|
|
|
More "Laxity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Turks, are cursed up hill and down dale, by these worthy survivors of the Auld Leaven. Everybody except the authors, Haldane and Leslie, "has broken the everlasting Covenant." The very Confession of Westminster is arraigned for its laxity. "The whole Civil and Judicial Law of God," as given to the Jews (except the ritual, polygamy, divorce, slavery, and so forth), is to be maintained in the law of Scotland. Sins are acknowledged, and since the Covenant every political step—Cromwell's ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... refusals is not far to seek if we believe Arnault's description of Pauline—"An extraordinary combination of the most faultless physical beauty and the oddest moral laxity. She had no more manners than a schoolgirl—she talked incoherently, giggled at everything and nothing, mimicked the most serious personages, put out her tongue at her sister-in-law.... She was a good child naturally ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... and slipped out of again with gratifying facility in America, and Kansas is notorious for the laxity prevailing there as regards marriage and divorce. It will be advisable to take the opinion of counsel on the matter, but I can hold out very little hope that your divorce would hold good, even in America. You see, you are entered as a British subject on the marriage register, and I imagine ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... of these I had long felt, and still feel, that of all the weaknesses in our institutions, one of the most serious is our laxity in the administration of the criminal law. No other civilized country, save possibly the lower parts of Italy and Sicily, shows anything to approach the number of unpunished homicides, in proportion to the population, which are committed in sundry parts of our ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... Grecian society, when Greek civilization was rapidly passing away, when ancient creeds had lost their majesty, and general levity and folly overspread the land. Deeply impressed with the prevailing laxity of morals and the absence of religion, he lifted up his voice more as a reformer than as an inquirer after truth, and taught for more than fifty years in a place called the Stoa, "the Porch," which had once been the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... thought that felony and misdemeanour were as much natural classes as mammal and marsupial, and that all that they could do was to remove the benefit of clergy when the corresponding class of crime happened to be specially annoying. They managed to work out the strange system of brutality and laxity and technicality in which the impunity of a good many criminals was set off against excessive ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... which the State attempts though vainly to guarantee both to stockholders and creditors that there is one hundred dollars of actual value behind each one hundred dollars of par value of capital stock, or some other system must be adopted which, while not being chargeable with the vagueness and laxity of the newer legislation of other States, will permit a share of capital stock, although nominally one hundred dollars in value, to represent, as the word implies, only a certain share or proportion, which may be more or less than par, of whatever net assets ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... kept up all the same; mass was said; the taxes were paid (the sole thing that Paris extracts of the provinces), and the mayor passed resolutions. But all these acts of social existence were done as mere routine, and thus the laxity of the local government suited admirably with the moral and intellectual condition of the governed. The events of the following history will show the effects of this state of things, which is not as unusual in the provinces as might be supposed. ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... standpoint, are the product of intelligence and character combined. Though distinctly in the minority, and usually met in the better grades of private practice, one is often surprised how many there are, considering the treacherous and deceptive features of the disease, which leave so much excuse for laxity and misunderstanding on the part of the laymen. A conscientious patient is one who is not content with any ideal short of that of radical cure. It takes unselfishness and self-control to go without those things which make the patient in the infectious stage dangerous to others. For ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... resort of adventurers of all kinds, and particularly of buccaneers. These were piratical rovers of the deep, who made sad work in times of peace among the Spanish settlements and Spanish merchant ships. They took advantage of the easy access to the harbor of the Manhattoes, and of the laxity of its scarcely-organized government, to make it a kind of rendezvous, where they might dispose of their ill-gotten spoils, and concert new depredations. Crews of these desperadoes, the runagates of every country and clime, might be seen swaggering, in open day, about ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... the hard labours of every-day life, deserve hanging without the mercy of trial. A due observance of Sunday, and especially the English country observance of Sunday, is one of the saving graces of our national constitution. In the large towns, a growing laxity concerning the 'keeping of the seventh day holy,' is plainly noticeable, the pernicious example of London 'smart' society doing much to lessen the old feeling of respect for the day and its sacredness; but in small greenwood places, where it is still judged decent and obedient to the ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... Forum was ringing with the fame of this new writer, and that from the Palatine to the Subura his poetry was taking like wildfire. She was dumb before such strange comfort. What was this "fame" to which men were willing to sacrifice their citizenship? Nothing in Rome had so shocked her as the laxity of family life, the reluctance of young men to marry, the frequency of divorce. She had felt her first sympathy with Augustus when he had endeavoured to force through a law compelling honourable marriage. Now, all that was best in her, all ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... it was a flock of sheep instead of a party of soldiers!" This admonition brought them into some order, and they advanced a little less irregularly, but still in as slovenly a manner as could well be conceived. If the French were not known to be good soldiers, one would think this laxity of discipline little likely to make them so; but they are, like French servants, good enough in their way, though careless in the extreme, and too tenacious ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... to withstand the shock. Her internal fires could not break into eruption; she had very little fluid surface. And the nature of her atmosphere was such that it was not easily disturbed into storms. Only if there was laxity in the handling of the planet's ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... with the Cherries" at Vienna, and the "Madonna with St. Bridget and S. Ulfus" at Madrid, and while it has been surmised that the example of the precise Albert Duerer, who paid his first visit to Venice in 1506, was not without its effect in preserving Titian from falling into laxity of treatment and in inciting him to fine finish, it is interesting to find that Titian was, in fact, discarding the use of the carefully traced and transferred cartoon, and was sketching his design freely on panel or ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... lady, being fully capable of understanding his value, were not wanting in attention. He, however, told me, that old Mr. Langton, though a man of considerable learning, had so little allowance to make for his occasional 'laxity of talk[1392],' that because in the course of discussion he sometimes mentioned what might be said in favour of the peculiar tenets of the Romish church, he went to his grave believing him ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... signified by a curt, reluctant laugh that he saw the joke. For Edward Henry could no longer depend on Mr. Seven Sachs. Mr. Seven Sachs had to take the greatest pains to keep the muscles of his face in strict order. The slightest laxity with them—and he would have been involved in another and more ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... unwedded wife of Theudemir. The Gothic historian calls her his concubine,[16] but this word of reproach hardly does justice to her position. In many of the Teutonic nations, as among the Norsemen of a later century, there seems to have been a certain laxity as to the marriage rite, which was nevertheless coincident with a high and pure morality. It has been suggested that the severe conditions imposed by the Church on divorces may have had something to do with the peculiar marital usages of the ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... in Tolstoy. The harsh rigidity of the old Russian laws had not the slightest influence, either in changing this national attitude or in diminishing the prevalence, at the very least as great as elsewhere, of sexual laxity or sexual aberration. Nowadays, as Russia attains national self-consciousness, these laws against immorality are being slowly remoulded in accordance with the national temperament, and in some respects—as ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... complexion, though he was, I noticed, a hearty and careless eater. He was energetic and swift in his movements, as though the world were easily read, and he could come to quick decisions and successful executions of his desires. He had no moments of laxity and hesitation, even after a breakfast, on a hot morning, too, of ham and eggs drenched in coffee. He made me feel an ineffective, ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... indifference to religion, to say the least, his satirical turn, his love of the world, and his contempt of all that was great and good, he strongly resembles his reputed son; whilst the levity of Lady Walpole's character, and Sir Robert's laxity and dissoluteness, do not furnish any reasonable doubt to the statement made by Lady Louisa Stuart, in the introduction to Lord Wharncliffe's 'Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.' Carr, Lord Hervey, died early, and his half-brother succeeded him in ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... in her younger days; now she was out of their reach, they tried in turn to comfort her; and when she would not be comforted, they, too, felt aggrieved by the presence of one whose austerity reproached their own laxity; they resented her disappointment at Soeur Monique's having been transferred to Lucon, and they, too, left her to the only persons whose presence she had ever seemed to relish,—namely, her maid Veronique, and Veronique's mother, her old nurse Perrine, wife of a farmer about two miles ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... most camps regarding entering the water is as follows: "No one of the party shall enter the water for swimming or bathing except at the time and place designated, and in the presence of a leader." Laxity in the observance of ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... spreading into Kansas not because, as it turned out, the immigrants into Kansas mostly did not want it, but because it was wrong, and the United States, where they were free to act, would not have it. The greatest evil in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was the laxity of public tone which had made it possible. "Little by little, but steadily as man's march to the grave, we have been giving up the old faith for the new faith." Formerly some deference to the "central idea" of equality was general and in some sort of abstract sense slavery ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... Outdoor relief, which, in the eyes of the poor, carries with it very little of the discredit and dislike that gathers round the workhouse, is now by far the larger part of poor-law relief; and in many districts it is administered with great laxity. ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... London preacher of modern thought. How changed the outlook of the world from my childhood's days, when Sunday was a day of strict theological habit, from which no departure could be permitted! The laxity of modern life, by comparison is, I think, somewhat appalling. We have made the mistake of breaking away from old beliefs and convictions without replacing them with something better. We do not make as much, or as good, use of our Sundays as we ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... he liked; it was hoped, but it was by no means demanded, that he would make himself agreeable, like a gentleman invited to a dinner-party. Allowing, however, for everything that was a concession to worldly traditions and to the laxity of man's nature, there must have been in the enterprise a good deal of a certain freshness and purity of spirit, of a certain noble credulity and faith in the perfectibility of man, which it would have been easier to find in Boston in the year 1840, than in London five-and-thirty ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... of his school or religious family, said to him with intolerable rudeness, habes mel in ore, sed fel in corde: to which he made no reply, nor showed the least resentment. Mr. Alban Butler was totally averse to the system of probabilism, and to all assertions that favor laxity in morale. This is evident from the dictates which he delivered to us, from his treatise De Decalogo, de actibus humanis, in his Epitome moralis sacramentorum, &c. It is still more evident from his Epitome ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... the master of the house she would have much preferred high tea in the schoolroom, combined with a certain laxity as to hours and to dress; but Damaris, in whom the sense of style was innate, stood out for the regulation dignities of late dinner and evening gowns. To-night, however, thanks to her own unpunctuality, Miss Bilson found ample excuse ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... his royal cousin at the Tower, where the court exhibited a laxity of morals and a faculty for intrigue that were little ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... Choisie, vol. i., 380; Du Pin's Bibl. Eccles., vol. xiv., and Biblioth. Fabric, pt. i., 359; from which latter we learn that, in the public library, at Deventer, there is a copy of Erasmus's works, in which those passages, where the author speaks freely of the laxity of the monkish character, have been defaced, "charta fenestrata." A somewhat more compressed analysis of the contents of these volumes appeared in the Sylloge Opusculorum Hist.-Crit., Literariorum, J.A. Fabricii, Hamb. ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... overworked Legislature concerning the new and necessary regulations. Sir Wilfrid's half-measure supersedes neither the Magistrates nor the Parliament, though for two hundred years the Nation has suffered through the laxity of both. Surely we chiefly need real Provincial Legislatures, and, until we get them, Local Folk Motes and Local Elective Boards are ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... laxity in the tenth century was to be brought to a close in the eleventh partly by the pressure brought to bear on the Papacy by the Saxon emperors, but still bore by the ambitious resolution of Gregory VII. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... displeasure with grief and pity for the offender. So it is that a Mason should treat his brethren who go astray. Not with bitterness; nor yet with good-natured easiness, nor with worldly indifference, nor with the philosophic coldness, nor with a laxity of conscience, that accounts everything well, that passes under the seal of public opinion; but with charity, with ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... each. Afterwards, they would return to the guard-house to play a hundred of dominoes, would consume a quantity of cider there, and eat cheese, while the sentinel, worn out, would keep opening the door every other minute. There was a prevailing absence of discipline, owing to Beljambe's laxity. ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... foundation of charitable institutions of every description, but they have contented themselves with merely alleviating misery instead of removing its causes; and the benevolence that raised houses of correction, poor-houses, and hospitals, is rendered null by the laxity of the legislation. No measures are taken by the governments to provide means for emigration, to secure to the peasant his freehold, to the artificer the guarantee he ought to receive and to give, and the maintenance of the public morals. The punishment awarded for immorality and ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... won favour by his cheerful, frank, independent spirit. If he was idle at one time, at another he could develop plenty of energy; if he was one of the most popular boys in the school, he was not afraid to risk his popularity by protesting strongly against moral laxity or abuses which others tolerated. It is well to remember this, which is attested by his school-fellows, when reading his letters, in which at times he blames himself for caring too much for the good ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... all the business functions and offices of common life, is at once their natural right, their individual interest, and their public duty; the claim and the obligation reciprocally supporting each other; that the idleness of the rich, with its attendant physical debility, moral laxity, passional intemperance and mental dissipation, and the ignorance, wretchedness, and enforced profligacy of the poor, which are everywhere the curse and reproach of the sex, are the necessary results ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... opposite sides,—as she has had to defend the divine nature of Christ against the Ebionites, and His humanity against Docetism, and was attacked both on the plea of excessive rigorism and excessive laxity (Clement Alex., Stromata, iii. 5),—so in politics she is arraigned on behalf of the political system of every phase of heresy. She was accused of favouring revolutionary principles in the time ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... interesting to us as marking a transition point in the history of women; as the author of the first romances of any note written by her sex; as a moral teacher in an age of laxity; and as a woman who combined high aspirations, fine ideals, and versatile talents with a pure and unselfish character. She aimed at universal accomplishments from the distillation of a perfume to the writing of a novel, from the preparation of a rare dish to fine conversation, from playing ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... daughters of old conquerors and soldiers of these islands, who, as these have nothing to leave them, are left unprotected; the illegitimate daughters of Spaniards and Indian women (and they are numerous), every one of whom is ruined if she is not sheltered here, because of the great laxity [of morals] in the country; and all are taught and instructed until they depart married. Some married women who quarrel with their husbands are also sheltered there, until the trouble is smoothed over; and there are some poor widows. It is a work of great charity, and one that prevents ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVIII, 1617-1620 • Various
... the chief men of the democratic party not to leave the city, but to remain and perish in it; as indeed they did, for every one who trusted to his word was put to death. Moreover, Androkleides relates a story which shows Lysander's extreme laxity with regard to oaths. He is said to have remarked, that "We cheat boys with dice, and men with oaths!" In this he imitated Polykrates, the despot of Samos—an unworthy model for a Spartan general. Nor was it like a Spartan to treat the gods as badly as he treated his enemies, or even ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... analogy between the experiences of Cowper and Wordsworth in the way of translation. Wordsworth's translation of Virgil was prompted by the same kind of reaction against the reckless laxity of Dryden as that which inspired Cowper against the distorting artificiality of Pope. In each case the new translator cared more for his author and took a much higher view of a translator's duty than his predecessor had done. But in each ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... and suffered in body if I drank or ate more than was wise. As regards worse things than wine and cards, I think Miss Wynne was right when she described me as a girl-boy; for the least rudeness or laxity of talk in women I disliked, and as to the mere modesties of the person, I have always been like some ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... accentuate religious differences and animosities. Both Sikhs and Musalmans are gradually dropping ideas and observances retained in their daily life after they ceased to call themselves Hindus. On the other hand, within the Hindu fold laxity is now the rule rather than the exception, and the neglect of the old ritual and restrictions is by no means confined to the small but influential reforming minority ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... selects should be distinguished by the quality of dignity. Here is the one room in the house where formality is thoroughly in place; it is at table where bad manners are wont most to show themselves among children, and laxity in etiquette among their parents. Just as the exclusive use of the room for eating purposes saves labor in housework, so will its dignity in decoration aid in enforcing the mother's teaching of good habits to ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... committed through want or suffering. Yet, though the offenders had been proven guilty in every instance, only two cases were known in which the penalty of the law had been enforced. Does not this bespeak laxity of public morals in Boston in regard to such abuses of ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... from his headquarters at Gjatsk, the Emperor ordered his army to prepare for a general engagement. There had been for some days much laxity in the police of the bivouacs, and he now redoubled the severity of the regulations in regard to the countersigns. Some detachments which had been sent for provisions having too greatly prolonged their expedition, the Emperor ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... herself that she had imagined a little tendency, on Chris's part, too—well, to impress her with his friendliness. She had seen him flirt with other women, and indeed small love affairs of all sorts were constantly current, not only in Annie's, but in Leslie's group. A certain laxity was in the air, and every month had its separation or divorce, to be flung to ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... guardians, it was assumed, could always find 'work,' and they were to relieve the able-bodied without applying the workhouse test. The act, readily adopted, thus became a landmark in the growth of laxity.[86] ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... which their masters throw around them, and might be moulded in the generality of cases, with almost certain effect, by the will and conduct of the master—passes over, with an indolent and epicurean censure, the lighter delinquencies which he may happen to detect, laughs perhaps at his own laxity, and, when at length alarmed, discharges the culprit without a character, and relieves himself, at the expense of he knows not whom, by making of a corrupted menial a desperate outcast. If it be said that a man ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 576 - Vol. 20 No. 576., Saturday, November 17, 1832 • Various
... chief priests," said the old man, "pronounced it unlawful to cast into the treasury the thirty pieces of silver, seeing it was the price of blood; but the gentility of the present day is less scrupulous. There is a laxity of principle among us, Mr. Murdoch, that, if God restore us not, must end in the ruin of our country. I say laxity of principle; for there have ever been evil manners among us, and waifs in no inconsiderable number, broken loose from ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... been made to an atrocious slur cast without a shred of evidence on her moral character. There is as little foundation for more general though milder charges of laxity. It is admitted that she had little love for her first husband, and it seems to be probable that her second had not much love for her. She was certainly addressed in gallant strains by men of letters, the most audacious being Clement Marot; but the almost universal reference of the ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... Tramore had not married again. The disadvantage to his children of the miserable story was thus left uncorrected, and this, rather oddly, was counted as HIS sacrifice. His mother, whose arrangements were elaborate, looked after them a great deal, and they enjoyed a mixture of laxity and discipline under the roof of their aunt, Miss Tramore, who was independent, having, for reasons that the two ladies had exhaustively discussed, determined to lead her own life. She had set up a home at St. Leonard's, and that contracted shore had played a considerable part in ...
— The Chaperon • Henry James
... overlooked, because it is not demonstrative, and a total unconsciousness of what is called, in highly civilised circles, "propriety." The very freedom of manners which, in some countries, might denote laxity of morals, is here the evident stamp of their purity. The thought has often recurred to me—which is the most truly pure and virginal nature, the fastidious American girl, who blushes at the sight of a pair of boots outside a gentleman's bedroom door, and who ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... some one could be found to stem the tide of decadence and help the people to remount the slope which they were descending, the fate of Judah was certain. A prophet—the last of those whose predictions have survived to our time—stood forth amid the general laxity and called the people to account for their transgressions, in the name of the Eternal, but his single voice, which seemed but a feeble echo of the great prophets of former ages, did not meet with a favourable ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... master of Crompton, and he had his house full half the year. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that his servants were found willing to compound for some occasional ill usage, in return for general laxity of rule, and many unconsidered trifles in the way of perquisites. His huntsmen and whips got now and then a severe beating; his grooms found it very inconvenient when "Squire" took it into his mad head ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... wonderful prospect, but thinking less of his own vast possessions than of the great cathedral of Morningquest, which he coveted for Holy Church. He had become a convert to Roman Catholicism in his old age, and his bigotry and credulity were as great now as his laxity and scepticism had been before ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... other, it was believed that when the canoe approached the floating turtle, the male would separate from the female and both would dive down in different directions. So at Mowat in New Guinea men have no relation with women when the turtles are coupling, though there is considerable laxity of morals at other times. In the island of Uap, one of the Caroline group, every fisherman plying his craft lies under a most strict taboo during the whole of the fishing season, which lasts for six or eight weeks. Whenever he is on shore he must spend all his ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... it is true, were honest—the frenzy of outraged humanity to avenge a terrible crime which the law, in its delay, often had let go unpunished. The laxity of the law, the unscrupulousness of its lawyers, their shrewdness in clearing criminals if the fee was forthcoming, the hundreds of technicalities thrown around criminals, the narrowness of supreme ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... evident, from what Cook himself tells us (above), and from what is now well known of the laxity of Tahitian morals, that this punishment would seem excessive to the natives, and especially to the women, who were accustomed themselves to ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... of the most delightful summers of my life. Intellectual and intelligent without being learned or particularly bookish; quick in her perceptions and nearly faultless in her judgment of others; broadly charitable, not through any laxity of principle on her own part, but through knowledge of the stumbling-blocks of which the world is full for the unwary, she was a constant surprise and pleasure to me. For, among the vices of women I had long counted uncharitableness; and among their disadvantages ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... for example, may, from rooted prejudice, have believed him guilty. No less than his most malignant and unscrupulous foes they resented furiously their inability to demonstrate it. They regarded it as evidence merely of his abominable craft. The ordinary and extraordinary laxity of his confinement indicated their doubt of his fair liability to any. The intervals of rigour were meant to notify to the sceptical that the Government was at last on the track of evidence which would confirm the equity of everything from ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... northern laxity, retired to Italy, and having high connections became at seventy a mitred abbot. He put on the screw of discipline; his monks revered and hated him. He ruled with iron rod ten years. And one night he died, alone; for he had not found the way to a single heart. The Vulgate was on his pillow, and the ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... "disciplinary" stifled every question, subdued every doubt, and removed the subject from the realm of rational discussion. By its nature, the allegation could not be checked up. Even when discipline did not accrue as matter of fact, when the pupil even grew in laxity of application and lost power of intelligent self-direction, the fault lay with him, not with the study or the methods of teaching. His failure was but proof that he needed more discipline, and thus afforded a reason for retaining the ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... hurt his mind.