford readers. It sold for the high price of half-a-crown a copy; and, what is hardly credible, the gownsmen received it as a genuine production. "It was indeed a kind of fashion to be seen reading it in public, as a mark of nice discernment, of a delicate and fastidious taste in poetry, and the best criterion of a choice spirit." Such was the genesis of "Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson", edited by John Fitz Victor. The name of the supposititious nephew ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... within him a sort of very personal and poignant struggle going on beneath that seeming attitude of rigid disapproval. He joined the hunters, as it were, because he was afraid-not, of course, of his own instincts, for he was fastidious, a gentleman, and a priest, but of being lenient to a sin, to something which God abhorred: He was, as it were, bound to take a professional view of this particular offence. When in his walks abroad he passed one of these women, he ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... was a Tancred, with a pedigree dating from the days of feudalism. And after all he looked such a gentle little fellow that Durant could almost have forgiven him. He was so beautifully finished off. You could only say of him that he was fastidious, he had the prejudices of his class. He scorned to make conversation a sordid traffic in ideas. At any rate, Durant felt himself released from all obligation to ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... in vain, however, and finally stepped up to a man who at first appeared to be clothed in pajamas, and my son was just going to inquire for the first officer, when the smoke cleared away a little revealing our fastidious but brave officer dressed in his nightgown, with his sword strapped around his waist, and a ...
— Young Peoples' History of the War with Spain • Prescott Holmes
... bath-room is at your service. Meanwhile, Burrows will be laying the table for breakfast. When you have finished your tub, come into my dressing-room, and let me rig you out. We are about of a size, and I think I shall be able to meet your most fastidious taste. In fact, I could rig you out as anything—from a tramp to an officer of ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... his duel with the colonel, and his fortunate appearance in the nick of time, seem too rich in coincidences: still, as the Dormont case and the Ormiston case have shown, coincidences as unlooked for do occur. A fastidious critic has found fault with Brown's flageolet. It is a modest instrument; but what was he to play upon,—a ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... slightly acquainted with the elder brother of his old friend,—a man who possessed some of Ernest's faults,—very proud, and very exacting, and very fastidious; but all these faults were developed in the ordinary commonplace world, and were not the refined abstractions ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Burton's face there remained no echo of the impatience of a few minutes past. In his serene eyes was no hint of remembered annoyance. As he drew back his sister's chair, one saw in his masterful face only the satisfied pride of a man fastidious of taste in all things from ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... accomplished man of his time," says Hales, "and was something much more than accomplished. His learning was not only wide but deep; his taste, if perhaps too fastidious, was pure and thorough; his genius was of no mean degree or order; his affections were of the truest and sincerest. . . . His poems are works of refinement rather than of passion; but yet they are inspired with genuine sentiment. They are no doubt extremely artificial in form; the weight ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... of his ear was no longer shocked. She never dared to undeceive him, but mentioned the fact to another musician, a violinist, who exclaimed, greatly amused, "The idea of a pianist pretending to be fastidious about concord in music! Why, the instrument at its best is a bundle of discords." Both of these musicians were guilty of affectation; for, although the piano's chords are slightly dissonant, the intervals of the chromatic scale are made the same by the violin-player as by the pianist. What ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... isolation—no matter from what cause—awakened the sympathies between us. Our ties were formed, on my part, simply because I was assured that I should have no rival; and on his, possibly, because he perceived in my haughty reserve of character, a sufficient security that his fastidious sensibilities would not be likely to suffer outrage at my hands. In every other respect our moods and tempers were utterly unlike. I thought him dull, very frequently, when he was only balancing between ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... concealment she felt assured by many circumstances: his coming to this obscure tavern; his choosing to take his meals and smoke his pipe in his bedroom; and his walking out with his face muffled—all of which was in direct antagonism to Lord Vincent's fastidious habits; and, finally, his taking a whole carriage in the railway train, for no other purpose than to have himself and his party entirely ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... policy of Rome. Up to that time Augustus had had beside him a powerful helper—first Agrippa, afterwards Tiberius; but then he found himself alone at the head of the Empire, a man already well on in years; and for the first time it appeared that this zealous bureaucrat, this fastidious administrator, this intellectual idler, who could do an enormous amount of work on condition that he be not forced to issue from his study and encounter currents of air too strong for him, was ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... when, in the absence of the new inmate, Georgiana went into his room to put it in order for the day, she found it impossible not to note the character of his belongings. They were few and simple enough, but in every detail they betrayed a fastidious taste. And among the articles in ebony and leather which lay upon the linen cover of the old bureau stood one which held her fascinated attention. It was a framed photograph of a young and very lovely woman in evening dress, and the face which smiled ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... that it is not possible for modern up-to-date Art to be florescent under this retrograde and fossilized system, and be warned that such untradesmanlike goings-on will deservedly forfeit the confidence and patronage of their most fastidious customers. ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... himself between Harlan's feet and rubbed against his trousers, leaving a thin film of black fur in his wake. Being fastidious about his personal appearance, Harlan kicked Claudius Tiberius vigorously, grabbed his hat and went out, slamming the door, and whistling with an ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... in her face. This woman had graced many a drawing-room as Senator d'Alberg's wife, and when the session time called her to the capital many a fair-haired damsel of eighteen summers had envied the fine face and faultless figure, that had captivated even the fastidious nature of ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... in his element,—a fact which the casual observer would have found it hard to believe; for he was a dapper little gentleman, dainty in his attire and presumably fastidious as to his surroundings, and these last were, in the present instance, hardly calculated to suit a fastidious taste. In a word, Mr. Fetherbee was "doing" Lame Gulch, doing it from the tourist's standpoint, delighting in every distinctive feature of the ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... read and say, word for word, the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the Psalms, etc. And I must still read and study daily, and yet I cannot master it as I wish, but must remain a child and pupil of the Catechism, and am glad so to remain. And yet these delicate, fastidious fellows would with one reading promptly be doctors above all doctors, know everything and be in need of nothing. Well, this, too, is indeed a sure sign that they despise both their office and the souls of the people, yea, even God and His Word. They do not have to ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther
... idly, and if you refuse to hear reason, I will utterly disinherit you, though you are my only child. Ponder it well. You have been raised in luxury, and taught to believe yourself one of the wealthiest heiresses in the state; contrast your present position, your elegant home, your fastidious tastes gratified to the utmost; contrast all this, I say, with poverty—imagine yourself left in the world without one cent! Think of it! think of it! My wealth is my own, mark you, and I will give it to whom I please, irrespective of all claims of custom. ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... from the cultured of other nations and epochs. Having laid it down as an axiom that our aesthetic judgments are "for the most part immediate, and, so to speak, intuitive," and observing that the fastidious differ among themselves, and that their delight in fine objects is no more intense than the delight of the vulgar in coarser themes, he proceeds to the conclusion that there can be no valid right or wrong in taste, no absolute standard of beauty. ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... morbid ethical daintiness. There is a ripeness of moral fastidiousness that is often difficult to distinguish from rottenness. It is part of the feminism of America, born of our prosperity, for not one of these fastidious moralists is not a rich man, and Germany ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... his debut on the stage of Ratcliffe Highway, and executed those unparalleled murders which have procured for him such a brilliant and undying reputation. On which murders, by the way, I must observe, that in one respect they have had an ill effect, by making the connoisseur in murder very fastidious in his taste, and dissatisfied by anything that has been since done in that line. All other murders look pale by the deep crimson of his; and, as an amateur once said to me in a querulous tone, "There has been absolutely nothing doing since his time, or nothing ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... progress. Everything would be dropped, all present would join in the meal, and the last good story or joke would pass around. In his notes Mr. Jehl says: "Our lunch always ended with a cigar, and I may mention here that although Edison was never fastidious in eating, he always relished a good cigar, and seemed to find in it consolation and solace.... It often happened that while we were enjoying the cigars after our midnight repast, one of the boys would start up a tune on the organ and we would all sing together, or one of the others would give ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... not any honest man deliver this department of Jeff Davis' most efficient allies into the hands of the United States Government, by any means Heaven might place in his power? If there is a man so fastidious of propriety, so mindful of selfish considerations, that he would not, then, in our opinion, that man is a coward, a traitor, an imbecile too weak to punish, and deserving the scorn and contumely of his countrymen, for all coming time. This proposition was the next day reported ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... little poem, calls so 'pleasant.' And no wonder! To be whirled along at the rate of forty miles an hour, over a smooth road, reposing on velvet-cushioned seats, with backs just at the proper angle to rest a tired head,—ice-water,—the last novel or periodical—all that can tempt your fastidious taste, or help to while away the time, offered at your elbow, is indeed pleasant; but wo to the fond imagination that pictures to itself such luxuries on a United States Military Railroad. Be thankful if in the crowd of tobacco-chewing soldiers ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... curiosity of D'Artagnan, so that our musketeer, in a tolerably bad humor, desired to go to bed as soon as he had supped. D'Artagnan was introduced by Bazin into a mean chamber, in which there was a poor bed; but D'Artagnan was not fastidious in that respect. He had been told that Aramis had taken away the key of his own private apartment, and as he knew Aramis was a very particular man, and had generally many things to conceal in his apartment, he had not been surprised. He, therefore, although it appeared ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... can pay her," responded Flower. The thought of any shelter or any food was grateful to the fastidious girl now. ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... curious instant he looked out over the village, his fastidious scholar's soul absorbed by some intellectual irritation, of which Rose understood absolutely nothing. She stood bewildered, silent, longing childishly to speak, to influence him, but not knowing ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... L, and then she descended to the basement and mechanically looked it over. Everything that could be counted hers by the most fastidious sense of property had been left behind him in the utmost neatness. On their accustomed nail, just inside the furnace-room, hung the blue overalls. They looked like a ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... a saint!" we fancy we hear whispered by the fastidious and scrupulous into whose hand ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... his firm, regular tread, he suggested poise and confidence and, perhaps, vanity also in his fastidious dress. As Marta's slight, immature figure came to the edge of the veranda, he wondered what she would be like five years later, when she would be twenty-two and a woman. It was unlikely that he would ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... asserted to be perfect; and he would do this without any shame, without any apparent sense of inconsistency or weakness. Edwin noticed a similar trait in other grown-up persons, and it astonished him. It astonished him especially in his father, who, despite the faults and vulgarities which his fastidious son could find in him, always impressed Edwin as a strong man, a man with the heroic quality of not caring too much what ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... give the enclosed to dear Dr. Parsons? There are noble lines in his book, which gains much by being known. Dear John Ruskin was here when it arrived, and much pleased with it on turning over the leaves, and he is the most fastidious of men. I must give him the copy. His praise is indeed worth having. I am as when I wrote last. God bless you, ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... was simple, but well cooked. Sibyl never ate with hearty appetite, and declined everything not of excellent quality; unlike women in general, she was fastidious about wine, yet took of it sparingly; liqueurs, too, she enjoyed, and very strong coffee. To a cigarette in the mouth of a woman she utterly objected; it offended her sense of the becoming, her delicate ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... life and thought, such a power of good sense, a kind of assurance so authoritative, that he takes rank with the greatest; and his peers are not many. You may like him or not, may attack him or sing his praises, but you cannot ignore him. He is of those that die hard. Be as fastidious as you will; make up your mind to recognize only those who are, without any manner of doubt, beyond and above all others; however few the names you keep, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... many things in their way of cookery, and in their tastes for such articles as sharks' fins, fish maws, beche-de-mer, etc., which are revolting to an educated stomach; but in their way the Chinese are quite as dainty as the most fastidious of other lands, and in fine vegetables, fish, and fruits they enjoy as much variety and evince as discriminating a taste as any people in the world. Their fish are sold in the markets alive, and taken from the tanks as selected ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... secure from observation themselves, they could easily see all that passed in the glade. Several tents had been set, although the flaps were wide open and within one of these sat Francisco Alvarez in all the gorgeous attire of a Spanish officer, most fastidious in his taste. The gold on his uniform glittered, the lace on his cuffs was snowy and fresh, and the polished hilt of his small sword gleamed in the firelight. He had the air of ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to him. It may be that general vulgarity will one day be the condition of happiness, for the worst American vulgarity would not send Giordano Bruno to the stake or persecute Galileo. We have no right to be very fastidious. In the past we were never more than tolerated. This tolerance, if nothing more, we are assured of in the future. A narrow-minded, democratic regime is often, as we know, very troublesome. But for all that men of intelligence find that ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... perfectly within three months. Soon after my arrival at his house I became afraid of Cousin Charles. Not that he ever said anything to justify fear of him—he was more silent at home than elsewhere; but he was imperious, fastidious, and sarcastic with me by a look, a gesture, an inflection of his voice. My perception of any defect in myself was instantaneous with his discovery of it. I fell into the habit of guessing each day whether ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... have a great love and respect for my native tongue, and take great pains to use it properly. Sometimes I write essays half-a-dozen times before I can get them into the proper shape; and I believe I become more fastidious as I ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... Arthur breakfasted with him and seemed as if he were on the verge of a confession. It was plain enough now what he had wanted to confess. And if their words had taken another turn...if he himself had been less fastidious about intruding on another man's secrets...it was cruel to think how thin a film had shut out rescue from all this guilt and misery. He saw the whole history now by that terrible illumination which the present sheds back upon the past. But every other feeling as it rushed upon ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... Carter's Camp were not remarkably fastidious. They knew but one form of celebration, and they had no thought of hunting out new ones. The one thing needful to make a celebration completely successful was—liquor. This they must have in order to do justice to ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... free from grossness. Though not cold-natured, he was rather bright than hot—less Byronic than Shelleyan; could love desperately, but with a love more especially inclined to the imaginative and ethereal; it was a fastidious emotion which could jealously guard the loved one against his very self. This amazed and enraptured Tess, whose slight experiences had been so infelicitous till now; and in her reaction from indignation against the male sex ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... the camp, and all went on well and heartily; so that they felt disposed to regard wagon-travelling—in the words of a writer of great experience—as a prolonged system of picnicking, excellent for the health, and agreeable to those who are not over-fastidious about trifles, and who delight in being in the open air. At other times, especially when passing through unhealthy regions, some of their number were brought very low by severe illness, and others—even ...
