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More "Gentility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... them in Scotland until after the Restoration, otherwise than as persons of family. At that period there are traces of their having been fined by public authority, but not for any ordinary criminal offence. From this time forward I find no trace of their gentility. During the eighteenth century they are, I think, principally traced by a line of maltsters (no doubt a small business then) in Lanarkshire. Their names are recorded on tombstones in the churchyard of Biggar. I remember going ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... restlessness, superstition, weakness, and folly that had composed her life, and had now produced this egregious interview. And in the midst of this emotion she was touched by his statuesque face, with its glimmering suggestion of gentility cast down, of pride lost in a dread that she might not find ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... him. I had encountered a friend in that overgrown city; I saw a familiar face the first for many months. Without CALCULATING whether he could be of service to me, or whether it was proper to appear before him in apparel more remarkable for its antiquity and simplicity than its gentility, I obeyed the dictates of an honest heart, rushed towards him, and grasped his hand. Perceiving his astonishment, and that he was about to reprove my unauthorized familiarity, ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... supplied all her guests with tea and coffee, while Monsieur Philomene went round with the cakes and bread and butter. Madame Desjardins spread her pocket-handkerchief on her lap—a pocket-handkerchief the size of a small table-cloth. Madame de Montparnasse, more mindful of her gentility, removed to a corner of the tea-table, and ate her bread and butter in her black ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... infinitely varied. Sometimes a single felicitous touch brings out the whole type and character, as when the modern author Leonard Merrick hints at shabby gentility by mentioning the combination of a frock coat with the trousers of a tweed suit. Suggestion is very powerful in this field, especially when mental qualities are to be delineated. Treatment should vary with the author's object; whether ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... elements of power which oligarchies possess. The slaveholding education gives elements of control, the bearing and habit of command, and the assertion of superiority. This exercises its influence over weak minds. People doubtful of their own gentility bow to the established aristocracy of slavery. The thing that hath been is that which shall be, and there is no ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... always ill-at-ease among us. Our youth is so long past, and we two are so altered that we, I think, may speak of its happenings now without any bitterness. I hated those sordid, petty traits. I raged at your incessant pretensions to gentility because I knew you to be so much more than a gentleman. Oh, it infuriated me—how long ago it was!—to see you cringing to the Court blockheads, and running their errands, and smirkingly pocketing their money, and wheedling them into helping the new play to success. You ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... attach overmuch importance to the gentility of their Boy's avocation; to fathers who think that because the bank is rich its employes must necessarily become so in time; to friends who criticize the bankclerks of their acquaintance for not settling down—this story ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... distinctions which she would draw between best and second-best, and every-day; to receive her somewhat prolix admonition how he was to demean himself in respect of the wearing of each one; for Miss Emily Sewell was a gentlewoman, and held rigidly to various traditions of gentility which had been handed down in the Sewell family, and which afforded her brother too much quiet amusement to be disturbed. He would not have overthrown one of her quiddities for the world; it would be taking away a part ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... became very monotonous. It is on a higher level, and though tolerably fertile, is deficient in verdure, the olive being almost the only tree met with. Lambesc, like Orgon, which it much exceeds in size, has an air of faded gentility and desertion, and its fine public fountains tell a tale of better days. In this town the states of Provence were convened annually in the reign of Louis XIV.; and it possessed also many of the privileges of a capital in the days of the ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... ordinarily bestowed on them, is required. Foremost in consideration must be the subject of cleanliness. Dirty and coarse hands are no less marks of slothfulness and lowbreeding than clean and delicate hands are of refinement and gentility. To promote softness and whiteness of the skin, mild emollient soaps, or those abounding in oil or fat, should alone be adopted for common use; by which means the tendency to contract chaps and chilblains, and roughness ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... appearances than by their intrinsic worth. Their education is conducted mainly with the view of pleasing and attracting the admiration of others, rather than of improving and developing their qualities of mind and heart. They are imbued with notions of exclusiveness, fashion, and gentility. A respectable position in society is held up to them as the mark to be aimed at. To be criminal or vicious is virtually represented to them as far less horrible than to be "vulgar." Immured within the bastile of exclusivism, woman is held ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... sisters-in-law. Neither struck her fancy particularly, perhaps because there was nothing particular to strike it. The Misses Harper were, like most female branches of "county families," vegetating on their estates from generation to generation in uninterrupted gentility and uniformity. Of the two, Agatha liked Mary best; for there was great goodnature shining through her fearless plainness—a sort of placid acknowledgment of the fact that she was born for usefulness, not ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... purifications of women, and such other meetings, where 'it is incredible to tell what meat is consumed and spent'. But, besides these, there were many poorer farmers who lived at home 'with hard and pinching diet'. Wheaten bread was at this time a luxury confined to the gentility, the farmer's loaf, according to Tusser, was sometimes wheat, sometimes rye, sometimes mastlin, a mixture of wheat and rye, though the poorer farmer on uninclosed land ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... brought those qualities into such subjection to her beauty that it was impossible and out of nature—or I thought so—to separate them from her beauty. Truly it was impossible to dissociate her presence from all those wretched hankerings after money and gentility that had disturbed my boyhood,—from all those ill-regulated aspirations that had first made me ashamed of home and Joe,—from all those visions that had raised her face in the glowing fire, struck it out of the iron on the anvil, extracted it from the darkness of night to look in at ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... people, I cannot tell, but great feet had been the fashion there time immemorial, and the higher the family the larger were they. It was, therefore, the aim of everybody above the degree of shepherds, and such-like rustics, to swell out and enlarge their feet by way of gentility; and so successful were they in these undertakings that, on a pinch, respectable people's slippers ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... a feeling which pervades the popular mind in the metropolis on the subject of the duty which respectable people owe to respectability. It is impossible for a housekeeper in a neighbourhood having any claims to gentility, to escape the recognition of this feeling in the lower class of industrials. If you have a broken window in the front of your house, the travelling glazier thinks, to use his own expression, that you have a right to have it repaired, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... it in opulence. All honest, jog-trot men, who go on smoothly and dully, and write history and politics, and are praised: men, sir, who, had they been bred cobblers, would all their lives only have mended shoes, but never made them." "Finding" (says George) "that there is no great degree of gentility affixed to the character of an usher, I resolved to accept his proposal; and having the highest respect for literature, hailed the antiqua mater of Grub Street with reverence. I thought it my glory to pursue a track which Dryden and Otway trod before me. Alas, Dryden struggled with indigence ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... husband you were. No! I can't forget how my mother lived and died. You call it nonsense. Well, I call it something else. You took a most effective way to punish my poor mother for having the temerity to marry an English gentleman. Thank God, I have my mother to look back to for my own ideas of gentility." ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... see, is unabating. A new generation of little maidens is springing up around us, are they, too, destined to follow the beaten track their elders have trodden so unworthily? Will they be taught these nice discriminations between wealth and no wealth? Must they, too, meet a struggling gentility with a haughty, overbearing carriage, and elbow out less independent aspirants, whom some capricious fortune has brought within their contact? Does one little star in the vault above shine less brightly or twinkle less gladly because myriads of others ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... appearance of gentility on straitened means. It looked as though the gentleman belonged to that class of idle landowners who used to flourish in the times of serfdom. He had unmistakably been, at some time, in good and fashionable ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... wrapped up between the broad-gauge and the narrow-gauge, like a hare in a bottle-spit. The opening of the line to Rugby affords a new short way to London. The population will henceforward increase at the expense of its gentility, but the police and sanitary arrangements before alluded to, will always make Leamington a favourite with invalids, ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... not tell me that you had been hurt, Benita," he exclaimed in his light, refined voice, one of the stamps of that gentility of blood and breeding whereof all his rough years and errors had been unable to deprive him. "They only told me that you were saved. It is part of my ill-fortune that at our first moment of greeting I should give you pain, who have caused you ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... bewildering dream. As the great floating palace, all aglitter and aglow with splendors of paint and upholstery hitherto unknown, swung from her moorings out into the stream, Dan quite forgot the gentility of his surroundings and the elegant Dud Fielding at his elbow, and waved his hat with a wild "Hurrah" to half a dozen Wharf Rats who were fishing off ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... remained. It was tied with pink packthread instead of ribbon. Cannie undid the string. It was a book, not new, bound in faded brown; and the title printed on the back was "The Ladies' Manual of Perfect Gentility." ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge
... looked like a cheap swell. In his dress he caricatured the fashion, and exhibited a sort of pretentious gentility which betrayed his innate vulgarity. He stared in wonder when a boy with a bundle under his arm started from his seat, and hurried toward him with the greeting: "How ...
— Herbert Carter's Legacy • Horatio Alger
... with flying streamers, was sitting by the fireside spinning. She had heard the news of Pete as Philip passed through to Sulby, and was now wondering if it was not her duty to acquaint Uncle Peter. The sweet and natty old gentlewoman, brought up in the odour of gentility, was thinking on the lines of poor Bridget, Black Tom when dying under the bare scraas, that a man's son was his son in ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... are unbearable in the impertinent equality with which they treat people. For, in short, there ought to be a certain subordination in things; and what puts me out of all patience is that a town upstart, whether with two days' gentility to boast of or with two hundred years', should have impudence enough to say that he is as much of a gentleman as my late husband, who lived in the country, kept a pack of hounds, and took the title of Count in all the deeds that ...
— The Countess of Escarbagnas • Moliere
... himself and a recruiting sergeant. And after this again there comes an appendix containing an apologia for Lavengro, a great deal more polemic against Romanism, some historical views of more originality than exactness, and a diatribe against gentility, Scotchmen, Scott, and other black beasts of Borrow's. This appendix has received from some professed admirers of the author a great deal more attention than it deserves. In the first place, it was ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... of the men and women can be studied in intermittent flashes as they pass under the strong glare of the lights. The utter absence of men and women of gentility makes the procession seem like the invasion of the Huns into the Empire. Among the thousands there are descendants of those very men who made the legions of Rome flee in terror. The torch of progress is again in the hands of the uncultured, and as history proves the race is ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... book. As I read his article in THE GALAXY, I could imagine him giving vent to many a hearty laugh. But he is writing for Catholics and Established Church people, and high-toned, antiquated, conservative gentility, whom it is a delight to him to help you shock, while he pretends to shake his head with owlish density. He is ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... lamp-post before the door, so he knew the house from its neighbours. Baker's Terrace as a whole was a defeated aspiration after gentility. The more auspicious houses were marked by white stones, the steps being scrubbed and hearthstoned almost daily; the gloomier doorsteps were black, except on Sundays. Thus variety was achieved by houses otherwise as monotonous and prosaic as ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... democratic villages. But even a village, in a great and vigorous democracy, where there are no overshadowing squires, where the "county" has no social existence, where the villagers are conscious of no superincumbent strata of gentility, piled upwards into vague regions of privilege—even a village is not an institution to accept of more or less graceful patronage; it thinks extremely well of itself, and is absolute in its own regard. Salem is a sea-port, but it is a sea-port deserted and decayed. It belongs to ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... dense, fragrant orange-groves and rich, fruitful vineyards. A ride of twenty-five miles brought us to Los Angeles, a town with the same beautiful surroundings. It was, at that time, a quaint, old, dilapidated Spanish place, with an air of shabby gentility, but the subsequent tide of immigration and trade has doubtless transformed it. We returned to the coast and took the steamer to San Diego, which, with its arid, sandy waste, has little to recommend it to the visitor, save ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... yet it was as good a career as he could enter upon. The merchant service is not so genteel as the navy, to be sure, but, then, it is really more promising, in a lucrative point of view, and a young man of no family need not mind about the gentility." ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... through the knot-holes in the fence, and over the top of it when they could get there, which wasn't an easy thing to do, as the fence was pretty high. The Knight girls could make faces too, for all their gentility. Their yard had one great advantage over the other: it possessed a wood-shed, with a climbable roof, which commanded Miss Miller's premises, and upon this the girls used to sit in rows, turning up their noses at the next ...