[215] The long subsequent line of actors admirable in private as in public life, and all the gentle and generous associations of the histrionic art, have not weakened the testimony of its greatest name against its less favourable influences; against the laxity of habits it may encourage; and its public manners, bred of public means, not always compatible with home felicities and duties. But, freely open as Dickens was to counsel in regard of his books, he was, for ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... he said, having walked round the ranks. "I am sorry to find all this laxity in the important matter of dress, and I rely upon you to take immediate ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... urged him on to occasional unseemliness. He acted upon his audience, and the audience reacted upon him. He thundered against the profligacy of the rich, the selfishness of Society, the iniquities of the government, the excesses of the monks, the laxity of discipline in the schools, and the growing tendency in the Church to worship the Golden Calf. In some instances priests and monks had married, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... you find. I asked a New York lady at Newport if she had ever met Miss ——, a prominent Chinese missionary. She had never heard of her, and considered most missionaries very ordinary persons. This same lady, when some one spoke about laxity of morals, replied, "It is not morals but manners that we need"; and I can assure you that this high-church lady, a model of propriety, judged her men acquaintances by that standard. If their manners were correct, she apparently did ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... how then was I disappointed, when the men who had drunk my beer, drew on those grievous ropes, twice as hard as the men I had been at strife with! Yet this may have been from no ill will; but simply that having fallen under suspicion of laxity, they were compelled, in self-defence, ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... I spent two frantic days getting Casey out of jail. The traffic cop's defeat had been rather public; and just as soon as he could stand up straight in the pulpit, the minister meant to preach a series of sermons against the laxity of a police force that permits such outrages to occur in broad daylight. More than that, the thing was in the papers, and people were reading and giggling on the street cars and in restaurants. Wherefore, the L. A. P. was on ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... momentary satisfaction was far from being happiness. As he formerly had been weighted with a bad conscience, so now was he burdened with the heavy thought which oppressed Antigone, that by honourable observance of a rite he had obtained for himself the reward of dishonourable laxity. Occasionally he had to be helped to his lodgings by his servant from the Cercle he frequented, through having imbibed a little too much liquor to be able to take care of himself. But he was harmless, and even when he had been ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... Japan presented practically an ultimatum; on February 6 broke off diplomatic relations; on February 8 declared war; and on the same night—just as the Czar was discussing with his council what should be done—she delivered her first blow. By extraordinary laxity, though the diplomatic rupture was known, the Port Arthur squadron remained in the outer anchorage, "with all lights burning, without torpedo nets out, and without any guard vessels."[1] Ten Japanese destroyers attacked at close quarters, fired 18 torpedoes, and put the battleship ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... star-gazing. He had allowed his cigar, after the first few puffs, to smoulder untasted; his lips were drawn into an expression very unlike the laxity appropriate to pleasurable smoking. When the murmur of the pines had for a moment been audible, he said, ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... Though she had not cared to face the fact, she was troubled by a suspicion that she had made an unwise choice then. Leslie had changed since their marriage. He was harsh at times, and though he had, even in their more humble quarters, surrounded her with a certain amount of luxury, there was a laxity in his manners and conversation that jarred upon her. Geoffrey, she remembered, had not been addicted to mincing words, but, at least, he had lived in accordance with a Spartan moral code. Millicent ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... bribery, and condemned; the king remitted the imprisonment and fine, and for the remainder of his life Bacon devoted himself to science, rejecting every suggestion toward a renewal of his political activity. The moral laxity of the times throws a mitigating light over his fault; but he cannot be aquitted of self-seeking, love of money and of display, and excessive ambition. As Macaulay says in his famous essay, he was neither malignant nor tyrannical, but he lacked ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... manner, expresses infirmity of body, and implies no charge of any laxity in moral principle; yet I have seen English persons looking with considerable consternation when an old-fashioned Scottish lady, speaking of a young and graceful female, lamented her ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... system in Japan, there, were no popular disturbances, and the empire was peacefully ruled. It is because the Japanese were truly moral in their practice that they required no theory of morals, and the fuss made by the Chinese about theoretical morals is owing to their laxity in practice. It is not wonderful that students of Chinese literature should despise their own country for being without a system of morals, but that the Japanese, who were acquainted with their own ancient literature, should pretend that Japan too had ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... at length (and, to my ignorance, persuasively) in favour of a genial laxity in the application of phonetic rules to old proper names. Do they apply to these as strictly as to ordinary words? 'This is a question that has often been asked . . . but it has never been boldly answered' (i. 297). Mr. Max Muller cannot have forgotten that ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... and that, with far better material to choose from, and more of it, the 'Varsity wouldn't stand a ghost of a show in the eyes of the professional judges unless Billy would "brace up" and "take hold." Billy was willing as Barkis, but the faculty said it would put a premium on laxity to make Billy a 'Varsity captain even though the present incumbents were ready, any of them, to resign in his favor. "Prex" said No in no uncertain terms; the challenge was declined, whereat the institute crowed lustily and the thing got ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... Satan, with his bleak smile, "you cite very respectable authority: and I shall take your reproof in good part. I will endeavor to be more strict in the future. And you must not blame my laxity too severely, Emperor Jurgen, for it is a long while since any man came living into Hell to instruct us how to manage matters in time of war. No doubt, precisely as you say, we do need a little more severity hereabouts, and would gain by adopting more ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... separate detective force be placed under the department, whose duty it should be to detect any infringements of the above-mentioned laws, and to bring the offenders to justice in the ordinary course of law. It should also be in the sphere of the Board's work to report to the proper authorities any laxity on the part of the officials who have to administer the above-mentioned laws. The Board is to report to the Executive Council upon the working of the laws referred to, and to suggest alterations. It must be well understood ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... of heresy, specious enough to carry conviction to such a burning zealot as Pius V. This Pope, in his new regulations for the maintenance of Church discipline, requisitioned the services of physicians in the detection of laxity of religious practices, or of unsoundness. "We forbid," he says in one of his bulls, "every physician, who may be called to the bedside of a patient, to visit for more than three days, unless he receives an attestation that the sick man has made fresh confession ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... opposed to a virtue by way of excess, so is there a vice opposed to it by way of deficiency, which latter is opposed both to the virtue which is the mean, and to the vice which is in excess. Now the same vice pertaining to deficiency is opposed to both cruelty and savagery, namely remission or laxity. For Gregory says (Moral. xx, 5): "Let there be love, but not that which enervates, let there be severity, but without fury, let there be zeal without unseemly savagery, let there be piety without undue clemency." Therefore savagery ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... The laxity of ideas prevailing among a large number of our people regarding pensions is becoming every day more marked. The principles upon which they should be granted are in danger of being altogether ignored, and already pensions are often claimed because the applicants are ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... wrostled, sir, between the silent orders in my bosom pulling me one way, and the written orders in my pocket-book pushing me the other, until (saving your presence) I was in a cold sweat. In that dreadful perturbation of mind and laxity of body, to what remedy did I apply? To the remedy, sir, which has never failed me yet for the last thirty ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... "The most important peculiarity of American English is a laxity, irregularity, and confusion in the use of particles. The same thing is, indeed, observable in England, but not to the same extent, though some gross departures from idiomatic propriety, such as different to for different from, are common in England, which none but very ignorant ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... must have taken place he was certain and, although he was still unable to imagine how he could be got out of the prison, he felt that, in some way or another, Terence would manage it. He thought over the means by which the latter had escaped from the convent, but the laxity that had there prevailed, in allowing people to come in to sell their goods to the prisoners, was not permitted in the prison where he was confined. The prisoners were, indeed, allowed to take exercise for an hour in the courtyard, but no civilian ever entered it, and twelve ...
— Under Wellington's Command - A Tale of the Peninsular War • G. A. Henty
... his own part, did not apprehend trouble, either, but the A.-G.'s bland and unconscious encouragement of laxity was distinctly irritating, "Excuse me, sir, but I have been telling 'em right along that there will be a rumpus. I was trying to ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... emperor's preference—sufficient to sustain the popular regard, but not brilliant enough to throw his patron into the shade. For the rest, his vices were of a nature not greatly or necessarily to interfere with his public duties, and emphatically such as met with the readiest indulgence from the Roman laxity of morals. Some few instances, indeed, are noticed of cruelty; but there is reason to think that it was merely by accident, and as an indirect result of other purposes, that he ever allowed himself in such manifestations of irresponsible power—not as gratifying any harsh impulses of his ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... incipient decline of the great kingdom was accompanied with specially unpleasant consequences so far as Palestine was concerned (Megabyzus). All this naturally tended to produce in the community a certain laxity and depression. To what purpose (it was asked) all this religious strictness, which led to so much that was unpleasant? Why all this zeal for Jehovah, who refused to be mollified by it? It is a significant fact that the upper ranks of the priesthood were least of all concerned to counteract this ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... and a library of about a thousand volumes, including the Hundred Best Books as selected by the late Lord Avebury, to the school equipment. None of these things did anything but enhance the suspicion of laxity his wife's escapade had created in the limited opulent and discreet class to which his establishment appealed. One boy who, under the influence of the Hundred Best Books, had quoted the ZEND-AVESTA to an irascible but influential grandfather, was ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... cause was probably the laxity of opinion and practice with regard to the marriage-tie. Heaven forbid that we should enter on a defence of French morals, most of all in relation to marriage! But it is undeniable that unions formed ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... we examine the causes of this great revolution in Roman family life from the austere morals and stable family of the early Romans to the laxity and promiscuity of the later Romans, we find that these causes can perhaps be grouped under four or five principal heads, (1) First among all the causes we must put the destruction of the domestic religion, namely, ancestor worship, through the growth of nature worship and skeptical philosophy. ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... the clergy themselves were in urgent need of some awakening force. Those of good family led, for the most part, worldly and frivolous lives, while the humbler sort were as ignorant as the peasants among whom they lived. The religious wars had led to laxity and carelessness; drunkenness and vice ...
— Life of St. Vincent de Paul • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... Remy was not only a great artist, but a man whose character was "wholly free from that deplorable laxity which is so often a blot on the proud escutcheon of his noble profession;" that he had married an American lady; that he had "embraced the Protestant religion"—no sect was specified, possibly to ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... is true. Strictly speaking, the changes should be attributed to those forces which come into action when the antagonist force is withdrawn. But though there is inaccuracy in saying that the freezing of water is due to the loss of its heat, no practical error arises from it; nor will a parallel laxity of expression vitiate our statements respecting the multiplication of effects. Indeed, the objection serves but to draw attention to the fact, that not only does the exertion of a force produce more than one change, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... the Suffrage movement somewhat as in older-fashioned days of Second Empire laxity well-to-do people evaded military service under conscription by paying a substitute to take their place in the fighting line. On account of her husband, and the children she had just had or was going to have, she ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... it is true, is often warmly challenged; in actual life, we are told, many of those who profess determinist principles are notorious for their strenuous moral calibre, and certainly not open to the charge of laxity. Let that statement be ungrudgingly accepted; what it proves is no more than that prussic acid is entirely harmless—provided it is not taken. We are quite willing to admit that Determinism, provided ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... witnessed in the Church to-day. The bishops were no better. They looked for emoluments and court favor. Even the better class of ecclesiastics gave themselves up to the intellectual luxury of admiring Plato and imitating Cicero. While a general laxity of morals in all orders of religious life—among priest and monk, pope and cardinal—was bringing odium on the Church, and weakening her hold upon the people—especially upon the Teutonic races—the seeds of regeneration ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... including abundance of cotton [with flax, hemp, wheat, wine, and the like]. The people have vineyards and gardens and estates. They live by commerce and manufactures, and are no soldiers.' Nor did the peculiar laxity of morals, which seems always to have distinguished the people of the Khotan region, escape Marco Polo's attention. For of the 'Province of Pein' which, as we shall see, represents the oases of the adjoining modern district ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... procession seen in its passage through narrow streets. The spectator feels it to be fool's play, when he can distinguish the tedious commonplace of each man's visage, with the perspiration and weary self-importance on it, and the