— Hunting the Lions • R.M. Ballantyne
... these humble supporters, and occasionally fastidious juniors would go the length of throwing chunks of mud at them through the railings. But nothing discouraged them or abated their fervid desire to see the school win. Every year they seemed to increase in zeal, and they were always in great form at ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... traced wonderful shapes. Those people who fancy that Dickens was a mere clown; that he could not describe anything delicate or deadly in the human character,—those who fancy this are mostly people whose position is explicable in many easy ways. The vast majority of the fastidious critics have, in the quite strict and solid sense of the words, never read Dickens at all; hence their opposition is due to and inspired by a hearty innocence which will certainly make them enthusiastic ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... a trifle fastidious, haven't I?" he murmured, and unconsciously he mimicked Hogarty's measured accents. "But I hardly believe that any sensitive scruples of mine would annoy me much in this matter. I don't know but what I'd just as soon squash a snake with a brick, even ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... and when, in 1638, it appeared that a cargo of them had been forcibly introduced, they were sent back to Africa. Prisoners of war were condemned to servitude; and, altogether, the feeling on the subject of human bondage appears to have been both less and more fastidious than it afterward became. There was no such indifference as was shown in the Southern slave trade two centuries later, nor was there any of the humanitarian fanaticism exhibited by the extreme Abolitionists of the years before the ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... now filled with blood fell into the valleys, and avalanches of human beings rolled down the deepest precipices. Death reaped such a harvest there where human life had never been before, that the vultures, becoming fastidious through the abundance, picked out only the eyes of the corpses to carry to their young—at least so says the tradition of the peasants ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... the result of constitutional shyness, was intensified by the sharp sorrows of his later life. In truth, as Mr. Leslie Stephen has said: "Lockhart was one of the men who are predestined to be generally misunderstood. He was an intellectual aristocrat, fastidious and over-sensitive, with very fine perceptions, but endowed with rather too hearty a scorn of fools as well as of folly.... The shyness due to a sensitive nature, was mistaken, as is so often the case, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... Mohun and Claude. Of all the family William and Adeline alone took her view of the case. Ada lectured Phyllis on her 'naughtiness,' and plumed herself on her aunt's evident preference, but William was not equally sympathetic. He was indeed as fastidious as Emily herself, and as much annoyed by such misadventures; but he maintained that she was to blame for them, saying that the state of things was not such as it should be, and that the exposure might be advantageous if it put her on her guard ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... allowed to do it at the price of abandoning common humanity; you have no right to make your nest in the boughs of knowledge, and let all the rest of the world go as it will. You have no right to make your home among those who are polished and exquisite and fastidious in their tastes, whose garments are beauty, whose house is a temple of art, and all whose associations are of like kind, and neglect common humanity. You have no right to shut yourself up in a limited company of those who are like you in these directions, and let all the rest of men go without ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... alarm about a particular feature in the heroine's history. In the original conception, and in the book as actually written and printed, Miss Mowbray's mock marriage had not halted at the profane ceremony of the church; and the delicate printer shrank from the idea of obtruding on the fastidious public the possibility of any personal contamination having occurred to a high-born damsel of the nineteenth century." Scott answered: "You would never have quarrelled with it had the thing happened to a girl in gingham—the silk petticoat ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... about shelter for the night. This was a "jumping-off" place, said the agent, with barracks and shanties for a construction-gang; there were saloons, and what was called a hotel, but it wouldn't do for a lady. I pleaded that I was not fastidious—being anxious to nullify the effect which the name van Tuiver had produced. But the agent would have it that the place was unfit for even a Western farmer's wife; and as I was not anxious to take the chance of being blown overboard in the darkness, I spent ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... contradictory theory, which, in a multitude of forms, has impoverished mankind and deluged the earth with blood. I cry out against it, because I feel that I am incapable of contending against the error to which it has given birth, otherwise than by a long and fastidious dissertation to which no one would listen. Oh! if I could only find a ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... the newspapers said, "plunged the village of Pietranera into a state of consternation," a young man with his left arm in a sling, rode out of Bastia, toward the village of Cardo, celebrated for its spring, which in summer supplies the more fastidious inhabitants of the town with delicious water. He was accompanied by a young lady, tall and remarkably handsome, mounted on a small black horse, the strength and shape of which would have attracted the admiration of a connoisseur, although, by some strange accident, one of its ears ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... number and variety in its human servitors that had not been dreamed of in a simpler age. The slave of the farm, with his hard hands and weather-beaten visage, could no longer be brought by his elegant master to the town and exhibited to a fastidious society as the type of servant that ministered to his daily needs. The urban and rustic family were now kept wholly distinct; it was only when some child of marked grace and beauty was born on the farm, that it was transferred to the mansion as containing a promise ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... her by that look. No, no! No stains, no smears, no shufflings! She was conscious of no moral impulse, in the usual sense of the word. Her imagination took in no possibility of actual wrong. But when, with a fastidious impulse of good taste, she turned her back on something ugly, she turned her back unwittingly on something ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... Herbemont holds the same rank as Concord in the North. The vine is fastidious as to soil, requiring a well-drained warm soil, and one which is abundantly supplied with humus. Despite these limitations, this variety is grown in an immense territory, extending from Virginia and Tennessee to the Gulf and westward ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... proceed, though with some reluctance, to the description of the natives, the Kalushes. They are, as I have already said, the most worthless people on the face of the earth, and disgusting to such a degree that I must beg fastidious readers to pass over a few pages. The truth of my narrative makes it necessary for me to submit to the revolting task of showing to what point of ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... to have had the greatest influence on his public conduct, was his dislike of the Puritans; a dislike which sprang, not from bigotry, but from Epicureanism. Their austerity was a reproach to his slothful and luxurious life; their phraseology shocked his fastidious taste; and, where they were concerned, his ordinary good nature forsook him. Loathing the nonconformists as he did, he was not likely to be very zealous for a prince whom the nonconformists regarded as their protector. But Sprat's faults afforded ample security that he would never, from ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... became used to them. The first night I slept on board I smelt something very disgusting as I got into my bunk; and at last I discovered that it arose from a dead rat in the wainscot of the ship. My nose being somewhat fastidious as yet, I moved to the other side of the cabin. But four kegs of strong-smelling butter sent me quickly out of that. I then tried a bunk next to the German Jews, but I found proximity to them was ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... unwilling; not in the vein, loth, loath, shy of, disinclined, indisposed, averse, reluctant, not content; adverse &c. (opposed) 708; laggard, backward, remiss, slack, slow to; indifferent &c. 866; scrupulous; squeamish &c. (fastidious) 868; repugnant &c. (dislike) 867; restiff|, restive; demurring &c. v.; unconsenting &c. (refusing) 764; involuntary &c. 601. Adv. unwillingly &c. adj.; grudgingly, with a heavy heart; with a bad, with an ill grace; against one's wishes, against one's will, against the grain, sore against one's ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... given to preaching. This is the first time I ever come to the penitent form, and you put me there yourself—hard. I've seen a few in my time, and I ain't fastidious so as you can notice it. But let me tell you right not that I'm worth the devil alone knows how many millions, and that I'd sure give it all, right here on the bar, to turn down your hand. Which means I'd give the whole shooting match just to be back where I was before I quit sleeping ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... passing on a great variety of subjects. If we still persist in saying when some one jingles some jig upon the piano that it is "charming," if we say of every daub in the Academy that it is "lovely," if every new building or statue is pronounced "awfully jolly," if the fastidious rubbish of the last volume of poetry is "grand," if the slip-shod grammar of the last new novel is "quite sweet," when shall we see an end of these bad things? And observe further, these bad things live on and affect the human mind ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... he is the most disillusioned and ironical of Russian writers. With a tender poetical delicacy, almost worthy of Shakespeare, he sketches his appealing portraits of young girls. His style is clear—objective—winnowed and fastidious. He has certain charming old-fashioned weaknesses—as for instance his trick of over-emphasizing the differences between his bad and good characters; but there is a clear-cut distinction, and a lucid charm about his work that reminds one of certain old crayon drawings or certain ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... distinction: it was public confirmation of his secret sense that he was cut out for a bigger place. It must not be understood that Glennard was vain. Vanity contents itself with the coarsest diet; there is no palate so fastidious as that of self-distrust. To a youth of Glennard's aspirations the encouragement of a clever woman stood for the symbol of all success. Later, when he had begun to feel his way, to gain a foothold, he would not need ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... cell was a dark, damp, filthy hole under ground. Instead of bringing Arthur "to reason," it thoroughly exasperated him. His luxurious home had rendered him daintily fastidious about personal cleanliness, and the first effect of the slimy, vermin-covered walls, the floor heaped with accumulations of filth and garbage, the fearful stench of fungi and sewage and rotting wood, was strong enough to have satisfied the offended officer. When he was pushed in and the door ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... be sure, had been declared by the oracle of Apollo also to be "the supremely wise man." For those who commonly go by the name of the Seven Sages are not admitted into the category of the wise by fastidious critics. Your wisdom people believe to consist in this, that you look upon yourself as self-sufficing and regard the changes and chances of mortal life as powerless to affect your virtue. Accordingly they ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... at me,—that I shall encounter no cold looks, no sneers, no bursts of anger, no snarl of stinginess, no contempt of my opinion and advice. I know that now men treat me with respect and attention, such as their wives rarely, if ever, receive from them. Sensitive and fastidious as I am, I do not know whether my gain is not, to me, greater than my loss. I know it ought not to be so,—that it argues a vicious, an unchristian, almost an uncivilized state of society; but that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... governor the domestic relations of the buccaneers underwent a material change, for the former brought many women with him—fit persons, from the past profligacy of their lives, to consort with the inhabitants of Tortuga. But the buccaneers were not fastidious in the selection of wives, and history gives us no right to suppose that there was a single forlorn damsel left without a husband. 'I ask nothing of your past life,' would the buccaneer say to the fair one to whom he proposed himself. 