— What Katy Did • Susan Coolidge
... at all," repeated Mrs. Jarley. "It's calm and classical. No low beatings and knockings about, no jokings and squeakings, like your precious Punches, but always the same, with a constantly unchanging air of coldness and gentility; and so life-like, that if wax-work only spoke and walked about, you'd hardly know ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... scent, the scent of Suburbia, seemed to float between the tall chimneys in the morose atmosphere. The purple chariot, which rolled on and on like the chariot of Fate, drew gradually away from the large thoroughfares into mean streets, whose air of dull gentility was for ever autumnal, and the Prophet, on passing some gigantic gasworks, mechanically wondered whether it might not, perhaps, be that monument to whose shadow Malkiel the First had lived and died. Once, looking up at the black sky, he remarked ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... for many of them are, by a great deal, much more like gentlemen than a number of the merchant skippers or mates in our British ships, whose horny fists and tar-stained dress make few pretensions to outward gentility. ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... place had a dilapidated look that surprised Lindsay. The bell was of that brand you keep pulling till you discover it is out of order. Decayed gentility marked the neighborhood, though the blank front of ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... "He ain't a gentleman," Mrs. Bunce had said. And the man certainly was not a gentleman. The old man in the white cravat was very neatly dressed, and carried himself without any of that humility which betrays one class of uncertified aspirants to gentility, or of that assumed arrogance which is at once fatal to another class. But, nevertheless, Mrs. Bunce had seen at a glance that he was not a gentleman,—had seen, moreover, that such a man could have come only upon one mission. She was right there too. ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... latterly to be as fine a point of honor as any article in the code of chivalry or noblesse. The arrogance that claims a superiority of class, and the obsequiousness that loves a lord, all this Nietschean "pathos of distance," whether felt from the heights or the depths, is sharply repugnant to a new gentility, that embraces all that have had the joy of promiscuous social intercourse. From this aristocracy no one is excluded that does not exclude himself through servility or superciliousness. Its distinction is liberality, that ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... cut your stick, tell us what's up,' said an old Republican colonel, who cared not a rap for Imperial gentility and choice language. ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... Oriental character they have in common consists in their large, square, palatial mansions, with sunny gardens round them. The two first have seen better days. They are in perfect harmony with the condition of weakened, but not impoverished, gentility. Each of them is a "paradise of demi-fortunes." Each of them is of that intermediate size between a village and a city which any place has outgrown when the presence of a well-dressed stranger walking up and ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... was construed into an unpardonable affront by the justice's lady, who abused the director in the most opprobrious terms for his insolence and ill manners; and retiring in a storm of passion, vowed revenge against the saucy minx who had presumed to vie in gentility with Miss Gobble. The justice entered into her resentment. The gravedigger lost his place; and Suky's lover, young Oakley, was pressed for a soldier. Before his mother could take any steps for his discharge, he was hurried away to the East Indies, by the industry and contrivance ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... not disdained the counting-house, or even the shop; their names are enrolled in the Livery and Companies of London; and in England, as well as in the Italian commonwealths, heralds have been compelled to declare that gentility is not degraded by ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... here, forty years ago, I felt myself an old man, and the building was even then a dilapidated old rookery, and since then we—the house and I—have lapsed physically with the decline of the neighborhood about us, until now our only claims to gentility are perhaps our ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... of doubtful gentility. She had, in her first marriage—I don't think, D'Artagnan, I am telling you anything new—married a lawyer; they thought that 'nauseous;' you can understand that's a word bad enough to make one kill thirty thousand men. I have killed two, which has made people hold ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... wasn't a greater lady in the land than Cilly Dennison." Her brother was very different; tall and athletic, and rather handsome, he made no pretensions to be a gentleman. He valued his fine farming and fine cattle a great deal higher than Juniper Hitchcock's gentility. ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... a lady, whose natural-born gentility poverty might obscure but could not conceal. Years of want and struggling deprivation had dimmed her charms; but they had neither bowed nor bent her stately form, nor quenched the inherent virtue of self-respect, nor deprived ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... her grip on his collar. "That's your look-out, and I should have thought you'd have made sure you knew before you decided on your base perfidy." And then she had mouthed and minced, with ever so false a gentility, her consistent, her sickening conclusion. "Of course—I may mention again—if you too distinctly object to the trouble of looking, you know where to ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... the line for conduct. A high sense of rectitude, a lowly soul, with a pure and kind heart are elements of nobility which will work out in the life of a human being at home—everywhere. "Private refinement makes public gentility." ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... fell into his clutches. They had already vowed vengeance upon him, these sometime brethren of the coast, for his betrayal of their confidence at Panama; they had further resented his honor of knighthood, his cloak of respectability, his assumption of gentility, and now that he hanged and punished right and left without mercy, their anger and animosity were raised to the point of fury, and many of them swore deeply with bitter oaths that if they ever caught him defenceless they would make him pay dearly in torture ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... yield the forfeiture, which he would not: a refusal which in those days was an act of outlawry in a gentleman, as it is now of bankruptcy in a base mechanic; the gentleman having in our wiser times a more liberal privilege of gentility, which enables him to keep his land and laugh at his creditor. Thus the mutual resentments and interests of the king and the abbot concurred to subject the earl to the penalties of outlawry, by which the abbot would gain ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... how he has been at the head of his class, and showing his school tickets, which his mother, with untiring admiration, deposits in the little real china tea pot—which, as being their most reliable article of gentility, is made the deposit of all the money and most ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... altar. Far off its coming shines. I was always impressed by the fact that even with us a well-bred gentleman in reduced circumstances never forgets to keep his beaver well brushed, and I remember that long ago I spoke of the hat as the ultimum moriens of what we used to call gentility,—the last thing to perish in the decay of a gentleman's outfit. His hat is as sacred to an Englishman as ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Fisher as Triplet can scarcely claim that he ever saw the part at all. The quaint figure, the well-saved but threadbare dress, the forlorn air of poverty and suffering commingled with a certain jauntiness and pluck, the profound feeling, the unconscious sweetness and humour, the spirit of mind, gentility, and refinement struggling through the confirmed wretchedness of the almost heart-broken hack—who that ever laughed and wept at sight of him in the garret scene, sitting down, "all joy and hilarity," to write his comedy, can ever forget those details of ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... system, men who were willing enough to raise themselves and their sons to a higher social plane, but objected on semi-theological grounds to any one from below doing likewise—neatly satirising them and their notions of gentility, and quoting Plato in support of his contention that what is wanted even more than means to help capacity to rise is "machinery by which to facilitate the descent of incapacity from the higher strata to the lower." He repeats in new phrase his warning] "that every man of high ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... sport, and have his fist gloved with his jesses.[38] A justice of peace he is to domineer in his parish, and do his neighbour wrong with more right.[39] He will be drunk with his hunters for company, and stain, his gentility with droppings of ale. He is fearful of being sheriff of the shire by instinct, and dreads the assize-week as much as the prisoner. In sum, he's but a clod of his own earth, or his land is the dunghill and he the cock that crows over it: and commonly his race is quickly run, and his children's ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... that 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, ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... enjoyed a more perfect hospitality. I have been in many a richer home where there was not a hundredth part of the true gentility—the gentility of unapologizing simplicity ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... always torn by painful, shameful jealousy when he thought of the Englishman, and his entire nature appeared to change. He could not have called him "Hawtree" or "Mr." for his life; that savoured of gentility and the fervid past when the man was perhaps a picturesque figure, quoting the English classics in the guise of an unfortunate exile. Besides, if he fathomed Poussette's feelings correctly, the latter in his own jealousy of Crabbe might be found ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... Let this suffice concerning the Nature and Manners of the People in general: The ensuing Chapters will be spent in more particular accounts of them. And because they stand much upon their Birth and Gentility, and much of what is afterwards to be related hath reference unto it: I shall first speak of the various ranks and degrees of ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... The captain, brawny and respectable, spoke for the group. Behind him was a short but dignified gray-haired gentleman whom she took to be the present or former Governor of the State of Kentucky, of whom the boy had spoken. With him were several men who appeared to have some fair title to gentility. Other passengers pressed in an ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... we were "officers and gentlemen," and thought no small beans of ourselves as such. There were at times absurd manifestations of this same precocious dignity, of which I may speak later; still, as O'Brien said of Boatswain Chucks, "You may laugh at such assumptions of gentility, but did any one of his shipmates ever know Mr. Chucks to do an unhandsome or a mean action?—and why? Because he ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... its vulgarest; and the nex-retrousse, the coarse mouth, the double chin, are most forcibly exhibited in this limning by Wright; who did not, like Reynolds, or like Lawrence, cast a nuance of gentility over every subject of his pencil. Horace—can we not hear him in imagination?—is telling his friends how Sir Robert used to celebrate the day on which he sent in his resignation, as a fete; then he would point out to his visitors a Conversation-piece, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... conserved in pot-pourri. Tapestry covered more than three-fourths of the wall, swinging gently in the draught from the open window, a harpischord stood in a corner, a couch that had apparently been occupied stood between the fireplace and the door, and a score of evidences indicated gentility and taste. ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... off alone, and a curious visit he had. It was not easy for him to guess at the sacredness of those traditions of gentility and superiority that the 'Misses Hepburn' held—not so much for their own sakes as in faithful loyalty to the parents many years dead, and to the family duty that imposed a certain careful exclusiveness on them in deference to ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... not yet thoroughly persuaded that his style of football wasn't a success. "But for that unfortunate riot, which comes from playing with less cultured colleges," he remarked to a Senior the next spring, "that would have been the most successful exhibition of mental control and inherent gentility ever seen ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... that such a thing is not his place, his excuse is analogous to that of the Hindu servant when he pleads his caste. When an Englishman of birth or profession, which is held to confer gentility, refuses to associate with a tradesman or mechanic; or when members of a secret society exclude all others from their meetings; or when any other social distinction arises, it would present itself to the mind of the Hindu as ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... can err but once.... Enquire diligently of her disposition, and how her parents have been inclined in their youth. [209] Let her not be poor, how generous [20well-born] soever; for a man can buy nothing in the market with gentility. Nor choose a base and uncomely creature altogether for wealth; for it will cause contempt in others, and loathing in thee. Neither make choice of a dwarf, or a fool; for by the one thou shalt beget a race of pigmies, while the other will be thy continual disgrace, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... subsisting on the misplaced indulgence of an undiscerning public, and one who, if gentlemen and ladies (like ourselves) would only condescend to write, would find his appropriate circle in a work-house, unless he escaped it by dying in an hospital. You proceed to——! What, in the name of gentility, can ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... the centre of a large district, not at all like the retired gentility of Marbridge, very much bigger and busier. Captain Polkington, who had lived quietly so long, felt rather lost and bewildered at first in the bustling intricate streets; there were so many people, especially among the shops, they ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... been beforehand with them, and they be ranked among those who have nothing to show for their honesty but their money, nothing for their religion but their dissembling, or a fat benefice, nothing for their wit but their dressing, for their nobility but their title, for their gentility but their sword, for their courage but their huffing, for their preferment but their assurance, for their learning but their degrees, or for their gravity but their wrinkles or dulness. They had better laugh at one another here, as it is the custom of the world. Laughing ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... noblemen; therefore it was not ambition on her part. He could have married any number of wealthier American girls; therefore it was not avarice on his part. He was a good-looking, stalwart chap with a very fetching drawl, infinite gentility, and a man despite his monocle, while she was beautiful, witty and womanly; therefore it is reasonable to suspect that it must have been love that made ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... have given her the money if I had had it, for the pleasure of having her again; but putting my hand into my trows-ers, found silver only to something like a pound in value, and told her that. Then losing her gentility she said, "I'm damned if you do go, you bugger, till you ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... weather, as if he were perpetually exposed to sun and wind, rain and hail; sharp of movement, evidently of more than ordinary intelligence, and, in spite of his rough garments and fur cap, having an indefinable air of gentility and breeding about him. Brereton had already noticed the pitch and inflection of his voice; now, as Harborough touched his cap to the Mayor, he noticed that his hands, though coarsened and weather-browned, were well-shaped and delicate. Something about him, something ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... intellect; it smoothed away prejudices and upset conventionalities; and the ruddy glow of our sunburnt cheeks was the external token of the healthy natural tone of the feelings within. No; this passion for comfort and gentility in the wilderness, is a bad sign of the generation: it bespeaks effeminacy of character, and a vanity which, however graceful it may be thought in the town, shews mean and ridiculous among the hills, and woods, and waters ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... cottage with a double coach-house, A cottage of gentility; And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin Is ...