very cut of his pantaloons, and the stiffness or laxity of his shirt-collar, and the dust on the back of his black coat. In order to become majestic, it should be viewed from some vantage point, as it rolls its slow and long array through the centre of a wide plain, or the stateliest ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... accepted any form of Buddhism at all. It must not, however, be supposed that all Tibetan sects except the Gelugpa are necessarily and altogether evil; a truer view would be that as the rules of other sects permit considerably greater laxity of life and practice, the proportion of self-seekers among them is likely to be much larger than among the stricter reformers. The investigator will occasionally meet on the astral plane students of occultism from all parts of the world (belonging to lodges quite unconnected with the Masters of ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... dependent upon artificial sustention; the South would not express the condition in this language, but acted upon the idea none the less. It was true that the North was not aggressive towards slavery, but was observing it with much laxity and indifference; that the crusading spirit was sleeping soundly, and even the proselyting temper was feeble. But this state of Northern feeling could not relieve the South from the harassing consciousness that slavery needed not only toleration, but ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... experiment with Ralph soon became apparent. Watchful and experienced mothers began to suspect that my brother's method of flirtation was dangerous, and his style of waltzing improper. One or two ultra-cautious parents, alarmed by the laxity of his manners and opinions, removed their daughters out of harm's way, by shortening their visits. The rest were spared any such necessity. My father suddenly discovered that Ralph was devoting himself rather too significantly to a young ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... a low level, and his result was generally repudiated. Even Selden applied to Aconcio the remark ubi bene, nil melius; ubi male, nemo pejus. The dedication of such a work to Queen Elizabeth illustrates the tolerance or religious laxity during the early years of her reign. Aconcio found another patron in the earl of Leicester, and died about ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... exclamation was "Thorney Davenant!—I know you, my man!" At the time of the inquest, no identification was made with any name whose owner was being sought by the Police, so no one caught the clue it furnished. There may have been slowness or laxity of investigation, but a sufficient excuse may lie in the fact that Ibbetson certainly spoke the name wrong, or that his hearer caught it wrong. The name was not Davenant, but Daverill. He was the son of old Mrs. Prichard, of Sapps Court, called after his father, and inheriting all his ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... too many of the cases the sentence of incompetence or cowardice was just. Even when simple laxity of discipline was at the bottom of trouble, the effect was exasperating. Washington had much to teach the minor members of his army. That it was in all outward aspects a truly volunteer assemblage, we have the testimony of an eye witness. "It is very diverting," wrote the Reverend ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... Moderns, have thought that all Colours might in a general way be made out by these two; whose being Diversify'd, will in our Case be attended with these two Circumstances, the One, that the Protuberant Particles being Increas'd in Bulk, they will oftentimes be Vary'd as to the Closness or Laxity of their Order, fewer of them being contain'd within the same Sensible (though Minute) space than before; or else by approaching to one another, they must Straighten the Pores, and it may be too, they will by their manner of Associating ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... Sabbath and the great festivals, and even dispensed with the rite of circumcision. Thus the admission of Gentiles on very easy terms into the Church was no new idea to the Palestinian Jews; it was known to them as part of the shocking laxity which prevailed among their brethren of the Dispersion. With Stephen, this kind of liberalism seemed to have entered the group of 'disciples.' He was accused of saying that Jesus was to destroy the temple and change the customs of Moses. In his bold defence he admitted that in his ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... minister of God without the fountain of truth—that however favorably we may be prone to regard them, a thought will arise that the absence of this sacred book may perhaps be referred to the indolence of the monkish pen, or to the laxity of priestly piety. But such I am glad to say was not often the case; the Bible it is true was an expensive book, but can scarcely be regarded as a rare one; the monastery was indeed poor that had it not, and when once ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... men graduated, in the next year only 44 did so; until the end of Henry VIII's reign the average number graduating was 57, and in Edward's reign the average was 33.[2] Naturally, therefore, some laxity crept into the administration of the University and the colleges. Active enemies of our literary treasures were not behindhand, In 1535 Dr. Layton, visitor of monasteries, descended upon Oxford. "We have sett Dunce [Duns Scotus] in Bocardo, and have utterly banisshede hym Oxforde for ever, with all ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... poor by methods other than the practice of artificial birth control. To a very great extent Malthusian teaching was responsible for the Poor Law of 1834, the most severe in Europe, the demoralising laxity of the old Poor Law being replaced by degrading severity. Again, as recently as 1899, a Secretary of State reiterated the Malthusian doctrine by explaining that great poverty throughout India was due to the increase of population under the pax Britannica. Now the truth is that if ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... am willing," said Phillotson with grave reserve, opposition making him illogically tenacious now. "A great piece of laxity ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... we must occupy ourselves with other investigations You cannot fail to have remarked the extreme laxity of the examination of the corpse. To be sure, the question of identity was readily determined, or should have been; but there were other points to be ascertained. Had the body been in any respect despoiled? Had the deceased any articles of jewelry about her person ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... must step down from their throne of parental authority, and take the law from their children's mouths; for they had no other means of finding out what was good American form. The result was that laxity of domestic organization, that inversion of normal relations which makes for friction, and which sometimes ends in breaking up a family that ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... the laxity of Highland conversation, that the inquirer is kept in continual suspense, and by a kind of intellectual retrogradation knows less as he hears more.' Johnson's Works, ix. 47. 'They are not much accustomed to be interrogated by others, and seem ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... from whose lips the advice 'Stare super antiquas vias' was often heard to proceed, and he was by profession a speculator, yet in that significant book, the 'Autobiography,' he describes this age of Truth-hunters as one 'of weak convictions, paralyzed intellects, and growing laxity of opinions.' ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... importance, which render our colleges superior to all other places of education. Their institutions, although somewhat fallen from their primaeval simplicity, are such as influence, in a particular manner, the moral conduct of their youth; and in this general depravity of manners and laxity of principles, pure religion is no where more strongly inculcated. The academies, as they are presumptuously styled, are too low to be mentioned; and foreign seminaries are likely to prejudice the unwary mind with Calvinism. But English universities render their students virtuous, at least by ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... rank escaped the contagion of Roman society. It was fashionable for men like Bembo and La Casa to form connections with women of the demi-monde and to recognize their children, whose legitimation they frequently procured. The Capitoli of the burlesque poets show that this laxity of conduct was pardonable, when compared with other laughingly avowed and all but universal indulgences. Once more, compare Guidiccioni's letter to M. Giamb. Bernardi Opp. vol. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... colored men of the State of Arkansas have still to complain that violence and injustice to their race still exists to an alarming extent. In most cases the perpetrators go unwhipped of justice. That when they are arraigned the law is administered with such laxity and partiality that the escape of the criminal is both easy and possible. In no instance is the penalty of the law enforced against a white man for the murder of a Negro, however palpable the case ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... nephew, as he himself declares, was an ardent frequenter of races, "house-raisings,"* (* Anglice, house-warmings.) and country dances is hardly surprising, and it is assuredly no ground whatever for reproach. Nor is it strange that, amid much laxity, he should have retained his integrity, that his regard for truth should have remained untarnished, and that he should have consistently held aloof from all that was mean and vile. His mother was no mere memory to that ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... Cistercian monks, founded in 1577 by Jean de la Barriere, abbot of the Cistercian monastery at Feuillans, in Languedoc. The movement thus organised was a protest against the laxity which had crept into the Church, and probably received some stimulus from the Reformation, which was then in progress. The Feuillans settled in a convent in the Rue St. Honore, Paris, which in after years became the meeting-place of a revolutionary club, which took the name of Feuillans; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... to the simplicity of his own service, was struck by the extravagance and luxury of the Spanish officers, who always travelled with sumpter mules laden with delicacies; and he was no less struck with the laxity of discipline in all ranks. The Spanish cavalry were armed with lances and shields; the militia carried not only old fashioned carbines but lassos and bows and arrows. There was small wonder that the Spanish authorities, civil, military, and ecclesiastical alike, should wish to keep ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... words and names and of your (Jewish) law, you must see to it yourselves." When the Greeks who were standing by proceeded to beat the chief of Paul's Jewish accusers, the governor shut his eyes to the matter. This may have been a laxity, but it would almost appear as ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... included the whole able-bodied population, and details as for extra duty were the means by which physicians, clergymen, civilian office-holders, etc., were exempted from service in the army. These lists were rigidly scrutinized, and the laxity which had grown was corrected as far as possible. The aggregate of Hood's army, "present and absent," on August 1st, was 135,000, though his "aggregate present" was only 65,000. [Footnote: Ibid.] It included, of course, prisoners ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... Farrinder, who was presently surrounded with sympathetic remonstrants. Miss Birdseye had given her up; it had been enough for Miss Birdseye that she should have said, when pressed (so far as her hostess, muffled in laxity, could press) on the subject of the general expectation, that she could only deliver her message to an audience which she felt to be partially hostile. There was no hostility there; they were all only too much in sympathy. ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... persons concerned, explaining the plan by which each priest (if he desired) might go on his own circuit where he would be most needed. She lamented, however, the fewness of the priests, and attributed to this the growing laxity of many families—living, it might be, in upland farms or in inaccessible places, where they could but very seldom have the visits of the priest and the strength of ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... your city of its heaviest burdens will be, according to our injunctions, an act of judicial impartiality, not of laxity. Live, by God's help, a mirror of the justice of the age, delighting in the security of all. Some people call the Isles of the Atlantic 'Fortunate:' I would rather give that name to the place where you ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... therefore adduce the opinion of Mrs. Graham, the first historian of the Republic, as to the estimation in which he was generally held:—"Zenteno has read more than usual among his countrymen, and thinks that little much. Like San Martin, he dignifies scepticism in religion, laxity of morals, and coldness of heart, if not cruelty, with the name of philosophy; and while he could shew creditable sensibility for the fate of a worm, would think the death or torture of a political opponent matter for congratulation." I was his political opponent, as wishing ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... thinking that severity of punishment can have the same restraining effect as probability of some punishment being inflicted; but if mildness of penalty is to be superadded to difficulty of conviction, and both are to be mounted upon laxity in detection, the "pile" will be "complete" with a vengeance. There is a peculiar fitness, perhaps, in the fact that all these ideas for comfortable punishment should be urged at a time when there appears to be a tolerably general disposition to inflict no punishment at all. There are, however, ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... which belongs to the idem in alio, the same radical idea expressed with a difference—similarity in dissimilarity; but to throw one's own thoughts, matter, and form, through alien organs so absolutely as to make another man one's interpreter for evil and good, is either to confess a singular laxity of thinking that can so flexibly adapt itself to any casual form of words, or else to confess that sort of carelessness about the expression which draws its real origin from a sense of indifference about the things ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... and murmured a prayer, in fear lest he had been guilty of laxity of judgment. But neither ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... desuetude induced Sir James Stephen, in his "Digest of the Criminal Law" to regard it as "practically obsolete." But the event has proved that no law is obsolete until it is repealed. It has also proved Lord Coleridge's observation that there is, in the case of some laws, a "discriminating laxity," as well as Professor Hunter's remark that the Blasphemy Laws survive as a dangerous weapon in the hands of any fool or fanatic who likes to ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... the maddest rookie (recruit) you ever saw! Having been old Dodge's roommate up to reveille this morning, I am in a position to state that he took advantage of the general laxity last night, and slipped out of barracks after taps last night. He and some other embryo cadets got a rowboat, through connivance with a soldier in the engineer's detachment. They rowed across the river, to Garrison, and had some kind ...