'If anybody would have had you where ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... which prove that Adam sought intercourse with the Muses by making advances on his own part, though we must confess that he does not appear to have been fairly met half-way by that capricious and fastidious sisterhood. Many of his almanacs and diaries, with entries dating from 1595, and from which the author makes liberal and interesting transcripts in an Appendix, have been happily preserved, and have a grateful use to us. They ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... hand, and, through the establishment of monopoly-prices, the consumers upon the other hand. The state thus becomes the employer of shoeworkers and the vender of shoes to the citizens. But A, being a fastidious citizen, does not like the factory product of the state any more than he formerly did the factory product of private enterprise. Under the old conditions, he used to employ B, a shoemaker who does not like factory work, a craftsman ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... Carl's older brother, Boyd, who was somewhat fastidious, ran into him in Spokane. He tells how Carl insisted he should spend the night at his room instead ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... something experimental to occupy them on pain of perpetual holiday. Men will then try to spend twenty thousand a year for the sake of having to earn it. Instead of being what we are now, the cheapest and nastiest of the animals, we shall be the costliest, most fastidious, and best bred. In short, there is no end to the astonishing things that may happen when the curse of Adam becomes first a blessing and then an incurable habit. And in that day we must not grudge children their share ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... very certain, that this Irish girl was not annoyed by the kinks in John's hair. Nor was she overly fastidious about the small percentage of colored blood visible in John's complexion. It was, however, a strange occurrence and very hard to understand. Not a stone was left unturned until John was safely on the Underground Rail Road. Doubtless she helped to earn the money which was paid for ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... moment silence reigned. Madame de la Baudraye, studying Lousteau, saw that he was dressed as the most fastidious dandy might ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... by our near approach to Rome. Arrived there, he at once finds his way to the livery stables, and establishes himself permanently with the horses. Throughout the winter, we take with good humour the flippant comments of flaneurs and over-fastidious friends, touching the bestowal of our patronage upon such an ill-favoured cur, while we thought ourselves the objects of his gratitude and affection; but Frate's character (we gave him this name from the length of his beard, the colour ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... It's perfect babble; it's nonsense! If you really believe you have a penchant for sturdy and rather grubby worthiness unadorned you are mistaken. The inclination you have is merely for a pretty face and figure. I know you. If I don't, who does! You're rather a fastidious young man, even finicky, and very, very much accustomed to the best and only the best. Don't talk to me about your disinterested admiration for a working girl. You haven't anything in common with her, and you never could have. And you'd better be very careful ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... respectable with the other. It is yellow, hard, and worked so perfectly free from every particle of buttermilk that it might make the voyage of the world without spoiling. It is salted, but salted with care and delicacy, so that it may be a question whether even a fastidious Englishman might not prefer its golden solidity to the white, creamy freshness of his own. But it is to be regretted that this article is the exception, and not the ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the way with his majestic stride, dangling a pair of pince-nez by their cord, as a fastidious person might carry a mouse by its tail, and ushered her ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... morning of the 9th the tailors whom Murat had asked for arrived. He ordered a great many clothes, taking the trouble to explain all the details suggested by his fastidious taste. He was thus employed when General Nunziante came in. He listened sadly to the king's commands. He had just received telegraphic despatches ordering him to try the King of Naples by court-martial as a public enemy. But he found the king so confident, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... may have had a crack or so in it, and I cannot assert that Tommy never struck a false note; but the man in the corner was not fastidious as a musical critic; the sickly light was flickering through the car, the quiver on the red flats was quite out of sight, the train was shrieking away into the west,—the baleful, lonely west,—which was dying fast now ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... right,' said Barnet, perceiving that Downe was only a little muddy, and looking more at the wife than at the husband. Almost at any other time—certainly during his fastidious bachelor years—he would have thought her a too demonstrative woman; but those recent circumstances of his own life to which he had just alluded made Mrs. Downe's solicitude so affecting that his eye grew damp as he witnessed it. Bidding the lawyer and his family good-night he left them, and ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... enthusiasm I express concerning this divine wanderer? You would not if you saw him. You have been tutored and refined by books and retirement from the world, and you are therefore somewhat fastidious; but this only renders you the more fit to appreciate the extraordinary merits of this wonderful man. Sometimes I have endeavoured to discover what quality it is which he possesses that elevates him so immeasurably above any other person I ever knew. I believe it to be an intuitive discernment, a ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... heavy rains come down, and sweep the vast fetid accumulation into the torrents, the water is polluted with filth; and, but for the precaution mentioned, the natives would prove themselves as little fastidious as those in London who drink the abomination poured into the Thames by Reading and Oxford. It is no wonder that sailors suffered so much from fever after drinking African river water, before the present admirable system of condensing it ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... "These fastidious thieves never took money in large amounts, only took plate when it was of the purest metal and least cumbersome sort; and always aimed for the brightest, the purest, the costliest diamonds. Diamonds indeed seemed ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... other day he exclaimed: "Wonderful! One would think this the portrait of Captain Anthony himself if..." I wanted to know what that if was. But Powell could not say. There was something—a difference. No doubt there was—in fineness perhaps. The father, fastidious, cerebral, morbidly shrinking from all contacts, could only sing in harmonious numbers of what the son felt with a ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... man whom Fate suddenly swings from his fastidious life into the power of the brutal captain of a sealing schooner. A novel of adventure warmed by a beautiful love episode that every reader will hail ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... was not made of ordinary clay. Miss Wildmere prided herself upon giving the impression that she was remote from all that was common or homely in life. She cultivated the characteristic of daintiness. In her dress, gloves, jewelry, and complexion she would be immaculate at any cost. Graydon's fastidious taste could never find a flaw in her, as regarded externals, and she knew the immense advantage of pleasing his eye with a delicacy that even approached fragility in its exquisite fairness, while at the same time ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... should be taught to eat everything that is wholesome, and not be permitted to become finical or fastidious in its appetite. It ought not, however, to be forced to eat any particular article for which it is found that there is an invincible dislike. Variety of diet is good for a child, after ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... The fastidious exclusion of this and similar idioms in modern writing occasions unnecessary embarrassment for the writer, both in narration and argumenting, and contributes to ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... surprised that the fastidious older brother should leave his comfortable city quarters and lose himself in this God-forsaken place. "Sure, I'll ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... to go away without a word; my fastidious eyes bring me misgivings. When the first taste is good, why risk a second? But one of the reapers has seen me. He bids me a friendly good-morning; and, before I have time to answer, ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... come to an extraordinary process which is said to have been originally introduced to satisfy a fastidious taste that demanded a chocolate which readily melted in the mouth and yet had not the cloying effect which is produced by excess of cacao butter. In this process the chocolate is put in a vessel shaped something like a shell ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... young girl which did not seem beautiful to the old relative. Her originality, which made the well-trained servants stare, seemed the perfection of piquant grace to one whose fastidious tastes had been an example to the whole neighborhood. In her estimation Lady Clara could do nothing which was not in itself loveliest and best. The old lady had been so long without an object of affection, that her love of this ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... with this list to our own country, and to our own times, it might be curiously augmented, and show the world what men the Critics are! but, perhaps, enough has been said to soothe irritated genius, and to shame fastidious criticism. "I would beg the critics to remember," the Earl of Roscommon writes, in his preface to Horace's Art of Poetry, "that Horace owed his favour and his fortune to the character given of him by Virgil and Varus; that Fundanius and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Walpole, for whom Mr. Bedford had unquestionably done some service or other, and of whose son, Horace Walpole, the letter-writer, he had continued from that day to be a kind of dependent or protege, being precisely the sort of unobtrusive factotum which that fastidious eccentric needed to manage his mundane affairs. But now, after this long time, when the King's business was placed in the hands of George Grenville, who entertained the odd notion that a Collector ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... murder, he found his old pal J. C. P. Collins—but how changed! Could that coarse and bloated countenance belong to the fastidious and pleasure-loving Collins? ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... "Even the discerning, fastidious, and turbulent Atterbury said, after an interview with him, 'So much understanding, so much knowledge, so much innocence, and such humility, I did not think had been the portion of any but angels, till I saw ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... He begged that Amy would stay, and it was permitted on condition that he would not talk, Guy even cutting short a quotation of,—'As Juno had been sick and he her dieter,'—appropriate to the excellence of the broths, which Amabel and her maid, thanks to their experience of Charles's fastidious tastes, managed to devise and execute, in spite of bad materials. It was no small merit in Guy to stop the compliment, considering how edified he had been by his wife's unexpected ingenuity, and what a comical account he had written of it to her mother, such, as Amy told him, ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... platitudes and the stereotyped commonness of its metaphors. The writer who is afraid of originality feels himself in deep water when he launches into a commonplace. For him who is timid because weak, there is no advice, except suggesting the propriety of silence. For him who is timid because fastidious, there is this advice: get rid of the superstition about chastity, and recognise the truth that a style may be simple, even if it move amid abstractions, or employ few Saxon words, or abound in concrete images and ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... architecture of this chapel. Orvieto Cathedral is one of the finest and most impressive of the Italian churches, and from its foundation in 1290, the authorities had been notoriously lavish in their expenditure for its building, and fastidious in their choice of architects, sculptors, and painters.[63] From the point of view merely of decoration, they could have given the work to no better artist than Signorelli, and the first impression, on passing into the chapel from the austere and spacious ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... singular talents of his all lent themselves to this intrepid and indefatigable pursuit of effect. And the most disagreeable feature is that Macaulay was so often content with an effect of an essentially vulgar kind, offensive to taste, discordant to the fastidious ear, and worst of all, at enmity with the whole spirit of truth. By vulgar we certainly do not mean homely, which marks a wholly different quality. No writer can be more homely than Mr. Carlyle, alike ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... that the ignorant and unthinking affected to treat as unnecessary and fastidious a rigid attention to rules and decorum; but he thought nothing trivial which touched, however remotely, the dignity of that body; and he appealed to their experience for the justice of this sentiment, and urged them in language the most impressive, and in a manner the most commanding, ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... Missourian, and his wife, big, fat, worried and complaining, was a Kentuckian. Neither of them had any fear of dirt, and Fan had grown up not merely unkempt, but smudgy. Her gown was greasy, her shoes untied, and yet, strange to say, this carelessness exercised a subduing charm over Lester, who was fastidious to the point of wasting precious hours in filling his boots with "trees" and folding his neckties. The girl's slovenly habits of dress indicated, to his mind, a similar recklessness as to her moral habits, and it sometimes happens that men of his stamp come to find a fascination ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... of his fathers, so delightful in itself, so infinitely desirable on account of its nearness to Paris, to Geneva, to Rome, to all that is most interesting in Europe. The less wealthy, less cultivated, less fastidious class of Americans are not so much haunted by these longings. But the convenience of living in the Old World is so great, and it is such a trial and such a risk to keep crossing the ocean, that it seems altogether likely that a