— English Satires • Various
... Yeomanry of Georgia. Labour being here the especial portion of slaves, it is thenceforth degraded, and considered unworthy of all but slaves. No white man, therefore, of any class puts hand to work of any kind soever. This is an exceedingly dignified way of proving their gentility, for the lazy planters who prefer an idle life of semi-starvation and barbarism to the degradation of doing anything themselves; but the effect on the poorer whites of the country is terrible. I speak now ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... a fresh consignment packed in sawdust was eagerly watched by the 'Johns.' Of course we were imitating our parents." It was no doubt these cutty pipes which are referred to in one of the sporting books of Robert Surtees as the "clay pipes of gentility." ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... emphasis on the word Master,) "will you be pleased to undo the door?—What ails you?—are you at your prayers in private, to complete the devotion which you left unfinished in public?—Surely we must have a screened seat for you in the chapel, that your gentility may be free from the eyes of common folks!" Still no whisper was heard in reply. "Well, master Roland," said the waiting-maid, "I must tell my mistress, that if she would have an answer, she must either come herself, or send ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... who are to be found now and then painfully earning the bread which is very bitter to them in richer people's houses, and preserving in their little silent souls some fetish in the shape of a scrap of gentility, which is their sole comfort, or almost their sole comfort. Mrs. Copperhead's fetish was the dear recollection that she was "an officer's daughter;" or rather this had been her fetish in the days when she had nothing, and was free to plume herself on the reflected ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... not seek for a foil in inferiority; nor fear contamination from coming in contact with that which is coarse and homely. It reposes on itself, and is equally free from spleen and affectation. But the spirit of gentility is the mere essence of spleen and affectation; of affected delight in its own would-be qualifications, and of ineffable disdain poured out upon the involuntary blunders or accidental disadvantages of those whom it chooses to treat as its inferiors. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... themselves. I said that my country-folk in general had a great many admirable qualities, but at the same time a great many foibles, foremost amongst which last was a crazy admiration for what they called gentility, which made them sycophantic to their superiors in station, and extremely insolent to those whom they considered below them. He said that I had spoken his very thoughts, and then asked me whether I wished to be taken the most agreeable walk ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... that after she had seen Harry lighting a fire to broil chickens' legs in a Chinese temple, under the willow-pattern cannon-ball tree, and heard Henry Ward saying it was not like a lieutenant in the navy, she found herself replying, 'Use before gentility;' and in the enunciation of this—her first moral sentiment—discovered that it ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... coffee-stand she broke more than once into a hop of glee. Barney had changed his mind concerning her. A solid sovereign which must be changed and a companion whose shabby gentility was absolute grandeur when compared with his present surroundings made ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Benevolent Fund makes no pretensions to gentility, squanders no treasure in keeping up appearances, that it considers that the money given for the widow and the orphan, should really be held for the widow and the orphan, I think I have exhausted the case, which I desire most strenuously to commend ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... received in the drawing-room of Enterprise House, which was rarely opened nowadays. It had a charming air of slightly old-fashioned gentility, just as its dead mistress had left it, and the rough Northerners came in with an abashed air. John Gaviller, resplendent in the dress-suit, stood by the piano, with the little lady on one hand and the large lady on the other, and one after another the men marched up and made their obeisances. ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... together for the space of an hour without biting or scratching one another. There you might have seen a throng of young females, not filled with envyings of each other's charms, nor displaying the ridiculous affectations of gentility, nor yet moving in whalebone corsets, like so many automatons, but free, inartificially happy, ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... "The extremes of society approach much more closely to each other than perhaps the Dean of Saint Patrick's expected. The savage is always to a certain degree polite. Besides, going always armed, and having a very punctilious idea of their own gentility and consequence, they usually behaved to each other and to the Lowlanders with a good deal of formal politeness, which sometimes even procured ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... Voltaire); and the histories of both the author and the play are curious. The author's real name was Caron, and he had been bred a watchmaker. But he was ambitious; he gave up his trade, and bought a place about the Court, which was among those which conferred gentility, and which enabled him afterwards on one occasion to boast that he could establish a better claim to the rank of noble than most of that body, since he could produce a stamped receipt for it. He married two rich widows. He next obtained the ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... Lombardies," said Abel, waving a long arm at them. "They are the trees of princesses. When I was a boy they were fashionable. Anyone who had any pretensions to gentility had a row of Lombardies at the foot of his lawn or up his lane, or at any rate one on either side of his front door. They're out of fashion now. Folks complain they die at the top and get ragged-looking. So they do—so they do, if you don't risk your neck every spring climbing up ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... planted the —— fern. His home-nest was close to the ground, but the lower one is, the less fear of falling; and in woods, the elevation at which you sleep is a matter of taste, and not of expense or gentility. He awoke to life when the wood was dressed in the pale fresh green of early summer; and believing, like other folk, that his own home was at least the principal part of the world, earth seemed to him so happy and so beautiful an abode, that his heart felt ready to burst with ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... instinctively shuns whatever in the shape of man is degraded, outraged, and forsaken. He does not make the poverty of others the reason for robbing them; he does not make the oppression of others the reason for oppressing them, for his gentility is his religion; and therefore with simple truth and tender audacity the old English dramatist Dekkar calls Him who gave the name to our religion, and who destroyed the plea that might makes right, "the first true gentleman, that ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... occasional vividness, of no extraordinary kind. I will just note one of these occasions, ere I pass on to what makes my dreamer truly interesting. It seemed to him that he was in the first floor of a rough hill-farm. The room showed some poor efforts at gentility, a carpet on the floor, a piano, I think, against the wall; but, for all these refinements, there was no mistaking he was in a moorland place, among hillside people, and set in miles of heather. He looked ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Parcel (to her friend—for the sake of vindicating her gentility). Oh, my dear, I do feel so funny, carrying a great brown-paper parcel, in a bus, too! Anyone would take me for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 30, 1890. • Various
... me: I know you'd save money by it. I've been reckoning what you lay out in omnibuses; and if you'd a chaise of your own— besides the gentility of the thing—you'd be money in pocket. And then, again, how often I could go with you to town,—and how, again, I could call for you when you liked to be a little late at the club, dear! Now you're ...
— Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures • Douglas Jerrold
... the nurse, a simpering piece of faded gentility, who did not presume to state her name as a fact, but merely offered it ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... determined, like him, to become "unsophisticated," "to owe the worm no silk, the cat no perfume"—seeing, indeed, that if they had, they could not have paid for them; so they tore off, of their own will, the peacock's feathers of gentility, the sheep's clothing of moderation, even the fig-leaves of decent reticence, and became just what they really were—just what hundreds more would become, who now sit in the high places of the earth, if it paid them as well to be unrespectable ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... understand much about titles and nobility, and those sort of things; but I'm sorry she's gone down in the world, for though a little particular about gentility, she's a good sort of woman in her way, and keeps up her character, and earns ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... shop the master, judging by my appearance, which was certainly not exactly that of a gentleman, ventured to observe that it was customary with gentlemen, whom they had not the honour of knowing, to leave a deposit. Although the very proposal was an attack upon my gentility, I made no reply; but pulling out a handful of guineas, laid down two on the counter, and walked away, that I might find another shop at which we might order the livery of Timothy; but this was only as a reconnoitre, as I did not intend to order his liveries until I could ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... was sorry to hear that you lost your purse. Perhaps the finder was more in want than you are, and it may be of service to him, and you can do without it. A little money is sometimes useful. You must bear in mind that it will not be becoming in a Virginia girl now to be fine or fashionable, and that gentility as well as self- respect requires moderation in dress and gaiety. While her people are suffering, she should practise self-denial and show her sympathy in their affliction. We are all pretty well. Your poor mother suffers ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... 'pleased' than otherwise. I have now mentioned all who have done me the honour to notice me and mine, that is, my bear and my book, except the editor of the 'Satirist', who, it seems, is a gentleman—God wot! I wish he could impart a little of his gentility to his subordinate scribblers. I hear that Mr. JERNINGHAM[1] is about to take up the cudgels for his Maecenas, Lord Carlisle. I hope not: he was one of the few, who, in the very short intercourse I had with him, treated me with kindness when a boy; and ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... not a landlord. It suits my purpose better, and is in every way more convenient, to rent a small house on a yearly agreement. But if I were a landlord, I would not allow any tenant of mine to do anything that tended to undermine and honeycomb the gentility of the district. I should take a very short method with such a tenant. I should say to him or her: "Now, then, either this stops, or you go out this instant." That would settle it. However, I ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... as Sam—or perhaps, even Langdon—would have been in the same circumstances. I wonder if there is another country where so many gentlemen and ladies are born, or another where so many of them have their natural gentility educated ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... Leah, etc. They have also a way of deducing women names out of the mens, as from Charles, Charlotte, from Lowis, Lowisse, from Paul, Pauline, from Jean, Jeane. Thir be much more frequent amongs the baser sort then the gentility, just as it is wt the names of Bessie, Barbary, Alison and others ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... Mrs. Church. "This is a nice state of things, I must say. Who minds what a slip of a young lady says?—meaning no offence to you, miss; but I have been spending my money right and left, getting tea that beats all for gentility, and now one of the ladies is off as it were in a flash of an eye. What about ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... the bounds of modesty and respect, and he has gradually separated himself from the rabble of bettors and blackguards of whom he was once the most conspicuous, and tacitly asserted his own independence and acquired gentility without ever presuming towards those whom he has been accustomed to regard with deference. His position is now more anomalous than ever, for a member of Parliament is a great man, though there appear no reasons why the suffrages of the blackguards of Pontefract ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... There was that about his humble mien, his tired look, his decayed-gentility clothes, that almost reached the mustard, seed of charity that still remained, remote and lonely, in the empty vastness of my heart, notwithstanding I observed a portfolio under his arm, and said to myself, Behold, Providence ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the same time, at Versailles a very beautiful woman, the Countess Lamotte. She traced her lineage to the kings of France, and, by her vices, struggled to sustain a style of ostentatious gentility. She was consumed by an insatiable thirst for recognized rank and wealth, and she had no conscience to interfere, in the slightest degree, with any means which might lead to those results. Though somewhat notorious, as ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... hereafter, let it be Miss Martineau's Deerbrook. It is really very striking; and parts of it are very true and very beautiful. It is not so true, or so thoroughly clear and harmonious, among delineations of English middle-class gentility, as Miss Austen's books, especially as Pride and Prejudice, which I think exquisite; but it is worth reading. The hour and the Man is eloquent, but an absurd exaggeration.—I hold out so valorously against this ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... under the shelter of mighty rocks, passed more ruins. We stopped to examine these older ruins of the ancient O'Ruarkes. A Milesian gentleman showed us through them. It is the correct thing to have a ruin on your place; it is a kind of patent of gentility. If a banshee could be thrown in along with a ruin, a new man would give a great price for an old place. But banshees are getting scarce and decline to be caught. This ruin has been patched over, clumsily but earnestly, so that hardly a speck of the original ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... writers Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all his books a single remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society which is not either commonplace or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates, may serve as examples. To say that these passages are sophistical would be to pay them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable observations made by himself in the course ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... "I am utterly wretched now. The simplest gentility—" she paused, but her wish was clear. He restrained himself with difficulty. Drifting slowly across the scattered roofs of the town was the leaden smoke of his mills and fires; as they drove into the main street the thin crash ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... not particular how or what they eat; of necessity they abandon the refinements of civilisation as needless and cumbrous. To-day, however, partly to protract his stay and so give Spurling time, partly to assert his waning gentility, the memory of which in its heyday Strangeways shared, he attempted to be lavish, to set a table, and to entertain. For cloth he spread a dress-length of gaudy muslin, such as Indians purchase for their squaws. He opened some tins of canned goods that he might provide his guest with more ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... of encountering the Contessa with a basket containing a couple of mutton cutlets, a ball of wool and some tooth-powder. So she put on her Prince of Wales's cloak, and, postponing further reflection over the bridge-party till a less busy occasion, set forth in unencumbered gentility for the morning gossip. At the corner of the High Street, she ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... and unceremonious demand the knight flushed angrily, frowned, made an expressive gesture with his lips and his nose which suggestively indicated that there was something offensive in the air between the wind and his gentility, ending the pantomime by finding a pass and handing it over to his "nigger," then—not deigning to speak—motioned him and it to the threatening figure. As this black man came forward, Brooks, looking at him a moment, cried ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... opinion sufficiently loud to strike upon the tympanum of the poor fellow at the door, I could perceive his dark eyes glisten, and the blood tinge his woe-begone cheeks; his lips trembled with emotion: there was an evident struggle between offended gentility, and urgent necessity. ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... a gentleman who undertakes the care and education of a few backward boys, who are beguiled and trained to study by kind discipline, without the least severity (which too often frustrates the end desired). Situation extremely healthy. Sea and country air; deep gravelly soil. Christian gentility assiduously cultivated on sound Church principles. Diet unsurpassed. Wardrobes carefully preserved. The course of instruction comprises English, classics, mathematics, and science. Inclusive terms, ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... more than moral forgery; it is with them an uttering base coin upon false pretences. It is generally the wives and families of professional men who are afflicted with pretension to fashion, of which we shall give abundant examples when we come to treat of gentility-mongers. But the heavy swell, who is of all classes, from the son and heir of an opulent blacking-maker down to the lieutenant of a marching regiment on half-pay, is utterly destitute of brains, deplorably illiterate, and therefore incapable, by nature and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... abortive attempt or two made in other quarters, I was successful in procuring lodgings for a few days in the house of a respectable widow lady of the place, where I found comfort and quiet on very moderate terms. The cast of faded gentility which attached to so many of the older houses of Kirkwall,—remnants of a time when the wealthier Udallers of the Orkneys used to repair to their capital at the close of autumn, to while away in each other's society their dreary ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... were allowed no privileges such as their former habits impelled them to seek. If they played a flute in the hearing of the overseer, they were commanded to be silent instantly. If they dared to put a gold ring on their finger, even that trifling pretension to gentility was detected and disallowed by the jealous overseer. (These things were specified by Mr. G. himself.) They were seldom permitted to associate with the overseers as equals. The only thing which reconciled the book-keepers to this abject state, was the reflection ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... sober symphony in brown to a gorgeous wealth of color that might vie with the most audacious wall-paper of an aesthetic age. This "belated traveller" of a carpet-bag had all the appearance of a faded and bedraggled gentility,—was, in fact, a veritable tramp among luggage. It sagged down as it stood on the floor. It ran here and there into strings, as of shoes untied and coat fastened together by twine in lieu of buttons. And it was trampy with mouldy discoloration and travel-stains. It was of vast dimensions, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... of birth, and the presumption of new men in attempting to found a new system of gentility, Boswell proceeds: "Mr. Thrale had married Miss Hester Lynch Salusbury, of good Welsh extraction, a lady of lively talents, improved by education. That Johnson's introduction into Mr. Thrale's family, which contributed so much to ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... netting, stained tablecloth, and hard cane chairs, expanded until she fancied herself in the drawing-room of Blenheim House. Between the landladies there was little enough to choose. Mrs. Raithby Lawrence, notwithstanding her caustic tongue and suspicious nature, had at least made some pretense at gentility. The woman who faced her now—hard-featured, with narrow, suspicious eyes and a mass of florid hair—was unmistakably and ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... within the sacred triangle of gentility (as it was known in Eden Valley), of which the manse, the General's bungalow, and the residence of Mr. Shepstone Oglethorpe occupied the three angles, my grandmother was the first caller upon the lonely children in the great house ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... their work a moment as they saw me glance towards them, and each, with the simple gentility of the German working man, quietly stood on his head until I had finished ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... de Lamotte's contemplated visit to Paris, Derues was filled with alarm. If she were living free and independent in Paris she might find out the truth about the real state of his affairs, and then good-bye to Buisson-Souef and landed gentility! No, if Mme. de Lamotte were to come to Paris, she must come as the guest of the Derues, a pleasant return for the hospitality accorded to the grocer at Buisson-Souef. The invitation was given and readily accepted; M. de Lamotte still had enough confidence ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... seem, too; and that is the only agreeable part of the matter. For the customary attentions of your Marquis of Montcalm—I warrant me, Duncan, that he of Lothian would buy a dozen such marquisates—but if the news of the letter were bad, the gentility of this French monsieur would certainly compel him ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... 'First Class' you find quite a collection of shabby gentility. And you'd never believe what a lot you can get there ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... upon the town in sudden glory, threw all her companions into the shade. Never had such a fine lady of comedy been seen, said the critics; never had an actress (who was not expected to be over-versed in the affairs of the "quality") displayed such gentility, high-breeding and evidence of being—Heaven knew how—quite "to the manner born." Never was woman so bubbling over with humour, said the people. As for Colley, he was delighted, of course, but believing that ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... Gentility, now hereditary, was derived from the tenure of land; the idea of it was emphasised by the adoption of surnames and armorial bearings. A close aristocracy was created, somewhat modified by the right claimed by the king of creating nobles. Prelates and abbots ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... neighbourhoods where the Donkey goes in at the street door, and appears to live up-stairs, for I have examined the back-yard from over the palings, and have been unable to make him out. Gentility, nobility, Royalty, would appeal to that donkey in vain to do what he does for a costermonger. Feed him with oats at the highest price, put an infant prince and princess in a pair of panniers on his back, adjust his delicate trappings to a nicety, take him to the softest ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... pretty, dark-eyed, smooth-cheeked little creatures, with clear skins of burnt umber color, and the reddest mouths in the world, until the girl grows up and her mother tattooes her lips blue, for gentility's sake. ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... of mine he may keep it. I know its tenor and I am not eager to know the very words in which my lady says 'No.' HO! HO! HO!" he laughed, "I will go to the Swamp; my scented rival in his perfumed clothing, will hardly wish the smell of the tanning pits to come between him and his gentility." ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... The politest of Roman poets has felicitously described how the two halves of a warrior's head fell to right and left of his vertebral column. Mr Kipling's savagery is of this excessively cultivated kind. It is not atavism or a sinister resolution to stand in the way of progress and gentility. Mr Kipling's warrior tales, in fact, allow us clearly to realise that Mr Kipling's real inspiration and interest is far away from the battle-field and the barrack. They are the kind of battle story which is usually written by sedentary poets ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... admiration in her clear, honest eye, then taking a coarse towel, she rubbed a large silver spoon, till it shone brighter and brighter, and laid it by the side of my bowl. She had first spread a white napkin under it, to give my simple repast an appearance of neatness and gentility. The bowl itself was white, with a wreath of roses round the rim, both inside and out. Those rosy garlands had been for years the delight of my eyes. I always hailed the appearance of the glowing leaves, when the milky fluid sunk ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... to southern electors, became amateur huntsmen, and in New York and Boston the chase was pursued with all the zeal and apparent delight that could have been expected in Guinea or Virginia. Slave-catching was the test, at once, of patriotism and gentility, while sympathy for the wretched fugitive was the mark of vulgar fanaticism. The north was humbled in the dust, by the action of her own recreant sons. Every "good citizen" found himself, for the first time in the history of mankind, a slave-catcher by law. Every official, appointed ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... mute on the edge of a chair Sits a thin-faced lady, a stranger there, A type of decayed gentility; And by some small signs he well can guess That she comes to him ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... the helpless form of an invalid child, a girl about eleven years old. The room was comfortless. An old, high-colored piece of carpeting half covered the rough floor; its originally gaudy pattern, out of which all but the red had faded, bearing witness to some past stage of family gentility, and serving to ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... Soto. His parents were Spanish nobles, perhaps the most haughty class of nobility which has ever existed. It was, however, a decayed family, so impoverished as to find it difficult to maintain the position of gentility. The parents were not able to give their son a liberal education. Their rank did not allow them to introduce him to any of the pursuits of industry; and so far as can now be learned, the years of his early ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... whether on their own initiative or on that of their friends, in more elaborate and expensive forms of procedure than were habitual to the humbler ranks of contemporary society. But the Worcester diocese covered a very wide area, and was honeycombed with Shakespeare families of all degrees of gentility. The William Shakespeare whom Anne Whately was licensed to marry may have been of a superior station, to which marriage by license was deemed appropriate. On the unwarranted assumption of the identity of the William Shakespeare ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... has just been here—such a pleasing, clever young man, speaking Italian perfectly, and French extremely well. He is the son of some fellah of Lower Egypt, sent to study at Pisa, and has not lost the Arab gentility and elegance by a Frenghi education. We fraternized greatly, and the young hakeem was delighted at my love for his people, and my high opinion of their intelligence. He is now gone to inspect the sick, and is to see me again and give me directions. He was very ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... loved things artistic in design— Order and beauty, all about him. Yet So kind he was, if it befell his lot To dine within the humble peasant's cot, He made it seem his native soil to be, And thus displayed the true gentility. ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... he said, my daughter. He had a swiftness of tongue, for which I am myself famous, especially in fortune-telling; but he used the language of gentility, and a shortness of speech which you will observe among those who are accustomed to order what they want instead of asking for it. I had hard work to summon voice to reply to him, my daughter, and I cannot ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... damn!" God damn!—damn the knocking about and pushing! I see at a glance that these people have enough to do. They live on a grand scale, and though food and clothes are dearer with them than with us, they must still be better fed and clothed than we are—as gentility requires. Moreover, they have enormous debts, yet occasionally, in a vainglorious mood, they make ducks and drakes of their guineas, pay other nations to box about for their pleasure, give their kings a handsome douceur ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... dine. The place was crowded, and rather shamefacedly (as is the national way) he sat down at a small table opposite a girl in a light-blue blouse and a very big hat, who was eating risotto and drinking lager beer. She assumed an air of exaggerated primness and gentility, keeping her eyes down toward her plate, and putting very small quantities into her mouth at a time. Glad of distraction, Harry watched her with amusement. At last ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... And after all, she was common stuff—a farmer's daughter, bred at the National School. By taking her he would be making just a yokel of himself.... Yet was it worth clinging to his simulacrum of gentility—boosted up by his father's title and a few dead rites, such as the late dinner which had impressed her so much. The only real difference between the Goddens and the Trevors was that the former knew their job ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... angles to the shore, running up the valley of the Avon; but it soon ceased to be fishy, and became agricultural, owning a few cottages of very humble gentility, which were wont to hang out boards to attract lodgers of small means. At one of these Grace rang, and obtained admittance to a parlour with crazy French windows opening on a little strip of garden. In a large wheeled chair, between the fire and the window, surrounded by numerous little appliances ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... be applauded or hissed by pit, boxes, and galleries? Could he forego the renown of being the first wit of his age? Could he attain that renown without sullying what he valued quite as much, his character for gentility? The history of his life is the history of a conflict between these two impulses. In his youth the desire of literary fame had the mastery; but soon the meaner ambition overpowered the higher, and obtained supreme dominion over ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of ironing. She thought it peculiar but genteel, and gentility is always desirable. There must be something about the climate of California that is especially inspiring to authors—a kind of magnetism in the atmosphere that draws out all the literary talent which may be lying dormant in their souls—so that any one desirous ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 34, November 19, 1870 • Various