— Dick Prescott's First Year at West Point • H. Irving Hancock
... at Oxford, where his good looks gained for him the name of 'the handsome proctor.' In 1760 he took Orders, and in 1761 was presented by Mr. Knight of Godmersham—who had married a descendant of his great-aunt, Jane Stringer—to the living of Steventon, near Overton in Hampshire. It was a time of laxity in the Church, and George Austen (though he afterwards became an excellent parish-priest) does not seem to have resided or done duty at Steventon before the year 1764, when his marriage to Cassandra Leigh must ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... that coffee is sold on description; and when the French trader is asked, "How do you know your delivery is up to description so far as cup quality is concerned?" he answers that this is arrived at from the general appearance and the smell of the coffee in the green. Perhaps one reason for the laxity in buying cup quality may be explained by the fact that coffee is roasted very high, in fact it is burned almost to a charred state; and unless the coffee is unusually bad in character, the burned taste eliminates any foreign ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... effect in composing his sermons. He had very suave and winning ways as confessor, though he enjoined great strictness as preacher. This led a witty woman of his time to say of him: "Father Bourdaloue charges high in the pulpit, but he sells cheap in the confessional." How much laxity he allowed as confessor, it is, of course, impossible to say. But his sermons remain to show that, though indeed he was severe and high in requirement as preacher, he did not fail to soften asperity by insisting ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... It is at last recognized that America has something of its own to offer the world,—a style developed within the last, two decades. The prime movement of the times presenting boldness, brilliance and a laxity of detail in portrayal, the art of America, as shown in this exhibition, embodies these characteristics without emphasizing them. Keeping in mind the fact that the Palace contains little American art earlier than 1905, American artists are showing ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... moved forward leaving our camps standing; Keyes's brigade in the lead, then Schenck's, then mine, and Richardson's last. We marched via Vienna, Germantown, and Centreville, where all the army, composed of five divisions, seemed to converge. The march demonstrated little save the general laxity of discipline; for with all my personal efforts I could not prevent the men from straggling for water, blackberries, or any thing on ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... of new resolutions. The genial disorder of the chairs, moved at the whim of the Olympians, had all been put straight, and the whole room possessed an air of studied correctness, as though it were anxious to forget the previous evening's laxity with the least ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... on the staircase prepared me for the knock and entry of Withers. (One of the things which had for some time ceased to amuse me was the laxity of manners, proper to the season, among the servants of the big block of chambers where I lived.) Withers demurely handed me a letter bearing a German post-mark and marked 'Urgent'. I had just finished dressing, and was collecting my money and gloves. A momentary thrill of curiosity broke ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... his head to exclaim, "How true that is!" all would have been well. But they must needs write something original, something different from other men's thoughts; and immediately the censors and critics began to spy out heresy, or laxity of morals, and the fools were dealt with according to their folly. There used to be special houses of correction in those days, mad- houses built upon an approved system, for the special treatment ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... 1. Laxity of method in cultivating. 2. Poor means of transmission. 3. Severe competition by the United States. 4. Disturbed condition ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson
... the Prefecture had latterly betrayed a laxity of interest that invited official attention, if they did not call down upon ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... that thinks before it speaks in all important matters, and when it speaks, is firm; and yet, which readily and gladly accords to the children every liberty and indulgence which can do themselves or others no harm. And on the other hand, how often do we see foolish laxity and indulgence in yielding to importunity in cases of vital importance, alternating with vexatious thwartings, rebuffs, and refusals in respect to desires and wishes the gratification of which could ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... a well known fact that laxity in dress and negligence in military courtesy run hand in hand with laxity and negligence in almost everything else, and that is why we can always look for certain infallible symptoms in the individual dress, ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... separation consists of many hundreds of planks, and a solid bulwark of timbers more than a foot thick, besides an inner "skin," the whole being held together by innumerable iron and oaken bolts and trenails, and tightened with oakum and pitch. We had almost fallen into this error—or poetical laxity of expression—by saying that, on the night of which we write, little did Miss Tippet know that she was separated from, not death exactly, but from something very awful, by a single plank; at least, by the floor of her own residence, and the ceiling ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... latter great wrong, a few suffered dreadfully—particularly on Sundays, when they had for some time expected the earth to open and swallow the public up; but which desirable event had not yet occurred, in consequence of some reprehensible laxity in ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... During winter, when the days were short, or when bad weather made it impossible to go out on summer evenings, Mrs. Caldwell always read aloud to the children after tea till bed-time. Most mothers would have made the children read; but there was a great deal of laxity mixed with Mrs. Caldwell's harshness. She found it easier to do things herself than to make the children do them for her. They objected to read, and liked to be read to, so she read to them; and as, fortunately, she had no money to buy children's books, she read what there were in ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... of Cistercian monks, founded in 1577 by Jean de la Barriere, abbot of the Cistercian monastery at Feuillans, in Languedoc. The movement thus organised was a protest against the laxity which had crept into the Church, and probably received some stimulus from the Reformation, which was then in progress. The Feuillans settled in a convent in the Rue St. Honore, Paris, which in after years became the meeting-place of a revolutionary club, which took the name of Feuillans; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... his intellectual dressing. Every third manufacturer from the midlands or the north has some such undertow of 'affairs.' A physiological uneasiness, an imaginative laxity, the temptations of the trip to London—weakness masquerading as a psychological necessity. The Lady of the Carbuncle seems to have got rather a hold upon him. She has kept him in order for three or ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... something in excuse which I could not understand, and I thought was only laxity on his part. I told him that, if such things were to happen, his house was no home for me. And he began, "Come now, Lucy, I say, that's hard, when 'twas Harold, and not me, and all ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... gave her well-chiselled features so dark and forbidding an aspect it was a surprise to see the grace that swept into her face when, at something one of her comrades said, she broke into a smile. Two shabby men on Vida's left were working themselves into a fine state of moral indignation over the laxity of the police in allowing these women to air their vanity ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... establish look-out posts for this purpose; this system will be augmented at night by patrols if necessary. b. The watching of the enemy must be continuous and long occupation of the sector will not warrant any laxity. ...
— Military Instructors Manual • James P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker
... applause of his auditors urged him on to occasional unseemliness. He acted upon his audience, and the audience reacted upon him. He thundered against the profligacy of the rich, the selfishness of Society, the iniquities of the government, the excesses of the monks, the laxity of discipline in the schools, and the growing tendency in the Church to worship the Golden Calf. In some instances priests and monks had married, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... the first time, his mind was in this transitory, suffering state. The various countries which he visited, the various creeds with which he became acquainted the intolerance of the one, the laxity in others in direct opposition to their superstitious and irrational practices; the truly touching piety which he found in the Greek monasteries (at Zytza and at Athens), in the midst of which and in the silence of whose cloisters, he loved to share the peace and even the austerities ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... every kilo of wax or copal screwed out of the natives at a cost of five centimes or less, he received into his pocket a bonus of fifteen centimes, that is to say the bonus to Meeus was three times what the natives got; if by any laxity or sense of justice, the cost of the wax or copal rose to six centimes a kilo, Meeus only got ten centimes bonus, ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... of Tendilla set himself vigorously to reform these excesses: he knew that laxity of morals is generally attended by neglect of duty, and that the least breach of discipline in the exposed situation of his fortress might be fatal. "Here is but a handful of men," said he; "it is necessary that each man ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... perhaps no more than fair to say that whatever laxity was apparent at this hour in the Eleventh Corps was by no means incompatible with a readiness to give a good account of itself if an attack should be ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... ceremony, or adding the least circumstance, but always insisting, with his companions of the same order, even on points that might seem inconsiderable, and urging upon them, that though they might think the deity was easily pacified, and ready to forgive faults of inadvertency, yet any such laxity was a very dangerous thing for a commonwealth to allow: because no man ever began the disturbance of his country's peace by a notorious breach of its laws; and those who are careless in trifles, give a precedent for ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Declaration of Breda toleration was to be granted to all, and Hyde distinctly announced that it was the intention of the King to carry out that obligation to all. That was no part of the Presbyterian view, and portended a laxity which their consciences would not permit them to accept, and which might even embrace the hated Roman Catholics. If it was Hyde's intention by this announcement to countercheck their demand for a compromise which, in the pliancy of the King's ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... of the blame was General Rutowski's: one could surmise some laxity of effort, and a rather slovenly-survey of facts, in that quarter. The Enterprise, from the first, was flatly impossible, say judges; and it is certain, poor Rutowski's execution was not first-rate. "How get across the Elbe?" Rutowski had said to himself, perhaps not quite with the due rigor ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... Scudery is especially interesting to us as marking a transition point in the history of women; as the author of the first romances of any note written by her sex; as a moral teacher in an age of laxity; and as a woman who combined high aspirations, fine ideals, and versatile talents with a pure and unselfish character. She aimed at universal accomplishments from the distillation of a perfume to the writing of a novel, from the preparation of a rare dish to fine conversation, ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... London, 1720), had been comparatively cautious in their treatment of the subject. Their record is far from clean, but they had exposed some impostures, chiefly, it is fair to say, where Nonconformists, or Catholics, had detected the witch. With the Restoration the general laxity went so far as to scoff at witchcraft, to deny its existence, and even, in the works of Wagstaff and Webster, to minimise the leading case of the Witch of Endor. Against the 'drollery of Sadducism,' the Psychical Researchers within the English Church, like Glanvill and Henry More, or ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... Law; the "What-is-there-to-do?-I-do-it Pharisee," always on the search for a precept to fulfil; and, lastly, the "dyed Pharisee," whose externals of devotion were but a varnish of hypocrisy.[3] This strictness was, in fact, often only apparent, and concealed in reality great moral laxity.[4] The people, nevertheless, were duped by it. The people, whose instinct is always right, even when it is most astray respecting individuals, is very easily deceived by false devotees. That which it loves in them is good and worthy of being loved; but it has not sufficient ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... had done its notable part in developing the political consciousness, there was a clearer distinction of ranks and a dimmer distinction of parties; so that Mr. Brooke's miscellaneous invitations seemed to belong to that general laxity which came from his inordinate travel and habit of taking too much in the form ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... Japanese, being straightforward, could do without teaching." Motowori repeated these ideas in a slightly different way: "It is because the Japanese were truly moral in their practice, that, they required no theory of morals; and the fuss made by the Chinese about theoretical morals is owing to their laxity, in practice.... To have learned that there is no Way [ethical system] to be learned and practised, is really to have learned to practise the Way of the Gods." At a later day Hirata wrote "Learn to stand ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... a brighter light, guides every man who comes into the world than to the lessons of the teachers. Men were dismissed from the colony, or otherwise punished, on bare suspicion of wrong-doing or wrong-thinking. Nor is it unlikely that hostility in high places may have availed itself of this laxity of law to ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... to three or four generations and that you have most scrupulously observed the rules of etiquette and propriety. It's but fair that you should try, with one mind, and show some little regard for what's right and proper. But if you contrariwise behave with such laxity as to let people gratify their wishes by guzzling and gambling, and my aunt comes to hear of these nice doings, a little scolding from her will be of little consequence. But if the various women, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... so beautiful and so august a spectacle presented to the moral eye, as Europe afforded the day before the revolution in France. I knew indeed that this prosperity contained in itself the seeds of its own danger. In one part of the society it caused laxity and debility; in the other it produced bold spirits and dark designs. A false philosophy passed from academies into courts; and the great themselves were infected with the theories which conducted to their ruin. Knowledge, which in the two last centuries either ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... is often warmly challenged; in actual life, we are told, many of those who profess determinist principles are notorious for their strenuous moral calibre, and certainly not open to the charge of laxity. Let that statement be ungrudgingly accepted; what it proves is no more than that prussic acid is entirely harmless—provided it is not taken. We are quite willing to admit that Determinism, provided it is not put into practice, is nothing ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... he was, Richard J. Montcalm had foreseen trouble at this meeting, for it was the boldest invasion yet into the territory of evil and laxity. His forces were marshaled. Several of the town's ministers who had been with him on other issues had balked on this one, but he had three of them present, as well as heads ...
