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More "Lax" Quotes from Famous Books



... The conclusion is just, and Diderot might have verified it by the state of the higher society of his country at that very moment. One cause of the moral corruption of France in the closing years of the old regime was undoubtedly the lax and shifting interpretations, by which the Jesuit directors had softened the rigour of general moral principles. Many generations must necessarily elapse before a habit of loosely superseding principles in ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley

... present at the formation of new churches, I have mourned to see that, instead of declaring infant baptism to be the duty of believers, as was formerly done in our older churches, a compromise with modern lax views is made, by merely permitting infant baptism, saying, in the confession of faith, that, "Baptism is the privilege only ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams

... by their unavoidable ignorance of our language and our customs, and by a quite natural mental confusion as to our standards of conduct, to them so curiously exacting in some respects as, for instance, where the schooling of their children is concerned, so incomprehensibly lax in others, say, in the unusual freedom accorded to those same children when grown but a ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry

... of forces involved. Hayti was lost to France as a result of the negro uprising under Toussaint l'Ouverture. Practically all the French Antilles changed hands twice in 1794, the failure of the British to hold them arising from a combination of yellow fever, inadequate forces of occupation, and lax blockade methods on the French coast, which permitted heavy reenforcements to leave France. General Abercromby, with 17,000 men, finally took all but Guadaloupe in the next year. As Holland, Spain, and other nations came under French control, England seized their colonies likewise—the ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott

... I think not, John. Well, you couldn't come to a more charming place than this, Miss Worsley, though the house is excessively damp, quite unpardonably damp, and dear Lady Hunstanton is sometimes a little lax about the people she asks down here. [To SIR JOHN.] Jane mixes too much. Lord Illingworth, of course, is a man of high distinction. It is a privilege to meet him. And that member of Parliament, ...
— A Woman of No Importance • Oscar Wilde

... great men, and the old time Buccaneers who had made history about its walls. He gazed upon it and wondered. Were they such bad old days? Were the men who lived in those times great men? Were they scoundrelly Buccaneers? Were their scruples and morals any more lax than those of to-day? Were they any different from those who walked under the shadow of the old walls? They were the questions doubtless asked a thousand times in as many minutes by those who paused to think as they ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum

... Episcopalians of Virginia, where a larger Norman-English stock was settled, with infusions of French-Huguenot blood, and where slavery bred more men of wealth and broader social distinctions, were sternly religious in their laws, although far more lax and pleasure-loving in their customs. Everywhere, this new life of Englishmen in a new land developed their self-reliance, their power of work, their skill in arms, their habit of common association for common purposes, and their keen, intelligent ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord

... Fordun's "Scotichronicon," makes it a reproach to lax prelates that they suffer the common people to vary after their own pleasure the days kept as fast days in honour of Mary. In doing so he recalls that on Saturday, the first Easter Eve, she abode unshakenly in the faith, when the apostles doubted. Good reason, therefore, why ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell

... say—which must have cost him dearly—withdrew from the bed where his grandson's body lay shrunken, lax, and grimy. To be sure that it was Firm, I gave one glance—for Firm had always been straight, tall, and large—and then, in a miserable mood, I stole to the Sawyer's side to stand with him. "Am I to blame? Is this my fault? For even this am I to blame?" I whispered; ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore

... practiced so far as possible wherever obstetrical patients are attended, but only in the hospital can the underlying principles be applied with complete thoroughness and persistence. The hospital is constantly alert, whereas in private houses carelessness or ignorance, or both, often lead to lax technique. As a result, statistical evidence indicates that two to three infections occur among those delivered at home ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons

... with more certainty tend to increase the crime of perjury than the multiplying custom-house oaths, and what are termed oaths of office. ... In Ireland the habits of the common people are already too lax with regard to truth. The difference of religion, and the facilities of absolution, present difficulties so formidable to their moral improvement as to require all the counteracting powers of education, ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth

... Puritan, prosperous, powerful, progressive—presents probably the most remarkable evidence earth affords of the blessings of Protestantism, while the results of Roman Catholicism left to itself are writ large in letters of gloom across the priest-ridden, lax and superstitious South. Her cities, among the gayest and grossest in the world, her ecclesiastics enormously wealthy and strenuously opposed to progress and liberty, South America groans under the tyranny of a priesthood which, in its highest forms, is unillumined ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray

... rest was lost in an incoherent babble, and with a deep sigh she fell lax into Cleggett's arms. The reaction from despair had been too much for her; it had come too suddenly; at the first word of reassurance, at the first ray of dawning hope, she had fainted. High-strung natures, ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis

... furtive glance, but, upon being observed, he resumed his crouching attitude, which concealed his face beneath the rim of his weather-worn hat. It was evident that he was afraid of being recognized. He had the slinking air of the convict, and his form, so despairing in its lax lines, appealed to Lee with even greater poignancy than his face. "I'm sorry," she said to him, "but it was my duty to help ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland

... need not depend on one lover surely?—" and he would get for answer, "No, she need not—but it so happens that she does,"—which to everybody seemed extraordinary, more particularly in Italy, where morals are so lax, that a woman has only to be seen walking alone in the public gardens or streets with one of the opposite sex, and her reputation is gone for ever. It is no use to explain that the man in question is her father, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... with a sudden laugh. 'And the joy of not having any more visits to make! I wonder if you've ever thought of that? Just at first, I mean; for society's getting so deplorably lax that, little by little, it will edge up to us—you'll see! I don't want to idealize the situation, dearest, and I won't conceal from you that in time we shall be called on. But, oh, the fun we shall have had in the interval! And ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton

... plain that, although in the period from 1807 to 1820 Congress laid down broad lines of legislation sufficient, save in some details, to suppress the African slave trade to America, yet the execution of these laws was criminally lax. Moreover, by the facility with which slavers could disguise their identity, it was possible for them to escape even a vigorous enforcement of our laws. This situation could properly be met only by energetic and sincere international co-operation. ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois

... The public square was crowded with vehicles, live stock, and countrymen whose chief pleasure was to mix in motley crowds, and to whose fancy an uproar of some kind was ever welcome. On such occasions, in the somewhat lax administering of justice of those early times, the killing of a fellow creature seemed indeed a trifle light ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts

... see who was coming. Then he hastened back to Menelaos and told him that two strangers of princely bearing were at the palace gate, and asked if he should unharness their horses or send them on their way. Menelaos was vexed that any of his servants should be so lax in hospitality, and told him he had acted like a foolish child, and reminded him of the gifts that had been showered on them when they wandered so long in foreign lands. And he bade him hasten to unharness ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer

... had been easier than he had hoped. In the excitement as the new prisoners were brought aboard, security measures had been lax. No one had expected a third visitor; in consequence, no one looked for one. Huge as it was, the Jupiter Equilateral ship had never been planned as a prison, and it had taken time to stake out the guards in a security system that was at all effective. In addition, every man who served ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse

... policeman. Every citizen is, a policeman, and it is his duty to assist the police and the magistracy in every way he can, and give his time, if necessary, to do so. Here is a man who is a perfectly natural product of an infamous system in this city—a charge upon the lax patriotism in this city of New York that this thing can exist. You have encouraged him, in every way you know how to overcharge. He is not the criminal here at all. The criminal is the citizen of New York and the absence of patriotism. I am not here to avenge myself on him. I have no quarrel ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... an awful pleasure bland Spreading o'er the Thunderer's face, When the sound climbs near his seat, The Olympian council sees; As he lets his lax right hand, Which the lightnings doth embrace, Sink upon his mighty knees. And the eagle, at the beck Of the appeasing, gracious harmony, Droops all his sheeny, brown, deep-feather'd neck, Nestling nearer to Jove's feet; While o'er his sovran eye The curtains ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... forgive you," returned Grace. "I'm a very lax correspondent, too. I'm so glad you've been well, and ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower

... senator's son. "It seems that several years ago they were a little lax, and, as a consequence, some fellows slipped through that had no right to pass. Now they have jacked the examiners up, so that the test is likely ...
— Dave Porter and His Double - The Disapperarance of the Basswood Fortune • Edward Stratemeyer

... shown to have neither ear nor nose for the subtleties of philological and archaeological study—was much read and more talked of, not because of any interest in the system of Grampus, or any precise conception of the danger attending lax views of the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis, but because the sharp epigrams with which the victim was lacerated, and the soaring fountains of acrid mud which were shot upward and poured over the fresh wounds, were found ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot

... have great merit," said the Irish cotters, whose names were Lee and Twohy, "when they succeed in causing a lax Catholic to trample on every precept of his religion and to perjure himself; but as God is just, and as those who counsel to evil partake of its guilt, and will have to suffer its punishment, so will all the sins that your minister's cruel advice led us to commit ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley

... docile because of her deep love for her husband, under the latter's attempts to interest her in the faith which he holds dear. Trescott, who compels admiration by his fine, straightforward course, takes his wife to a small Missouri town, where Southern prejudice is still rife and laws are lax, and where feeling is bitter against the uncle of Constance, the absentee landowner, who has sent Trescott to represent him in enforcing evictions from a tract of land to ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various

... desponding; manhood only callous and desperate. Some thought that systems would last their time; others, that something would turn up. His deep and pious spirit recoiled with disgust and horror from such lax, chance-medley maxims, that would, in their consequences, reduce man to the level of the brutes. Notwithstanding a prejudice which had haunted him from his childhood, he had, when the occasion offered, applied to Mr. Rigby for instruction, as one distinguished ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli

... cried: "Stop her!" The two oars were lifted simultaneously, and then by his father's orders Jean pulled alone for a few minutes. But from that moment he had it all his own way; he grew eager and warmed to his work, while Pierre, out of breath and exhausted by his first vigorous spurt, was lax and panting. Four times running father Roland made them stop while the elder took breath, so as to get the boat into her right course again. Then the doctor humiliated and fuming, his forehead dropping with sweat, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant

... through them as if her life depended on the task. Rapidly as she went to work at this singular task, it occupied an hour, and when it was all over the prim, starched old lady actually sat down upon her own door-step with lax hands, and crushed her best new bonnet against the door-post in a very abandonment of ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray

... the world there remained not one living soul who through ties of kinship was authorised to properly control these children. Nor could they themselves even remember parental authority; and only a shadowy recollection of their grandfather's lax discipline survived, becoming gradually, as time passed, nothing more personal to them than a pleasant legend kept alive and nourished in the carefully guarded stories told them by Kathleen Severn and by ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers

... avert one's eyes from the spectacle presented by the luckless Ellen Berstoun, were it not that her unhappy condition makes the contrast between lax and proper principles the more poignant. No mate with two thousand pounds a year for her! Instead, merely a hopeless passion for an impecunious subaltern sweltering in far-off India. That was poor company throughout the long series of monotonous months that were ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston

... the Sorbonne, though divided on nearly every other issue, made common cause against the Society. They were assisted in their campaign by Madame de Pompadour, the king's mistress, for whom the Jesuit theology was not sufficiently lax, and by the Duc de Choiseul, the king's prime minister. The well-known Jesuit leanings of Louis XV. and of the royal family generally, imposed a certain measure of restraint upon the enemies of the Society, until the famous La Valette law ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey

... time. Among the ladies especially a sort of frivolity was conspicuous, and it could not be said to be a gradual growth. Certain very free-and-easy notions seemed to be in the air. There was a sort of dissipated gaiety and levity, and I can't say it was always quite pleasant. A lax way of thinking was the fashion. Afterwards when it was all over, people blamed Yulia Mihailovna, her circle, her attitude. But it can hardly have been altogether due to Yulia Mihailovna. On the contrary; at first ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... extreme—giving seldom, but with choice and purpose—Joshua, without inspiring sympathy, commanded generally that cold respect, which is always paid to the rigid moralist; for instead of yielding to the influence of lax and dissolute colonial manners, he appeared to live with great regularity, and his exterior had something of austerity about it, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... When their client had married one of Reuben Vanderpoel's daughters, they had felt that extraordinary good fortune had befallen him and his estate. Their private opinion had been that Mr. Vanderpoel's knowledge of his son-in-law must have been limited, or that he had curiously lax American views of paternal duty. The firm was highly reputable, long established strictly conservative, and somewhat insular in its point of view. It did not understand, or seek to understand, America. It had excellent ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... to the purity of morals, for the proper and inestimable worth of an absolutely good will consists just in this, that the principle of action is free from all influence of contingent grounds, which alone experience can furnish. We cannot too much or too often repeat our warning against this lax and even mean habit of thought which seeks for its principle amongst empirical motives and laws; for human reason in its weariness is glad to rest on this pillow, and in a dream of sweet illusions (in which, instead of Juno, it embraces a cloud) it substitutes for morality a bastard patched up ...
— Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals • Immanuel Kant

... affecting the base running, having been at no time as clear and definite as they should be; nor have the existing rules bearing upon base running been strictly observed by the majority of the umpires each year; especially was this the case in 1892, when the observance of the balk rule was very lax indeed. The difficulty in framing a proper rule for the purpose is, to properly define the difference between a palpable fielding error, which enables a base to be run on the error, and an error ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick

... there into space, Mrs. Kaufman sat with her arm still entwining the slender but lax form. "Ruby, is—is it something you ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst

... conduct. Very few, however, venture to take this ground. The ordinary method is to contend for some measure of Church order—for the right and duty of excluding some of the worst—and then to lean on this parable for an argument in favour of a lax and against a stringent administration. We submit that to take your stand on this parable, and thence contend for the exclusion to some extent of the evil from the pale of the Church, is to trample all ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... of the undergraduates. His learning and pre-eminence in his department were universally admitted. He had a caustic wit and his sayings were the current talk of the campus. He maintained discipline, which was quite lax in those days, by the exercise of this ability. Some of the boys once drove a calf into the recitation-room. Professor Hadley quietly remarked: "You will take out that animal. We will get along to-day with our usual number." It ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew

... cases the more healthy and picturesque of the existing small towns will develop a new life. Already, in the case of the London area, such once practically autonomous places as Guildford, Tunbridge Wells, and Godalming have become economically the centres of lax suburbs, and the same fate may very probably overtake, for example, Shrewsbury, Stratford, and Exeter, and remoter and yet remoter townships. Indeed, for all that this particular centripetal force can do, the confluent "residential ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... title of the Marquise de Pompadour. This story, unadorned, may sound paltry, even commercial, but we should not fall into the error of judging it by twentieth century standards. The morals of the French Court, never austere, were especially lax in the reign of Louis XV., and galanteries were the fashion, rather than the exception; while for the post of King's favorite there was a continual ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various