... but influential class of Americans who copied foreign manners, the United States of America had gained something of a national character in European estimation. In the New World alone, labor was deemed compatible with gentility. The increasing facilities of traffic and manufacture gave a tremendous impulse to the development of the country. Thus a surprising number of railroads were opened in the States of New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Improvements connecting Philadelphia and Pittsburg were completed ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... himself, never guessed the depths of his contempt for all they stood for. They had the dollars, they were on top; but some day the nemesis of Good-breeding would smite them—the army of the ghosts of Gentility would rise, and with "Marse Robert" and "Jeb" Stuart at their head, would sweep away ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... is always on the lookout for an easy berth with good pay and no work. Let the young man whose conceit greatly exceeds his brains, be ashamed of his cane and kid gloves; but never let a man who works be ashamed of his hard hands. There is an old proverb which says, "Mere gentility sent to market, won't buy ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... India, where the government was irresponsible. The English courts of justice there were more terrible to the natives than the very wrongs they pretended to redress. The customs and laws and moral ideas of the conquered country were spurned and ignored by the greedy scions of gentility who were sent to rule a population ten times larger than that between the Humber ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... the presence of persons of high standing, found it impossible to forget his humble birth, and suspected that in some way there was always a lack of gentility about him; while with companions of more modest pretensions he must maintain the distant dignity which he ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker
... tell me that you had been hurt, Benita," he exclaimed in his light, refined voice, one of the stamps of that gentility of blood and breeding whereof all his rough years and errors had been unable to deprive him. "They only told me that you were saved. It is part of my ill-fortune that at our first moment of greeting I should give you pain, who have ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... for over two years. She had not seen him since before his confirmation, which she looked on vaguely as some sort of civil ceremony like a superior kind of getting apprenticed ... perhaps as being definitely apprenticed to gentility. She had had Vassie "done" at Plymouth for that reason. This strange boy, this young man, was coming to-day to her house, which was his house ... coming to upset everything. She stared again, trying to trace the features she remembered after a fashion, but which love had never imprinted on her memory ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... timid creatures who are to be found now and then painfully earning the bread which is very bitter to them in richer people's houses, and preserving in their little silent souls some fetish in the shape of a scrap of gentility, which is their sole comfort, or almost their sole comfort. Mrs. Copperhead's fetish was the dear recollection that she was "an officer's daughter;" or rather this had been her fetish in the days when she had nothing, and was free to plume herself on the reflected glory. Whether in the depths ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... like them among the "Yankee" traders of the North. A claim of that sort is likely to be aggressively made by those who have least title to make it, and, as strife between North and South grew hotter, the gentility of the latter infected with additional vulgarity the political controversy of private life and even of Congress. But, as observant Northerners were quite aware, these pretensions had a foundation of fact. An Englishman, then or now, in chance meetings with ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... dismal spot, nevertheless, with not even an air of faded gentility to recommend it. It seemed to have no better days behind it, nor to hold within itself the possibility of any future improvement. It was narrow, and extended only the length of a city block, yet it was by no means wanting in many of those luxuries which mark ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... had been to find the address of a little shop-girl, a niece of Norah's, a child who had been educated at one of the ward schools, and whom no power could induce to take a place as waitress or chambermaid. To stand twelve or fourteen hours behind the counter of a Grand street store met her ideas of gentility and of personal freedom far better than yielding to the requirements of a mistress; and the six dollars a week went in cheap finery till the hard times forced her to make it part of the family fund. Then sore trouble came. The father had died, the mother was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... faculty of Fisk, like those who in large cities man college settlements, day and night seek in every way and by all means to arouse and perpetuate the highest Christian ideals. Added to these are intellectual training, musical culture and a spirit of true gentility. The student body honors scholarship, awakens ambitions, cultivates good manners, frowns upon untidyness of appearance, while by firmly sustained legislation the faculty forbids any display of extravagance in attire. Patches and ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 01, January, 1900 • Various
... was a lady, whose natural-born gentility poverty might obscure but could not conceal. Years of want and struggling deprivation had dimmed her charms; but they had neither bowed nor bent her stately form, nor quenched the inherent virtue of self-respect, nor deprived her of the correct and appropriate diction, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... impossible to deny it absolutely. But if the company of the Human Comedy falls short in this respect, it is not because some of its members do "shady" things. It is because the indefinable, but to those who can perceive it unmistakable, aura of "gentility"—in the true and not the debased sense—is, at best, questionably present. This is not the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... gaunt quadrangle, of a bell hourly booming over the traffic of the city to recall him from the public-house where he has been lunching, or the streets where he has been wandering fancy-free. His college life has little of restraint, and nothing of necessary gentility. He will find no quiet clique of the exclusive, studious and cultured; no rotten borough of the arts. All classes rub shoulders on the greasy benches. The raffish young gentleman in gloves must measure his scholarship with the plain, clownish laddie from the parish ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... town with all the airs of a big one; with none of the charming informality of the old Southern small town; none of the engaging ruggedness of the established Middle-Western town; none of the faded gentility of the old New England town. A strident dame, this, in red satin and diamonds, insisting that she is a lady. Interesting, withal, and ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... pleased to undo the door?—What ails you?—are you at your prayers in private, to complete the devotion which you left unfinished in public?—Surely we must have a screened seat for you in the chapel, that your gentility may be free from the eyes of common folks!" Still no whisper was heard in reply. "Well, master Roland," said the waiting-maid, "I must tell my mistress, that if she would have an answer, she must either come herself, or send those on errand to you ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... account of three things, her age, her ugliness, and her low degree. The lady, not at all offended, replied with excellent arguments to all his objections. She showed him that with age is discretion, with ugliness security from rivals, and that all true gentility depends, not upon the accident of birth, but upon the character of ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... purse. Perhaps the finder was more in want than you are, and it may be of service to him, and you can do without it. A little money is sometimes useful. You must bear in mind that it will not be becoming in a Virginia girl now to be fine or fashionable, and that gentility as well as self- respect requires moderation in dress and gaiety. While her people are suffering, she should practise self-denial and show her sympathy in their affliction. We are all pretty well. Your poor mother suffers more pain than usual during this ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... your stick, tell us what's up,' said an old Republican colonel, who cared not a rap for Imperial gentility and choice language. ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... never be forgotten that a cab is a thing of yesterday, and that he never was anything better. A hackney-cab has always been a hackney-cab, from his first entry into life; whereas a hackney-coach is a remnant of past gentility, a victim to fashion, a hanger-on of an old English family, wearing their arms, and, in days of yore, escorted by men wearing their livery, stripped of his finery, and thrown upon the world, like a once-smart footman when he is no longer ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... married about a year after Fanny Clayton's wedding, to a sprig of gentility with about as much force of character as herself. This took place on the same night that Lieut. Harwood, son of Mrs. Harwood before alluded to, led to the altar Mary Clayton, the sister of Fanny, who was conceded by all, to be the loveliest girl they had ever ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... they could not afford to be exclusive, for there were but twenty or thirty families in the town that laid any claims to gentility, and they had all to be invited in order to fill the hall and pay the bills. Thus it came to pass that Paul Jespersen, the book-keeper in the fish-exporting firm of Broby & Larsen, received a card, although, to be sure, there had been a long debate in the committee as to where the ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... was nothing genteel in such actions and she wouldn't gin in a mite till that day in Vienna she had a letter that brought her nose down where it belonged, and she acted different after readin' it and didn't talk any more about gentility or the onbroken prosperity of the Mudd-Weakdews, and I wuz shocked myself to hear ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... and minds of the French people. Enterprise was deadened, invention crippled. Honesty was nothing, honor everything. Life was of little value. Labor was the badge of servility; laziness the very badge and passport of gentility. The serf-owning spirit was an iron wall between noble and not noble—the only unyielding wall between France and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... and wilful as of old, she had brought those qualities into such subjection to her beauty that it was impossible and out of nature—or I thought so—to separate them from her beauty. Truly it was impossible to dissociate her presence from all those wretched hankerings after money and gentility that had disturbed my boyhood,—from all those ill-regulated aspirations that had first made me ashamed of home and Joe,—from all those visions that had raised her face in the glowing fire, struck it out of the iron on the anvil, extracted it from ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... Death shadow-near Till I, unfrighted, wake His charnel fear In every face that wariful Meets mine; this bud-mouth make Unkissable With kisses; and up-lap My soul's youth sap Till 't withers to a clutch about the gold You think pays all; yet from this reedy mould, This swamped, unfructant sedge, Gentility's marsh edge, I, on free wing, shall take My swan-course o'er the brake, Leaving the chanson of thy sin to thee Who hast not seen, not touched the ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... saw a cottage with a double coach-house, A cottage of gentility! And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin Is pride ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... that you should be satisfied with so scanty a provision of gentility in the olden time, Dickon. Most of the American genealogists commence their traditions like the stories for children, with three brothers, taking especial care that one of the triumvirate shall be the pro genitor of any ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... the friend thus addressed—was a card-sharper, and he instantly seized the opportunity to make something out of the happy disposition of this modern prodigal son, this scion of gentility. With the utmost frankness he explained to the young man his wonderful method of keeping his pockets full of money, and showed that nothing could be easier than for Olivier to go and do likewise in his terrible condition;—in short, on one hand there were within his grasp, ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... practical features.—C.D.W.]—stimulated industry, thrift, the inclination to settle down to the necessary hard work of the world, or have they bred idleness, indisposition to work, a vaporous ambition in politics, and that sort of conceit of gentility of which the world has already enough? If any one is in doubt about this he can satisfy himself by a sojourn in different localities in the South. The condition of New Orleans and its negro universities is often cited. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the theory that ladies should dress inconspicuously in the public streets and hostelries, and for a woman to do otherwise, he considered, was to prove that she had no claim upon gentility. Evan used to go so far as to say that the only people who display their fine clothes in hotels are those who have no homes ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... waiters, coupled with the fact that all this was speeding onward through the night, made me feel as though I were partaking of a repast in an enchanted palace. The easy urbanity of the three well-dressed Americans gave me a sense of uncanny gentility and bliss ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... Saris told me that some have two; but these are of the baser sort and slaves, as he was told by one of these marked by this note of gentility.—Purch.] ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... gentility? People in different stations in England entertain different ideas of what is genteel, {329} but it must be something gorgeous, glittering, or tawdry to be considered genteel by any of them. The beau-ideal of the English aristocracy, of course with some exceptions, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... a peg in life, old sport, that's all," laughed Carrie. "In Italy wearing a hat is a sign of gentility. No work-girl ever has one on her head even on Sundays. I offered a cast-off of mine to the bonne at a hotel once, and she eyed it longingly, but said she daren't wear it if she took it, her friends would think ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... times, and we don't wanter be too previous," suggested Wynbrook. But their verdict, when they at last met the new cousin, was unanimous, and their praises extravagant. To their inexperienced eyes she seemed to possess all her aunt's gentility and precision of language, with a vivacity and playfulness all her own. In a few days the whole camp was in love with her. Yet she dispensed her favors with such tactful impartiality and with such innocent enjoyment—free from any suspicion of coquetry—that there were no ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the better this strange intruder. The moonlight which fell in pale green bars across the Bokhara beneath her slippered feet; the melodramatic situation which had brought them together; the unmistakable gentility of this compelling intruder of her maidenly domain; the curious collapse of his aggressiveness—all these things united to cast a sympathetic spell over her. She was foolish—to the extreme of placing herself in a ridiculous situation! She was culpable—in protecting ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... small diamond-shaped panes of very poor greenish glass set in lead, there being so much lead and so little glass that the room is but dark in the brightest sunshine. Indeed, it is decidedly a sign of gentility that the house has any window at all, beyond the square hole with the ...