considerable current of re-migration will ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... good as his word. In five minutes he was no longer a busy professional man, but a gentleman of leisure, with hands cleaner than those of any fastidious clubman, and clothes which carried no hint of past usage in other places less chaste than his wife's ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... exhausted before all the admirers of the piece were supplied. A second was therefore undertaken, which has been improved by greater care in printing, and by the omission of those equivocal sentences which were offensive to the more fastidious part of the public. Such an alteration, however, in the construction of the play as should satisfy all the wishes of my friends and critics ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... plain to this sheltered declivity was striking and suggestive. From the opposite bank one might fancy that the youthful and original dwelling had ambitiously mounted the crest, but, appalled at the dreary prospect beyond, had gone no further; while from the road it seemed as if the fastidious proprietor had tried to draw a line between the vulgar trading-post, with which he was obliged to face the coarser civilization of the place, and the privacy of his domestic life. The real fact, however, was that the ravine furnished wood and water; and as Nature also provided one ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... beholder with the truth that Roman blood alone, and that too of all the Gracchi, runs in her veins. Her form harmonizes perfectly with the air and character of the face. It is indicative of great vigor and decision in every movement; yet it is graceful, and of such proportions as would suit the most fastidious Greek. I am thus minute in telling you how Fausta struck me, because I know the interest you and Lucilia both take in her, and how you will desire to have from me as exact a picture as I can draw. Be relieved, my dear friends, as to the state of my heart, nor indulge ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... democratic and a pleasant spoken man." He told of an opportunity he once had for regular employment, riding on the stage-coach by the side of a farmer's pretty daughter. She suggested that he might like a milk route, and "perhaps father can get you one." So formal, dignified, and fastidious was he that this seems improbable, but ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... which I hate, Childe Harold; but also appreciates Wordsworth; Sometimes adventures on Schiller; and then to religion diverges; Questions me much about Oxford; and yet, in her loftiest flights, still Grates the fastidious ear with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... insect and fungus diseases that appear every year, make the Southern agricultural problem one requiring more brains than that of the North, East or West. The advance of civilization has brought, and is constantly bringing, about a more healthy form of competition. The markets are becoming more fastidious, and he who puts such a product upon the market as it demands, controls that market, regardless of color. It is simply a survival ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... range and extent of grasp and insight. This is a fact, too, which Mr Helps has noted. 'A suggestion,' says he, 'may be ever so old; but it is not exhausted until it is acted upon, or rejected on sufficient reason.' He has, therefore, no fastidious dread of saying anything which has been said before, but readily welcomes wise thoughts from all directions, often reproducing them with such felicity of expression, as to give them new effect. ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... various rumours repeated by different priests and dignitaries of the Church, who had travelled as far as the distant little Cathedral-town embowered among towering pines and elm trees, where the Cardinal had his abiding seat of duty;—and he had been anxious to meet the man who in these days of fastidious feeding and luxurious living, had managed to gain such a holy reputation as to be almost canonized in some folks' estimation before he was dead. Hearing that Bonpre intended to stay a couple of nights ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... but it is horrible to stay. P—— has dramatic emotions so genuine that she delights and thrills me. Come, what was I going to write? That I am calm and agitated, sorrowful and joyous, jealous and indifferent. It seems to me that fastidious society is possible to have and, at the same time, ...
— Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood) • Marie Bashkirtseff
... which was always observable upon youthful imaginations and consciences morally pure, here fell upon stone. He who was so much at his ease on the shores of his charming little lake, felt constrained and not at home in the company of pedants. His perpetual self-assertion appeared somewhat fastidious.[1] He was obliged to become controversialist, jurist, exegetist, and theologian. His conversations, generally so full of charm, became a rolling fire of disputes,[2] an interminable train of scholastic battles. His ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... this respect. They were always coming up to the back door, clamoring for food—always unappeased. They preferred cake, fresh bread, hot boiled potatoes, doted on tender bits of meat, but would gobble up anything and everything, more voracious and less fastidious than the ordinary hog of commerce. Bags of corn were consumed in a flash, "shorts" were never long before their eager gaze, they went for every kind of nourishment provided for the rest of the menagerie. A goat is supposed to have a champion ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... searching the face at his side with grave intensity. It did not seem to him that this man could ever have been of the sort that his friend Rotherby would have cared to admit to terms of intimacy. Rotherby—notwithstanding his sins—had been fastidious in many ways. ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... utterly dissimilar views of the same object. Thus, as Mr. Spencer has shown,[144] in looking at things national there may be not only a powerful patriotic bias at work in the case of the vulgar Philistine, but also a distinctly anti-patriotic bias in the case of the over-fastidious seeker after culture. And I need hardly add that the different estimates of mankind held with equal assurance by the cynic, the misanthropist, and the philanthropic vindicator of his species, illustrate a like diversity of the ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... my fastidious readers would not have cared much for a simple meal thus prepared, and eaten without the use of plates or forks; but there are others who have dined in this way, and the remembrance of such meals, with the glorious appetite of forest or mountain ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... if such there are, are dumb to question. The Land beyond the Grave has been, if not observed, yet often and variously described: if not explored and surveyed, yet carefully charted. From among so many accounts of it that we have, he must be fastidious indeed who can not be suited. But of the Fatherland that spreads before the cradle—the great Heretofore, wherein we all dwelt if we are to dwell in the Hereafter, we have no account. Nobody professes knowledge of that. No testimony reaches our ears of flesh ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... fortunate or others are particularly fastidious. The guide who showed me the Sepulchre was not particularly noisy or profane or palpably mercenary; he was rather more than less sympathetic than the same sort of man who might have shown me Westminster Abbey or Stratford-on-Avon. He was a small, solemn, owlish old ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... year to the students of the Royal Academy, has nobly vindicated Hogarth as an artist and a man, in words that all who heard will long remember. "Hogarth," he said, "it is true, is often gross; but it must be remembered that he painted in a less fastidious age than ours, and that his great object was to expose vice. Debauchery is always made by him detestable, never attractive." Charles Lamb, one of the best of his commentators, who has viewed his labors in a kindred spirit, speaking of one of his most elaborate and varied works, the "Election ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... the most transparent roguery. And that the others were rogues Dick grew more and more convinced, and it would have been hard to say which of the party he detested the more; Gilderman, the suave Johannesburg expert, glib, well-dressed and fastidious; Jelder, the syndicate's expert from the same locality, a rough-voiced, domineering mining engineer; Zweiter and Spattboom, the "financial" men; or Junes and Grosman, the two prospectors. On the whole, he thought, were he a free agent, he would have picked a quarrel with each and all of them ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... go in for pot-hunting, you know. What he always wanted was to cultivate his own mind, not to get prizes." It was with heartfelt admiration that this feature in his character was dwelt upon by his disciples. Not a doubt that he could have got whatever he liked to go in for, had he not been so fastidious and high-minded. He was fellow of his college as it was, had got a poetry prize which, perhaps, was not the Newdigate; and smiled indulgently at those who were more warm in the arena of competition than ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... it lurked far out of sight; and the priest had a case that might have satisfied a conscience even more fastidious;—and he felt a sort of triumph in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... she answered, carelessly; "but of what do you complain? Do I not perform the duties of your mansion in a manner to satisfy your fastidious tastes?" ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... long in these mountain solitudes," thought she; "her ideas will become romantic, and her taste fastidious. If it is dangerous to be too early initiated into the ways of the world, it is perhaps equally so to live too long secluded from it. Should she make herself a place in the heart of her mother and sister it will be so much happiness gained; and should it prove otherwise, it will ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... of us be a kind of Roscius in his way; and you have said that fastidious men are not so much pleased with what is right, as disgusted at ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... customs, other manners. He had travelled a reasonable amount for an Addington man, but always he had been able to believe that Eden is what it was when there was but one man in it and one woman. There was, of course, too, the serpent. But Alston was fastidious, and he kept his mind as far away from the serpent as possible. He thought of his mother and sister, and instantly ceased thinking of them, because to them Esther was probably a sweet person, and he ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... visitors came. He was offered and accepted four hundred dollars for one of his cabinet pictures. In a word, orders flowed in upon him; he could hardly paint fast enough to supply the demand. He became rather fastidious in his dress—patronized the first tailors and boot makers, cultivated the graces, and took lessons in the waltz and polka. At Mr. Greville's, and some of the other houses he visited, he was remarked as being somewhat of a dandy. ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... still. A perfume of violets, and the more dainty scent of primroses, pervaded the garden. It seemed incredible that any man should be allowed to live in such a spot; but then Captain Carey was almost as gentle and fastidious as a woman. ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... them they stopped short. Uncle Mowbray was a fastidious man. He sniffed and turned up ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... as good as his word. In five minutes he was no longer a busy professional man, but a gentleman of leisure, with hands cleaner than those of any fastidious clubman, and clothes which carried no hint of past usage in other places less chaste ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... "I am responsive to every mood. You will find in me love and hate, virtue and vice. I don't preach: I give you life as it is. You will find here adventures cunningly linked with romance and seasoned to suit the most fastidious taste. Try me." ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... cheap restaurant, not far away, where the two for a moderate sum obtained a plentiful meal. Had either been fastidious, some exception might have been taken to the style in which the dishes were served, but neither was critical. A dapper young clerk, however, who sat opposite Tom, seemed quite disturbed by the presence of the bootblack. As his eye rested on Tom he sniffed contemptuously, ...
— The Young Explorer • Horatio Alger
... Glenn, in huge delight. "I wouldn't have believed it. Carley, I hope you tell your fastidious and immaculate Morrison that you held one of my pigs in your ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... nothing of the anchorite was the dressing-room, furnished with all the comforts and conveniences necessary to an elegant and fastidious ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... in the strict discipline of a man of war, wanted "savoir faire" in dealing with the fastidious young captains, and the equally sensitive "high privates"; while they no doubt looked upon us as a domineering, tyrannical set of exclusives and wished that we were on board the Federal gunboats in the river, or farther. My personal ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... domestics, his splendid equipages betokened immense revenues. Sarah was then eight years of age. Already graceful and charming, she pleased all, and was the idol of the Jew. All her inclinations were unhesitatingly gratified. Always elegantly dressed, she attracted the eyes of the most fastidious, of which her father seemed strangely careless. It will readily be understood how the mestizo, Andre Certa, became enamored of the beautiful Jewess. What would have appeared inexplicable to the public, was the hundred thousand piasters, ...