... battleship alone was there a watch. I could see him plainly in the upper works of the ship, and as I watched I saw him spread his sleeping silks upon the tiny platform in which he was stationed. Soon he threw himself at full length upon his couch. The discipline on Omean was lax indeed. But it is not to be wondered at since no enemy guessed the existence upon Barsoom of such a fleet, or even of the First Born, or the Sea of Omean. Why indeed ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... strange that the political field should so often be the field of a lax and depressed morality, when we consider that here is the great theatre where human ambition struggles for its aims; here are enlisted the strongest passions of the soul; here throng some of its ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin

... which did not meet the rigid requirements of their own belief; and they planned at once a Spanish crusade which was intended to improve the general deplorable condition of public morals and at the same time to modify, in a most radical way, the liturgy of the Spanish Church, which was far too lax in points of discipline. Their conduct at the time of the surrender of Toledo, in 1074, is a most excellent example of the eager, yet thoughtless, way in which they went about their new work. When King Alfonso, after an interval of more than three hundred years, regained possession of the ancient ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger

... a single writer of any distinction to-day, unless it is Mr. W.W. Jacobs, who is content merely to serve the purpose of those slippered hours. So far from the weary reader being a decently tired giant, we realise that he is only an inexpressibly lax, slovenly and under-trained giant, and we are all out with one accord resolved to exercise his higher ganglia in every possible way. And so I will say no more of the idea that the novel is merely ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... Mr. Stubmore the story he had imparted to Mr. Clump. Somehow or other, men who live much with horses are always more lax in their notions than the rest of mankind. Mr. Stubmore did not seem to grow more ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 2 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... sweet-peas grown near Darjeeling in Upper India, but originally derived from England, can be successfully cultivated on the plains of India; for they flower and seed profusely, and their stems are lax and scandent. In some of the foregoing cases, as Dr. Hooker has remarked to me, the greater success may perhaps be attributed to the seeds having been more fully ripened under a more favourable climate; but this view can hardly be extended to so many cases, including plants, which, from being cultivated ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin

... date in Rome's political history. That this borrowing assisted greatly in Latin cultural advancement, none may deny; but it is also true that the new Hellenised literature exerted a malign influence on the nation's ancient austerity, introducing lax Grecian notions which contributed to moral and material decadence. The counter-currents, however, were strong; and the virile Roman spirit shone nobly through the Athenian dress in almost every instance, imparting to the literature a distinctively national ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft

... I saw others and then more at another point in the wall. It was a long lax line of ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... presence is suffered or desired. All those gray or bald heads, and all those bulging shirt-fronts, must look alike at the first glance, and it can be only to carefuler scrutiny that certain distinctions of projecting whiskers and mustaches pronounce themselves. The various figures, lax or stiff in their repletion, must more or less repeat one another, and the pudgy hands, resting heavily on the tables' edges or planted on their owners' thighs, must seem of a very characterless monotony. The poor old fellows ranked in serried sameness at the tables ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... stationed there. Its object was to challenge all passers-by during the dark hours, and it formed part of the scheme already elaborated by the authorities for a complete search of every foot of ground. But Brazilian soldiers are apt to be lax in such matters. These men were all lying down, and smoking. For a marvel, they happened to be silent when Marcel led his cohort into the open road. They were listening, in fact, to the crackling of the undergrowth, though utterly unsuspicious of its cause, and the first ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy

... so scattered through the forests, and the discipline of some of the divisions was so lax that it was some days before McClellan had them ranged in order on the Chickahominy. Another week elapsed before he was in a position to undertake fresh operations; but General Johnston had now four divisions on the spot, and he was too enterprising ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty

... although Mac was blue Presbyterian and an inveterate theologian, somehow, out here in the wilderness, it was more possible to forgive a man for illusions about the Apostolic Succession and mistaken views upon Church government. The Colonel, at all events, was not so lax but what he was ready to back up the Calvinist in an endeavour to keep the Sabbath (with a careful compromise between church and chapel) and help him to conduct ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)

... near a very picturesque spot, which artists were in the habit of frequenting with their sketch-books. Allowed a degree of liberty which mamma never accorded me at home, I availed myself of the lax regimen of my grandmother, and roamed at will about the beautiful country adjacent. In one of these ill-fated excursions I encountered a young artist, who was spending a few days in the neighbourhood. I was a simple-hearted schoolgirl, untutored in worldly wisdom, and had always spent ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... never a letter from Bob. It sometimes crossed John's mind that his brother might still be alive and well, and that in his wish to abide by his expressed intention of giving up Anne and home life he was deliberately lax in writing. If so, Bob was carrying out the idea too thoughtlessly by half, as could be seen by watching the effects of suspense upon the fair face of the victim, and the anxiety of the ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy

... church with such arms as they had to resist the Ku Klux. It had not been thought that the danger would be imminent until about the expiration of the time named in the notice; so that the watch which had been determined upon had not been strictly kept, and on this night had been especially lax on one of the roads ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... as, undeterred by what has occurred since then, I affirm now, that secession was a right, that separation is a fact, and that reconstruction is an impossibility." Mr. Gregory denounced Mr. Seward as "lax, unscrupulous, and lawless of the ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... with rats, and its discipline was lax, in all save speed and quality of work, and some of his companions were of a dissipated stamp. To add to his discomforts, the line he worked was old and defective; but he improved the signals by adjusting three sets of instruments, and ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro

... "you have promised to obey me; till this minute you have kept your word; are you getting lax ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)

... executed more men without process of law than have been executed under the law in all the United States since then. These lynchings also were against the law. In short, it may perhaps begin to appear to those who study into the history of our earlier civilization that the term "law" is a very wide and lax and relative one, and one extremely difficult of ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough

... supposed to at once close the gate, blow a horn, and exhibit a flag. Upon hearing the horn or observing the flag, the warder on the roof raised the alarm, and assistance was sent. Such was the system, but as no attack had taken place for some years the discipline had grown lax. ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies

... the sons left home to work elsewhere, he was expected to bring or send home all his earnings, except what he required for food, lodgings, and other necessary expenses; and if he understood the word "necessary" in too lax a sense, he had to listen to very plain-spoken reproaches when he returned. During his absence, which might last for a whole year or several years, his wife and children remained in the house as before, and the ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... LICINIUS, Roman Emperor from 260 to 268, and for seven years (253-260) associated in the government with his father, the Emperor Valerian; under his lax rule the empire was subjected to hostile inroads on all sides, while in the provinces a succession of usurpers, known as the Thirty Tyrants, sprang up, disowning allegiance, and aspiring to the title of Caesar; in his later years he roused himself to vigorous resistance, but in 268 was murdered ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... prepared to name Ensamples still of things exclusively To one another adapt. Thou seest, first, How lime alone cementeth stones: how wood Only by glue-of-bull with wood is joined— So firmly too that oftener the boards Crack open along the weakness of the grain Ere ever those taurine bonds will lax their hold. The vine-born juices with the water-springs Are bold to mix, though not the heavy pitch With the light oil-of-olive. And purple dye Of shell-fish so uniteth with the wool's Body alone that it cannot be ta'en Away forever—nay, though thou gavest ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius

... this manner of living evidently seemed ungodly, and perhaps the citizens of New Amsterdam were a trifle lax not only in their appetite for the things of this world, but also in their indifference toward the Sabbath. As Madam Knight observes in her Journal: "There are also Dutch and divers conventicles, as they call them, viz., Baptist, Quaker, etc. They are not strict in keeping ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday

... just and catholic spirit. We translate the conclusion of the last article, in which Mr. Schmidt gives the result of his careful analysis of all the works of the author: "The novel, on account of its lax and variable form, and the caprice which it tolerates, is in my opinion not to be reckoned among those kinds of art, which, as classic, will endure to posterity. The authors who have been most read in ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... with his baggage disguised as a horse-boy. But no princess, no beauty, no female blandishments had any charms for Ivanhoe: no hermit practised a more austere celibacy. The severity of his morals contrasted so remarkably with the lax and dissolute manner of the young lords and nobles in the courts which he frequented, that these young springalds would sometimes sneer and call him Monk and Milksop; but his courage in the day of battle was so terrible and admirable, ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray

... a white thing, that is fulle swete and righte delicyous, and more swete than hony or sugre; and it comethe of the dew of hevene that fallethe upon the herbes, in that contree; and it congelethe and becomethe alle white and swete: and men putten it in medicynes for rich men, to make the wombe lax, and to purge evylle blood: for it clensethe the blode, and puttethe out malencoyle. This lond of Job marchethe to the kyngdom of Caldee. This lond of Caldee is fulle gret: and the langage of that contree is more gret in sownynge, that it is in other parties bezonde ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation. v. 8 - Asia, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt

... in very much the same relationship to China as Corea; and, although the enforcement of the suzerain tie was lax, there was no doubt that at Pekin the opinion was held very strongly that the action of France was an encroachment on the rights of China. But if such was the secret opinion of the Chinese authorities, they took no immediate steps to arrest the development of French policy in Tonquin ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... waving his hat to invite the passers-by, began to preach in a strange jargon of mingled Castilian and Tuscan. The Theatines were among the most zealous and rigid of men; but to this enthusiastic neophyte their discipline seemed lax, and their movements sluggish; for his own mind, naturally passionate and imaginative, had passed through a training which had given to all its peculiarities a morbid intensity and energy. In his early life he had been the very prototype of the hero of Cervantes. The single study of the young Hidalgo ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... in their practice of piety and the obligations of religion and charity; but they have always indulged in the fancies and ideas of the great school of free-thinking philosopher Sofis, whose observance of the ordinances of severe and joyless life is notedly lax. ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon

... can be produced from the annals of revered Antiquity? Placidia's care for her purple-clad son has often been celebrated; but by Placidia's lax administration of the Empire its boundaries were unbecomingly retrenched. She gained for him a wife and for herself a daughter-in-law[716] by the loss of Illyricum; and thus the union of Sovereigns was bought by a lamentable ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)

... imposture, the ponderous hammer which smote the brazen idolatry of his age." He labored to expose the vices that had taken shelter in the sanctuary of the Church,—a reformer of ecclesiastical abuses rather than of the lax morals of the laity, and hence did different work from that of Savonarola, whose life was spent in a crusade against sin, wherever it was to be found. His labors were great, and his attainments remarkable for his age. He is accused of being ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord

... apartment floored formally with squares of black and white marble, furnished in the formal style of the eighteenth century, and hung around with formal family portraits and curious old prints in which rather lax classical subjects were treated with a formal severity. The library being our usual habitat, I inferred that our change of quarters was in honour of the day. It was much to my liking; for in that antiquely ordered room—and the presence of the Vidame helped the illusion—I felt always as though ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier

... while MacMaine was in the prisoner's cell, and he was relying on the lax discipline of the soldiers to get him and Tallis out of the cell block. With luck, the guards would have failed to listen too closely to what they had been told by the men they replaced; with even greater luck, the previous guardsmen would have failed to be too explicit about ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett

... little band that went toward the Alamo, and there were three women and three children in it, but since they knew definitely that Santa Anna and his great army had come there was not a Texan who shrank from his duty. They had been lax in their watch and careless of the future, faults frequent in irregular troops, but in the presence of overwhelming danger they showed not the least fear ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler

... it was not the public services, terrible though these were, that formed the most depressing feature of Sunday in St. Andrews; it was the rigid discipline which pervaded her home-life. My grandfather, I believe, was looked upon as being somewhat lax in his religious views, and he was undoubtedly more liberal—perhaps one might say more advanced—than many of his neighbours. Yet even he had to render homage to the universal law. So when Sunday came round ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.

... desolating King Philip's War; persistent interference with their chartered Liberties; dissensions in the Boston Church and quarrels of magistrates and clergy; the rise of "an anti-ministerial spirit" and the growth of worldliness and lax living among the people. "What are the reasons that have provoked the Lord to bring his judgments upon New England?" Such was the primary question which the Synod of 1679 was called upon to answer. "Declension from the primitive foundation work, innovation in doctrine and worship"—this, ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker

... harsh and terrible cry from Hutchinson! He made one last convulsive effort and it doomed him. Slowly he lost his balance. Cordts's dark, evil, haunting face swung round. Both men became lax and plunged, and separated. The dust rose from the rough steps. Then the dark forms shot down—Cordts falling sheer and straight, Hutchinson headlong, with waving arms—down and down, vanishing in the depths. No sound came up. A little column of yellow ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey

... for the statement of our view of the attitude a rational religion takes up in the solemn presence of death. "Stoicism shall not be more exigent," said Emerson of the new Church. We take no lax view of life and its responsibilities, but we refuse to magnify death into the one thing worth living for or thinking about. Homo liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat. We do not set about digging our graves, we do not carry our coffins ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... myself. She liked the best of everything, and these our circumstances allowed us to give her. For the rest, though in kitten days suspected of having caught a mouse, she had never been known in after life to do anything which the most lax of economists could describe as useful. She would lie all day in the best arm-chair enjoying real or pretended slumbers, which never affected her appetite at supper-time; although in that eventide ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various

... appeared in the street; the ladies dropped me half-curtseys, and walked over to the other side. That precious clergyman went from one tea-table to another preaching on the horrors of seduction, and the lax principles which young men learned in popish countries and brought back thence. The poor Fawn's appearance at home a few weeks after my return home, was declared to be a scheme between her and me; and the best informed agreed that she had waited on the other side of the river until I gave her the ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Besides bringing on us the whole mass of savage nations, whom fear and not affection had kept in quiet, there is danger that in giving time to an enemy who can send reinforcements of regulars faster than we can raise them, they may strengthen Canada and Halifax beyond the assailment of our lax and divided powers. Perhaps, however, the patriotic efforts from Kentucky and Ohio, by recalling the British force to its upper posts, may yet give time to Dearborn to strike a blow below. Effectual possession of the river from Montreal to the Chaudiere, which is practicable, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... As a matter of fact, in my own experience, I have found that the major portion of nodal formations appear on the left cord, indicating that it is the weaker. The fact that one cord is slightly lax while the other vibrates at full tension along its face causes trouble. Another source of difficulty is subglottic, owing to inflammation of the mucous membrane in the trachea, which extends upward and ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller

... felicity in his subject, that he could thus select a pattern of private purity and public honour in the person of the actual Sovereign, without incurring the least suspicion either of base adulation or lax morality.... ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... was organized at once, but Westby was not admitted to it. There was not room for the substitutes; they were expected to do their own training. Westby was notoriously lax in that matter and had to be nagged constantly by Collingwood, whom he found some pleasure ...
— The Jester of St. Timothy's • Arthur Stanwood Pier

... approve and co-operate in he stands aloof from, and satisfies his unhappy disposition with carping criticisms and ungenerous censures. A neighbour who does not reach his standard of moral excellence in character and action he pronounces lax in principles and delinquent in life. One who does not agree with him in his peculiar views of some disputed doctrine of Christian faith or principle of Church discipline he judges to be little better than a heretic or ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate

... I've got an appointment." Beaton rose too, and Fulkerson put the two books in his lax hands. "Take these along, Michelangelo Da Vinci, my friend, and put your multitudinous mind on them for about an hour, and let us hear from you to-morrow. We hang upon ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... office. He has served twenty years, with exception of one term when he and Menocal had a disagreement. Menocal controls the votes in this county, you know; that's general knowledge. But things became so lax under the Mexican sheriff who displaced him that he was put back in office. Menocal ordered it; he has much property and believes in law and order; and there's little or no stealing with Winship in the sheriff's saddle. I've heard that he first required the banker ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd

... things. Crime is persecuted, wickedness is condoned, and goodness treated with indifference in both countries. Men care more for what they eat than anything else, and combine a closely defined idea of meum with a lax perception as to tuum. Barring a little difference of complexion and feature the Englishman would make a good Japanese, or the Japanese a first-class Englishman. But when an American comes to us ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope

... and most of our numerous race-grounds and race-towns, are scenes of destructive and universal gambling among the lower orders, which our absurdly lax police never attempt to suppress; and yet, without the slightest approach to an improperly harsh interference with the pleasures of the people, the Roulette and E.O. tables, which plunder the peasantry at these places for the benefit of travelling sharpers (certainly equally respectable with some ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... prized. These tobacco notes provided the only currency in Virginia until she resorted to the printing press during the French and Indian War. By the end of the eighteenth century the reputation of the inspectors and the value of the tobacco notes began to decline, due primarily to lax inspecting. Exporters and manufacturers frequently demanded that their tobacco ...
— Tobacco in Colonial Virginia - "The Sovereign Remedy" • Melvin Herndon

... His habit of ejaculatory prayer was, I think, directed against this tendency. The agitation with which he once said that corruption had entered into his heart by means of a dream seems to me a proof of this. He took a tolerant view of the lapses of others, and of course the standard of the age was lax in this respect. But I have little doubt myself that here Johnson found himself often confronted with a sensuous tendency which he thought degrading, and ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson

... recognize a right and reasonable discipline as such, even though it causes him personal inconvenience, because he has acquired a sense of military values. But if it is either unduly harsh or unnecessarily lax, he likewise knows it and wears it as a hairshirt, to the undoing of his morale. Though the man, like the group, can be hurt by being pushed beyond sensible limits, his spirit will suffer even more sorely if no real test is put upon his abilities ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense

... started and got under way, the fathers of the Province assumed a vigilant oversight of its orthodoxy, but discharged with a lax and grudging service the responsibility of its maintenance. They ejected the first President, the protomartyr of American learning, the man who sacrificed more to the College than any one individual in the whole course of its ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various

... a world that also contained aggressive militarism, has broken down. We live in a world of improvised State factories, commandeered railways, substituted labour and emergency arrangements. Our vague-minded, lax, modern democracy has to pull itself together, has to take over and administer and succeed with a great system of collective functions, has to express its collective will in some better terms than "go as ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells

... your hands!' you must be partic'lar an' see he does it. Which if you grows lax on this p'int he's mighty likely to put your ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis

... veracity, would in its tendency be destructive to the safeguards of personal virtue and of social purity; and his arguments for the lie of exigency are similar to those which are put forward in excuse for common sins against chastity, by the free-and-easy defenders of a lax standard in such matters. "Some moralists," says the average young man of the world, "in their extreme regard for personal purity, will not admit that any act of unchastity is necessary, even to protect one's health, or as an act of love. But the men of virility and strong feeling will let ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull

... examples about to be given, it will be observed that That is never used, whether it correspond to the quod or the ut of the Latin. Nee eme vitzn, nap hibe, I see that you are lax; Nee aguteran, Domincotze amo misa ea vitzaca, I know that you have not heard mass Sunday; where vitzaca or vitzcauh is passive perfect, and the literal rendering is, I know, on Sunday your mass was not heard. I desire that you may live here, Nee eme iuide ...
— Grammatical Sketch of the Heve Language - Shea's Library Of American Linguistics. Volume III. • Buckingham Smith

... Christianity was not among the religiones licitae of the Empire. Over and over again it had been pronounced by Imperial Rescript unlawful. This being so, Diocletian saw in its toleration merely one of those corruptions of lax government which it was his special mission to sweep away, and proceeded to deal with it as with any other abuse,—to be put down with whole-hearted vigour ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare

... non-assimilation proves E. Scand. source. Cp. Sw. dial. slakk adj. bending, e.g., "bakken jaer no na slakk," the hill slopes a great deal, again a W. Scand. form in Sw. dial. The word is probably related to Eng. slack, loose, lax, Dan. slak, ...
— Scandinavian influence on Southern Lowland Scotch • George Tobias Flom

... abolished altogether. Every one of these articles contained material for a future explosion. It was impossible to comply with them fully, because on the one side a conviction of their justice or expediency was wanting, and on the other they were considered as far too lax in their requirements—because individual cases usually occurred in such a shape that their conditions were not applicable in every particular, and finally, because the embers of passion still glowed in the bosoms ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger

... Revival'—Hyde, Sigerson, Atkinson, Stokes—are not Celtic at all but Teutonic; that, in short, I have been following the multitude to speak loosely. Well, I confess it, and I will confess further that the lax use of the word 'Celt' ill beseems one who has been irritated often enough by the attempts of well-meaning but muddle-headed people who get hold of this or that poet and straightly assign this or that quality of his verse ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... face burned and his eyes smoldered with a fever only half sane. At times cold sweat stood on his temples and he trembled, with every muscle lax and inert. As dawn began to lighten the eastern sky-line no man could say—and least of all himself—which counsel ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck

... was still further increased by the wasteful and lax use of public funds. The money which was wrung from the poor people by these unequal taxes, was seldom wisely or economically expended. Much was squandered upon foolish projects, costly in the extreme, and impossible of accomplishment. ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker

... as either of you, would simply be lost; where he would be tied down by such stringent rules that he could never amount to anything on the gridiron. I don't mean to say that at Robinson the faculty is lax regarding standing or attendance at lectures, but I do say that it holds common-sense views on the subject of college athletics, and does not hound a man to death simply because he happens to belong to the football ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour

... various privileges which lay open to him: others in his place would have frequented the passages, hung about the yards and grown familiar with the tap, where spirits were openly bought and sold. Money could do much in those days of lax discipline, and the man who could pay and could give need have very few wants unsatisfied. But Adam's only desire was to be left undisturbed and alone; and as this entailed no undue amount of trouble after their first ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various

... period. He began to be received into the unknown upper world. His fame soon spread from among his fellow-rebels on the benches, and began to reach the ushers and monitors of this great Ayrshire academy. This arose in part from his lax views about religion; for at this time that old war of the creeds and confessors, which is always grumbling from end to end of our poor Scotland, brisked up in these parts into a hot and virulent ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson

... crouching attitude, which concealed his face beneath the rim of his weather-worn hat. It was evident that he was afraid of being recognized. He had the slinking air of the convict, and his form, so despairing in its lax lines, appealed to Lee with even greater poignancy than his face. "I'm sorry," she said to him, "but it was my ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland

... this can be produced from the annals of revered Antiquity? Placidia's care for her purple-clad son has often been celebrated; but by Placidia's lax administration of the Empire its boundaries were unbecomingly retrenched. She gained for him a wife and for herself a daughter-in-law[716] by the loss of Illyricum; and thus the union of Sovereigns was bought by a lamentable ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)

... European Orient, inaugurated by Bismarck as a defense and check against Russia, has always been keen on the friendship and good will of the Turk for reasons which will be obvious enough later. During the Caprivi Chancellorship, the relation between the two empires became rather lax. Wilhelm II with his keen farsightedness set about to remedy this. In his usual spectacular, but in most cases efficient, manner, he went with his royal consort in state to Palestine, calling first on the Sultan. The tremendously enthusiastic reception that ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves

... seeking to shelter itself under the guidance of a stronger force, and to effect a moral anchorage or moorings behind the lee of his great friend. When Bozzy indulges in 'the luxury of noble sentiments,' he is often known to be courting an indemnity to his conscience for lax practice. Longfellow makes Miles Standish in his belligerent mood turn in the Caesar to where the thumb-marks in the margin proclaimed that the battle was hottest; Boswell often indicates the decline and fall of the moralist by an apparently ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask

... obligations of religion and charity; but they have always indulged in the fancies and ideas of the great school of free-thinking philosopher Sofis, whose observance of the ordinances of severe and joyless life is notedly lax. ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon

... Pershing was a man of commanding presence. He was a great family man and loved his family devotedly. He was not lax, and ruled his ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden

... were cashiered. The sentence of several of them was considered extremely hard, and many circumstances appearing in their favour, his majesty was pleased to restore them to their former rank. Courts-martial, indeed, appear to have taken place very frequently. Discipline was often lax, and that high tone which afterwards prevailed in the navy was ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston

... well prepared to support the cause of their griesly paramours. Lord Hastings himself had retired for the night to a farmhouse nearer the field of battle than the hostel; and as in those days discipline was lax enough after a victory, the soldiers had a right to license. Master Porpustone found himself completely at the mercy of these brawling customers, the more rude and disorderly from the remembrance of ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... dis tract' re flect' taint ca nal' ex pand' re fresh' trail cra vat' a bet' re lent' aim de camp' be deck' re ject' maim pro tract' be held' re quest' train re cant' be quest' re bel' strain re fract' de fect' re gress' chain re lax' e lect' re press' paint at tack' e rect' sub ject quaint at tract' ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey

... that "it is too late to save the wild life"; for excepting the dead-and-gone species, that is not true. Let no man say that "we can not save the wild life by law"; for that is not true, either. As long as laws are lax, even law-abiding people will take ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... were right,' he cried, 'I find him a prowler, breaking all rules of discipline. A perverted, impudent rascal! An example shall be set to my school, sir. We have been falling lax. What! I find the puppy in my garden whistling—he confesses—for one of my servants—here, Mr. Boddy, if you please. My school shall see that none insult me with impunity!' He laid on Heriot like a wind on a bulrush. Heriot bent ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... seat on the corner of his cot, or took notice of any one or of anything in the hospital room. He sat there, day after day, all day long, with his eyes fixed upon a certain point of vacancy; what he saw, what he thought, no one knew. His hands lay before him on his bony knees, lax and inert. Half a lifetime in prison, and now he was nearing the end, mute and motionless, making no complaint or protest—the power for that had gone by. He no longer spoke of parole; and no parole came. ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... is not a thing to be done once for all, but needs perpetual repetition. When we clasp anything in our hands, however tight the initial grasp, unless there is a continual effort of renewed tightening, the muscles become lax, and we have to renew the tension, if we are to keep the grasp. So in our Christian life it is only the continual repetition of the act which our Lord here calls 'entering in by Him' that will bring to us this continual exemption from, and immunity ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren

... indifferent, heedless, inattentive, regardless, lax, incautious, remiss, inconsiderate, nonchalant, neglectful, unwary, imprudent, indiscreet, improvident, reckless, desultory, perfunctory, devil-may-care, slovenly, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... subject of the corn agitation, (obstinately pursued through the session,) we may remark—and we do so with pain—that all laws whatsoever, strong or lax, upon this question are to be regarded as provisional. The temper of society being what it is, some small gang of cotton-dealers, moved by the rankest self-interest, finding themselves suffered to agitate almost without opposition, and the ancient landed interest of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... customs; they existed long before you or me. It is in your interest, brother, that the majesty of the throne should not be weakened or altered; and if, from Duc d'Orleans, you one day become King of France, I know you well enough to believe that you would never be lax in this matter. Before God, you and I are exactly the same as other creatures that live and breathe; before men we are seemingly extraordinary beings, greater, more refined, more perfect. The day that ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... you," he said, "who, I perceive, will some day come over upon the very ground I now occupy. Our modern ways of thinking have become too free and lax. We cannot draw the rein and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... Cutler. He had always said that Plume was lax, and here was proof of it. "I might have wanted you—I did want you, hours ago, Mr. Blakely, and even Major Plume would not countenance his officers spending the greater part of the night away from the post, especially on a government horse," and there ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King

... eyes from the spectacle presented by the luckless Ellen Berstoun, were it not that her unhappy condition makes the contrast between lax and proper principles the more poignant. No mate with two thousand pounds a year for her! Instead, merely a hopeless passion for an impecunious subaltern sweltering in far-off India. That was poor company throughout the long series of monotonous months that were now ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston

... very wonderful bell-bird (Casmarhynchos carunculata), called campanero by the Spaniards. From the upper part of the bill grows a fleshy tubercle about the thickness of a quill, sparingly covered with minute feathers. It was now hanging down on one side, quite lax. It was evident, therefore, that the bird, when alive, elevated it when excited by singing or some other cause; indeed afterwards, on examining it, we found it connected with the interior of the throat, which further convinced us of this fact. ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston

... the gilded statuettes of Faith and Hope. The former, looking downwards, has something of Sienese severity. Hope is with upturned countenance, joining her hands in prayer; charming alike in her gesture and pose. Two instalments for these figures are recorded in 1428. The authorities had been lax in paying for the work, and we have a letter[88] asking the Domopera for payment, Donatello and Michelozzo being rather surprised—"assai maravigliati"—that the florins had not arrived. The last of ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford

... and the discipline of Dr Jolliffe was more lax than many parents and guardians quite liked; and yet few of the boys who went there were rich. It was very rarely, that is, that one of them had not to make his own way in the world. And the number, which was limited, was always complete. For results speak for themselves, and the examination ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough

... after many adventures in dodging about the village, and seeing Jacques and the two women servants safely past the lax cordon of rebels, without taking advantage of the situation to take refuge in the Fort himself, had come back to his beloved dogs with a presentiment that something had gone wrong with the others, and that his services might be required. He was ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie

... leaving the axe-handle with its ugly load standing out at an angle, and the two lads stood watching the serpent's head as the jaws parted once or twice and then became motionless, while the folds twisted round the stout ash-handle gradually grew lax and then dropped limply and loosely upon the earth, ending by heaving slightly as a shudder seemed to run from the bleeding neck ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn

... father and grandfather, professed to be a Mussulman. His mother was a Persian; he was a Persian in his thoughts and ways. He was imbued with the old Mogul instinct of toleration. He was lax and indifferent, without the semblance of zeal. He consulted soothsayers who divined with burned rams' bones. He celebrated the Persian festival of the Nau-roz, or new year, which had no connection with Islam. He reverenced the seven heavenly bodies by wearing ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various

... twelve,[FN96] when the King being minded to have him taught the arts and sciences, bade build him a palace amiddlemost the city, wherein were three hundred and threescore rooms,[FN97] and lodged him therin. Then he assigned him three wise men of the Olema and bade them not be lax in teaching him day and night and look that there was no kind of learning but they instruct him hterin, so he might become versed in all knowledge. He also commanded them to sit with him one day in each of the rooms by turn and write on the door thereof ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton

... in literature as in life, a code of his own, which, if sometimes lax where others were stringent, was always stringent in higher matters, where others were lax. Even the friendship of Emerson could not coerce him into that careful elaboration which gives dignity and sometimes a certain ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various

... were rising from the table Westervelt entered with a face like a horse, so long and lax was it. "They have burned us alive!" he exclaimed, as he sank into a chair and mopped his red neck. He shook like a gelatine pudding, and Helen could not ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland

... him go! And while he passed the gate I stood i' the crowd So close I could have touched him! Few discerned In one so soiled the erst Arch-Emperor!— In the lax mood of him who has lost all He stood inert there, idly singing thin: "Malbrough s'en va-t-en guerre!"—until his suite Came up ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy

... been the punctuation. In the original this consists principally of dashes and commas, often quite capriciously distributed. Here also, I have been lax in reducing the text to the requirements of modern standards, and have left much latitude to the reader ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton

... a number of instances American masters were refused water, the only excuse being that they had not conformed to all the port or customs regulations. There can be no doubt that many fishing captains were quite too lax in this, presuming on the power of their nation and remembering the liberties enjoyed under reciprocity, while too forgetful of the stern letter of the treaty which the Canadians were executing against them. It was plain on the other hand that however wrongly Canadian subalterns may at ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews

... system, which has already been carried to such an extent as to endanger the lives and property of every honest and well disposed inhabitant of the colony. This system, so injurious of itself, has been powerfully seconded by the lax and indiscriminate manner in which convict servants have been assigned to the various settlers. Being in most instances freed or emancipated convicts themselves, many of them possess but little character, and in fact only accept the different indulgences ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth

... just, and Diderot might have verified it by the state of the higher society of his country at that very moment. One cause of the moral corruption of France in the closing years of the old regime was undoubtedly the lax and shifting interpretations, by which the Jesuit directors had softened the rigour of general moral principles. Many generations must necessarily elapse before a habit of loosely superseding principles in individual cases produces widespread demoralisation, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley

... were now sitting in Gilbert's room in the lax attitude of people who have eaten well and ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine

... cultivation of opium poppy and cannabis, mostly for the domestic market; transshipment point for illicit drugs to and via Russia, and to the Baltics and Western Europe; lax ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... to be said by any one with firm reason and unsophisticated conscience in extenuation of this crime. We have only to remember that a great many other persons in that lax time, when the structure of the family was undermined alike in practice and speculation, were guilty of the same crime; that Rousseau, better than they, did not erect his own criminality into a social theory, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... branches, beneath which a little pot of water is hung, and after they have made some progress, they are inclosed in bamboo tubes, and so coaxed down to the ground. They are mere slender whip-cords before reaching the earth, where they root, remaining very lax for several months; but gradually, as they grow and swell to the size of cables, they tighten, and eventually become very tense. This is a curious phenomenon, and so rapid, that it appears to be due to the rooting part mechanically dragging down the aerial. The branch meanwhile ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... Pindarick madness" is well known. The "first and obvious defect" of Dryden's Threnodia "is the irregularity of its metre." The "lax and lawless versification" of this type of poetry, he wrote in the Life of Cowley, "concealed the deficiencies of the barren, and flattered the laziness of the idle." One cannot but wonder therefore at his praise of Morrison's ode. To be ...
— A Pindarick Ode on Painting - Addressed to Joshua Reynolds, Esq. • Thomas Morrison

... government of James. Did he not know, she asked, that the religion of the rebels was only a cloak for treason? Would he trust men who had so often betrayed him? He could never expect them to keep their plighted faith in the future, if their great offences in the past were not even acknowledged: a lax government set all turbulent spirits in motion, and led to shipwreck. With this advice, and similar suggestions from the clergy, came the news of fresh commotion. Francis Stuart, who had been made Earl of Bothwell by James, but who after this had given great trouble ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke

... the speaker that moment would have pressed the query farther, no human being could have misread the answer. With the same little hysterical, unnatural laugh the girl sank back in her seat. The tense hands went lax. ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge

... Bommaney that old Brown, to his daughter's perplexity and grief, began to show signs of trouble almost as marked as those he had displayed after his old friend's defection. The old boy's newspaper no longer interested him of a morning. He began to be lax about that morning ride which he had once regarded as being absolutely necessary to the preservation of health in London. He had been impassioned with the theatre, and had become a diligent attendant at first-night performances. Even these ceased to have any ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray

... luxury in its ranks, the wholesale abuse of power by the officers and sergeants, the looseness of discipline, the havoc wrought by "army usurers," the "money marriages," so much in vogue with debt-ridden officers, the hard drinking and lax morals prevailing, the gaming for high stakes, which is another festering sore, and leads to the ruin of so many,—and a whole train of other evils. The professional, that is, the military, press has joined in this ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg

... them have been reared in small towns, where the efforts of parents to train their children in Jewish ways, if tried at all, barely passes the first two or three pages of the "Siddur"; while those who have been raised in the city are generally the victims of the lax system of Jewish training prevalent there. At the most they have only a superficial knowledge of Jewish culture, of the great Jewish movements of the past and present. The Synagogue or Temple represents to the mind of ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... Offenses which now would at most be the subject of private remonstrance were treated as public crimes and expiated in church before the whole parish. Gavin Hamilton, Burns's friend and landlord at Mossgiel, a liberal gentleman of means and standing, was prosecuted in the church courts for lax attendance at divine service, for traveling on Sabbath, for neglecting family worship, and for having had one of his servants dig new potatoes on the Lord's day. Burns's irregular relations with Jean Armour led to successive appearances by both ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson

... to Clay. There had lived beaux and belles, memories of whom hang still about the town, people it with phantom shapes, and give an individual or a family here and there a subtle distinction to-day. There the grasp of Calvinism was most lax. There were the dance, the ready sideboard, the card table, the love of the horse and the dog, and but little passion for the game-cock. There were as manly virtues, as manly vices, as the world has ever known. And there, love was as far from lust ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox

... of golden light from the low sun slanted into the place through the western window from which the Venetians had been pulled back, and fell across the face of the man who lay still and lax in his chair, eyes closed and chin dropped a little so that his mouth hung weakly open. He looked very ill, as, indeed, any one might look after such an attack as he had suffered on the night previous. That one long moment of deathly ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman

... that they should be sent to Kentucky as soon as we were again in possession of West Virginia. Most of these regiments came under my command again later in the war, and I became warmly attached to them. Their drill and discipline were always lax, but their courage and devotion to the national ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox

... riffraff of Europe to pay periodical visits to Germany, they thereby prevent many respectable persons from settling in that country; for any wife or mother who has the interests of her family at heart, would fly from a place where gambling is allowed, as from a pest-house. At the same time, a very lax tone prevails in these towns, and every finer feeling is blunted—in many cases irreparably—by constant association with hard-hearted, callous, and unscrupulous gamblers. That this was a view taken by the more enlightened of the Germans, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various

... fisherman exercised himself some hours today but I believe without success. at 3 P.M. J. Fields returned very unwell having killed nothing. shortly after an old man and woman arrived; the former had soar eyes and the latter complained of a lax and rheumatic effections. we gave the woman some creem of tartar and flour of sulpher, and washed the old man's eyes with a little eyewater. a little before dark Drewyer R. Fields and LaPage returned having been also unsuccessfull they had killed a hawk only and taken the ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al

... to keep a great part of the nation desolate. They hindered communication and destroyed industry. They had a trivial object, and most severe sanctions; for, as they belonged immediately to the king's personal pleasures, by the lax interpretation of treason in those days, all considerable offences against the Forest Law, such as killing the beasts of game, were considered as high treason, and punished, as high treason then was, by truncation ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... referred to as "The Empire of the Natchez." For tradition says that long ago this small tribe, whose home was in the Big Black country, was at the head of a loose confederation embracing most of the nations from the Atlantic coast quite into Texas; and adds that the expedition of De Soto severed its lax bonds and shook it irremediably into fragments. Whether this is worth our credence or not, the comparative civilization of the Natchez, and the analogy their language bears to that of the Mayas of Yucatan, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... The agitation with which he once said that corruption had entered into his heart by means of a dream seems to me a proof of this. He took a tolerant view of the lapses of others, and of course the standard of the age was lax in this respect. But I have little doubt myself that here Johnson found himself often confronted with a sensuous tendency which he thought degrading, ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson

... breathed a sharp-nosed little woman in the chair next but one to G.J., gazing inimically at the lax mouth and cynical eyes of Lady Queenie, who for four years had been the subject of universal whispering, and some shouting, and one or two ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett

... been easier than he had hoped. In the excitement as the new prisoners were brought aboard, security measures had been lax. No one had expected a third visitor; in consequence, no one looked for one. Huge as it was, the Jupiter Equilateral ship had never been planned as a prison, and it had taken time to stake out the guards in a security system that was at all effective. In addition, every man who ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse

... easily computed as "while your Pulse beateth 200 stroaks." Quantities are a more difficult affair. How is one to know how much smallage was got for a penny in mid-seventeenth century? The great connoisseur Lord Lumley is very lax, and owns that his are ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby

... added, further to exasperate these people, render them desperate, and drive them, if possible, into open rebellion." It had been a vexatious circumstance, too, that not long before this time he had received a rebuke from the Massachusetts Assembly for having been lax, as they fancied, in notifying them of some legislation of an injurious character, which was in preparation. "This censure," he said, "though grievous, does not so much surprise me, as I apprehended ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.

... the best of everything, and these our circumstances allowed us to give her. For the rest, though in kitten days suspected of having caught a mouse, she had never been known in after life to do anything which the most lax of economists could describe as useful. She would lie all day in the best arm-chair enjoying real or pretended slumbers, which never affected her appetite at supper-time; although in that eventide which is the feline morn she would, if certain ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various

... Hepatica. HEPATICA. The Leaves.—It is a cooling gently restringent herb; and hence recommended in a lax state of the ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury

... gently and with half-shut eyes through her illuminated house. She turned the lights out in her room and undressed herself in the darkness. She laid herself on the bed with straight lax limbs, with arms held apart a little from her body, with eyelids shut lightly on her eyes; all ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair

... Sir Silas, if it dragged the law by its perversions to the side of oppression and cruelty. The order of Jesuits, I fear, is as numerous as its tenets are lax and comprehensive. I am sorry to see their ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor

... supposed that any alteration of Shakspeare's text would be necessary, or would be allowed; as little is it to be supposed that Shakspeare would commence a play in his old-accustomed, various, and unequalled verse, and finish it in the easy, but somewhat lax and familiar, though not inharmonious numbers of a reverent disciple."—Tyas's Shakspeare, vol. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 55, November 16, 1850 • Various

... Talmud was exposed to the worst changes, and this all the more readily, because at that time no one had a notion of what we call respect for the text, for the idea of the author. As rigidly as the text of the Bible was maintained intact in the very minutest details, so lax was the treatment of the Talmud, which was at the mercy of individual whim. Naturally, the less scrupulous and less clearsighted allowed themselves the most emendations. Accordingly, Rabbenu Gershom felt called upon to put a severe restriction upon such liberties. Though he succeeded ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber

... increased their own allowances (p. 056) and the salaries of their brewer and their cook; the Fellows had resisted the authority of the Warden; they had neglected the attendances at divine service enjoined by the Founder, and they had been lax about expulsions. The change which Walter de Merton had made in a scholar's life was so far-reaching that a secular would probably not have shared the astonishment of Archbishop Peckham (himself a friar) at the unwillingness of the Merton scholars to ...
— Life in the Medieval University • Robert S. Rait

... myself out loud? It's really nothing—Jack will explain once more that he can't explain"—and so on. Whether the attempt justified itself or not would depend largely on the acting. In any case, it is clear that the author, though as a rule somewhat lax in his craftsmanship, was here aiming ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... England or their equivalents in the Westminster Assembly's catechisms. Thus, while the Dissenter might alter the terms of his liturgy to a degree not allowed to the Churchman (though the latter would in those lax days go pretty far sometimes), he was still supposed to be 'sound' on the fundamental creeds. It would appear to be a fortunate accident for Unitarian development in some of these old Dissenting congregations that, either the prevalent understanding or a hope for speedy inclusion in the national ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant

... to the Crown, James, was born in October 1430, while the King was at strife with the Pope, and asserting for King and Parliament power over the Provincial Councils of the Church. An interdict was threatened, James menaced the rich and lax religious orders with secular reformation; settled the Carthusians at Perth, to show an example of holy living; and pursued his severities against many ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang

... Dearest, accept a cruel truth from a man of the world—it is only the love you call guilty that lasts. There is a stimulus in sin and mystery that will fan the flame of passion and keep love alive even for an inferior object. The ugly women know this, and make lax morals a substitute for beauty. An innocent intrigue, a butterfly affection like ours, will seldom outlive the butterfly's brief day. Indeed, I sometimes admire at myself as a marvel of constancy for having kept faith so long with ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... carried so far. He has been telling me of a very unpleasant scene in which he took part quite recently. He went as the deputy of some missionary society to preach in the neighbourhood of Trantridge, a place forty miles from here, and made it his business to expostulate with a lax young cynic he met with somewhere about there—son of some landowner up that way—and who has a mother afflicted with blindness. My father addressed himself to the gentleman point-blank, and there was quite a disturbance. It was very foolish of my father, I ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... made away with himself, [1682]Jovius in elogiis. A grave and learned minister, and an ordinary preacher at Alcmar in Holland, was (one day as he walked in the fields for his recreation) suddenly taken with a lax or looseness, and thereupon compelled to retire to the next ditch; but being [1683]surprised at unawares, by some gentlewomen of his parish wandering that way, was so abashed, that he did never after show his head in public, or come into the pulpit, but pined away with melancholy: ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... the goal of his endeavors. Mary Anerley, still an exile in the house of the tanner, by reason of her mother's strict coast-guard, had long been thinking that more injustice is done in the world than ought to be; and especially in the matter of free trade she had imbibed lax opinions, which may not be abhorrent to a tanner's nature, but were most unbecoming to the daughter of a farmer orthodox upon his own land, and an officer of King's Fencibles. But how did Mary make this change, and upon questions of public ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... a class animal, but there is no rule against eating the object whose name the class bears. The usage in the Santa Cruz group in regard to eating, and the belief as to descent from the sacred object, differ in different islands; they are sometimes lax and vague, ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... thirty years ago for one of the New England States, regrets that, even then, home government had grown lax. He wittily says that Young America is rampant, parental influence couchant; and no reversal of these positions is ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... social circle is also dependent upon the convictions and opinions of those who compose it. There is a social conscience which is very lax in one group and will allow almost any departure from the moral law, but in another group it is very strict in its requirements. The social conscience is constantly weakened in one case by persons joining the first group, who are weak in moral principle; and as constantly strengthened ...
— Studies in the Life of the Christian • Henry T. Sell