— Our Little Lady - Six Hundred Years Ago • Emily Sarah Holt
... extensive cod-fishing and even whaling enterprises. Its harbor has suffered since; the rails too have gone through to Spain, and St. Jean is left mildly and interestingly mournful, in its lessened power, its decayed gentility. ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... suggested the nurse, a simpering piece of faded gentility, who did not presume to state her name as a fact, but merely offered it as a ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... my mistress speak of you." Hillyard knew enough of maids to understand that "mistress" was an unusual word with them. Here, it seemed, was a paragon of maids, who was quite content to be publicly Stella Croyle's maid, whose gentility suffered no offence by the recognition ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... Shabby gentility has nothing so characteristic as its hat. There is always an unnatural calmness about its nap, and an unwholesome gloss, suggestive ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... moment, with splendour to astonish, and with grandeur to subdue her lover. To tell the sad truth, she was no longer sure that it would be well to encourage him on the old footing; was she not standing on tiptoe, her skirts in her hand, on the brink of the brook that parted serfdom from gentility, on the point of stepping daintily across, and leaving domestic slavery, red hands, caps, and obedience behind her? How then was she to marry a man that had black nails, and smelt of glue? It was incumbent on her at least, for ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... profile,' and a vulgar face in profile is always seen at its vulgarest; and the nex-retrousse, the coarse mouth, the double chin, are most forcibly exhibited in this limning by Wright; who did not, like Reynolds, or like Lawrence, cast a nuance of gentility over every subject of his pencil. Horace—can we not hear him in imagination?—is telling his friends how Sir Robert used to celebrate the day on which he sent in his resignation, as a fete; then he would point out to his visitors a Conversation-piece, one of Reynolds's earliest efforts ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... cadets of a good one out of a fresh consignment packed in sawdust was eagerly watched by the 'Johns.' Of course we were imitating our parents." It was no doubt these cutty pipes which are referred to in one of the sporting books of Robert Surtees as the "clay pipes of gentility." ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... you a lesson in gentility," she said. "Understand, Miss Beauty, that English Cats veil natural acts, which are opposed to the laws of English respectability, in the most profound mystery, and banish all that is improper, applying to the creature, as you have ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... of true gentle-breeding (one does not like to say gentility) lies in the wish and the art to be agreeable. Good-breeding is surface-Christianity. Every look, movement, tone, expression, subject of discourse, that may give pain to another is habitually excluded ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... as fell into his clutches. They had already vowed vengeance upon him, these sometime brethren of the coast, for his betrayal of their confidence at Panama; they had further resented his honor of knighthood, his cloak of respectability, his assumption of gentility, and now that he hanged and punished right and left without mercy, their anger and animosity were raised to the point of fury, and many of them swore deeply with bitter oaths that if they ever caught him defenceless they would make him pay dearly in torture and torment ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... from a distance, with no personal knowledge, and a contempt for the foreign mother, and the pretensions to gentility. He would have been far kinder if his cousin had ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... her was irresistible—the soft grey ripple of hair about her brow, the shy girlish eyes, the long delicate hand with the fingers which, in spite of their declared readiness to work, trembled a little, and the voice which spoke the Northern speech with such clear-cut gentility, that the words fell on the ear with a certain cool freshness, like the splash of water in a fountain or the tinkle of a burn flowing ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... not know that she seemed clever. An exquisite, kind refinement, with a shade of quietism, gathered perhaps from the nuns, was what chiefly struck us. Or rather, upon that first occasion, we were conscious of a sense as of district-visiting on our part, and reduced evangelical gentility on the part of our hostess. The other impression followed after she was more at ease, and came with Stanislao and his little girl to dine on board the Casco. She had dressed for the occasion: wore white, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... despise the begging-letter, and he suffered his last punishment for receiving what another's courage had conveyed. His enterprise was not seldom rewarded with success, and for a decade of years he continued to preserve an appearance of gentility; but it is plain, even from his own narrative, that he was scarce an artist, and we shall best understand him if we recognise that he was a Philistine among thieves. He lived in an age of pocket-picking, and skill ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... I know shy neighbourhoods where the Donkey goes in at the street door, and appears to live up-stairs, for I have examined the back-yard from over the palings, and have been unable to make him out. Gentility, nobility, Royalty, would appeal to that donkey in vain to do what he does for a costermonger. Feed him with oats at the highest price, put an infant prince and princess in a pair of panniers on his ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... appearances. Living beyond our means does not incorporate the thought that, in order to save every possible cent, we should become slipshod and shabby. Carelessness in dress takes away from our rating as nothing else will for it has to do with first impressions of those with whom we come in contact. Gentility pays dividends of the highest order, being, as it is, a badge of character. Neatness bespeaks character, and it is just as cheap in dollars and cents to keep ourselves respectably clothed as to indulge in shoddy apparel under the delusion that we have saved money on the purchase ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... a cheap swell. In his dress he caricatured the fashion, and exhibited a sort of pretentious gentility which betrayed his innate vulgarity. He stared in wonder when a boy with a bundle under his arm started from his seat, and hurried toward him with the greeting: "How do ...
— Herbert Carter's Legacy • Horatio Alger
... highest grade of traders, the merchants, whom he defines by what he calls the vulgar expression, as being "such as trade beyond sea." Although he was eloquent in many books and pamphlets in upholding the dignity of trade, and lost no opportunity of scoffing at pretentious gentility, he never allows us to forget that this was the grade to which he himself belonged, and addresses the petty trader from a certain altitude. He speaks in the preface to the Complete Tradesman of unfortunate creatures who have blown themselves up in ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... men are not particular how or what they eat; of necessity they abandon the refinements of civilisation as needless and cumbrous. To-day, however, partly to protract his stay and so give Spurling time, partly to assert his waning gentility, the memory of which in its heyday Strangeways shared, he attempted to be lavish, to set a table, and to entertain. For cloth he spread a dress-length of gaudy muslin, such as Indians purchase for their squaws. He opened some tins of canned goods that he might provide his guest with ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... cap of Lincoln green, the puffed and ruffled sleeves, the petticoat of green-drugget cloth, the high heeled leather shoes, with their green ribbon bows, and the riding mask of black velvet which Debby remembered to have heard, only ladies of the highest gentility wore."[129] ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... had the old woman's approval. In the first place, he was related to the Frenches, and this in her eyes was a patent of gentility. Then, he had always been kind to little Betty and particularly civil to herself. He not only never omitted to ask after her health, but also inquired as to her pet ailments of "misery in her foot" and "whirlin' in her head," with an interest which flattered her deeply. But it went further ...