— The Gift Bearer • Charles Louis Fontenay
... she said, for the overthrow of that anarchy in which the Unguarded laxity of the king had plunged the first Country in the world,—vous me pardonnec, Mademoiselle,—was now from the German princes, who, she flattered herself, Would rise In ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... smaller and domestic fraction of Free Methodism separated itself upon an issue which may be most readily described as one of civilization. The seceders resented growth in material prosperity; they repudiated the introduction of written sermons and organ-music; they deplored the increasing laxity in meddlesome piety, the introduction of polite manners in the pulpit and classroom, and the development of even a rudimentary desire among the younger people of the church to be like others outside in dress and speech and deportment. They did battle ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... she. "And—I was cross, wasn't I? After all an old friend like you might be allowed a little laxity. There, never mind," holding out her hand. "Let us ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... chairs to choose from. Whatever she selects should be distinguished by the quality of dignity. Here is the one room in the house where formality is thoroughly in place; it is at table where bad manners are wont most to show themselves among children, and laxity in etiquette among their parents. Just as the exclusive use of the room for eating purposes saves labor in housework, so will its dignity in decoration aid in enforcing the mother's teaching of good habits to ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... life," the wickedness of which, however, did not amount to more than a liking for the sports and games of the lads of the village, bell-ringing, dancing, and the like. The prohibition of all liturgical forms issued in 1645, the observance of which varied with the strictness or laxity of the local authorities, would not seem to have been put in force very rigidly at Elstow. The vicar, Christopher Hall, was an Episcopalian, who, like Bishop Sanderson, retained his benefice unchallenged all through the Protectorate, and held it some years after ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... and frequently weeping, who used to sing him to sleep in a low, sweet voice. He had been brought up chiefly by his father's mistress, who was known as the Vicomtesse d'Oilly, a widow, and a rather good sort of woman. Her natural sensibility, and the laxity of morals then reigning at Paris, permitted her to occupy herself at the same time with the happiness of the father and the education of the son. When the father deserted her after a time, he left her the child, to comfort her somewhat by this mark of confidence ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... great festivals, and even dispensed with the rite of circumcision. Thus the admission of Gentiles on very easy terms into the Church was no new idea to the Palestinian Jews; it was known to them as part of the shocking laxity which prevailed among their brethren of the Dispersion. With Stephen, this kind of liberalism seemed to have entered the group of 'disciples.' He was accused of saying that Jesus was to destroy the temple ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... shock. Her internal fires could not break into eruption; she had very little fluid surface. And the nature of her atmosphere was such that it was not easily disturbed into storms. Only if there was laxity in the handling of the planet's motion ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... those forces which come into action when the antagonist force is withdrawn. But though there is inaccuracy in saying that the freezing of water is due to the loss of its heat, no practical error arises from it; nor will a parallel laxity of expression vitiate our statements respecting the multiplication of effects. Indeed, the objection serves but to draw attention to the fact, that not only does the exertion of a force produce more than one change, but ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... and particularly of buccaneers. These were piratical rovers of the deep, who made sad work in times of peace among the Spanish settlements and Spanish merchant ships. They took advantage of the easy access to the harbor of the Manhattoes, and of the laxity of its scarcely-organized government, to make it a kind of rendezvous, where they might dispose of their ill-gotten spoils, and concert new depredations. Crews of these desperadoes, the runagates of every country and clime, might be seen ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... thousand pities if we should tolerate the extermination of the elk, which would afford delight to every one who visited the Olympics, if only the herd might be preserved. One can hardly blame the hunters for taking advantage of the laxity of public sentiment. The State has it within its power easily to protect these animals by the employment of two or three game detectives of the right sort—keen, energetic men. These would soon break up the illicit traffic and bring the offenders to justice. ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... some freedom in the Onondaga village. They were not bound, and they could wander about within call of the low hut which had been assigned to them. This laxity misled Danton into supposing that escape ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... education has been to accentuate religious differences and animosities. Both Sikhs and Musalmans are gradually dropping ideas and observances retained in their daily life after they ceased to call themselves Hindus. On the other hand, within the Hindu fold laxity is now the rule rather than the exception, and the neglect of the old ritual and restrictions is by no means confined to the small but influential reforming minority which ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... she was troubled by a suspicion that she had made an unwise choice then. Leslie had changed since their marriage. He was harsh at times, and though he had, even in their more humble quarters, surrounded her with a certain amount of luxury, there was a laxity in his manners and conversation that jarred upon her. Geoffrey, she remembered, had not been addicted to mincing words, but, at least, he had lived in accordance with a Spartan moral code. Millicent was not a scrupulous woman, and her ideas of ethical justice ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... judiciously viewed, her gain in the matter was not the young man's loss. It was evident that Cecilia was not judicious, and that her good sense, habitually rigid under the demands of domestic economy, indulged itself with a certain agreeable laxity on this particular point. She liked her young friend just as he was; she humored him, flattered him, laughed at him, caressed him—did everything but advise him. It was a flirtation without the benefits of a flirtation. She was too old to let him fall in love with her, which ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... the highest offices in the church for money, to place boys on episcopal thrones, to absolve the most heinous and scandalous crimes for gold, to encourage the massacre of heretics, and to disgrace themselves by infamous vices. And a general laxity of morals existed among all orders of the clergy. They were ignorant, debauched, and ambitious. The monks were exceedingly numerous; had ceased to be men of prayer and contemplation, as in the days of Benedict and Bernard; ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... crookedly about my life. How, then, in such an atmosphere of compromise, to keep honour bright and abstain from base capitulations? How are you to put aside love's pleadings? How are you, the apostle of laxity, to turn suddenly about into the rabbi of precision; and after these years of ragged practice, pose for a hero to the lackey who has found you out? In this temptation to mutual indulgence lies the particular peril to morality in married life. Daily ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... by all the separate Protestant churches as doctrines of Protestantism. I would not delay either Phil. or myself for the sake of a trifle; but an impossibility is not a trifle. If from orthodox Turkey you pass to heretic Persia, if from the rigor of the Sonnees to the laxity of the Sheeahs, you could not, in explaining those schisms, go on to say, 'And these are the doctrines of Islamism;' for they destroy each other. Both are supported by earthly powers; but one only could be supported by central Islamism. ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... entrants into Osgoode Hall were graduates of any University, and three-fourths were men who had taken no degree, and yet there is no profession which demands a higher mental training than the Bar. In medical education there is certainly less laxity than in the United States; all the efforts of medical men being laudably directed to lengthen the course and develop the professional knowledge of the students. Still, not a few of our young men show their appreciation of the ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... and were as scrupulously prepared for their communion: the schools were kept up all the same; mass was said; the taxes were paid (the sole thing that Paris extracts of the provinces), and the mayor passed resolutions. But all these acts of social existence were done as mere routine, and thus the laxity of the local government suited admirably with the moral and intellectual condition of the governed. The events of the following history will show the effects of this state of things, which is not as unusual in the provinces ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... endears. Bousefield, he allowed, was proud, was difficult: nothing was really good enough for him but the middling good; but he himself was prepared for adverse comment, resolute for his noble course. Hadn't Limbert moreover in the event of a charge of laxity from headquarters the great strength of being able to point to my contributions? Therefore I must let myself go, I must abound in my peculiar sense, I must be a resource in case of accidents. Lim-bert's vision of accidents hovered ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... came to Court he was a fresh and unspoiled youth, with high ideals and utterly unacquainted with the ethical latitude and moral laxity of city and Court life. In bringing him to Court and the notice of the Queen, and at the same time endeavouring to unite his interests with his own by marriage with his granddaughter, Burghley hoped that—as in the case of his son-in-law, the Earl of Oxford, ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... began to manifest some slight symptoms of distress. There was a strain in the carriage of her throat, a dulness in her eye, a laxity in her ear, and a slight stagger in her gait, which Turpin noticed with apprehension. Still she went on, though not at the same gallant pace as heretofore. But, as the tired bird still battles with the blast ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... M. Remy was not only a great artist, but a man whose character was "wholly free from that deplorable laxity which is so often a blot on the proud escutcheon of his noble profession;" that he had married an American lady; that he had "embraced the Protestant religion"—no sect was specified, possibly to avoid jealousy—and that his health ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... who was firm in his religious convictions in his native village, having heard of the religious laxity prevalent in America, had fully made up his mind not to be misled by the temptation and allurements of the free country, but he succumbed in his struggle and renounced his Judaism when first submitting his chin to the barber's razor, at the entreaties and persuasions ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... may make to Roman Catholic services, they admit that everything is done decently and in order. The laxity, however, in the Italian churches is, or was until recently, beyond belief, and every traveller brought home some queer tale. Mrs. Burton, who prided herself on being "an old English Catholic," was frequently ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... our April number complained that the tendency of his view of Anne's times was to a social laxity, which might be very exhilarating but was very dangerous; that the lecturer's warm commendation of fermented drinks, taken at a very early hour of the morning in tavern-rooms and club houses, was as deleterious to the moral health of enthusiastic young readers disposed ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... that the ignorance and mental darkness of slave Virginia or Carolina should fear and hate above all things the light of knowledge that streams from New England; it is natural that the unquestioned immorality and laxity of principle engendered by slavery should shrink from the contrast with a state of morals unsurpassed for purity in the world; and that an obsequious church and clergy, which, in the holy name of religion, and 'using the livery of heaven to serve the devil in,' had dared by the thinnest ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the latter great wrong, a few suffered dreadfully—particularly on Sundays, when they had for some time expected the earth to open and swallow the public up; but which desirable event had not yet occurred, in consequence of some reprehensible laxity in the arrangements ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... confiscations and imprisonment. Toleration was not only very imperfectly understood, even by those who most lauded it, but it was often loudly vaunted by men whose lives and opinions were very far from recommending it. In an age notorious for laxity and profaneness, it was only too obvious that great professions of tolerance were in very many cases only the fair-sounding disguise of flippant scepticism or shallow indifference. The number of such instances ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... Aristotle sketched an outline (Politics, iv. v.) is not set either in time or in place.] and exhibits its gradual deterioration, through the successive stages of timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and despotism. He explains this deterioration as primarily caused by a degeneration of the race, due to laxity and errors in the State regulation of marriages, and the consequent birth of biologically ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... could not induce General Menesius to co-operate with her in any such plans. He had set his heart on making his pupil a virtuous and an accomplished man, and he knew very well that the system of laxity and indulgence which Sophia recommended would end in his ruin. After a considerable contest, Sophia, finding that Menesius was inflexible, manoeuvred to cause him to be dismissed from his office, and to ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott
... tail on his n, and then some uneasy consciousness would have him look again over the edge of his board at the sergeant; for, though there were scores of men lying within view on the ground, there was something in the "give" and laxity of Corny's posture that augured ill for him in Drake's experienced eyes, and, laying the history aside, he went over and kneeled down beside him. The man's eyes were closed, and a dull, yellowish pallor had taken the place of the usual brick ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... observation post, for which it was admirably adapted, as it looks down into the British position on Groen Kop. Moreover, the customary movements for protection, such as the relief of outposts, were carried out with such extraordinary laxity and neglect that De Wet was soon able to acquaint himself with almost every detail of the defence. Even the emplacements of a field gun and a pom-pom were disclosed by shots casually fired for ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... what Cook himself tells us (above), and from what is now well known of the laxity of Tahitian morals, that this punishment would seem excessive to the natives, and especially to the women, who were accustomed themselves to bear whatever blame ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... to be learnt other than the elementary one that virtue is a wiser guide than vice: many an Interlude was written to castigate a particular form of laxity or drive home a needed reform, in those years when the Stage was the Cinderella of the Church; one at least, The Four Elements, was written to disseminate schoolroom learning in an attractive manner. Nice Wanton ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... ships of his own division to make more sail, by setting all he could on the Barfleur, and by getting out his boats to tow her head round. Sir Gilbert Blane unintentionally gives a similar impression of laxity. ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... to the harbor of New-York, the number of hiding-places about its waters, and the laxity of its newly organized government, about the year 1695, made it a great rendezvous of pirates, where they might dispose of their booty and concert new depredations. As they brought home with them wealthy lading of all kinds, the luxuries of the tropics, and ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... this last year came his fall. He was charged with bribery, and condemned; the king remitted the imprisonment and fine, and for the remainder of his life Bacon devoted himself to science, rejecting every suggestion toward a renewal of his political activity. The moral laxity of the times throws a mitigating light over his fault; but he cannot be aquitted of self-seeking, love of money and of display, and excessive ambition. As Macaulay says in his famous essay, he was neither malignant ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... a difficult thing to keep any room in the house orderly, and Sidney, as part of his struggle against the downward tendency in all about him, against the forces of chaos, often did the work of housemaid in the parlour; a little laxity in the rules which made this a sacred corner, and there would have been no spot where he could rest. With some success, too, he had resisted the habit prevalent in working-class homes of prolonging Saturday ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... kindly, grateful, attached to persons and places, enduring and patient in fatigue and hardship, contented and cheerful. Their control should be uniform and consistent, not an alternation of rigor and laxity. Punishment for real faults should be invariable but moderate. "The best evidence of the good management of slaves is the keeping up of good discipline with little or no punishment." The treatment should be impartial except for good conduct which should bring rewards. Praise is often a better ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... leaving our camps standing; Keyes's brigade in the lead, then Schenck's, then mine, and Richardson's last. We marched via Vienna, Germantown, and Centreville, where all the army, composed of five divisions, seemed to converge. The march demonstrated little save the general laxity of discipline; for with all my personal efforts I could not prevent the men from straggling for water, blackberries, or any thing on the way ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... the elastic fibers were quite normal, but there was transformation of the connective tissue of the dermis into an unformed tissue like a myxoma, with total disappearance of the connective-tissue bundles. Laxity of the skin after distention is often seen in multipara, both in the breasts and in the abdominal walls, and also from obesity, but in all such cases the skin falls in folds, and does not have a normal appearance like that of the true ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... pleasure, for to all women wit and intellect have their charm. But still there was a cold and sharp levity in the tone of the man of the world that prevented the charm sinking below the surface. To Mrs. Leslie he seemed unconsciously to betray a laxity of principle; to Evelyn, a want of sentiment and heart. Lady Vargrave, who did not understand a character of this description, listened attentively, and said to herself, "Evelyn may admire, but I fear she cannot love him." Still, time passed ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book I • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... good-nature in us which he seems to gird at, while I would not consecrate a chapel, as they have not scrupled to do in France, to Notre Dame de la Haine, Our Lady of Hate, yet I cannot forget that the corruption of good-nature is the generation of laxity of principle. Good-nature is our national characteristick; and though it be, perhaps, nothing more than a culpable weakness or cowardice, when it leads us to put up tamely with manifold impositions and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... method of taking the vote and of safeguarding the honesty of elections should be the most important and fundamental of all questions in a republic. Such laws ought to be preliminary to all other laws. Yet as a matter of fact the laxity and ambiguity of many state election laws and the utter inadequacy of provisions for enforcement are almost unbelievable. The contemplation of the actual facts seriously reflects upon the intelligence and good faith of the successive lawmakers ...