... Zeno. But as yet he had found age only perplexed and desponding; manhood only callous and desperate. Some thought that systems would last their time; others, that something would turn up. His deep and pious spirit recoiled with disgust and horror from such lax, chance-medley maxims, that would, in their consequences, reduce man to the level of the brutes. Notwithstanding a prejudice which had haunted him from his childhood, he had, when the occasion offered, applied to Mr. Rigby for instruction, ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli

... destruction for, in, or against Me; in, or against thy Help.' Obviously, some words must be supplied to bring out any sense. Our Authorised Version has chosen the supplement 'is,' which fails to observe the second occurrence with 'thy Help' of the preposition, and is somewhat lax in rendering the 'for' of the second clause by the neutral 'but.' It is probably better to read, as the Revised Version, with most modern interpreters, 'Thou art against Me, against thy Help,' and to find in the second clause ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... been allowed the diversions of riding and hunting, and on May 28 he was suffered to go out for a ride under negligent or corrupt guard. Once well away from Hereford, the king's son fled from his lax custodians and joined Roger Mortimer, who was waiting for him in a neighbouring wood. On the next day he was safe behind the walls of Mortimer's castle of Wigmore, and, the day after, met Earl Gilbert at Ludlow, where he promised to uphold the ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout

... only went to his theatre towards eight o'clock, when the piece in favor came on, and overtures and accompaniments needed the strict ruling of the baton; most minor theatres are lax in such matters, and Pons felt the more at ease because he himself had been by no means grasping in all his dealings with the management; and Schmucke, if need be, could take his place. Time went by, and Schmucke became an institution in the orchestra; the Illustrious Gaudissart ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... adorable 'bisc' in society, with a wife hanging on his arm,—when as pater familias he convoys his flock of small children who tread on your toes at the chrysanthemum shows, what then? The world, my world, is generously and munificently lax, and though the limits of respectable endurance may be as hard to find as the 'fourth dimension of space', or the authenticity of the 'Book of Jasher', still for decency's sake we submit there are ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... shoreward, Charged with sighs more light than laughter, faint and fair, Like a woodland lake's weak wavelets lightly lingering forward, Soft and listless as the slumber-stricken air. Be the sunshine bared or veiled, the sky superb or shrouded, Still the waters, lax and languid, chafed and foiled, Keen and thwarted, pale and patient, clothed with fire or clouded, Vex their heart in vain, or sleep like serpents coiled. Thee they look for, blind and baffled, wan with wrath and weary, Blown for ever back by winds that rock the bird: Winds that seamews breast ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... the benevolent Emperor for a brief span of time engages in the menial occupation of a person of low class, and with his own hands ploughs an assigned portion of land in order that the enlightened spirits under whose direct guardianship the earth is placed may not become lax in their disinterested efforts to promote its fruitfulness. In this charitable exertion he is followed by various other persons of recognized position, the first being, by custom, the Guarder of the Imperial Silkworms, while at the same time the amiably-disposed Empress plants ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah

... his shirt twisted into a rope.... Oh, my dear fellow, I see what you are thinking! You fancy that there has been a want of common prudence—that the warders were lax—that they had let him retain his braces, his cravat or his shoe laces!... Well, it ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre

... of his lord. That night he cut belly, recommending his family to mercy. This was soon found—in debt and the debtor's slavery allowed by the harsh code. Thus was the jail kept full, with the innocent and a sprinkling of the guilty. No one dared to be lax; for life hung on salary, and on zeal the continuance of the salary. Moreover all revelled in the reward of the wine cup liberally bestowed for zealous service—and the more liberally as Shu[u]zen took his turn with his big cup, ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville

... disturbing any one. Yet he wiped his hands on his handkerchief before he crossed the room to an antique ebony cabinet where he helped himself to a little brandy. Then he came back to the desk and for a while stood lax, staring at the blurs ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell

... sharp tongue and irritable temper were due to overwork and neglect. The Honorable Erastus was not averse to champagne dinners and other costly excesses while at the state capital, and his fellow legislators considered him a good fellow, although rather lax in "keeping his end up." Moreover, he employed a good tailor and was careful to keep up an appearance of sound financial standing. But his home, which he avoided as much as possible, had little share in his personal prosperity. Mary ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne

... inform them that the utterances of Prince Bismarck were without any actual importance, as he was now only a private man. This only made matters worse; for the substance of the despatch quickly became known (another instance of the lax control over important State documents which we so often notice in dealing with German affairs), and only increased the bitterness of Bismarck, which was shared by ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam

... impossible for them to frown. For be it known that at these hotels in Egypt, a man cannot order his dinner when he pleases. He must breakfast at nine, and dine at six, as others do—or go without. And whether he dine, or whether he do not, he must pay. The Medes and Persians were lax and pliable in their laws in comparison with ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope

... down on a bench there in the lovely quiet, quite lax, and, because of its pressure, her natty little blue sailor in her lap. The air was like cool water and she closed her tired ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... urged the positive knowledge he possessed, and told them how he had made the examination to which Sir Oliver had voluntarily submitted, his single word carried no slightest conviction. Not for a moment was it supposed that this was aught but the subterfuge of one who had been lax in his duty and who sought to save himself from the consequences of that laxity. And the fact that he cited as his fellow-witness a gentleman now deceased but served to confirm his judges in this opinion. He was deposed from his office ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini

... flexor (perforatus) is ruptured there is no change in the position of the foot but the fetlock joint is slightly lowered. The pathognomonic symptom is the lax tendon during weight bearing, which may be felt by palpation of the tendon along its ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix

... expensive—and efficacious—had to be imported. There is evidence that the level of medical excellence in Virginia lowered during the century; many of the planters avoided the expensive visits and drugs, even passing laws to regulate fees and chastise lax ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes

... must fulfil their functions without fear or favour. (Applause.) They must look at the character of the performances at each theatre, considering only whether they were or were not beneficial to morality. In the past, under a regime happily now at an end, public opinion had been shamefully lax, and official control purely nominal; plays had been repeatedly performed, and even welcomed as classics, which he did not hesitate to say were full of incidents that were revolting to all well-regulated minds. SHAKSPEARE, who, with his undoubted talents, should have known ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various

... how it was.' He then, too, became aware of the meaning of violence. His tender and meditative nature had always held it in horror. And, perhaps for that very reason, he sought its explanation. It is by violence that an imperfect and provisional state of things is shattered, and what was lax is put into action again. Life is resumed, and a better order becomes possible. Here again we find his acceptance, his submission to the Reason that directs the universe; confidence in what takes place—that ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous

... century, praises them for the essential unreality of their presentations. They carried the spectator far away from the actual world to a region where society was more splendid and careless and brilliant and lax. They did not aim to produce an illusion of naturalness as our actors do to-day. If we compare the old-style acting of The School for Scandal, that is described in the essays of Lamb, with the modern performance of Sweet Kitty Bellairs, which dealt with the same ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton

... of its profits. It suited Dolph's adventurous disposition that he should be deputed to investigate the reason for these rumors, and for three nights he kept his abode in the desolate old manor, emerging after daybreak in a lax and pallid condition, but keeping his own counsel, to the aggravation of the populace, whose ears were burning ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner

... soon became so lax under the influence of the wine that he did not heed when the fat man and the ragged dandy dropped off to sleep and mingled their snores with the murmurs of the forest insects. He began to narrate his adventures, amatory, military, bibulous, and other. Presently, for a jest, he drank the health ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens

... habituated himself long to a hot climate, as Jamaica, for instance, should come late in life to reside in a colder climate, as England, for example, must run very great hazard indeed—nay, he could almost venture to predict, would fall a victim to the sudden tension of the lax fibres. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth

... finally, after three months of married wretchedness, he divorced her. A year later he married her again, but the old trouble reappeared, and so he divorced her a second time. If marital jealousy is less common among men than among women, the explanation is at hand in the lax moral standard for man. The feudal order of society, furthermore, was exactly the soil in which to develop masculine jealousy. In such a society ambition and jealousy go hand in hand. Wherever a man's rise in popularity ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... sarcasm behind his suddenly lax mouth. He saw a first lieutenant's uniform, but it bulged aesthetically; and he saw a first lieutenant's cap and bar, but it sat rakishly ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll

... Sheridan himself had volunteered, namely, the postponement of his right of being paid the amount of his claim, till after the Theatre should be built, was also a subject of much acrimonious discussion between the two friends,—Sheridan applying to this condition that sort of lax interpretation, which would have left him the credit of the sacrifice without its inconvenience, and Whitbread, with a firmness of grasp, to which, unluckily, the other had been unaccustomed in business, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore

... aneurism; 2. The depth of the parts, and tendency of the intestines to roll into the wound; 3. Specially on the right side, the proximity of the great veins. With these exceptions the passing of the ligature is not so difficult as in some situations, the lax cellular tissue in which the vessel lies generally yielding much more easily than the tough sheath which elsewhere, as in ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell

... feet again; but a few more minutes—then liberty and life. The better to guard his movements, his gaze fell. Out and down went his right hand, then his left, as his lithe body slid forward. Again he glanced up, paused—and on the instant every muscle of his tense body went suddenly lax. Instead of the closed eyes and sleeping face he had expected, two steady eyes were giving him back look for look. There had not been a motion; the face was yet that of a sleeper; the chest still rose and fell ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge

... for the War," says the Koelnische Zeitung. Our Hush-hush Department seems to have grown very lax of late. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 3rd, 1920 • Various

... thoroughly exhausted. Lane concentrated all his remaining strength in throttling the savage. But, just as the tense form beneath him grew lax with evident unconsciousness, and head fell limply back, extending over the edge of cliff, his own head was jerked violently backward by a noose cast around ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller

... of a foreigner, according to Billy's lax distinctions, that was olive of complexion and very black of hair and eyes. Slender and of medium height, he carried himself with an assurance that bordered upon effrontery, and as he bowed himself down the steps he flashed ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley

... thought, he has been beforehand with us. Also, daughter, surely your discipline is somewhat lax if you suffer knights thus to invade your chapel. ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard

... accused the Arminians of being more lax than Papists, and of filling the soul of man with vilest arrogance and confidence in good works; while the Arminians complained that the God of the Gomarites was an unjust God, himself the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... is still upon the statute-books. The chief weaknesses in the colonial administration of the territory, particularly prior to 1900—-but only to a slightly less extent since—-have been decentralization and a lax civil service. The concomitants of these have been irresponsibility and inefficiency. The governor has represented the president without possessing much power; the department of war has had illdefined ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... moral," says George Eliot, "any political leader who should allow his conduct in relation to great issues to be determined by egoistic passion, and boldly say that he would be less immoral even though he were as lax in his personal habits as Sir Robert Walpole, if at the same time his sense of the public welfare were supreme in his mind, quelling all pettier impulses beneath a magnanimous impartiality." George Eliot is almost without exception sound and just in her ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke

... his attention to the retreat. It was a little band that went toward the Alamo, and there were three women and three children in it, but since they knew definitely that Santa Anna and his great army had come there was not a Texan who shrank from his duty. They had been lax in their watch and careless of the future, faults frequent in irregular troops, but in the presence of overwhelming danger they showed not the least ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler

... prevalent sense that there are those present who maintain this attitude of hatred and contempt for sin and everything that breeds or fosters it, the tone, as men say, becomes low, or lax, the air becomes corrupt, and life in such surroundings becomes full of peril. If the good are timid, shrinking, showing no positive fervour, no zeal for virtue, and no moral indignation against evil influence, then the bad in their society will lift up their heads ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival

... and counted. He had no interest in the game, and experienced inside himself a half-sick, hollow feeling unique in his experience. Morris, Kitty and Margaret got in free, simply because his attention was too lax. Gerald and Celia had once more disappeared. After a decent interval the others became clamorous again ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White

... and have either made their escape or served their terms. Some of these may have been counterfeiters at home. They come to America either as stokers, sailors, stewards, or stowaways, and, while they can not get passports, it is surprising how lax the authorities are in permitting their escape. The spirit of the Italian law is willing enough, but its fleshly enforcement is curiously weak. Those who have money enough manage to reach France or Holland and come over first or second-class. The main fact is that they get here—law ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train

... in a state of intoxication, he leaves school hurriedly and betakes himself to an Army-crammer's where discipline is lax and dissipation easy. Here he keeps half-a-dozen fox-terriers, and busies himself about the destruction of domestic cats. Yet, by dint of much forcing on the part of his Coach, he succeeds in passing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various

... organized religious life have their difficulties: the one, the martinet superior and the routine subject; the other, the capricious subject and the lax superior. In one kind the bond of union as well as the stimulus of endeavor is mainly obedience, fraternal charity assisting; in the other it is mainly fraternal charity, obedience assisting; each has to overcome ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott

... a supreme situation. Even Mahaffy gazed at his friend in wonder. He had only seen him spend himself on trifles, with no further object than the next meal or the next drink; he had believed that as he knew him so he had always been, lax and loose of tongue and deed, a noisy tavern hero, but now he saw that he was filling what must have been the ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester

... was so scattered through the forests, and the discipline of some of the divisions was so lax that it was some days before McClellan had them ranged in order on the Chickahominy. Another week elapsed before he was in a position to undertake fresh operations; but General Johnston had now four divisions on the spot, and he was too enterprising ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty

... Silas into a mood of craven apology and left him with his head in his hands. To Kenny's disgusted glance he was like the Irish Grogach of folk lore, who tumbles around among the hills with a good deal of head and a lax body without much hint of bones. Well, Brian had thrashed somebody too. There were times when it couldn't be helped. And Brian had lived in a corncrib at seven cents a day. Kenny whipped out ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... Committee on Literature. Mrs. Catt with Mrs. Blankenburg (Penn.), Mrs. Lucy Hobart Day (Me.) and Mrs. Minola Graham Sexton (N. J.), presidents of their State associations, presided over Work Conferences. Mrs. Ida Porter Boyer, in her report on Libraries and Bibliography, brought to light the lax manner in which many State libraries are conducted. In that of New Jersey no catalogue had been printed for fifty years. In Montana the collection of books was thirty-five years old and had never been catalogued or classified. Various librarians reported no works on woman suffrage and women from ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper

... fully as "fillin' " as drinking the froth out of a pop-bottle, and equally as exhilarating. Like other sots, the more the literary bacchanal drinks the more he thirsts— appetite increased by what it feeds upon. We can forgive Byron and Boccaccio the lax morals of their productions because of their literary excellence, just as we wink at the little social lapses of Sarah Bernhardt because of her unapproachable genius; but Du Maurier's book is wholly bad. It could only ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... as these two for dealing with inferior races and new countries. Their virtues were courage, energy, alertness, inventiveness, generosity, honesty, truth-speaking; their commonest faults were violence, combativeness, lax ways in business, intemperance, narrowness of mind. They hated foreigners and Indians, and were ready to fight any one who behaved like an enemy or a critic; they held in honor women, their country, and brave men. ...
— Andrew Jackson • William Garrott Brown