— Mam' Lyddy's Recognition - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... the term "gentleman" being legally applicable to every man who has nothing to do and is out of the workhouse, cannot be accepted, as it would of necessity include thieves, mendicants and out-door paupers. The American police have been compelled, to defend the border-line of gentility against the encroachments of their vagabond gold-seekers, card-sharpers and ruffians, and confine the term to those of respectable calling. In California the term may be applied to every individual of the male gender and the Caucasian race, the line being drawn at Chinamen. An ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... evidently someone who sought to keep him neatly mended up, for her woman's eye had caught that detail in a glance. Through his inebriety lurked a ghost-like suggestion of past gentility. She turned impulsively back, beckoning to him as she searched her purse. In it were two quarters and one of ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... wishes to play she will reply "Shoot, boy!" and you should then select some spot suitable for the game and assist her, if she wishes your aid, to kneel on the ground. It might be an added mark of gentility to offer her your handkerchief or coat upon which ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... town they went, the Wollstonecrafts seem to have given signs of gentility and good social standing, which won for them, if not many, at least respectable friends. At Barking an intimacy sprang up between them and the family of Mr. Bamber Gascoyne, Member of Parliament. But Mary was too young to profit by this friendship. It was most ruthlessly interrupted three ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... the full benefit of it. Criticism can afford to be charitable to the clever, worthless man, now that no one admires or tries to respect him. Again, it may be advanced, in Hook's behalf, that political animosity—a less despicable, though not less hurtful passion than love of gentility—contributed to Hook's dislike of the quarter on the north side of Holborn. As a humorist he ridiculed, as a panderer to fashionable prejudices he sneered at, Bloomsbury; but as a tory he cherished a genuine antagonism to the district of town that was associated ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... occupations in which men engage are determined by the social prestige attaching to them no less than by economic considerations. The pay of stenographers is no less than that of primary-school teachers; it is often much more; yet many a girl remains a teacher for the gentility which is traditionally associated with the profession. In the same way many girls, in spite of the fact that they are economically and physically better off in domestic service than in factory work, still prefer the latter because of the social inferiority ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... caused by accident and sometimes made by tradesmen, but that good manners are the same to-day that they were hundreds of years ago, and that though the ways in which they are shown change, the basis is always the same, being kindness and gentility." ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... the greatest element in the cheapness of colonial life is its comparative want of 'gentility.' The necessity to keep up appearances is not one-sixth as strong as in England. The earthen pot cannot altogether flow down stream in company with the tin kettle, but it can more safely get within a shorter distance of its metallic rival. Rich ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... I desired to restrict my activities to boys coming from homes of the utmost culture and refinement, where principles of undoubted gentility were implanted from the cradle up. Yet it would seem that the germ of the thought touching on the Boy Scouts lingered within that marvellous human organism, the brain, resulting finally in consequences of an actually direful character. Of that, however, more ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... dainty cap with flying streamers, was sitting by the fireside spinning. She had heard the news of Pete as Philip passed through to Sulby, and was now wondering if it was not her duty to acquaint Uncle Peter. The sweet and natty old gentlewoman, brought up in the odour of gentility, was thinking on the lines of poor Bridget, Black Tom when dying under the bare scraas, that a man's son was his son in ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... persons and in their lives, the models for the masses of the people below them. Long after the nobility has lost every other social function connected with its vocation the ideals of the nobility have survived in our conception of the gentleman, genteel manners and bearing—gentility. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... say that he stands fifth, the Mandya, Manska, Debabon, and Banuon leading, while below him stand without any question the Maggugan and the Mamnua. He has not the height, the proportions, the fairness, nor the gentility of the first three. He lacks the nobility, courage, and intelligence of the fourth,[4] but he maintains his superiority over the Maggugan, whose repellent features, sparse hair, scanty clothing, and low intelligence put him only ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... Museum must have been as impenetrable as a Bastille. We imagine the prim under-librarian glancing with a supercilious expression upon the names and addresses of many poor, aspiring, honourable men—men, whose "condition," to use the phrase of the trustees, bespoke not the gentility of that vulgar age. In those days the weaver and the carpenter would as soon have contemplated a visit to St. James's Palace as have hoped for an admission ticket to the ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... more suggestive and imposing than Ehrenthal's had been. Passing through this door, the visitor entered an empty lobby, in which a shrewd youth spent the day as half porter, half errand-boy, and a spy besides. This youth differed from the original Itzig only by a species of shabby gentility in his appearance. He wore his master's old clothes—shining silk waistcoats, and a coat a little too large for him. He showed, in short, that the new firm was more advanced in matters of taste and toilette than the in many respects commonplace establishment of Ehrenthal. The visitor, ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... wickedness and extreme folly of swearing, he gives the words and imprecations then commonly in use; but which, happily for us, we never hear, except among the most degraded classes of society. Swearing was formerly considered to be a habit of gentility; but now it betrays the blackguard, even when disguised in genteel attire. Those dangerous diseases which are so surely engendered by filth and uncleanness, he calls not by Latin but by their plain English names. In every case, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... built, and made. And, directing and sometimes owning this human machinery, there has always been a superior class, bound usually by a point of honour not to toil, often warlike, often equestrian, and sometimes cultivated. In England this is the gentility, in most European countries it is organized as a nobility; it is represented in the history of India by the "twice born" castes, and in China—the most philosophically conceived and the most stably organized social system the old order ever developed—it finds its equivalent in the members of a ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... mean by this outrage?" she stormed. Her voice was low and rich, with a charming roundness that seemed the very hallmark of gentility. But, now, it was surcharged with an indignant amazement over the indignity put upon her by the representatives of the law. Then, abruptly, the blue eyes were softened in their fires, as by the ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... young thrush, who was born in that beautiful dingle where we last planted the —— fern. His home-nest was close to the ground, but the lower one is, the less fear of falling; and in woods, the elevation at which you sleep is a matter of taste, and not of expense or gentility. He awoke to life when the wood was dressed in the pale fresh green of early summer; and believing, like other folk, that his own home was at least the principal part of the world, earth seemed ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... enough to do it. Let this suffice concerning the Nature and Manners of the People in general: The ensuing Chapters will be spent in more particular accounts of them. And because they stand much upon their Birth and Gentility, and much of what is afterwards to be related hath reference unto it: I shall first speak of the various ranks and degrees ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... of the social transition bears upon all women: there is another which especially touches wives and mothers. In European countries, the aim at anything like gentility implies keeping one or more domestics to perform house-hold labors; but in our Free States every family aims at gentility, while not one in five keeps a domestic. The aim is not a foolish one, though follies may accompany it,—for the average ambition ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... baju. All had daggers, and several, who were evidently people of some consequence, had two in copper or silver sheaths. The latter had their teeth blackened, which was evidently looked on as a mark of gentility. They also wore turbans, while the lower orders only had little caps on their heads. The watering-place was some little way up the river, and while the mates proceeded there with the boats, I landed at the village or town. I had not proceeded far when I was given to understand ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... not eat bacon from his fingers, when a knife and fork had been especially provided for this purpose. Cyd accepted the rebuke, and thereafter imitated the manners of his companions, even carrying his ideas of gentility to extremes. ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... when the differences are not obvious," observed Eve. "Even London and Paris are not above the imputation of this folly. Sir George Templemore, if I understand him, wishes to know if we estimate gentility by streets, and ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... of things, ordinary course of things, ordinary run of things; matter of course; beaten path, beaten track, beaten ground. prescription, custom, use, usage, immemorial usage, practice; prevalence, observance; conventionalism, conventionality; mode, fashion, vogue; etiquette &c (gentility) 852; order of the day, cry; conformity &c 82; consuetude, dustoor^. one's old way, old school, veteris vestigia flammae [Lat.]; laudator temporis acti [Lat.]. rule, standing order, precedent, routine; red-tape, red-tapism^; pipe clay; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... yet no knowledge of it, but now I moved to him and plucked him by the sleeve and told him what was toward. In truth, I felt no small alarm for my friend, for I knew him to have no more than that passable facility with the sword which is essential to gentility. Then Messer Guido turned and came with me, and his friends followed him, and our numbers added to the circle that was forming about the disputants. So now, while Messer Simone was still angrily handling his sword-hilt, and while the smile still lingered on Dante's lips, Messer Guido stepped ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... upholders of a kind of caste system, men who were willing enough to raise themselves and their sons to a higher social plane, but objected on semi-theological grounds to any one from below doing likewise—neatly satirising them and their notions of gentility, and quoting Plato in support of his contention that what is wanted even more than means to help capacity to rise is "machinery by which to facilitate the descent of incapacity from the higher strata ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... officers here?" he exclaimed, turning away, however, from the second mate. "Where is Mr Grimes? what is the fellow about? send him here, some one. And you, sir—you think yourself a navigator— go and get your sextant and prove yourself one," he added, turning fiercely to me. "You young slips of gentility must be ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... the daughter of a reduced tradesman; she had high notions of gentility, but possessed more vanity and love of admiration than good sense. Neither of them could comprehend the true relation of parents. If they fed their children well, clothed them well, and sent them to the most reputable schools, they imagined that they had, in part, discharged their duty; and, wholly, ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... were dim and her natural force abated, her teeth, as she proudly told me, were her own. She obviously belonged to that rentier class who spend the evening of their days in the quiet town which serves as G.H.Q.—a town which has a kind of faded gentility, and which, behind its inscrutable house-fronts, conceals a good deal of quiet opulence in the matter of old china, silver, and oak. In her youth Madame had kept a pension and had had English demoiselles among ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... pot-pourri. Tapestry covered more than three-fourths of the wall, swinging gently in the draught from the open window, a harpischord stood in a corner, a couch that had apparently been occupied stood between the fireplace and the door, and a score of evidences indicated gentility and taste. ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... is not their crime that surprises, but their virtue; not their turbulence or discontent, but their inexplicable acquiescence. And yet there are still people who sneer at "the mob," "the vulgar herd," "the great unwashed," as though principles, gentility, and soap were privileges in reward of merit, and not the accidental luck of ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... psychological analysis, could not have explained why Mr. Hand was so objectionable to her. He was no relative of the family, she had discovered that; and, accustomed as she was to the old-fashioned gentility of a thrifty New England town, instinct told her that he could not possibly be one of its varied products. He might have come from anywhere; he talked so little that he was suspicious on that ground alone; and when he did speak, there was no accent at all that ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... walking with any people, who were not, at least, as well-dressed as themselves. I said that my country-folk in general had a great many admirable qualities, but at the same time a great many foibles, foremost amongst which last was a crazy admiration for what they called gentility, which made them sycophantic to their superiors in station, and extremely insolent to those whom they considered below them. He said that I had spoken his very thoughts, and then asked me whether I wished to be taken the most ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... Christian Scientists, and in that church, whose name I forget, but which is in the wide street or narrow piazza below the windows of the palace where the last Stuarts lived and died, my ineradicable love of gentility was flattered and my faith in the final sanctification of good society restored by the sight of gentlemen coming to and going from prayer with their silk hats ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... which lies just outside of Shepherd's Bush and Notting Hill. There it is that the Gipsy encampment may be found, squatting within an hour's walk of the Royal palaces and of the luxurious town mansions of our nobility and opulent classes, to the very west of the fashionable West-end, beyond the gentility of Bayswater and Whiteley's avenue of universal shopping. It is a curious spectacle in that situation, and might suggest a few serious reflections upon social contrasts at the centre and capital of the mighty British nation, which takes upon itself ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... cawings. But nature has been gently withdrawing such phenomena from the notice of Thomas Westwood's senses, from the time he began to miss the rooks. T. Westwood has passed a retired life in this hamlet of thirty or forty years, living upon the minimum which is consistent with gentility, yet a star among the minor gentry, receiving the bows of the tradespeople and courtesies of the alms-women daily. Children venerate him not less for his external show of gentry than they wonder at him for a gentle rising endorsation of ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... the plantation community. The merchants were plantation factors; the lawyers and doctors had country patrons; the wealthiest planters were town residents from time to time; and many prospering townsmen looked toward plantation retirement, carrying as it did in some degree the badge of gentility, as the crown of their careers. Furthermore the urban negroes, more numerous proportionately than anywhere else on the continent, kept the citizens as keenly alive as the planters to the intricacies of racial adjustments. For example Charleston, ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... has made some approach To gentility, now that he's stretched in a coach! He's taking a drive in his carriage at last! But it will not be long, if he goes on so fast: Rattle his bones over the stones! He's only ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... Daniel, and for a short time Lady Duberly. She assumes quite the airs and ton of gentility, and tells her husband "as he is a pear, he ought to behave ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... consequences arising from this general but unacknowledged poverty, and this very much acknowledged gentility, which were not amiss, and which might be introduced into many circles of society to their great improvement. For instance, the inhabitants of Cranford kept early hours, and clattered home in their pattens, ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Calvin; she in the second with Mr. Purchase, Peter Benny, and Mr. Tulse the lawyer, a large-headed, pallid man, with a strong, clean-shaven face and an air of having attended so many funerals that he paid this one no particular attention. His careless gentility obviously impressed Mr. Purchase, who mopped his forehead at half-minute intervals and as frequently remarked that the day was hot even for the time of year. Mr. Benny was solicitous to know if Mr. Tulse preferred the window up or down. Mr. Tulse preferred it down, and took snuff in such ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Lawson, and I walked soberly along. Then we popped into separate bathing houses, still looking like respectable and responsible members of society, and popped out five minutes afterward—scarecrows! spooks! animated rag-bags! with the last vestige of our gentility and ...