— Woman Suffrage By Federal Constitutional Amendment • Various
... John's wont, he arraigned the sin, the formalism, the laxity of the times; he proclaimed the advent of the Kingdom, the presence of the King; he demanded, in the name of God, repentance and reform. Herod was, as usual, impressed and convinced; he assented to the preacher's propositions; already he had settled ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... which I hold to be a great truth, and one on which I should not fear to challenge the verdict of long future generations—that, the direction in which the endeavour of woman to readjust herself to the new conditions of life is leading today, is not towards a greater sexual laxity, or promiscuity, or to an increased self-indulgence, but toward a higher appreciation of the sacredness of all sex relations, and a clearer perception of the sex relation between man and woman as ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... as to the relation of the state itself to its individual members, we find the Roman polity equally remote from the laxity of a mere defensive combination and from the modern idea of an absolute omnipotence of the state. The community doubtless exercised power over the person of the burgess in the imposition of public burdens, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the prevalent laxity of morals that occurred was the case of the Sanborn contracts. I was a member of the House when they were investigated, but took no special ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... permit them to grow up unbaptized, neither would they be recreant to the solemn duties which are binding upon the parent after its administration. But upon the subject of baptism itself, we have seen that there is great laxity of feeling and opinion. ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... to the Prefecture had latterly betrayed a laxity of interest that invited official attention, if they did not call down upon her the ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... do with the domestic serfs—the "drones" as he called them—and everyone said he spoiled them by his laxity. When a decision had to be taken regarding a domestic serf, especially if one had to be punished, he always felt undecided and consulted everybody in the house; but when it was possible to have a domestic serf conscripted instead of a land worker he did so without the least hesitation. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... those days resembled, as has been well said, in recklessness and extravagance, the spirit of the English seventeenth century, so graphically portrayed in Thackeray's Humorist, rather than the dignified caste of the nineteenth cycle of Christianity. Laxity of morals and the coolest disregard possible characterized that ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... Stephen, in his "Digest of the Criminal Law" to regard it as "practically obsolete." But the event has proved that no law is obsolete until it is repealed. It has also proved Lord Coleridge's observation that there is, in the case of some laws, a "discriminating laxity," as well as Professor Hunter's remark that the Blasphemy Laws survive as a dangerous weapon in the hands of any fool or fanatic who likes to ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... between himself and Mr. Adams. Those who know all the story about Mr. Airy being arrested in his progress by the neglect of Mr. Adams to answer a letter, with all the imputations which might have been thrown upon himself for laxity in the matter, know also that Mr. Airy's conduct exhibited moral courage, honest feeling, and willingness to sacrifice himself, if need were, to the attainment of the ends of private justice, and the establishment ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... partly perhaps owing to laxity of morals, but partly because the papal supremacy was not fully recognised, celibacy of the clergy was not strictly enforced. On the accession of Queen Mary great numbers of them were found to be married. She issued ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... arranged, instances enough have already appeared, and more are daily presenting themselves, to justify its extension to all cases in which chemical elements may be supposed combined with a certain degree of laxity, and so to speak in a tottering equilibrium. There can be no doubt that the process, in a great majority, if not in all cases, which have been noticed among inorganic substances, is a deoxidizing one, so far as the more refrangible rays are concerned. It is obviously ...
— Photographic Reproduction Processes • P.C. Duchochois
... Sabbath-breakers." Thereupon the stranger vanished; and the man was caught up with his staff and faggot into the moon, where he stands yet.' According to some narrators the stranger was Christ; but whether from German laxity in such matters or for some other reason, no text is quoted in evidence, as by the more orthodox British nurses. ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... at the suggestion, and also made an expressive gesture to indicate the general laxity of her dress—the soiled dressing-gown, her untidy hair. Then she leaned forward again, holding both hands, palms out, to the mica pane in the door of the stove, through ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... outside the orthodox Hindoo system; but they are heterodox rather than low-caste. The Rajas of Bharatpur, Dholpur, Nabha, Patiala, and Jind are all Jats. The Jats are a fine and interesting people, who seem to suffer little deterioration from the notorious laxity of their matrimonial arrangements. They are skilled and industrious cultivators. A saying has been current in Upper India that, if the British power is ever broken, the succession will pass ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... became a nun. The accusation brought against him by the Duke of Buckingham and others, of procuring objects for Henry's sensual appetite, is a scandal, to which no credence would have been attached but for Wolsey's own moral laxity, and the fact that the governor of Charles V. performed ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... the average of illegitimacy is ten per cent. but in Berlin the average for the last few years is twenty per cent. Out of every five children born in Berlin each year one is illegitimate! It is questionable whether the increasing demands of the army and navy require such laxity of moral ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... Government. But if that were the case Fred Crawford had no reason to suspect it. German surveillance was always both efficient and obtrusive, and he had to make his preparations under a vigilance by the authorities which showed no signs of laxity. Those preparations involved the assembling and the packing of 20,000 modern rifles, 15,000 of which had to be brought from a factory in Austria; 10,000 Italian rifles previously purchased, which B.S. had in store; bayonets for all ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... past years, and what must be done to surpass them. His ball must be worthy of the lady in whose honor it was to be given, and must, by the quality of its guests, set an example for the future. He had observed of late a growing liberality, almost a laxity, in social matters, even among members of his own set, and had several times been forced to meet in a social way persons whose complexions and callings in life were hardly up to the standard which he considered ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... be only too pleased. Now, if you wait for me while I change my boots we'll go out together." And the two men crossed the Green Park talking of the great moral laxity of the time they lived in; whereas in the eighteenth century men were even accused of boasting of their successes, now the conditions were reversed, men never admitting themselves to be anything else but virtuous; ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... which were assembled under Earnscliff's directions, there was more than one person qualified to act as a guide. For although the owner's character and habits of life were generally known, yet the laxity of feeling with respect to property prevented his being looked on with the abhorrence with which he must have been regarded in a more civilized country. He was considered, among his more peaceable neighbours, pretty much ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... a term which is now used with great laxity. In its strict sense, it means manures which contain only, and owe their exclusive value to the presence of, those substances which go to make up the inorganic part or ash of plants. It has, however, been usually taken to include all saline matters, ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... she had obtained so entire an ascendency over his mind that she was literally the monarch of France. The treasures of the empire were emptied into her lap. Notwithstanding the stigma attached to her position, the nation, accustomed to this laxity of morals, submitted to the yoke. As the idol of the king, and the dispenser of honors and powers, the clergy, the nobility, the philosophers, all did her homage. She was still young, and in all the splendor of her ravishing ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... not approve of laxity, he had still less sympathy with the extreme piety bordering on folly of those whom he called "crazy saints." Enemy to every exaggeration, he blamed those who, for example, imposed upon themselves two consecutive fast days. Once ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... no discredit is involved nor any suffering incurred, and the Arab priest performs the divorce service for a sum so trifling as half a florin! Probably the cheapness of food, and the ease with which life can be supported generally in such a country and climate, is the cause of this laxity of the marriage tie. As a Mohammedan, a Javan peasant is permitted to have as many as four wives, but he can rarely afford more than one, or two at ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... of so great a number of enemies, composed of Chinese and Japanese. That argument was not the one of least weight in the council in determining that our fleet should not sail against the enemy. I think that there has been neglect and laxity in the matter of not driving out the Japanese. But, in the case of the Chinese [it is] the greed for the eight pesos that each one pays for the license to remain in the country, and the excessive profits gained ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XX, 1621-1624 • Various
... exclamation of Mrs. Peachum, when her daughter marries Macheath, "Hussy, hussy, you will be as ill used, and as much neglected, as if you had married a lord," is worth all Miss Hannah More's laboured invectives on the laxity of the ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... of New England, the laxity of New York and Virginia needs little evidence. Contemporary travelers found the New Yorkers singularly attached to the things of this present world. Philadelphia was prosperous and therewith content. Virginia was a paradise with no forbidden ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... divine essence. And it would for a certainty fall on the day when it should allow a single stone of its edifice to be touched. Remember the terrible period through which it passed at the time of the Council of Trent. The Reformation had just deeply shaken it, laxity of discipline and morals was everywhere increasing, there was a rising tide of novelties, ideas suggested by the spirit of evil, unhealthy projects born of the pride of man, running riot in full license. And at the Council itself ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... But Boaz Negro was a blind man, and in a sense their host. Those reckless, strong young fellows respected and loved him. It was allowed to stand at that. Manuel was "a good boy." Which did not prevent them, by the way, from joining later in the general condemnation of that father's laxity—"the ruination ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... She is nearing the pinnacle of her power and the zenith of her glory, although the parochial clergy have sunk into vice and incapacity, and the monks, as a class, are lazy, ignorant and notoriously corrupt. Two things, especially, command the attention,—first, the immorality and laxity of the monks; and second, the growth of heresies and the tendency toward open schism. The necessity of reform was clearly apprehended by the church as well as by the heretical parties, but, since the church had such a hold upon society, those who sought to reform the monasteries by returning ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... This laxity of emotional tone was further increased by an incident, when, two days later, she kept an appointment with Nicholas in the Sallows. The Sallows was an extension of shrubberies and plantations along the banks of the ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... decisively of any man's faculties, whom I have only known in one degree of elevation; but take some opportunity of attending him from the cellar to the garret, and try upon him all the various degrees of rarefaction and condensation, tension and laxity. If he is neither vivacious aloft, nor serious below, I then consider him as hopeless; but as it seldom happens that I do not find the temper to which the texture of his brain is fitted, I accommodate ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... the Cherries" at Vienna, and the "Madonna with St. Bridget and S. Ulfus" at Madrid, and while it has been surmised that the example of the precise Albert Duerer, who paid his first visit to Venice in 1506, was not without its effect in preserving Titian from falling into laxity of treatment and in inciting him to fine finish, it is interesting to find that Titian was, in fact, discarding the use of the carefully traced and transferred cartoon, and was sketching his design freely on panel or canvas with a brush dipped in brown pigment, and altering and modifying ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... alio, the same radical idea expressed with a difference—similarity in dissimilarity; but to throw one's own thoughts, matter, and form, through alien organs so absolutely as to make another man one's interpreter for evil and good, is either to confess a singular laxity of thinking that can so flexibly adapt itself to any casual form of words, or else to confess that sort of carelessness about the expression which draws its real origin from a sense of indifference about the things to be expressed. Utterly at war this distressing ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... academy under the same roof with a brothel. There were ages before morality, and there have been ages between the moralities. There was, in England, an age between the decline of the Catholic morality and the rise of the Puritan, marked by a laxity of conduct, public and private, which was partly redeemed but not neutralized by Elizabethan genius and enterprise. No doubt when the revival came, there was a High Church as well as a Puritan morality, and that fact ought always ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... of you. I'd issue a divorce coupon with every marriage certificate, and done with it," he said, in desperate disgust. "Then this whole cursed business would be done away with. It isn't a question of our laxity of divorce laws," he said, after a pause, "it's a question of the senseless severity of the laws in other States. That's what throws this demoralizing business ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... his wife brought his body had not fulfilled the high hopes and dreams of the Restoration. The vice, and laxity of morals into which it was sinking, would certainly have been repugnant to the clean-living, high-souled statesman, and we can hardly think him unhappy in ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... the people. Whether to note it as a reluctance on their part to incur the guilt of an oath, or as a proof of habitual tact in evading it by artifice, is manifestly a difficulty hard to be overcome. We are decidedly inclined to the former; for although there is much laxity of principle among Irishmen, naturally to be expected from men whose moral state has been neglected by the legislature, and deteriorated by political and religious asperity, acting upon quick passions and badly regulated minds—yet we know that they possess, after ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... cards and dice a necessary step towards fashionable perfection, and ordained that Fiddlers were to be paid to play for you as substitutes for your own personal degradation, came to be remembered, possibly, more on account of the laxity of his precepts ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... in composing his sermons. He had very suave and winning ways as confessor, though he enjoined great strictness as preacher. This led a witty woman of his time to say of him: "Father Bourdaloue charges high in the pulpit, but he sells cheap in the confessional." How much laxity he allowed as confessor, it is, of course, impossible to say. But his sermons remain to show that, though indeed he was severe and high in requirement as preacher, he did not fail to soften asperity by insisting on the goodness, while he ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... besiegers were to become the besieged, their mistakes were to be turned against them, the experiments of inexperience were to be tested at the risk of total failure, and the morale severely tried by the grumbling and discontent arising for the most part from laxity of discipline, but somewhat so, too, from the wretched administration of the various civil departments of the army.[5] The officers did not know how to instruct their men, and the men could not be made to take proper care of themselves. In consequence of this state of ...