— The Pearl of Lima - A Story of True Love • Jules Verne
... shelter for the night. This was a "jumping-off" place, said the agent, with barracks and shanties for a construction-gang; there were saloons, and what was called a hotel, but it wouldn't do for a lady. I pleaded that I was not fastidious—being anxious to nullify the effect which the name van Tuiver had produced. But the agent would have it that the place was unfit for even a Western farmer's wife; and as I was not anxious to take the chance of being blown overboard in ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... already scuffed up that thin layer of nearly pure humus forming naturally on the forest floor where leaves and needles contact the soil. Most Americans would be repelled by many of the substances that decompose into humus. But, fastidious as we tend to be, most would not be offended to barehandedly cradle a scoop of humus, raise it to the nose, and take an enjoyable sniff. There seems to be something built into the most primary nature of humans ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... the Chapon fin. When you speak to some elderly gentleman with fastidious gastronomical tastes and an acquaintance with southern France of your intention of going to Bordeaux, he murmurs reminiscently: "Ah, yes! There is a restaurant there..." He means the Chapon fin. It was famous in '70 when the government came here before, ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... what was worse, a borrowed phraseology. The novels of Mdlle. de Scudery became the text-book of the precieux and the precieuses, for such was the name given to these gentlemen and ladies who set up for wits, and thought they displayed exquisite taste, refined ideas, fastidious judgment, and consummate and critical discrimination, whilst they only uttered vapid and blatant nonsense. What other language can be used when we find that they called the sun l'aimable eclairant le plus beau du monde, l'epoux de la nature, and that ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... For instance, I can distinguish between Scarborough and Llandudno quite easily with my eyes shut. Speaking as an expert, I may say that there is nothing to beat a small Cromer and seltzer; though some prefer a Ventnor and dash. Ilfracombe with a slice of lemon is popular, but hardly appeals to the fastidious." ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... the double order, and very soon the coffee and meat were placed before them. I suspect that few of my readers would have regarded these articles with any relish. One need not be fastidious to find fault with the dark-hued beverage, which was only a poor imitation of coffee, and the dark fragments of meat, which might have been horseflesh so far as appearance went. But to the two Italian ...
— Phil the Fiddler • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... certain over-fastidious women have long clamored for some new method of putting on a pillow case, but these people have either lost their teeth, or the new ones do not grasp the situation. They have tried several new methods, such as blowing the pillow case up, and trying to get the ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... Waranasi[21] an independent lady, of beauty so extraordinary, that swarms of lovers use to buzz continually about her like great black bees about the mango blossom in the spring. But independent though she was, she was so fastidious, that none of her innumerable lovers ever touched her heart even for a moment. And hence she lived like a lamp at midnight surrounded by the corpses of her victims, who fluttered about her lustre and perished in its flame. And then at last, one day it came about that a tall young Rajpoot almost ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... now well established, he found it still a difficult matter to live by his pen. Even when in good health, he wrote slowly and with fastidious care, and when his work was done had great difficulty in getting publishers to accept it. Since his death it has been proved that many months often elapsed before he could get either his most admired poems ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... poverty of those we rob prevents our having the good life for which we sacrifice them. Rich men or aristocrats with a developed sense of life—men like Ruskin and William Morris and Kropotkin—have enormous social appetites and very fastidious personal ones. They are not content with handsome houses: they want handsome cities. They are not content with bediamonded wives and blooming daughters: they complain because the charwoman is badly dressed, because the laundress smells of gin, because the sempstress is ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... one, not far from the railway station, and though comfortable, was not patronized by fastidious travelers. ...
— Luke Walton • Horatio Alger
... the soil. More fastidious always, in eating, man learned to grow food. Then came the dawn ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... not disposed to speak harshly of these fastidious young fellows, who will not be long out of the school before they will be rather sorry that they didn't treat Mr. Flipper a little more cordially. But a much more important matter is that he has, in spite of his color, made a good record every way, has kept up with his class, ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... very brave men both; and of a clearness and veracity peculiar among their contemporaries. In Chatham, too, there is something of the flash of steel; a very sharp-cutting, penetrative, rapid individual, he too; and shaped for action, first of all, though he has to talk so much in the world. Fastidious, proud, no King could be prouder, though his element is that of Free-Senate and Democracy. And he has a beautiful poetic delicacy, withal; great tenderness in him, playfulness, grace; in all ways, an airy as well as a solid loftiness of mind. Not born a King,—alas, no, not officially so, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... are indeed delightful to contemplate. Perfect in form, in attitude, and expression, they proclaim the powers of a consummate master. A fastidious observer might indeed object to the bold, muscular strength of the old man—as exhibited in his legs and arms—and as indicative of the maturity, rather than of the approaching extinction, of life ... but what sculptor, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... a set of Dickens' works by broiling a steak so as to please her father, who was a fastidious gentleman, and said he wanted it neither overdone ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... and half sitting, half leaning against the veranda, Mr. McClosky's guest turned his face, and part of a slight elegant figure, toward his host. The lower portion of this upturned face wore an habitual expression of fastidious discontent, with an occasional line of physical suffering. But the brow above was frank and critical; and a pair of dark, mirthful eyes, sat in playful judgment over the super-sensitive ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... language by oneself concerning another. The word is of classical refinement, and is even said to have been used in a fable by Georgius Coadjutor, one of the most fastidious writers of the fifteenth century—commonly, indeed, regarded as the ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... Royalist and not contradicted by the Venizelist Press, will doubtless seem startling for a Government whose mission was to establish democratic liberties. But they were justified by necessity. M. Venizelos and his partisans could not afford to be very fastidious: their political existence was at stake: they must make every effort, and summon every resource at their command. Anyone who was in Athens at that time and saw the Cretan guards, often with the Premier's photograph pinned on their breasts, assault such citizens as displayed the ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... Her foot was as small and her hand as white as of yore. Her hair, bound close about her head, was plentiful and glossy, and her eyes had lost none of their dangerous brightness. Her figure was coarser, and the white arm that gleamed through a muslin sleeve showed an outline that a fastidious artist might wish to modify. The most noticeable change was in her face. The cheeks owned no longer that delicate purity which they once boasted, but had become thicker, while here and there showed those faint red streaks—as though the rich blood throbbed ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... persons of both sexes, and various ages, none above five-and-twenty. But it must be remembered, that the pot was upon the earth, and the earth was the floor, and the circle was squatted round it. At the fire-place, each on a three-legged stool, sat an elderly man and woman. These stools the fastidious may call furniture if they please; but were any of my readers placed upon one of them, so rough and dirty were they, that he or she must have been very naughty, did not the stool of repentance ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... fastidious lungs," observed Lionel, with a smile. "I don't quite know how I should manage for myself, mother; except that I should take care to condense my expenses into the very narrowest compass that ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... dare they hope to find food. Thither had been sent an advanced detail with orders to buy at owners' prices flour, bacon, bread, coffee, anything the outlying settlements might have for sale that would sustain life. Men who had been living on horse or prairie-dog would not be fastidious. Here, too, the major had hoped by night to bivouac his weary men, but it seemed desperately far away. The march had been much impeded, and now, far out on his left flank was something that could not be passed uninvestigated. He, with ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... bungalow-like house was protected on the Gulf side by an enclosing wall surmounted by small cannon. The rich furniture within the house—the pictures, books, Oriental draperies, silver and gold plate and rare crystal—attested equally—so declared his enemies—to the fastidious taste of the Lord of Barataria and ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... at St.-Omer, and all that she had retained from it was a small stock of French idioms, most of which she had forgotten how to use, though she did use them frequently, with a certain timid pretension. Of that habit Fountain, the fastidious, thought that he should break her. But for the rest, her religion, her poverty,—well, she had a hundred a year, so that he and Laura would be no worse off for taking her in, and the child's prospects, of course, should not ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... morning itself; and although her costume was somewhat shrunken, and showed here and there patches of whitish discolouration from its long immersion in the sea, she still presented a picture of grace calculated to charm the most fastidious eye. ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... orators, believed in premeditation, and always wrote and corrected his speeches with fastidious care. While such men knew that inspiration might come at the moment of speaking, they preferred to base their chances ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... characteristic feature of the thing is, that I do not believe he meant to commit any impertinence whatever, but that the youth rather aimed to compliment me by assuming that I appreciated the feelings of a man made of porcelain, and would choose for him only the most choice and fastidious companionship. But I must say that he seemed to me in no way superior, but rather quite inferior, to my own black soldiers, who equalled him in courage and in manners, and far surpassed him in loyalty, modesty, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... was talking to the sacristan. "I hear many objections to that bird, sir," he remarked to me, "from fastidious tourists: one thinks that a peacock, spreading its jewels by mechanism, would have a richer effect. Another says that a swan, perpetually wrestling with its dying song, would be more poetical. Others, in the light of late events, would ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... the poet who could reckon on so clever and accomplished a public; but this was in truth a very dangerous advantage. Spectators whose understandings were so quick, would not be easily pleased. Thus Aristophanes complains of the too fastidious taste of the Athenians, with whom the most admired of his predecessors were immediately out of favour as soon as the slightest trace of a falling off in their mental powers was perceivable. On the other hand, he allows that the other Greeks ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... hyacinths and lilies of the valley; and though, as I have said, I don't admire the smell of hyacinths in the spring when it seems wanting in youth and chastity next to that of other flowers, I am glad enough now to bury my nose in their heavy sweetness. In December one cannot afford to be fastidious; besides, one is actually less fastidious about everything in the winter. The keen air braces soul as well as body into robustness, and the food and the perfume disliked in the summer are ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... of the fastidious Lady Montfort in Endymion that, visiting Paris in 1841, she could only with difficulty be induced to call on the British Ambassador and Ambassadress. "I dined," she said, "with those people once; but I confess that, when I thought of those dear Granvilles, their ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... everything; the thoughts and actions of men appear to you as particular instances of the universal mechanics, but in respect of them you cherish neither hatred nor anger. But there are things which disgust you; you have a fastidious taste, and it is profoundly true that morals are a matter of taste. My child, I could wish that the Academy of Moral Science thought as sanely as you. Yes. You are quite right. As regards the instincts which you attribute ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... but he was too self-reliant and capable to show it. All his life he had been immaculate, almost fastidious in his care of himself. Here he was coming, perforce, in contact with a form of life which jarred upon him greatly. Steger, who was beside him, made some comforting, ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... be said to be one with it. For who is the true critic but he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure. And who is the true man of culture, if not he in whom fine scholarship and fastidious rejection... develops that spirit of disinterested curiosity which is the real spirit, as it is the real fruit of the intellectual life, and thus attains to intellectual clarity; and having learned the best that is known and thought in the world, ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... angel go with you! Play your game cautiously, and let us hear the chink of Herr Eskeles Flies' gold near the rustling of our fragile bank-notes. And now go. Return in half an hour, that I may receive you in presence of our fastidious guests. They might not approve of this tete-a-tete, for you are said to ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... tightens all her muscles so that she moves as if she were tied together with ropes. The expression of her face is one of miserable strain and endurance; the tone of her voice is full of complaint. In eating either she takes her food with the appearance of hungry grabbing, or she refuses it with a fastidious scorn. Any nervous woman who really wants to find herself out, in order to get well and strong, and contented and happy, will see in this description a reflection of herself, even though it ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... birds cannot play that part. One is timid, another fastidious, another shy but ingenious. So, in the universal competition for a living, each has taken its own line according to the bent of its nature, and its one tool has been perfected for its trade until it can follow ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... at least, finished to the eyes of ordinary mortals, though its fastidious master means to retouch it;—a quite pure line engraving, by Mr. Charles Henry Jeens; (in calling it pure line, I mean that there are no mixtures of mezzotint or any mechanical tooling, but all is steady ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... rather more than is quite agreeable; but then we are at least awake and alive there, and the world out of doors is so much the pleasanter when we can get abroad. Everything does well, except those fastidious bipeds, men and women; corn ripens, grass grows, fruit is plentiful; there is no lack of birds to eat it, and there has not been such a wasp-season these dozen years. My garden wants no watering, and is more beautiful than ever, beating my ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... Falloden's fastidious sense approved her wholly: the white dress; the hat that framed her brow; the slender gold chains which rose and fell on her gently rounded breast; her height and grace. Passion beat within him. He hung on ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of people, but not to marry them," she said. "I suppose I'm too fastidious. All my life I've wanted somebody I could look up to, somebody great and big and splendid. Most men ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... these parsimonious Misters will soon recognise that it is not possible for modern up-to-date Art to be florescent under this retrograde and fossilized system, and be warned that such untradesmanlike goings-on will deservedly forfeit the confidence and patronage of their most fastidious customers. ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... all to me. Some one will turn up, who will fill your eye and fill your hand, and what more could you ask in a husband? But you must not be too fastidious. These difficult girls are sure to take up with 'crooked sticks' at last." (Mrs. Allen's views as to straight ones were not original.) "Leave all to me. I will tell you when the right ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... not fastidious in dress, and stood firmly and with dignity. I noted particularly his hair and his smile, the former black in color, plentiful, fine in quality, and parted distressingly straight; ...