... it is abused, and (3) The right to choose our own governors, to cashier them for misconduct and to frame a government for ourselves. There follows a curious little moral exhortation which shows how far the good Dr. Price was from forgetting his duties as a preacher. He had been distressed by the lax morals of some of his colleagues in the agitation for Reform, and he pauses to deplore that "not all who are zealous in this cause are as conspicuous for purity of morals as for ability." He cannot reconcile himself to the idea of an immoral patriot, and begs that they will at least hide their ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford

... Victorine's lax ideas of morality, keeping an affaire de coeur from the eyes of the public was all that was necessary to preserve the honor of a woman who chose to indulge ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie

... miserable weakness in the security to human life. The man with whom I stopped, had a son who married a white woman, or girl, and was shot down, and there was, as I understand, no investigation by the jury; and a number of cases have occurred of murders, for which the punishment has been very lax, or not at all, and, it may be, never will be; however, I rather think things are somewhat quieter. A few days ago a shameful outrage occurred at this place—some men had been out fox hunting, and came ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... rung out of the way by a cyclist who had come on them unawares. It was Tommy who had neglected to light his lamp, as the night, though dark, was clear and starry and municipal regulations were lax. ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... Joash is not afraid to assume a high tone with the culprits, and even with Jehoiada as their official head. He was in some sense responsible for his subordinates, and probably, though his own hands were clean, he may have been too lax in looking after the disposal of the funds. Note that while Joash rebuked the priests, and determined the new arrangements, it was Jehoiada who carried them out and provided the chest for receiving the contributions. The king wills, the high priest executes, the rank ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... late riser; and Imogen, behind the tea-pot and coffee, was always conscious of offering a crisp and charming contrast to lax self-indulgence. But this morning, as they all hemmed her in, fixed her in her rightful place, her cheeks irrepressibly burned with vexation and disappointment. The overheard insolence, too, had been like a sudden slap. She mastered herself sufficiently to kiss Mary's cheek and to take ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... followed the pursuit of arms. Then literature claimed him as her slave. His first book, Les amours du Palais Royal, excited the displeasure of King Louis XIV., and prepared the way for his downfall. In his Histoire amoureuse des Gaules (Paris, 1665, 1 vol., in-12) he satirised the lax manners of the French Court during the minority of the King, and had the courage to narrate the intrigue which Louis carried on with La Vallire. He spares few of the ladies of the Court, and lashes them all with his satire, amongst others Mesdames d'Olonne and de Chatillon. Unhappily ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield

... failing, without a leaning to virtue's side, to which some collectors have been, by reputation at least, addicted—a propensity to obtain articles without value given for them—a tendency to be larcenish. It is the culmination, indeed, of a sort of lax morality apt to grow out of the habits and traditions of the class. Your true collector—not the man who follows the occupation as a mere expensive taste, and does not cater for himself—considers himself a finder or discoverer rather than a purchaser. He is an industrious ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... Green Bay.—J.D. Doty, Esq., Judge of the District, reports (Oct. 15th) that the Grand Jury for Brown County, at the late special session of court, presented forty indictments! Most of these appear to have been petty affairs; but they denote a lax state of society. ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... mix de special dram dat I done learned from my gran'pappy. So, I pours in a little of dis an' a little of dat, den I shakes it 'twell it foams, den I fills de glasses an' draps in de ice an' de mint. Time de mens drink dat so an' so dey done forgot dey's tired; dey 'lax, an' when de ladies come down de stairs all dredd up, dey thinks dey's angels walkin' in gol' shoes. Dem wuz good times befo' de war an' befo' Marse Peter got shot. From de day Marse Peter rode his big grey hoss off to fight, we never seed him no more. Mis' Laura ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various

... delicious process of the tuning of two souls to each other, string by string, not without little half-pleasing discords now and then when some chord in one or the other proves to be overstrained or over-lax, but always approaching nearer and nearer to harmony, until they become at last as two instruments with a single voice. Something more than a year of this blissful doubled consciousness had passed over him when he found himself once more alone,—alone, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... whale. They were cutting off the flesh in strips, and on some of the farther trunks the white ribs were showing. It was the sound of their hatchets that made that chid, chid, chid. Some way away a thing like a trolley cable, drawn and loaded with chunks of lax meat, was running up the slope of the cavern floor. This enormous long avenue of hulls that were destined to be food gave us a sense of the vast populousness of the moon world second only to the effect of our ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells

... clergyman should be on the bench having been quite correct according to the notions of his younger days; and in spite of his beneficence he incurred a good deal of unpopularity for withstanding the lax good-nature which made his brother magistrates give orders for parish relief refused to able-bodied paupers by their own Vestries. This was a mischievous abuse of the old poor-law times, which made people dispose of every one's money ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge

... play, the untranslatable Hippolylus, Phaedra's nurse is made to conclude that certain men she refers to cannot be otherwise than lax in their morals, because they have finished the roofs of their houses in a very imperfect manner, her reasoning is inconsequential enough; but not more so than that of the renowned French chancellor, Michael ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various

... seem somewhat lax. Really, if the lower orders don't set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of ...
— The Importance of Being Earnest - A Trivial Comedy for Serious People • Oscar Wilde

... Cowan records two cases of the foregoing nature in idiots. The first case was a paralytic idiot of thirty-nine, whose cranial development was small in proportion to the size of the face and body; the cranium was oxycephalic; the scalp was lax and redundant and the hair thin; there were 13 furrows, five on each side running anteroposteriorly, and three in the occipital region running transversely. The occipitofrontalis muscle had no action ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... to be done with such a rag-bag, moralistic ass as this? In spite of all his philanderings, and the resultant qualms due to his fear of being found out, he prospered in business and rose to some eminence in his own community. As he had grown more lax he had become somewhat more genial and tolerant, more generally acceptable. He was a good Republican, a follower in the wake of Norrie Simms and young Truman Leslie MacDonald. His father-in-law was both rich and moderately influential. Having lent himself to some campaign ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... opportunity for collusion between the parties, so as to favor a very free granting of divorces. On the other hand, about one fourth of all the applications for divorce which come to trial are refused by the courts, showing that the courts are not so lax in all cases as they ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood

... man of forty, had a salute somewhat military in gesture, though conceived in a softer, more accommodating spirit. He raised his chubby hand to his forehead, but all the muscles of it were lax and the fingers loosely curved; at the same time he drew back his left foot and kicked up the heel a few inches. Louis amiably responded. Rachel went direct to Mrs. Heath, a woman of forty-five. She had never before seen Heath ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett

... on, peaceful as a brook. Isabel's arms hung lax and motionless: only her hands stirred, from the wrists, and so slightly, or else so rapidly without effort, that they too scarcely seemed to move. ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... have been preserved, but one is given which shows that she occasionally indulged in a pun. Some one, speaking of a certain bishop who was rather lax in his observance of Lent, said he believed he would eat a horse on Ash-Wednesday. "Very suitable diet," remarked her ladyship, "if it were ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various

... at all. Her people—who claim affinity with the Magyars of Hungary, but are possibly a back-wave of an earlier tide of population—had remained untouched by foreign influences since their conquest by Sweden, and their somewhat lax and wholesale conversion to Christianity: events which took place gradually between the middle of the twelfth and the end of the thirteenth centuries. Under the rule of Sweden, the Finns were left to their quiet life and undisturbed imaginings, among the forests ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang

... repeats the act, allured on by impunity or by gain. In fact, "it is not dire necessity which impels them;" they make a speculation of cupidity, a new sort of illicit trade. An old soldier, saber in hand, a forest-keeper, and "about eight persons sufficiently lax, put themselves at the head of four or five hundred men, go off each day to three or four villages. Here they force everybody who has any wheat to give it to them at 24 livres," and even at 18 livres, the sack. Those among ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... this summer day, Entered the accustomed haunt, and found for once No medicinal virtue. Not a leaf Stirred with the whispering welcome which I sought, But in a close and humid atmosphere, Every fair plant and implicated bough Hung lax and lifeless. Something in the place, Its utter stillness, the unusual heat, And some more secret influence, I thought, Weighed on the sense like sin. Above I saw, Though not a cloud was visible in heaven, The pallid sky look through a glazed mist Like a blue eye ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter

... puerilities, and simpering affectations, is in general bold, vigorous, and manly; but the disgraceful fault to which we object in his writings, is the scorn he every where evinces for all that is moral or religious. If he must be skeptical—if he must be lax in his human codes of excellence, let him be so; but in God's name let him not publish his principles, and cram them down the throats of others. Existence in its present state is heavy enough; ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney

... thought desperately: 'Dare I—oughtn't I—couldn't I somehow take her hand or put my arm round her, or something?' Instead, he sat very rigid at his end of the sofa, while she sat lax and lissom at the other, and one of those crises of paralysis which beset would-be lovers ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... dear, for your own sake!" exclaimed Mrs. Page, distressed by these lax remarks. "I'll look over your things to-morrow and see what ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge

... wages a mechanic, artisan or labourer, or engaged in any menial duty, besides insisting upon the usual restrictions in regard to taking money and competing with professionals. In association football the rules are much more lax, for although amateurs are clearly distinguished from professionals, an amateur may even become a regular member, though unsalaried, of a professional team without losing his amateur status. The Rugby game was, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... and proud man, disdained to please by such meretricious means as those of which Metastasio had availed himself: he was highly indignant at the lax immorality of his countrymen, and the degeneracy of his contemporaries in general. This indignation stimulated him to the exhibition of a manly strength of mind, of stoical principles and free opinions, and on the other ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... Inverness. The Pope sided with the queen in these melancholy broils, and James's private life (which was not faultless) was much more subject to criticism and interference than that of his at least equally lax rival on the English throne. A second son, Henry Benedict, Duke of York, was born in 1725, and, at one time, was regarded as of more martial disposition than Prince Charles. As the elder, Charles was first under fire, and at the siege of Gaeta, in 1734, while a mere boy, he displayed ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various

... I did not suspect you of any improper idea, when you offered to share my uncertain fortunes. Render me, I pray you, the same justice at this moment. My moral principles are very lax, it is true, but I am as proud as yourself. I never shall reach my aim by any subterfuge. No; strive to study art. I find you beautiful and seductive, but I am governed by sentiments superior to personal interests. I was profoundly touched by your sympathetic leaning toward me, and have sought ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... take advantage of the leniency toward late-comers to the luncheon. It is /always/ rude to keep people waiting; but it is doubly so to be lax in one's punctuality because one rule is not as exacting as another. The guest must also bear in mind that a great part of the enjoyment of the luncheon devolves upon his or her own cordiality and friendliness. Every guest must feel it a duty to supply some of the conversation, and if he is not ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler

... from the need of it soon enough," promised the other. She crossed to the piano. "What kind of music do you want? No; don't tell me. I should be able to guess." Half turning on the bench she gazed speculatively at the lax figure on the rug. "Chopin, I think. I've guessed right? Well, I don't think I shall play you Chopin to-day. You don't need that kind ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... 'sir'—it is folly. I am Abel Fletcher." For my father retained scrupulously the Friend's mode of speech, though he was practically but a lax member of the Society, and had married out of its pale. In this announcement of his plain name appeared, I fancy, more pride ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

... his arm about her, they were startlingly rung out of the way by a cyclist who had come on them unawares. It was Tommy who had neglected to light his lamp, as the night, though dark, was clear and starry and municipal regulations were lax. ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... and sell the loot. Cowards alone, together they fear nothing. Their imagination is perhaps inflamed by flash literature and "penny-dreadfuls." Such associations often break out in decadent country communities where, with fewer and feebler offspring, lax notions of family discipline prevail and hoodlumism is the direct result of the passing of the rod. These barbaric societies have their place and give vigor; but if unreduced later, as in many unsettled portions of this country, a semisavage state ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... from the table Westervelt entered with a face like a horse, so long and lax was it. "They have burned us alive!" he exclaimed, as he sank into a chair and mopped his red neck. He shook like a gelatine pudding, and Helen could not repress ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland

... only in the hospital can the underlying principles be applied with complete thoroughness and persistence. The hospital is constantly alert, whereas in private houses carelessness or ignorance, or both, often lead to lax technique. As a result, statistical evidence indicates that two to three infections occur among those delivered at home for one at ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons

... he could barely see the man from the corner of his eye. He was apparently unconscious of Antone's approach as he quietly replied to Halliday, but his fingers tightened on the bridle, and the horse, answering a closer pressure of heel and knee, suddenly lifted its head and stiffened its lax muscles ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly

... campanero by the Spaniards. From the upper part of the bill grows a fleshy tubercle about the thickness of a quill, sparingly covered with minute feathers. It was now hanging down on one side, quite lax. It was evident, therefore, that the bird, when alive, elevated it when excited by singing or some other cause; indeed afterwards, on examining it, we found it connected with the interior of the throat, which further ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston

... the axe-handle with its ugly load standing out at an angle, and the two lads stood watching the serpent's head as the jaws parted once or twice and then became motionless, while the folds twisted round the stout ash-handle gradually grew lax and then dropped limply and loosely upon the earth, ending by heaving slightly as a shudder seemed to run from the bleeding neck right ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn

... imported morphine base into heroin are in remote regions of Turkey and near Istanbul; government maintains strict controls over areas of legal opium poppy cultivation and output of poppy straw concentrate; lax enforcement of money-laundering controls ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... to the up-hill struggle which the Positive spirit had to maintain against the prevailing form, of the Theological. M. Comte, indeed, has considerably exaggerated the share of the Metaphysical spirit in this mental revolution, since by a lax use of terms he credits the Metaphysical mode of thought with all that is due to dialectics and negative criticism—to the exposure of inconsistencies and absurdities in the received religions. But this operation is quite independent of ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill

... If Jesus were to return, after all these centuries, and were only to do and say just what he did and said about the Sabbath when he was here before, there are many pious Protestants who would think him rather lax in his religious principles. How long he has been with us, and yet ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... than any other Englishman. He had his admission par la petite porte—that is, he gained his knowledge through his vices; and the Italians were so flattered to see a great Milor adapt himself so readily to their lax notions and loose morality that they grew ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever

... common name. The three clusters of Holston, Cumberland, and Kentucky settlements developed independently of one another, and though their founders were in each case of the same kind, they were at first only knit one to another by a lax ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt

... was now the sitting magistrate, and he committed her to prison with short examination. But the constable, whether from pity or for some consideration of his own convenience, did not wish to take her; and the administration of justice being somewhat lax, she was ordered by that official to go home until ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt

... Squads of infantry, banding together for protection, toiled along painfully by easy stages, unable to keep pace with the colours, but hoping to be up in time for the next fight; and amongst these were not a few officers. But this was not the worst. Lax discipline and the absence of soldierly habits asserted themselves with the same pernicious effect as in the Valley. Not all the stragglers had their faces turned towards the enemy, not all were incapacitated by physical ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson

... three rows of seats, each calculated to hold three persons, and as we were only six, we had, in the phrase of Milton, to "inhabit lax" this exalted abode, and, accordingly, we were for some miles tossed about like a few potatoes in a wheelbarrow. Our knees, elbows, and heads required too much care for their protection to allow us leisure to look out of the windows; but at length the road became smoother, and we became ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope

... seemed to me that theatrical road life with a one-night-stand company would be less brutalizing to the finer sensibilities, and less lowering to the ideals of a young girl, than the method of work required of many newspaper reporters in America to-day. The editor who scores the actress for lax morals seems often to ignore the fact that there is a mental as well as a ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... and co-operate in he stands aloof from, and satisfies his unhappy disposition with carping criticisms and ungenerous censures. A neighbour who does not reach his standard of moral excellence in character and action he pronounces lax in principles and delinquent in life. One who does not agree with him in his peculiar views of some disputed doctrine of Christian faith or principle of Church discipline he judges to be little better than ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate

... class, are subject to a terrible danger. Great numbers of mothers actually make their daughters drunkards by ever and again dosing them with brandy. This is done in secret, and imagined to be a most excellent thing. For instance, if the bowels get lax, as is the case in certain stages of disease, brandy is given as a remedy. How little do those who give it know that it is lessening vital energy and making cure impossible! But it is doing nothing else. We have many times over seen the dying ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk

... any way, however slight, offended the proprieties. But the vials of her fiercest anger were reserved for her mother-in-law, the Dowager-Countess, whose shameless intrigue with the Prince Regent scandalised the world in an age of lax morals; and the outraged Princess Caroline had no more valiant champion. She not only declined to have anything to say to her husband's mother, she carried her disapproval to the extent of refusing point blank to appear ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall

... he who considers himself as the true Anglican, excludes from the Church of Christ all but the adherents of his own orthodoxy; every minister and congregation has its small circle, beyond which all are heretics: nay even among that sect which is most lax as to the dogmatic forms of truth, we find the Unitarian of the old school denouncing the spiritualism of ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson

... aping age. Wieland alone was deeply sensible of this want of nature, and hence arose his predilection for the best poets of Greece and France. The German muse, led by his genius, lost her ancient stiffness and acquired a pliant grace, to which the sternest critic of his too lax morality is not insensible. Some lyric poets, connected with the Graecomanists by the Goettingen Hainbund, preserved a noble simplicity, more particularly Salis and Holty, and also Count Stolberg, wherever he has not been led astray by Voss's stilted manner. Matthison ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks

... mistake that the distinguished man made was that he went too far from shore with the boy. There are too many men to-day who are doing the same thing. They are going out too far in social life, they are too lax in the question of amusements, they are too thoughtless on the subject of dissipation. Some day they will stop, themselves recovering, but their boys will ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman

... Moshi Wilmshurst made his way along the side of the track until he came in touch with the hostile party. The Huns, suspecting nothing, were resting. Two Askaris had been posted as sentries, but they, too, were lax, little thinking that there was any danger of a surprise. The prisoner was seated at the base of a large tree, another Askari mounting guard over him. His back was turned in Wilmshurst's direction, but the subaltern was able to discern ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman

... reduced to its natural size, still made a prodigious quantity of water, his appetite very good, habit of body rather lax, and his complexion ruddy. On the 2d of June, being still rather weak, he was ordered decoct. cort. [Symbol: ounce]ii. ter de die; and on the 12th was discharged ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering

... a bliss On which the soul may rest, the hearts of all Yearn after it, and to that wished bourn All therefore strive to tend. If ye behold Or seek it with a love remiss and lax, This cornice after just repenting lays Its penal torment on ye. Other good There is, where man finds not his happiness: It is not true fruition, not that blest Essence, of every good the branch and root. The love too lavishly bestow'd on this, Along three circles ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri

... Vaucher, the smaller size of the corolla is common to the females of most or all of the above-mentioned Labiatae. The pistil of the female, though somewhat variable in length, is generally shorter, with the margins of the stigma broader and formed of more lax tissue, than that of the hermaphrodite. The stamens in the female vary excessively in length; they are generally enclosed within the tube of the corolla, and their anthers do not contain any sound pollen; but after long search I found a single plant with the stamens moderately ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin

... historic or of to-day, always come closer together. Very much more loving lovers, even, than they were before, became the two perched aloft that night. It was a comfort for the wedded pair to call to each other through the darkness. After a time, however, muscles grew lax with the continued strain. Weariness clouded the spirits of the couple and almost overcame them and only the thing which has always, in great stress, given the greatest strength in this world—the ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo

... prevalent in the world from day to day" he says. "When I compare what I have witnessed in my younger days and what I see to-day in my old age, the state is altogether different and we are bearing witness to this and it is hoped we shall be more attentive in future." Though he speaks regretfully of lax or incorrect discipline, he does not complain of the corruption of the faith by Tantrism and magical practices. He does however deprecate in an exceedingly curious passage ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... toward her salon. Moliere himself disclaims all intention of attacking the true precieuse; but the world is not given to fine discrimination, and the true suffers from the blow aimed at the false. This brilliant comedian, whose manners were not of the choicest, was more at home in the lax and epicurean world of Ninon and Mme. de la Sabliere—a world which naturally did not find the decorum of the precieuses at all to its taste; the witticism of Ninon, who defined them as the "Jansenists of love," is well known. It is not unlikely that Moliere shared her dislike of the ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason

... abuse the home-government in two ways, either by over-indulgence, or by the iron rod of tyranny. When we make it lax in its restraints and requisitions, it becomes merely nominal, and its laws are never enforced and obeyed. Often parents voluntarily relinquish their right and duty to rule their household; and as a consequence, their children ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips

... joined, the frigate sailed for the Mediterranean. Owen did his best to gain my confidence, and so far succeeded, that, being placed in his watch, I was his constant companion. I was at first shocked at his opinions and open acknowledgment of his very lax morals, and though in the latter respect he might not have been much worse in reality than others in the mess, I observed that by degrees some of them, especially Pearson, began rather to tight shy of him. Often I remarked an expression on his countenance which was most disagreeable, ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston

... wars." The new Protector was a weak and worthless man; but the bulk of the nation were content to be ruled by one who was at any rate no soldier, no Puritan, and no innovator. Richard was known to be lax and worldly in his conduct, and he was believed to be conservative and even royalist in heart. The tide of reaction was felt even in his Council. Their first act was to throw aside one of the greatest of Cromwell's reforms, and to fall back in the summons which they ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green

... great size, with the coverings of an artery, to none but a kind of private and single purpose, that, namely, of nourishing the lungs, why should the pulmonary vein, which is scarcely so large, which has the coats of a vein, and is soft and lax, be presumed to be made for many—three or four different—uses? For they will have it that air passes through this vessel from the lungs into the left ventricle; that fuliginous vapours escape by it from the heart into the lungs; and that a portion of the spirituous blood ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... their virtue. It has been said, we are a nation of shopkeepers. If that is true, then all the shops are in one street, packed tight, the one against the other. For we are a nation of neighbours too, prone to do what is being done next door, and a lax king upon the throne of England could turn our morals upside down. All things are fashions—even moralities—they take longer to come and longer to go, but they change with the rest of things nevertheless, and we follow, doing what is at the moment ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston

... who delights to wear A weedy flux of ill-conditioned hair, Seems of the sort that in a crowded place One elbows freely into smallest space; A timid creature, lax of knee and hip, Whom small disturbance whitens round the lip; One of those harmless spectacled machines, The Holy-Week of Protestants convenes; Whom school-boys question if their walk transcends The last advices of maternal ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... the native rage that first impell'd The insulted colons to the battling field; When first their high-soul'd sentiment of right And full-vein'd vigor nerved their arm to fight. For stript of health, benumb'd thy vital flood, Thy muscles lax'd and decomposed thy blood, What is thy courage, man? a foodless flame, A light unseen, ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow

... when—suddenly a sharp crack like a pistol shot cut the air. The music ceased—one of the violin strings had snapped. At another time the great man would have finished the number on the three remaining strings, but the heat, the lax practice of a holiday season—something, or perhaps everything combined, for the instant overcame him. He stood like an awkward child, gazing down at the trailing, ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson

... resist the material arguments and voted for the Germans. And if it is true that a number of people voted twice and even three times the Inter-Allied Commission fell short of its duties. It is said that the voting was so lax that if a stranger had been inscribed and did not turn up to vote, his legitimation was used by a native. Thus we are told of one Helena Rozenzoph, aged seventy-five, who was inscribed at Grab[vs]tajn. This woman had never existed; there had been a certain ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein

... Clay. There had lived beaux and belles, memories of whom hang still about the town, people it with phantom shapes, and give an individual or a family here and there a subtle distinction to-day. There the grasp of Calvinism was most lax. There were the dance, the ready sideboard, the card table, the love of the horse and the dog, and but little passion for the game-cock. There were as manly virtues, as manly vices, as the world has ever known. And there, love was as far from ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox

... passed his hand across his face, unconsciously; his arm fell lax at his side. As the girl had known, he did not follow the lead, would not follow it unless ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge

... the field, to battle with ferocious and demi-nude savages, whom ever subduing they carried home captives chained to their triumphal chariots; but it does seem to be uncommonly applicable to a time when many a priest, whose writings manifest a lax habit of thinking and betray a levity, indeed, licentiousness, ill according with a religious turn of mind, rose to the position of a great dignitary of the Church and a powerful arbiter of the destinies of his kind. As that was an age when Alexander VI. ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... the ear or ears to the pillory, placing in and upon the pillory, whipping, or imprisonment for life, is, or may be inflicted, shall, instead of such parts of the punishment, be fined and sentenced to hard labor for any term not exceeding two years." Also, as if dreading that lax laws might lead to a carnival of crime, the legislators restricted the operation of the new and lenient statute to three years. The act was renewed, however, at the close of that term, and finally, in 1794, the reform of the criminal code was crowned with the declaration that "no ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann

... Arragon. This they regarded, though wrongfully, as a hostile country; for, previous to their arrival, the people there had taken no part either way in the struggle, but the overbearing manner of Tesse, and the lax discipline of his troops, had speedily caused an intense feeling of irritation. Resistance had been offered to foraging parties of the French army, and the terrible vengeance which had been taken by Tesse for these acts had roused the whole province ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty

... mourned much over such a state of things in her household. What a scandal that not one of her children should give any evidences of saving grace! What a subject for reproach in the mouths of the ungodly! But it was not her fault; no, she often felt that Mr. Meeker was too lax in discipline, (she had had fears of him, sometimes, lest he might become a castaway,) and did not set that Christian example, at all times, which she could desire. For instance, after church on Sunday afternoon, it was his custom, when the season was favorable, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various

... possessed, and told them how he had made the examination to which Sir Oliver had voluntarily submitted, his single word carried no slightest conviction. Not for a moment was it supposed that this was aught but the subterfuge of one who had been lax in his duty and who sought to save himself from the consequences of that laxity. And the fact that he cited as his fellow-witness a gentleman now deceased but served to confirm his judges in this opinion. He was deposed from his office and subjected to a heavy fine, and there ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini

... revolts from the strain that the overtaxed body must bear, the leaden weariness of worn-out limbs, and the subconscious effort to retain warmth and vitality in spite of the ceaseless lashing of the icy gale. Then, as aching muscles grow lax, the nervous tension becomes more insupportable, unless, indeed, utter weariness breeds indifference to the personal peril each time the decks are swept by a frothing flood, or a slippery spar must be clung to with frost-numbed and often ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss

... had found age only perplexed and desponding; manhood only callous and desperate. Some thought that systems would last their time; others, that something would turn up. His deep and pious spirit recoiled with disgust and horror from such lax, chance-medley maxims, that would, in their consequences, reduce man to the level of the brutes. Notwithstanding a prejudice which had haunted him from his childhood, he had, when the occasion offered, applied to Mr. Rigby for instruction, as one distinguished in ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli

... 'Go as you please.' I give up the natural man. I admit training. I perceive I am lax and flabby, unguarded, I funk too much, I eat too much, and I drink too much. And, yet, what I have always liked in you, Benham, ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... Wanda, lying white and lax upon the couch near the fireplace, suddenly dropped her mother's hand and sprang to her feet, her body quivering with a quick anger that leaped ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory

... what mother would think about it. Would she be terribly shocked? I doubt if the little Mummy has the highest principles in the world; in fact, I don't doubt, for I am quite certain that the Mummy's principles are a little lax, but there, she is the Mummy, and I love her. What a queer thing love is, for Mummy is not the highest-souled woman, nor the most beautiful in the world. Still, she is the Mummy, and ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade

... apostrophes. When I say 'To efface,' wanting two-syllable measure, I do not write 'T' efface' as in the old fashion, but 'To efface' full length. This is the style of the day. Also you will find me a little lax perhaps in metre—a freedom which is the result not of carelessness, but of conviction, and indeed of much patient study of the great Fathers of English poetry—not meaning Mr. Pope. Be as patient with me as you can. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... those whom they have injured, Margaret loved with unusual fervour the sister with whom she had to forbear. For the same reason that the children, even the affectionate children, of tyrannical or lax parents, love liberty and conscientiousness above all else, Margaret was in practice gentle, long-suffering, and forgetful of self. For the same reason that the afflicted are looked upon by the pure-minded as sacred, Margaret regarded her sister with a reverence which preserved her ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau

... heedless, inattentive, regardless, lax, incautious, remiss, inconsiderate, nonchalant, neglectful, unwary, imprudent, indiscreet, improvident, reckless, desultory, perfunctory, devil-may-care, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... the realization of its loss, so there is a condition of hatred which leads to an enormous calmness and an unnatural absence of any tremor. Bell had reached that state. The instinct of self-preservation had gone lax. Where a man normally thinks first, if unconsciously, of the protection of his body from injury or pain, Bell had come to think first, and with the same terrible clarity, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various

... difference of the same idea. In meditation we consider supernatural things pertaining to our eternal salvation. The soul maintains herself with difficulty in the love and practice of virtue without the help derived from meditation; for when she gives it up, her fervor in piety grows lax, temptations became more frequent and obstinate, often followed by ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi

... "I have been lax in neighborly solicitude," The Laird continued. "I must send you over a supply of wood from the box factory. We have more waste than we can use in the furnaces. Is this your little man, Nan? Sturdy little chap, isn't he? Come here, bub, and ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne

... according to which the expressions of the press hostile to the monarchy can be individually punished, a matter, which is immaterial to us, all the more so, as the individual prosecution of press intrigues is very rarely possible and as, with a lax enforcement of such laws, the few cases of this nature would not be punished. The proposition, therefore, does not meet our demand in any way, and it offers not the least guarantee for the ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History