— Neighbor Nelly Socks - Being the Sixth and Last Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow
... adjoining stables, thereby endangering the lives of precocious babies who could crawl, but could not walk away from home, as well as affording food for criticism and scandal, not to mention the leaving behind of a species of secondhand odour of gentility such as coachmen ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... bull-fight all the world goes down to Tablada to see the bulls. Youth and beauty drive, for every one in Seville of the least pretension to gentility keeps a carriage; the Sevillans, characteristically, may live in houses void of every necessity and comfort, eating bread and water, but they will have a carriage to drive in the paseo. You see vehicles of all kinds, from the new landau with a pair of magnificent ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... substantially by so different a young person as Preciosa McNulty, who was preparing to set aside her mother's careful ambitions and to take a step forward on her own account. Only, Preciosa was looking less for cultivation and gentility than for "temperament." Less the dry specialist, however successful in the accumulation of this world's goods, than the resonant adventurer that would bring her full chance at all the manifold haps and mishaps of ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... fairly be called beautiful, and, at some points, magnificent; but by-and-by you become doubtfully suspicious of a somewhat unreal finery: it is pretentious, though not glaringly so; it has been built, with malice aforethought, as a place of gentility and enjoyment. Moreover, splendid as the houses look, and comfortable as they often are, there is a nameless something about them, betokening that they have not grown out of human hearts, but are the creations of a skilfully applied human intellect: no man ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... in Scotland until after the Restoration, otherwise than as persons of family. At that period there are traces of their having been fined by public authority, but not for any ordinary criminal offence. From this time forward I find no trace of their gentility. During the eighteenth century they are, I think, principally traced by a line of maltsters (no doubt a small business then) in Lanarkshire. Their names are recorded on tombstones in the churchyard of Biggar. I remember going as a child ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... run the risk of encountering the Contessa with a basket containing a couple of mutton cutlets, a ball of wool and some tooth-powder. So she put on her Prince of Wales's cloak, and, postponing further reflection over the bridge-party till a less busy occasion, set forth in unencumbered gentility for the morning gossip. At the corner of the High ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... passing through such a celebrated city, I disencumbered the under part of my saddle of the blanket, and the upper part of the boat-cloak with which it was usually adorned; and the penalty which I paid for my gentility was, sleeping the next two nights in position two miles in front of the town, while these useful appendages were lying on the baggage two miles ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... phase of the subject is a consideration of those who are worried lest in word or action, they fail in gentility. They are afraid to do anything lest it should not be regarded as genteel. When they shake hands, it must be done not so much with hearty, friendly spontaneity, but with gentility, and you wonder what that faint touch of fingers, reached high ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... somewhat decayed mansion which stood next to the corner of the Second Avenue. The corner itself was formed by a considerable grocer's shop, the near neighbourhood of which was fatal to any pretensions Ransom and his fellow-lodgers might have had in regard to gentility of situation. The house had a red, rusty face, and faded green shutters, of which the slats were limp and at variance with each other. In one of the lower windows was suspended a fly-blown card, with ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... edition was not published till 1655. In that year the author died, leaving to his widow his estate, or "colonie," which he called Colendonck. The name of Yonkers, where it was situated, perpetuates his title of gentility (Jonkheer ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • J. F. Jameson, Editor
... and insolent swagger which would have been always unbecoming, but which at this moment was grossly indecent." Elsewhere (and again I have nothing to add) Mr. Pattison describes Milton's prose pamphlets as "a plunge into the depths of vulgar scurrility and libel below the level of average gentility and education." But the Rector of Lincoln has not touched, or has touched very lightly, on the fault above noted, the profound lack of humour that these pamphlets display. Others have been as scurrilous, as ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... of Suburbia, seemed to float between the tall chimneys in the morose atmosphere. The purple chariot, which rolled on and on like the chariot of Fate, drew gradually away from the large thoroughfares into mean streets, whose air of dull gentility was for ever autumnal, and the Prophet, on passing some gigantic gasworks, mechanically wondered whether it might not, perhaps, be that monument to whose shadow Malkiel the First had lived and died. Once, looking up at the black sky, ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... and afterward inhabited for a term of years by one of the city fathers, a well-known and still widely remembered merchant. No unusual manifestations had marked it during his occupancy. Not till it had run to seed and been the home of decaying gentility, and later of actual poverty, did it acquire a name which made it difficult to rent, though the neighborhood was a growing one and the house itself well-enough built to make it a desirable residence. Those who had been induced to try living within its spacious walls invariably left at the end ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... way of speaking, fell in love with Elizabeth, the younger. The way it happened was this. She was walking down Mount Street with Maria, and she let fall her purse, and nothing in it but a pocket-piece to save her gentility. Harry was strolling off to my Lord Cappoquin's, from mounting guard at the Castle (for at that time his Lordship lived in Merrion Square); and indeed Mr Lepel was as fine a figure of a young man as a girl could wish to see, in his regimentals all laced with gold and his handsome ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... nation. Upon this account it is that the English challenge the prerogative of having the most handsome women, of the being most accomplished in the skill of music, and of keeping the best tables: the Scotch brag of their gentility, and pretend the genius of their native soil inclines them to be good disputants: the French think themselves remarkable for complaisance and good breeding: the Sorbonists of Paris pretend before any ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... of a certainty she goes on stilts. Now, I must say that is the very tip-top of gentility and politeness. One may forgive a lady giving coffee-parties, and decorating and dressing herself up, but to go on stilts, only on purpose to be higher than other folks, and to be able to look over their heads, that is coming it strong over us. How can such a high person ever come ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... at the time; "but really the service makes brutes of us all. It is hard to sacrifice our health, our night's rest, and our comforts; but still more so, that in my responsible situation, I am obliged too often to sacrifice my gentility." ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... forms of behaviour. And though her principal aim was to improve their minds in all useful knowledge; to render them obedient to their superiors, and gentle, kind, and affectionate to each other; yet did she not omit teaching them an exact neatness in their persons and dress, and a perfect gentility in their whole carriage. ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... countenance in which, though she was extremely bashful, a sensibility appeared almost incredible; and a sweetness, whenever she smiled, beyond either imitation or description. To conclude all, she had a natural gentility, superior to the acquisition of art, and which surprized ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... fortunes to the street, and greatest marvel of all, at least to my awed eyes, my father's Sunday clothes came into weekday wear, new ones taking their place in the great wardrobe that hitherto had been the stronghold of our gentility; to which we had ever turned for comfort when rendered despondent by contemplation of the weakness of our outer walls. "Seeing that everything was all right" is how my mother would explain it. She would lay the lilac silk upon the bed, fondly soothing down its ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... then shaking it suddenly as if burned. "Flame" and "fire" are represented by a quivering, upward motion of all the fingers. The memory of the ancient ruffled shirt of our forefathers is perpetuated in the sign for "genteel," "gentility" or "fine." It is the whole open hand, with fingers pointing upward, shaken in front of the breast. "Gentleman" and "lady" are expressed by the signs for "man" (the hat-brim) and "woman" (the bonnet-string), followed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... aroused by the charge of occasional vulgarity. If it be true, it is not improbable that the writer caught the infection from his grandfather. With one half the world, in its judgment of literature and of life, vulgarity is the opposite of gentility, and gentility is merely negative, and implies the absence of all character, and, in language, of all idiom, all bone and muscle. I have a notion—only do not whisper such heresy within college walls—that a college tutor must be genteel in his college judgments, that 'The Polite Letter ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... village dressmaker. A very bad one certainly, but still she could gore a skirt. She was not a native of the village, and signified her superior gentility by a mincing pronunciation. She had also a hiss with the sibilants peculiar to herself. Before I could remonstrate, Jack ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... bulk of mankind consisted of fine gentlemen that came to him to sit for their pictures. If every man who wears a laced coat (that he can pay for) was extirpated, who would miss them?" With all this haughty contempt of gentility, no praise was more welcome to Dr. Johnson than that which said he had the notions or manners of a gentleman: which character I have heard him define with accuracy, and describe with elegance. "Officers," he said, "were falsely supposed ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... large village, almost a country town, with a considerable variety of life. At this hour of the evening most of the houses were dark, for the labourers had gone to bed. But behind the drawn blinds of the little shops there were still lights here and there, and in the houses of the gentility. ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... there is no other explanation of the ninety-and-nine stories that come to us, from every port where ships arrive from the north coast of Cuba, of a commander of pirates there who is a marvel of courtesy and gentility——"* ...
— Madame Delphine • George W. Cable
... to his visitors. But the visitors were rapidly retreating along the path, the lines of Miss Elvira's back indicating disgust and outraged gentility. Mrs. Chase, however, looked back. Obviously she still did not know what ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... fashion when you put her there: and really old Spedding seems to me to have been the Stag whom so many followed in that fashion. She is capital as far as she goes: but she never goes out of the Parlour; if but Magnus Troil, or Jack Bunce, or even one of Fielding's Brutes, would but dash in upon the Gentility and swear a round Oath or two! I must think the 'Woman in White,' with her Count Fosco, far beyond all that. Cowell constantly reads Miss Austen at night after his Sanskrit Philology is done: it ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... ye, Mistress Elliott," said she, and hostility and gentility were nicely mingled in her tones. "A fine day, mem," the laird's wife would reply with a miraculous curtsey, spreading the while her plumage - setting off, in other words, and with arts unknown to the mere man, the pattern of her India ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... all the perfections of manly beauty which were assembled in his form, he had an air of neatness and gentility, certain smartness in the carriage and port of his head, that yet more distinguished him; his eyes were sprightly and full of meaning; his looks had in them something at once sweet and commanding; his complexion out-bloomed the lovely coloured rose, whilst its inimitable tender vivid ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... ladies as representative of Boston and its prejudices, though apparently they were not Bostonians. There were several serious and retiring couples, of whom one or other was an invalid, and several who were poor, and preferred the plated gentility of Mrs. Harmon's hotel—it was called the St. Albans; Mrs. Harmon liked the name—to the genuine poverty of such housekeeping as they could have set up. About each of these women a home might have clung, with all its loves and cares; they were naturally like ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... could doubt. (She was very emphatic here.) With regard to the family into which he was so soon about, after some solicitation, to be admitted, she believed Mr. Tackleton knew that, although reduced in purse, it had some pretensions to gentility; and that if certain circumstances, not wholly unconnected, she would go so far as to say, with the Indigo Trade, but to which she would not more particularly refer, had happened differently, it might perhaps have been in possession of wealth. ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... is young Fairfax," he said to himself as he jogged slowly homeward in the Arden fly, the single vehicle of that kind at the disposal of the village gentility; "so that is the son of Temple Fairfax. There is a look of his father in his eyes, but not that look of wicked power in his face that there was in the Colonel's—not that thorough stamp of a bold bad man. It will come, I ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... a milder form was sometimes to be seen; the pensive gentility of Samuel Salt. They were coevals, and had nothing but that and their benchership in common. In politics Salt was a whig, and Coventry a staunch tory. Many a sarcastic growl did the latter cast out—for Coventry had a rough spinous humour—at the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... strictly among the professional class; and in the provinces sharper than even in London is drawn the line between the richest tradesman who "keeps a shop," and the poorest lawyer, doctor, or clergyman who ever starved in decent gentility. It had been often a struggle for Hilary Leaf's girlish pride to have to teach A B C to little boys and girls whose parents stood behind counters; but as she grew older she grew wiser, and intercourse with Robert Lyon had ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... for Rebecca to do," thought Ruth, "that will not so greatly shock her notions of gentility. Dear me! she's as nice a girl as ever lived; but ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson
... with a double coach-house, A cottage of gentility; And the devil did grin, for his darling sin Is the pride ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... "what's become of Geraldine?" (Mrs Bowldler's Christian name was Sarah, but the two children vied in inventing others more suitable to her gentility). ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... patrician dwellings, Great Queen Street, where Shaftesbury's house may still be seen; Lincoln's Inn Fields, where, in the time of George II, the Duke of Newcastle held his levee of office-seekers, and Russell Square, now reduced to a sort of dowager gentility. Hereditary mansions, too ancient and magnificent to be deserted, such as Norfolk House, Spencer House and Lansdowne House, stayed the westward course of aristocracy at St. James's Square and Street, Piccadilly, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
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