— Modern Americans - A Biographical School Reader for the Upper Grades • Chester Sanford
... thinks of quarrelling? Not I; I'm sure I was only asking to be directed. I trust some time, if I live to be ninety, to suit your fastidious taste. I trust the coffee is right this morning, and the tea, and the toast, and the steak, and the servants, and the front-hall mat, and the upper-story hall-door, and the basement premises; and now I suppose I am to be trained in respect to my general education. I shall ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... pages, to a small purpose, or Mr. T. was much less a man than I have supposed, if these parties should not finally unite in consenting to the alliance. Of course, Miss Julia could be had, both of herself and parents, for the asking. But his fastidious notions could alone be satisfied with a gentlemanly course of gradually warming and more devoted attentions, with all the forms and observances, so far as the disadvantages of her surroundings would permit. It was some time in the last summer, that he had ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... love only; and his bride was far more than worthy of his love." When I thought of these expressions on the part of my friend, I confess that I felt indescribably puzzled. Could it be possible that he was taking leave of his senses? What else could I think? He, so refined, so intellectual, so fastidious, with so exquisite a perception of the faulty, and so keen an appreciation of the beautiful! To be sure, the lady seemed especially fond of him, particularly so in his absence, when she made herself ridiculous by frequent quotations of what had been said ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... were kinder. Looking at him, Robin saw that he had aged. There were no longer signs of that fastidious attention to his apparel which had characterized Montfichet ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... discomfort, "in a most superb library in the midst of a splendid baronial hall." But the library of the Reform Club probably contained all this heterogeneous learning. Does the "Gastronomic Regenerator," out of respect to the fastidious sentiments of its author, occupy a separate apartment in that ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... and daughter sighed as they recalled her memory. A sweet, calm, unpretending woman; admirable in the domesticities; in speech and thought distinguished by a native refinement, which in the most fastidious eyes would have established her claim to the title of lady. She had known but little repose, and secret anxieties told upon her countenance long before the final collapse ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... his cap a very knowing affair, but confessed that he had a hat in his hat-box; which was accordingly at once extracted from the hind-boot, and Tom equipped in his go-to-meeting roof, as his new friend called it. But this didn't quite suit his fastidious taste in another minute, being too shiny; so, as they walk up the town, they dive into Nixon's the hatter's, and Tom is arrayed, to his utter astonishment, and without paying for it, in a regulation cat-skin at seven-and-sixpence, Nixon ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... for their future portion. Her sister had enough, was strongly bound to assist Jeanie by any means in her power, and the arrangement was so natural and proper, that it ought not to be declined out of fastidious or romantic delicacy. Jeanie accordingly wrote to her sister, acknowledging her letter, and requesting to hear from her as often as she could. In entering into her own little details of news, chiefly ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... as a man-of-wars man that, having bought his little ship, he should arm her. He equipped her with four small carronades and a pivoted brass six-pounder on the forecastle. He then went to work to man her, but he did not very easily find a crew. Joe was fastidious in his ideas of seamen, and though some whom he cast his eye upon came very near to his taste, it cost him a great deal of trouble to discover the particular set ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... only a trifle lower in price than in England, but perhaps of inferior quality. Tobacco and cigars are ridiculously cheap, but not always nasty, because of their cheapness. Anyone content to smoke a cigar of fair quality may do so at a price about fifty per cent. less than in England; but if he is fastidious in his taste, and requires something superior, such as a genuine Havanna, he will look for it in vain. Strangely enough he can be obliged at most cigar dealers with Havanna cigars at Havanna prices, but as the ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... collected in state papers and records; but he was also famous for the extent of his general scholarship, and for the patronage which he manifested towards all who laboured about books. He was himself a most fastidious collector. He never heard of the appearance of a valuable work without ordering three or four copies on the fine paper manufactured for his private use; and of any such book already issued he would order several sets of sheets to be taken to pieces in order ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... sprinkling of the better nature, which, like holy water, chases away and disperses the contagion of the bad. They have this in them, besides, that they bring us acquainted with the every-day human face,—they give us skill to detect those gradations of sense and virtue (which escape the careless or fastidious observer) in the countenances of the world about us; and prevent that disgust at common life, that taedium quotidianarum formarum, which an unrestricted passion for ideal forms and beauties is in danger of producing. In this, as in many other things, they are analogous ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... party, Anthony Malone, was compared at this period, by an excellent authority, to "a great sea in a calm." He was considered, even by the fastidious Lord Shelburne, the equal, in oratory, of Chatham and Mansfield. He seems to have at all times, however, sunk the mere orator in the statesman, and to have used his great powers of argument even more in Council than in the arena. His position at the bar, as Prime Sergeant, ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... down, at the hotel, more gently than had seemed likely and bristled so much less than was to have been feared with explanations of the anguish of the Proberts, this didn't diminish the girl's sense of responsibility nor make the case a whit less grave. It only showed how sensitive and fastidious the Proberts were and therefore with what difficulty they would come round to condonation. Moreover Francie made another reflexion as she lay there—for Delia kept her in bed nearly three days, feeling this to be for the moment at any rate an effectual reply to any absurd heroics about leaving ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... lecture on the Transcendentalists he says: "... But their solitary and fastidious manners not only withdraw them from the conversation, but from the labors of the world: they are not good citizens, not good members of society; unwillingly they bear their part of the public and private burdens; they ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... unification of the languages proceeded. The jester Wamba in conversation with the swineherd Gurth explains how the Anglo-Saxon term took on the homelier, rougher, more workaday uses and left the more refined and fastidious uses for the Norman-French. A domestic animal, says Wamba, was cared for by the conquered people, and in consequence bore while living a "good Saxon" name—swine, ox, or calf; but it was served at the tables of the conquerors, and therefore when ready ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... gloves and shoes by this means, from a cheap Calcutta firm, instead of despatching an order to Simla regally regardless of cost. They by no means satisfied her fastidious taste; but she felt exalted to a superhuman pitch of virtue as she bore them ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... invitation, one of the gods ventured to remind AEgir that they were accustomed to dainty fare; whereupon the god of the sea declared that as far as eating was concerned they need be in no anxiety, as he was sure that he could cater for the most fastidious appetites; but he confessed that he was not so confident about drink, as his brewing kettle was rather small. Hearing this, Thor immediately volunteered to procure a suitable kettle, and set out with Tyr to obtain it. The two gods journeyed east of the ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... pass among the oi polloi of the world, were it not for a peculiar management in the way of providing for himself. It is true, he asked every one near him to eat of every thing he could himself reach, and that he used his knife as a coal-heaver uses a shovel; but the company he was in, though fastidious in its own deportment, was altogether above the silver-forkisms, and this portion of his demeanour, if it did not escape undetected, passed away unnoticed. Not so, however, with the peculiarity already mentioned as an exception. This touch of deportment, (or management, ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... about, Cutter would offer one of them a quarter to hold the stop-watch, and then drive off, saying he had no change and would "fix it up next time." No one could cut his lawn or wash his buggy to suit him. He was so fastidious and prim about his place that a boy would go to a good deal of trouble to throw a dead cat into his back yard, or to dump a sackful of tin cans in his alley. It was a peculiar combination of old-maidishness and licentiousness that ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... last two or three decades by that Australia which our fathers thought of chiefly as a kind of far-off rubbish-heap where they could fling out the human garbage of England, to rot or redeem itself as it might, well out of the way of society's fastidious nostril, and which to our childhood was chiefly associated with the wild gold-fever and the wreck and ruin which that fever too often wrought. The transportation system, so far as Australia was concerned, came virtually to an end with the discovery of gold in the region to which we had been shipping ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... alas!—to the many pleasant talks we would have together, each more than an hour long, on the occasion of these rare visits. All his stories were delightful, all his tastes elegant. His knowledge of books was profound and truly refined. His taste was most fastidious. Towards the close of his career he prepared a catalogue of his choice library, which showed to the world at once how elegant was his taste and knowledge. At once it became recherche. A few copies at a guinea were for sale, with a view to let the public know something ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... more chilled than a fastidious wine-fancier might have directed; nevertheless, it flowed over our parched palates with an intensity of zest which I do not believe it is in mortals to be conscious of enjoying till they have toiled a whole day ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... often on fish dead or alive; but not exclusively, as it also attacks young lambs, and drives off the ravens from carrion prey, being less fastidious in its diet than the GOLDEN EAGLE, which probably kills its own meat—and has been known to carry off children; for a striking account of one of which hay-field robberies you have but a few ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... wipe off the apologetic smile with a well directed blow. Mr. Denman's parting advice was in his mind and he was devoting all his powers to the business of adjusting himself to his present environment. But to his fastidious nature the experiences of the morning made it somewhat doubtful if he should be able to carry out the policy of adjustment to the extreme of schooling himself to bear with equal mind the daily contact with the dirt and disorder which held so large a place in the domestic economy of the Haley ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... voice of the people is the voice of God. He was invited to write for a theological magazine. Finally George Eliot was obliged to reveal her identity when the public was about to subscribe a sum of money for the pseudo-literary Liggins who was so fastidious as to refuse money for the product of his genius. Here ends the career of Liggins, ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... My appearance, as I have suggested, is singularly exemplary. My boots are placed, after the fastidious London fashion, on the feet: the laces are done up, the watch is going, the hair is brushed, the sleeve-links are inserted, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. As for my straw hat, I put it on eighteen times consecutively, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... barrel-organs were a nuisance, and of course I believed them; so that I left my home with a decided dislike to barrel-organs in general. Four years' residence, however, in the bush had rendered me much less fastidious in music, as well as in many other things; and during the two last years spent at York Factory, not a solitary note of melody had soothed my longing ear, so that it was with a species of rapture that I now ground away at the handle of this organ, which happened to be a very good ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... all one can be too fastidious, and when at last the girl could not keep down even an omelet, it was too much of a good thing for Maren. She took her daughter up to a wise woman who lived on the common. Three times did she try her skill on Soerine, ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... outward seeming, at least, it was all that the most fastidious could have required; a gem of Renaissance architecture in its turrets, its quaint, scrolled windows, and the carving of its stone facade. Age and romance breathed from every inch of it. For not less than four hundred years it had watched the changing life of Paris; and even to a lay ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... high service of love, one sees at once what a poetic fitness there is in their employ, and how our much-abused modern science has found at last for that fastidious god an appropriately dignified and beautiful ministrant. Coarse and vulgar indeed seem the ancient servitors and the uncouth machinery by which the divine business of the god was carried on of old. Today, through the skill of ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... great plantation, where was found growing in profusion, everything essential to the wants of the most fastidious of mortals, while the surrounding woods and river teemed with a great variety of fish ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... mere novelty or unlikeness to other men, but in range and extent of grasp and insight. This is a fact, too, which Mr Helps has noted. 