... Is there a man who could forgive twenty years of deliberate deception from the wife he thought the soul of honour? Maude, Maude! We live in lax times truly, when men and women laugh at principle and good faith, and deal with each other less honestly than the beasts of the field,—but for me there is a limit!—a limit you have passed! I think I could pardon your wrong to me more readily than I can pardon ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli

... his face white as death; one little hand hanging lax and pulseless over the side of the lounge, and the ruffled shirt thrust aside from the broad, snowy chest. Harry stood over him, fanning his forehead; while poor Louie was crouched in a corner, sobbing as though his heart would break, ...
— Red, White, Blue Socks. Part Second - Being the Second Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow

... been an active magistrate— that a clergyman should be on the bench having been quite correct according to the notions of his younger days; and in spite of his beneficence he incurred a good deal of unpopularity for withstanding the lax good-nature which made his brother magistrates give orders for parish relief refused to able-bodied paupers by their own Vestries. This was a mischievous abuse of the old poor-law times, which made people dispose of every one's money save their own. He had also been a keen sportsman; ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge

... majority, of Englishmen, have never seen a case of smallpox at all. Not knowing the awful danger they have escaped, through Great Britain having had compulsory vaccination since 1853, they have become lax in their belief in the necessity for the continuance of that precaution. "They jest at scars that never felt a wound." Towns such as Gloucester in England, in which a large number of children have been allowed to grow up unvaccinated, have always been visited sooner or later by a ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... analogy of the system of names; only, among the Etruscans, descent on the mother's side received much more consideration than in Roman law. The constitution of their league appears to have been very lax. It did not embrace the whole nation; the northern and the Campanian Etruscans were associated in confederacies of their own, just in the same way as the communities of Etruria proper. Each of these leagues consisted of ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... the start was, perhaps, purely physical. Atufal's presence, singularly attesting docility even in sullenness, was contrasted with that of the hatchet-polishers, who in patience evinced their industry; while both spectacles showed, that lax as Don Benito's general authority might be, still, whenever he chose to exert it, no man so savage or colossal but must, more ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville

... work, or are idle and careless, or cross and sulky, I don't intend to amuse you in the evenings. I was brought up on a stricter plan than the girls of the present day, and I mean while I am with you to bring you up in the same way. I prefer it to the lax way in which young ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade

... me to be as good a name to point a moral or adorn a tale of ambition, as any hero's that ever lived and failed. But we must remember that the morality was lax—that other gentlemen besides himself took the road in his day—that public society was in a strange disordered condition, and the State was ravaged by other condottieri. The Boyne was being fought and won, and lost—the bells rung in William's victory, in the ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... long since, referring to this part of his life, "that to force childhood to associate religion with such dry morsels is to violate the spirit, not only of the New Testament, but of common sense as well. I know one thing, that if I am 'lax and latitudinarian,' the Sunday Catechism is to blame for a part of it. The dinners that I have lost because I could not go through 'sanctification,' and 'justification,' and 'adoption,' and all such questions, lie heavily on my memory! I do not know that they have brought forth ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.

... the worst time in the world for parents to become lax in their discipline. One was the growing sentiment in favor of independence which was permeating all classes of society, and the other the great revival of learning among the people. Given a large class of persons highly educated and ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan

... for years been notoriously lax in the administration of law, and the enforcement of an unpopular measure was resented equally by the president of a large manufacturing concern and by the former victim of a sweatshop who had started a place of his own. Whatever ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... was far from being the sole amusement. There were theatrical booths, in front of which were pictorial representations of the scenes to be enacted within; and anon a drummer emerged from one of them, thumping on a terribly lax drum, and followed by the entire dramatis personae, who ranged themselves on a wooden platform in front of the theatre. They were dressed in character, but wofully shabby, with very dingy and wrinkled white tights, threadbare ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... globe, and finding no answer. How could I? It was too fair, I thought, standing there in the open; there was a fatal sweetness in the air, a deadly sufficiency in the beauty of everything around falling on the lax senses like some sleepy draught of pleasure. Not a leaf stirred, the wide purple roof of the sky was unbroken by the healthy promise of a cloud from rim to rim, the splendid country, teeming with its spring-time richness, lay in rank perfection everywhere; and just as rank and sleek and passionless ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold

... away I saw others, and then more at another point in the wall. It was a long lax line of men in ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... is quite likely to find himself when first he attempts to put Christian principles into practice. We imagine one brought up in the ordinary mixed circles of society, where there are unbelievers and lax Christians mingled together, and where there are no principles firmly enough held to interfere with any sort of enjoyment of life which offers. Such an one—a young woman, let us suppose—in the Providence of God becomes converted to our Lord, and comes ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry

... officer, and conducted to the Vice-President's chair, while that debonair man of the world took a seat on his right with easy grace. On Mr. Jefferson's left sat Chief Justice John Marshall, a "tall, lax, lounging Virginian," with black eyes peering out from his swarthy countenance. There is a dramatic quality in this scene of the President-to-be seated between two men who are to cause him more vexation of spirit than any others in public life. Burr, brilliant, gifted, ambitious, and profligate; ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson

... circle is also dependent upon the convictions and opinions of those who compose it. There is a social conscience which is very lax in one group and will allow almost any departure from the moral law, but in another group it is very strict in its requirements. The social conscience is constantly weakened in one case by persons joining the first group, who ...
— Studies in the Life of the Christian • Henry T. Sell

... by individual conscience, and to compel that righteousness which, without it, individual conscience would fail to enforce. As individual conscience becomes more stringent, civil Law may become more lax. If men would be just towards one another of themselves, there would be no necessity of human Law, to compel them to abstain from injury and to perform their duties ...
— The Religious Duty of Obedience to Law • Ichabod S. Spencer

... is said, was a stay-maker, but being a man of wit and parts he betook himself to study, and at a time when the discipline of the inns of court was scandalously lax, got himself called to the Bar, and practised at the quarter-sessions under me, but with little success. He became the conductor of a paper called The Public Ledger and a writer for the stage, in ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell

... become adherent to the sac of the aneurism; 2. The depth of the parts, and tendency of the intestines to roll into the wound; 3. Specially on the right side, the proximity of the great veins. With these exceptions the passing of the ligature is not so difficult as in some situations, the lax cellular tissue in which the vessel lies generally yielding much more easily than the tough sheath which elsewhere, as in the ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell

... modern sentiment. Moreover, commercial considerations entered into the reckoning. Industries in states where the laws were stringent were found to be at a disadvantage in comparison with like industries in states where the laws were lax, and this came to be regarded as a species of unfair competition. The advantages of uniformity and standardization seemed obvious from both the philanthropic and the commercial viewpoints, and Congress determined to take ...
— Our Changing Constitution • Charles Pierson

... practice of piety and the obligations of religion and charity; but they have always indulged in the fancies and ideas of the great school of free-thinking philosopher Sofis, whose observance of the ordinances of severe and joyless life is notedly lax. ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon

... this it is urged, that Turkish property would be endangered, if, in the present demoralised state of society, Christian evidence were admitted. But, while advancing this argument, it is forgotten that this state is traceable to the lax and vicious system pursued in the Mussulman courts, where, as the only way of securing justice for the Christians, Mussulman witnesses are allowed ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot

... faithful and true are Colonel James and his wife. They are both very good sort of people in a way, who live in a lax and frivolous age, who have plenty of money, no particular principle, no strong affection for each other, and little individual character. They might have been—Mrs. James to some extent is—quite estimable and harmless; but even as it is, they are not to be wholly ill spoken ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding

... Pietro said that he could never equal that original." This noble creation of religious art is now in the Pitti Palace at Florence, and fully bears out Vasari's appreciative criticism: in composition, in beauty of type in the mourning women and men, in the lax body of the dead Saviour, in the exquisite landscape with its trees defined against the far sky, our master touches here a very high level in religious art. As usual with works of this importance he fully signed it, on the rock on which ...
— Perugino • Selwyn Brinton

... Negro has given a splendid account of himself both as an exceptionally fearless fighting man and as a member of non-combatant troops. I made diligent effort to ascertain the manner in which the Negro troops conducted themselves behind the lines. It is much easier for a man to become lax in his conduct there than in actual fighting. Without exception every officer I questioned stated he could not ask for more obedient, willing, harder working or more patriotic troops than the Negro ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney

... have been shocked at my easy-going indifference. This holds especially true of politics. This is a matter upon which I feel easier in my mind than upon any other, and yet a great many people look upon me as being very lax. I cannot get out of my head the idea that perhaps the libertine is right after all and practises the true philosophy of life. This has led me to express too much admiration for such men as Sainte-Beuve and Theophile Gautier. ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan

... grace and glory, honour and immortality, and eternal life. He is in the church, he hath the ordinances rightly administered, yet he wants the most part, till he find Jesus Christ in all these. Many seek corn, wine, or any worldly good thing, saying, "Who will show us any good?" Fie upon such a lax and indifferent spirit, that hath no discretion or sense of things that are good, that sees not one thing needful, and no more good than is necessary. But the child of God is a seeker different from these also, he seeks the favour and countenance of God, Psal. ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... and looking straight ahead, followed by a feeling of satisfaction that this opportunity had presented itself for the new order to show where it stood in the matter of accepting doubtful characters on an equal social footing. It had properly vindicated itself of the charge that western society was lax in such matters. That they had hurt—terribly hurt—another, was of ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart

... of the Church. For the canons of discipline in force in Alexandria, see the Canonical Epistle of Peter of Alexandria, ANF, VI, 269 ff. (MSG, 18:467.) They were regarded by the rigorist party in Alexandria as too lax. Of the three schisms known to have arisen from the Diocletian persecution, that in Alexandria is known as the Meletian schism, and three selections are given bearing on it. For the proposals of the Council of Nicaea to bring about a settlement and union, see the Epistle of the Synod ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.

... portraits of his ancestors. The ancients had no kind of decisive, clear, and least of all dogmatically fixed ideas about the immortality of the soul and a life hereafter, but every one in his own way had lax, vacillating, and problematical ideas; and their ideas about the gods were just as various, individual, and vague. So that the ancients had really no religion in our sense of the word. Was it for this reason that anarchy and lawlessness reigned among them? ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... "Yes. Owing to the lax watch kept at the gate during those momentous hours, they were enabled to descend the steps to the ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux

... Glegg's front to-day was more fuzzy and lax than usual, she had a design under it: she intended the most pointed and cutting allusion to Mrs. Tulliver's bunches of blond curls, separated from each other by a due wave of smoothness on each side ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot

... consent, since the loss and death of our valiant Commander Captain Sawkins." Sawkins had been strict in religious matters, and had once thrown the ship's dice overboard "finding them in use on the said day." Since Sawkins' death the company had grown notoriously lax, but it is pleasant to notice how soon they returned to their natural piety, under a godly leader. With Edmund Cook down on the ballast in irons, and William Cook talking of salvation in the galley, and old ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield

... very lax in my duty to allow you on the street without a chaperone. Alene, I'm a failure as a stern old guardian! I think, to put myself right with the townspeople, I'll have to get arrested for beating my ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne

... free colleges, supported by public taxes. Sects and parties may have as many seminaries as they choose, and with rules of study and conduct so easily to be complied with, and administrations so lax, that the most contemptible idler or the most independent and self-willed simpleton shall see in them nothing to conflict with his habit or temper; but the graduates of these seminaries will not ascend the pinnacles of fame nor direct the affairs of nations: such affairs ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various

... versatile, and easily adapt themselves so as to please and get acquainted with those they fall in with. They have no scruples of conscience hindering them from complying with whatever is proposed; they are of any form of religion, have lax or correct morals, according to the occasion. They can revel with those that revel, and they can speak serious things when their society is serious. They travel up and down the country perhaps, or they are of professions or pursuits which introduce them to men ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman

... King being minded to have him taught the arts and sciences, bade build him a palace amiddlemost the city, wherein were three hundred and threescore rooms,[FN97] and lodged him therin. Then he assigned him three wise men of the Olema and bade them not be lax in teaching him day and night and look that there was no kind of learning but they instruct him hterin, so he might become versed in all knowledge. He also commanded them to sit with him one day in each of the rooms by turn and write on the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton

... a Socialist. I admit that we are rather lax in our definitions. You see, there is just one subject, of late years, which has brought together the Socialists and the Labour men, the Syndicalists and the Communists, the Nationalists and the Internationalists. All those who work for freedom are learning breadth. If they ever find a leader, ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... which strength is based. They did not seek to prevent irreligion, luxury, slavery, and usury, the encroachments of the rich upon the poor, the tyranny of foolish fashions, demoralizing sports and pleasures, money-making, and all the follies which lax principles of morality allowed. They fed the rabble with com and oil and wine, and thus encouraged idleness and dissipation. The world never saw a more rapid retrograde in human rights, or a greater prostration of liberties. Taxes were imposed according to the pleasure ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... mess etiquette, as it was called, did not interfere in any way with the good-fellowship existing between the C.O. and his junior officers; but it prevented men who had been away from home and the society of ladies for many years from growing lax in manners and careless ...
— Night Bombing with the Bedouins • Robert Henry Reece

... originally. His squat figure showed, to be sure, a certain hardiness and vigor gained in his outdoor life, but he had not even the rude grace of a stalwart manhood about him. He sank apologetically into a lax posture, even as he stood. His pale blue eyes lacked fire. His hair, uneven, ragged and hay-colored, seemed dry, as though hopeless, discouraged, done with life, fringing out as it did in gray locks under the edge of the battered hat he wore. He had been unshaven for ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough

... more attentively than ever, and his eyes were narrowed, and his lips were lax and motionless and foolish-looking, and he was deeply interested. For Anaitis had thought of some new diversions since their last meeting: and to Jurgen, even at forty and something, this queen's voice was all a horrible and strange and lovely magic. "She really tempts very ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell

... Obviously, some words must be supplied to bring out any sense. Our Authorised Version has chosen the supplement 'is,' which fails to observe the second occurrence with 'thy Help' of the preposition, and is somewhat lax in rendering the 'for' of the second clause by the neutral 'but.' It is probably better to read, as the Revised Version, with most modern interpreters, 'Thou art against Me, against thy Help,' and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... more gently and with half-shut eyes through her illuminated house. She turned the lights out in her room and undressed herself in the darkness. She laid herself on the bed with straight lax limbs, with arms held apart a little from her body, with eyelids shut lightly on her eyes; ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair

... basket was a strictly Platonic basket, and had merely been presented to him in the way of friendship. When he had made the statement with perfect gravity; for he felt it incumbent on him to disabuse the mind of this lax rover of any incorrect impressions on the subject; he signified that he would be happy to share the gifts with him, and proposed that they should attack the basket in a spirit of good fellowship at any time in the course of the night which ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens









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