'A suggestion,' says he, 'may be ever so old; but it is not exhausted until it is acted upon, or rejected on sufficient reason.' He has, therefore, no fastidious dread of saying anything which has been said before, but readily welcomes wise thoughts from all directions, often reproducing them with such felicity of expression, as to give them new effect. Thus, in all the elements of a profitable originality, he is rich and generous; ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... that "this cere perdue process is that by which many of the finest Italian bronzes of the best period were produced."[52] Thus it is that we find the Negroes of West Africa, as Dalton concludes, "using with familiarity and success a complicated method which satisfied the fastidious eye of the best artists ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... trouble last term, Bultitude," he said sternly, "on account of this same fastidious daintiness. Your excellent father has informed me of your waste and gluttony at his own bountifully spread table. Don't let me have occasion to reprove you for ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... they had not yet grown quite away from the breast of the bounteous Mother—threw themselves face downward on her brown bosom with uncouth caresses, filling the air with their laughter; and how Miss Mary herself—felinely fastidious and intrenched as she was in the purity of spotless skirts, collar, and cuffs—forgot all, and ran like a crested quail at the head of her brood until, romping, laughing, and panting, with a loosened ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... intimate Mr. King is with that tiresome, common, old Mr. Selwyn!" exclaimed Mrs. Vanderburgh to her daughter. "I never was so surprised at anything in all my life, to see that he keeps it up now, for I thought that aristocratic Horatio King was the most fastidious ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... tall and fat, and prosperous to the casual eye, as he most surely must have been offensive to the fastidious. One of them was short and fat, with pointed ears that made him look quite fox-faced. And the other was a reporter. From his appearance one would have said I hope, and truly, that only pursuit of his calling could have brought him in ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... compose, gentle, and stately in her ways. Miss Galindo must always have been hurried in her manner, and her energy must have shown itself in inquisitiveness and oddness even in her youth. But I don't pretend to account for things: I only narrate them. And the fact was this:—that the elegant, fastidious countess was attracted to the country girl, who on her part almost worshipped my lady. My lady's notice of their daughter made her parents think, I suppose, that there was no match that she might not command; she, the heiress of eight thousand a-year, and visiting about among earls and ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... on Old Year's night by the Punjab Commission, was, in Evelyn's eyes, the supreme event of the week; and when Desmond, after a mad gallop from the Bengal Cavalry Mess, threw open his bedroom door, he was arrested by a vision altogether unexpected, and altogether satisfying to his fastidious taste. ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... from his fat fist, and it rolled nearly to my feet; and the mother, not in the least disconcerted, gravely came and picked it up, and returned it to her boy. Nobody, however, was disturbed by the incident; all appeared to take it as a matter of course. And I confess I like this absence of fastidious conventionalities. Why should the mother be kept from the house of God because she may not bring her child with her? "Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not," said the great Preacher when the disciples would ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... was a bitter remembrance to him now—that morning when Arthur breakfasted with him and seemed as if he were on the verge of a confession. It was plain enough now what he had wanted to confess. And if their words had taken another turn...if he himself had been less fastidious about intruding on another man's secrets...it was cruel to think how thin a film had shut out rescue from all this guilt and misery. He saw the whole history now by that terrible illumination which the present ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... alone, and scrutinised him sternly. Long afterwards he read how some admirer of Lord Hartington had said that what he liked most about him was his "You-be-damnedness." The phrase, Eloquent felt, exactly described Mr Ffolliot; aloof, detached, a fastidious, fine gentleman to his finger tips, entirely careless as to what the common people thought of him; not willingly conscious, unless rudely reminded of their existence, that there were any common people: such, Eloquent felt sure, ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... Association. There was also a group called "The Sacred Legion," who did exceptionally disagreeable labors, not from the love of them but from the sacred principle of duty. Only occasionally some repugnant task had to be undertaken, and be it to the honor of the leaders, not one of them, even the most fastidious or cultivated, shirked the responsibility ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... and irritation of the scalp, particularly at the back of the head, lice or "nits" should be sought for. Sometimes it is more easy to find them on a fine-tooth comb passed through the hair. Lice are very common in dirty households, and are occasionally seen on the most fastidious persons, who accidentally acquire them ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... vision. We speak of creative "artists" in music, painting, and the other arts. We seemingly limit the creative functions to productions that may be hung on gallery walls, or played in concert halls, or otherwise displayed where idle and fastidious people gather to admire each other's culture. But if a man wants a field for vital creative work, let him come where he is dealing with higher laws than those of sound, or line, or colour; let him come where he may deal with the laws of personality. We want artists in industrial relationship. ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... has crowded with twenty men and boys into a space much smaller than the chamber assigned him, and he does not object to having half a dozen room mates. The bed is a wretched cot, but it is better than a bunk or a hammock, and Jack is not so used to cleanliness as to make him very fastidious. ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... very freedom of manners which, in some countries, might denote laxity of morals, is here the evident stamp of their purity. The thought has often recurred to me—which is the most truly pure and virginal nature, the fastidious American girl, who blushes at the sight of a pair of boots outside a gentleman's bedroom door, and who requires that certain unoffending parts of the body and articles of clothing should be designated by delicately circumlocutious terms, or the simple-minded ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... documents prove it. But they were not of such condition as pleased the fastidious son of Marie Stuart, who needs must import his weavers and his artists. And therein was shown his craftiness, for he had coaxed secretly from Flanders fifty expert weavers before the canny Dutch knew their talented material was thus being filched away. Every weaver was bound to secrecy, ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... Monday morning Madame Paquin, like many others in that anxious city, was tossing restlessly on her bed when she heard the familiar creaking of the market wagons which for so many years had done their share in feeding the hungry and fastidious people of Paris. Knowing that every able-bodied man had disappeared from his usual haunts within a few hours after the Mobilization Order was posted, she sprang out of bed ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... beauty that he was admiring she would cure him fast enough. She grabbed the slab of soggy brown cake from the bag and crammed about six inches of it into her mouth, the rest of it sticking out in a manner far from dainty. It had the desired effect. The fastidious Frenchman was completely disgusted. He immediately stopped his pursuit, exclaiming with a shrug: ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... so that our musketeer, in a tolerably bad humor, desired to go to bed as soon as he had supped. D'Artagnan was introduced by Bazin into a mean chamber, in which there was a poor bed; but D'Artagnan was not fastidious in that respect. He had been told that Aramis had taken away the key of his own private apartment, and as he knew Aramis was a very particular man, and had generally many things to conceal in his apartment, he had not been surprised. He, therefore, although it appeared comparatively even harder, ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... So was the Mont, spectral no longer, but nearing with every plunge forward of our sturdy young Percheron. Locomotion through any new or untried medium is certain to bring with the experiment a dash of elation. Now, driving through water appears to be no longer the fashion in our fastidious century; someone might get a wetting, possibly, has been the conclusion of the prudent. And thus a very innocent and exciting bit of fun has been gradually relegated among the lost arts ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... action, simple without redundancy, her exquisite elocution, her deep yet controlled passion, and the magic of a voice thrilling even in a whisper—this form of Phidias with the genius of Sophocles—entirely enraptured a fastidious audience. When she ceased, there was an outburst of profound and unaffected appreciation; and Lord St. Aldegonde, who had listened in a sort of ecstasy, rushed forward, with a countenance as serious as the theme, to offer his thanks ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... we passed, for a small quantity of newly-burned tobacco lay in the bowl; and a fresh patch of clay on the mouthpiece had probably been added, either in the way of general repairs or by some extra-fastidious traveller, who preferred having a private mouthpiece of his own. After rather a severe march through rocky mountain gorges, we reached Chungun, a little oasis of about five acres of standing barley, with three or four flat-roofed houses dotted about it in the usual ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... admiring the brilliant picture of the conquest of Africa and Italy, before Gibbon gives us further proofs of his many-sided culture and catholicity of mind. His famous chapter on the Roman law has been accepted by the most fastidious experts of an esoteric science as a masterpiece of knowledge, condensation, and lucidity. It has actually been received as a textbook in some of the continental universities, published separately with notes and illustrations. ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... everybody speaks to everybody, he has been utterly confounded by the English ceremony of 'introduction,' when enforced as the sine qua non condition of personal intercourse. If England is right, then how clownishly wrong must have been his own previous circles! If England is not ridiculously fastidious, then how bestially grovelling must be the spirit of social intercourse in his own land! But no man reconciles himself to this view of things in a moment. He kicks even against his own secret convictions. He blushes with shame and anger at the thought of ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... Paumotu Archipelago, and seized a number of girls whom he sold to Chilian and Peruvian buyers. But, as a matter of fact, Hayes never sold a native girl, though he was always willing to barter for a new charmer any member of his harem who had palled upon his fastidious tastes. And if the other man in these little matters evinced the slightest want of trade-reciprocity, he generally regretted it, for he would lose the household chattel, and getting nothing for her, save perhaps lumps and excoriations, or perhaps a sarcastic note informing him that the writer could ...
— Concerning "Bully" Hayes - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke
... must double your value for Messrs. Jones Musgrave, Jacobs, Ebden, Theobald, and Whewell. "Cling to those who cling to you!" said the immortal Johnson to your mother, when she uttered something that seemed fastidious relative to a person whose ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... were not large, they were very regular, and she had no fastidious tastes. She and her cockatoo lived on her wages; and all the tips added up, and never spent, year after year, went to swell a very comfortable little account at interest in the Birkbeck Bank. This little account had mounted ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... students of the Royal Academy, has nobly vindicated Hogarth as an artist and a man, in words that all who heard will long remember. "Hogarth," he said, "it is true, is often gross; but it must be remembered that he painted in a less fastidious age than ours, and that his great object was to expose vice. Debauchery is always made by him detestable, never attractive." Charles Lamb, one of the best of his commentators, who has viewed his labors in a kindred spirit, speaking of one of his most elaborate and varied works, the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... sordid surroundings of Charlot's private quarters the Captain and the Deputy supped that evening. The supper sorted well with the house—a greasy, ill-cooked meal that proved little inviting to the somewhat fastidious La Boulaye. But the wine, plundered, no doubt, in common with the goblets out of which they drank it—was more than good, and whilst La Boulaye showed his appreciation of it, Charlot abused it like a soldier. They sat facing each other across the little deal table, whose stains were now ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... having lived a life of such irreproachable gentility as this, Miss Carew would have the bad taste to die in any way not pleasant to mention in fastidious society. She could be trusted to the last, not to outrage those friends who quoted her as an exemplar of propriety. She died very unobtrusively of an affection of the heart, one June morning, while trimming her rose trellis, and her lavender-colored print was not even rumpled when ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... were likely they could get food and a hospitable bed there, for love of Christian charity, and if perchance, a moral parlor entertainment might meet with generous countenance—"for," said they, "this exhibition hath no feature that could offend the most fastidious taste." ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... overstatement in any direction. And it was the same with his character, as shown in daily life; it was frank, generous, cordial, and manly. No man was less querulous, less irritable, less exacting than he. His social nature was warm; discriminating, but not fastidious. He liked men for the good there was in them, and his taste in friendship was wide and catholic. He was rich in friends, and this book proves how just a title to such wealth he could show. We shall be surprised, if this biography does not attain a popularity as wide and as enduring as that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... best method either of creating or of governing the world. Had we been asked to say whether it was likely that, under the rule of infinite wisdom and almighty power, certain insects, reptiles, and fishes, that are unattractive to the eye, and loathsome to the fastidious taste of many, could find a place at all among the works of God, we might have thought it improbable that they should be created; but they exist notwithstanding, and the fact of their existence is enough to ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... was also a Trimmer by the constitution both of his head and of his heart. His understanding was keen, sceptical, inexhaustibly fertile in distinctions and objections; his taste refined; his sense of the ludicrous exquisite; his temper placid and forgiving, but fastidious, and by no means prone either to malevolence or to enthusiastic admiration. Such a man could not long be constant to any band of political allies. He must not, however, be confounded with the vulgar crowd of renegades. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... get, like them, absorbed in such humble things, getting for instance my pickles nicely greened, and of a proper degree of crispness, and my preserves, and jellies prepared with equal perfection for diseased and fastidious palates. "Why can't they talk of their minds, and the food these must relish, and assimilate, instead of all the time being devoted to the body; how it must be fed and clothed?" I asked, with perhaps too evident contempt, of Mrs. Flaxman, one evening ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... edition of my ROBBERS were exhausted before all the admirers of the piece were supplied. A second was therefore undertaken, which has been improved by greater care in printing, and by the omission of those equivocal sentences which were offensive to the more fastidious part of the public. Such an alteration, however, in the construction of the play as should satisfy all the wishes of my friends and critics has not been ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... getting through seasons of catarrh without a handkerchief, there are several stories that would scarcely please the fastidious readers ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... of the first caravan enlightened me also on the subject of honga, or tribute. Tribute had to be packed by itself, all of choice cloth; for the chiefs, besides being avaricious, are also very fastidious. They will not accept the flimsy cloth of the pagazi, but a royal and exceedingly high-priced dabwani, Ismahili, Rehani, or a Sohari, or dotis of crimson broad cloth. The tribute for the first caravan cost $25. Having more than one ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... instead of paper or canvas for his drawings he was given a large slate and a slate pencil. (By the way, the art with which he mastered the material, which was new to him, is remarkable. I have seen some of his productions, and it seems to me that they could satisfy the taste of the most fastidious expert of graphic arts. Personally I am indifferent to the art of painting, preferring live and truthful nature.) Thus, owing to the nature of the material, before commencing a new picture, K. had to destroy the previous one by wiping ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... Bassett was a fastidious man. He had never recovered from the initial horror caused by Balatta's female awfulness. Back in England, even at best the charm of woman, to him, had never been robust. Yet now, resolutely, as only a man can do who is capable ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... I cannot but flatter myself that my meals are regulated with frugality. My usual dish at supper is some pickled salmon, which you eat in the liquor in which it is pickled, along with some oil and vinegar; and he must be prejudiced or fastidious who does not relish it as singularly well tasted ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... occupants. They were very smart people. You could tell it from the way they looked. They had an air contemptuous and sullen. The world is not good enough for them, Cassy thought. In an hour, car and carriage would stop. The agreeable occupants would alight. They would enter fastidious homes. Costly costumes they would exchange for costumes that were costlier. They would sit at luxurious boards, lead the luxurious life and continue to, until they died ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... that of the season, which it is most necessary for the fashionable tailor to know. In writing the first scene of the "Second Part of Henry IV.," his mind was evidently crossed by the shade of some over-particular dandy, whose fastidious nicety as to the set of his garments he had failed to satisfy; for he makes Northumberland compare himself to a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... to his ravisht eyes Spreads flowery fields and opens golden skies; Breathes Orphean music thro the dancing groves, Trains the gay troops of Beauties, Graces, Loves, Lures his delirious sense with sweet decoys, Fine fancied foretaste of eternal joys, Fastidious pomp or proud imperial state,— Illusions all, that pass the ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... afford any evidence, he was not a man to be either loved or envied. He seems to have wasted life in discontent, by the rage of neglected pride, and the languishment of unsatisfied desire. He is querulous and fastidious, arrogant and malignant; he scarcely speaks of himself but with indignant lamentations, or of others but with insolent superiority when he is gay, and with angry contempt when he is gloomy. From the letters that passed between him and ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... State morality; but in the struggle the independence had been carried to a pitch of absurdity of which they were unconscious. For, if many of them were not lacking in a rude sort of talent, they had little intelligence and less taste. They could not rise above the fastidious atmosphere which they had created, and like all cliques, they had ended by losing all sense of real life. They legislated for themselves and hundreds of fools who read their reviews and gulped down everything they were pleased to promulgate. Their ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... were to court and entreat the men, they would not only be blamed, but, after intreaty, they would be reputed as vile, or after marriage as libidinous, with whom there would be no association but what was cold and fastidious; wherefore marriages would thereby be converted into tragic scenes. Wives also take it as a compliment to have it said of them, that being conquered as it were, they yielded to the pressing intreaties of the men. Who does not foresee, that if ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... limit, in order to restrain and control the stimulus. Then we think that we are decent. That is because we rest at peace in a status which is conventional and accustomed. Variation from it one way is fastidious; the other way is indecent, just as it would be at any other limit whatever. It is the comparison of the mores of different times and peoples which shows the arbitrariness and conventionality. It would be difficult to mention anything in Oriental mores which we regard with such horror as ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... the Braboys could not longer live comfortably in Mr. O'Flaherty's house, and they soon vacated the premises, first letting the rent get a couple of weeks in arrears as a punishment to the too fastidious landlord. They moved to a small house on Hackman Street, a favorite ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... government clerk in official uniform, with a cross on his neck— had obviously been waiting a long while already. Two clerks were writing at tables with scratching pens. The appurtenances of the writing-tables, about which Alexey Alexandrovitch was himself very fastidious, were exceptionally good. He could not help observing this. One of the clerks, without getting up, turned wrathfully to Alexey Alexandrovitch, half closing his eyes. "What ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... world. Further, practising but little the art of elaborate composition, and master of a spoken style more effective for the purposes of the pulpit than almost any written one, save that of Chalmers, he failed, in all his attempts in writing, to satisfy a fastidious taste, which he had suffered greatly to outgrow his ability of production. And so he failed to leave any adequate mark behind him. I find that for my stock of theological idea, not directly derived from Scripture, I stand more indebted to two Scotch theologians than to all ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... lasted only twenty days. Our several voyages in the canoes of the Orinoco, and a passage in an American vessel laden with several thousand arrobas of salt meat dried in the sun had rendered us not very fastidious. ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... library, his papers, notes, and instruments, and the manuscript of a work upon diseases connected with climate, on which he had been engaged for many years, but had never succeeded in polishing to his own fastidious satisfaction, or in coming to the end of new discoveries. To Etheldred, his only legacy was his writing-desk, with all its contents. And Mr. Spencer looked so suspicious of those contents, that ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... too, that a change was perceptible in Godolphin's habits, and crept gradually over the character of his thoughts. Dissipation ceased to allure him, the light wit of his parasites palled upon his ear; magnificence had lost its gloss, and the same fastidious, exacting thirst for the ideal which had disappointed him in the better objects of life, began now to discontent him with its ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... over fastidious, monseigneur; but before the post can be bought, it must be offered ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... Andernach, Bonn, and Nuyss. The other three, Tricesimae, Quadriburgium, and Castra Herculis, or Heraclea, no longer subsist; but there is room to believe, that on the ground of Quadriburgium the Dutch have constructed the fort of Schenk, a name so offensive to the fastidious delicacy of Boileau. See D'Anville, Notice de l'Ancienne Gaule, p. 183. Boileau, Epitre iv. and the notes. Note: Tricesimae, Kellen, Mannert, quoted by Wagner. Heraclea, Erkeleus in the district of Juliers. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... a number of amulets, some of which I will mention later, but admits that he had no faith in them, but merely ordered them as placebos for rich and fastidious patients who could not be persuaded to adopt a more rational treatment. Baas tells us that "A regular Pagan amulet was found in 1749 on the breast of the prince bishop Anselm Franz of Wurzburg, count ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... was a distinguished one, and the French cooks of Napoleon's household had displayed all their culinary skill to satisfy the palate of even the most fastidious epicures. Napoleon, as usual, gave his guests but little time to revel in the delicacies prepared for them. Scarcely half an hour had elapsed since the commencement of the dinner, when he rose, and thereby gave the signal that the gala-dinner was ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... The Runkle would be on a wrong tack this time! If he scented any attraction among the members of Mrs Hilliard's house-party, it would of a certainty be attributed to the pretty American heiress, Honor Ward. No one would suspect for a moment that the fastidious Stanor Vaughan had been laid captive by a ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... a fastidious critic in the case of a thing which he can do without. But necessary things are those without which we cannot live, or without which we ought not to live, or without which we do not want to live. Examples of the first group are, to be rescued from the hands ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... forgotten—the rats! I used to have a horror of rats, but here I soon became used to them. The first night I slept on board I smelt something very disgusting as I got into my bunk; and at last I discovered that it arose from a dead rat in the wainscot of the ship. My nose being somewhat fastidious as yet, I moved to the other side of the cabin. But four kegs of strong-smelling butter sent me quickly out of that. I then tried a bunk next to the German Jews, but I found proximity to them was the least endurable of all; and so, ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... unwilling; not in the vein, loth, loath, shy of, disinclined, indisposed, averse, reluctant, not content; adverse &c (opposed) 708; laggard, backward, remiss, slack, slow to; indifferent &c 866; scrupulous; squeamish &c (fastidious) 868; repugnant &c (dislike) 867; restiff^, restive; demurring &c v.; unconsenting &c (refusing) 764; involuntary &c 601. Adv. unwillingly &c adj.; grudgingly, with a heavy heart; with a bad, with an ill grace; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... English faults he was, as Cardinal Newman has said, "an Englishman to the backbone"; and he was, further, a fastidious, high-tempered English gentleman, in spite of his declaiming about "pampered aristocrats" and the "gentleman heresy." His friends thought of him as of the "young Achilles," with his high courage, and noble form, and "eagle eye," made for such great things, ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... cylinder-stove. The round aperture over the little door was glowing red, like an enraged eye; and the quivering radiation of the heat from the polished black surface was plainly perceptible to the sight. The room had lost something of the neat and fastidious appearance which it had worn a few months before. The colored drawing of a patent derrick, fastened to the wall by a tack at each corner of the paper, had broken loose at one end, and was curling over on itself like a withered leaf. The string by which the ingenious almanac had ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
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