— The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77 • Samuel Adams Drake
... teaching of the New Testament Scriptures concerning the way of salvation. This, too, accounts for the fact that in this writing the accusation is more impressively repelled than before, that the doctrine of justification by faith lone resulted in moral laxity, and that, on the other hand, the fundamental and radical importance of righteousness by faith for the whole moral life is revealed in such a heart-refreshing manner. Luther's appeal in this treatise to kings, princes, the nobility, municipalities ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... as a sacred duty, in view of the laxity of those who seemed to be the pillars of the Church, to be all the more watchful and unyielding. But he was delightfully inconsistent when confronted with particulars. In conversation with him one night after one of the meetings, ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... strategy was adopted by the Anti-Saloon League. What it will do if it finds that it cannot put through its plan of excluding liquor from all ships, American and foreign, remains to be seen. Now it may be replied to all this that a certain amount of laxity is to be found in the execution of all laws; that the resources at the disposal of government not being sufficient to secure the hunting down and punishment of all offenders, our executive and prosecuting officers and police and courts ...
— What Prohibition Has Done to America • Fabian Franklin
... make so great a breach in the Sunday habits of her youth. As soon as David's ideals began to tease her out of thought and sympathy, his freedoms also began to affect her. She was no longer so much chilled by his strictness, or so much shocked by his laxity. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... work. Dom. Menard has written upon this rule in his Comments on the Concord of Rules of St. Benedict of Anian. Dom. Mege's Commentaires sur le Rege de St. Benoit, in 4to. printed at Paris in 1687, have been much blamed by his brethren for laxity. Dom. Martenne published with more applause his Commentarius in Regulam S. Benedicti, in 4to., in 1690. Son edition de la Regle est la plus exacte qu'on nous a donne; et son Commentaire egalement judicieux ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... these I had long felt, and still feel, that of all the weaknesses in our institutions, one of the most serious is our laxity in the administration of the criminal law. No other civilized country, save possibly the lower parts of Italy and Sicily, shows anything to approach the number of unpunished homicides, in proportion to the population, which are committed in sundry parts of our own country, and indeed ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... other particulars remained a peculiar people. As a rule, indeed, they were less rigid in their religious views and more tolerant of foreign customs than those Jews who remained in Palestine. But Paul's father was not one who had given way to laxity. He belonged to the straitest sect of his religion. It is probable that he had not left Palestine long before his son's birth, for Paul calls himself a Hebrew of the Hebrews—a name which seems to have belonged only to the Palestinian Jews and to those whose ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... person who need have any fear was one who ignored guidance of the existing standards of his profession, and to this extent the law was, at least in part, a deterrent against laxity ...
— Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Various Aspects of the Problem of Abortion in New Zealand • David G. McMillan
... cast their shadow before. That curious feature of Boswell's character, the mixture of religious sentiments and the Sterne vein of pietistic moralizing united with laxity in practice, appears strangely enough in the letter to Temple, dated in the February of 1767, and sent to his friend who had just been ordained to the living of Mamhead in Devon. 'I view,' he writes, ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... they were "disciplinary" stifled every question, subdued every doubt, and removed the subject from the realm of rational discussion. By its nature, the allegation could not be checked up. Even when discipline did not accrue as matter of fact, when the pupil even grew in laxity of application and lost power of intelligent self-direction, the fault lay with him, not with the study or the methods of teaching. His failure was but proof that he needed more discipline, and thus afforded a reason for retaining the old methods. The responsibility ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... do not trust me I shall distrust myself. The time is past, it is true, when I used to stand on the settle, sing oragna fiagata fa and kiss the tip end of your nose; but have I therefore shown laxity in respect, love and obedience? I say ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... pagan, and this partly explains his laxity. It would doubtless be going too far to say that he remained faithful to paganism all his life. It is not likely that this urban councillor of Thagaste was a particularly assured pagan. Speculative and intellectual ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... a solid bulwark of timbers more than a foot thick, besides an inner "skin," the whole being held together by innumerable iron and oaken bolts and trenails, and tightened with oakum and pitch. We had almost fallen into this error—or poetical laxity of expression—by saying that, on the night of which we write, little did Miss Tippet know that she was separated from, not death exactly, but from something very awful, by a single plank; at least, by the floor of her own residence, and the ceiling ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... sanction for quite opposite views in the Scripture, and proclaimed that the godless should be exterminated as the Canaanites had been. In ethical matters some sects practised the severest code of morals, while others were distinguished by laxity. By some marriage was forbidden; others wanted all the marriage they could get and advocated polygamy. The religious meetings were similar to "revivals," frequently of the most hysterical sort. Claiming that they were mystically united to God, or had direct revelations from him, they rejected ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... at the beginning of piano study positive finger movements must be acquired; finger action must be so thoroughly grounded that it becomes second nature, a very part of the player, something he can never forget nor get away from. So fixed should it become that no subsequent laxity, caused by the attention being wholly centered on interpretation can disturb correct position, condition, or ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... Canon of scripture, and the fact that it appeals rather to the comparatively few, to those, that is to say, who are able and willing to make the surrender it requires. Whereas, in the Mahayana, or Greater Vehicle, we see a system characterized by that increased ease and laxity, which too often accompany a season of repose and the cessation of the enthusiasm that attends the establishment of a new movement. The chief features of the Mahayana may be pronounced to be its less exacting standard of practical morality, its willingness to descend ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... which, in the eyes of the poor, carries with it very little of the discredit and dislike that gathers round the workhouse, is now by far the larger part of poor-law relief; and in many districts it is administered with great laxity. ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... by the foundation of charitable institutions of every description, but they have contented themselves with merely alleviating misery instead of removing its causes; and the benevolence that raised houses of correction, poor-houses, and hospitals, is rendered null by the laxity of the legislation. No measures are taken by the governments to provide means for emigration, to secure to the peasant his freehold, to the artificer the guarantee he ought to receive and to give, and the maintenance ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... in an instant one of the most difficult problems in the condition of mankind. But I am not aware that this principle of the materialists is supported by facts. The same nations have been chaste or dissolute at different periods of their history; the strictness or the laxity of their morals depended therefore on some variable cause, not only on the natural qualities of their country, which were invariable. I do not deny that in certain climates the passions which are occasioned ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... first knew Dr. Reilly he was Secretary of the Illinois State Board of Health, located at Springfield, and an occasional correspondent of the Chicago Herald. The State of Illinois owes to him its gradual rescue from a dangerous laxity in the matter of granting medical licenses, until to-day the requirements necessary to practise his profession in this state compare favorably with those of any other state of the Union. Shortly after I went from the Herald to the News, ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... Christ have too often sided with the oppressor, fettered human thought in departments foreign to religion, and inculcated degrading beliefs, which scholars eminent in orthodoxy declare indeducible from any Biblical precept. It is not the incredibleness of a metaphysical belief, but a laxity or cowardice of the practice connected with it, which can point the reformer's gibe and wing his sarcasm. Theodore Parker virtually told the Christian minister that he must reprove profitable and popular sins, or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... necessary, too, are cautions on this subject, because the natural inclination of the human mind is to take no precautions at all, and to treat these matters, which really demand the utmost obtainable precision, with careless laxity. It is true that every one admits the utility of criticism in theory; but this is just one of those principles which are more easily admitted than put into practice. Many centuries and whole eras of brilliant civilisation had to pass away before ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... years to root out of a race or nation evils that have become fixed in its nature. But while there is much to be deplored as to laxity in morals among the masses there has been constant and steady improvement in this regard. It is no doubt true that any race, kept in bondage under similar conditions, and for the same length of time as ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... of September, from his headquarters at Gjatsk, the Emperor ordered his army to prepare for a general engagement. There had been for some days much laxity in the police of the bivouacs, and he now redoubled the severity of the regulations in regard to the countersigns. Some detachments which had been sent for provisions having too greatly prolonged their expedition, the Emperor ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... (1664), gardening, Elysium Britannicum (unpub.), architecture, prevention of smoke in London, engraving, Sculptura (1662), and he was one of the founders of the Royal Society, of which he was for a time sec. The dignity and purity of E'.s character stand forth in strong relief against the laxity of his times. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... morals have a great influence on private morals; and gradually into family and social life there comes that laxity in the daily relations of the citizens which Plato has wittily termed, "equality between things that are equal ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... Paris Conference had for a short period what is termed a good press, and a rigorous censorship which never erred on the side of laxity, whereas those of the Vienna Congress were criticized without truth. For example, the population of Vienna, we are told by Bavaria's chief delegate, was disappointed when it discerned in those whom it was wont to worship as demigods, only mortals. "The condition of state affairs," writes Von Gentz, ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... preferment, without a shoal or rock in his course, fairly wealthy, and belonging to a well-esteemed county family, connected through his brother with the very elite of literary society, it seemed as though, in the laxity of the early part of the century, Reginald Heber could hardly have helped falling into the indolence of learned ease, the peril of the well-beneficed clergy of his day, especially among those who had not accepted the peculiarities of the awakening ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... have been annexing a friend's property. I regret to see the notorious laxity of principle on the subject of umbrellas ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... within his own discretion to admit or to refuse any votes that might be tendered, and that he might lawfully refuse any "which in his own mind he thought illegal." It is a striking proof of the laxity which prevailed on every quarter in electioneering practices, that the House, to a great extent, admitted his justification or excuse as valid. By a strange stretch of lenity, they gave him credit for ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... accumulated treasure of public esteem and respect which his uncle had been so uninterruptedly laying up. Neither could a social objection to the Marchese's bachelorhood be raised on the score of any such laxity of moral conduct as the world is wont to expect, and to tolerate with more or less of indulgence, in persons so free from special ties. Had the Marchese been an archbishop himself, instead of being merely the intimate ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... back. There was more in it to him than the withholding of credit which belonged to an obscure old man, or the self-aggrandizement of a pompous braggart. To Bruce it was indicative of a man with a moral screw loose, it denoted a laxity of principle. With his own direct standards of conduct it was ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... truth, a sort of whipping-boy, by whose vicarious agonies all the other transgressors of the same class are, it is supposed, sufficiently chastised. We reflect very complacently on our own severity, and compare with great pride the high standard of morals established in England, with the Parisian laxity. At length our anger is satiated. Our victim is ruined and heart-broken. And our virtue goes quietly to sleep for ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... pious chivalry of the North," had lost all respect for their traditions. "There were few who in going back did not encounter some Saracen or Jewish grandmother in their genealogy."[219] Moreover, many had brought back to Europe the laxity of morals they had contracted during the Crusades. The Comte de Comminges practised polygamy, and, according to ecclesiastical chronicles, Raymond VI, Comte de Toulouse, one of the most ardent of the Albigense Credentes, had his harem.[220] ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... noticed that five of them would beg in the name of Maria, for one who asked in the name of Jesus. I also desired to have put my hands to the holy work, but found extreme difficulty in the way, owing both to the Mahometan laxity in regard to the use of women, and the debauched lives of some unchristian Christians.—May he who hath the key of David open their eyes, and in his good time send labourers into ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... noticed, a hearty and careless eater. He was energetic and swift in his movements, as though the world were easily read, and he could come to quick decisions and successful executions of his desires. He had no moments of laxity and hesitation, even after a breakfast, on a hot morning, too, of ham and eggs drenched in coffee. He made me feel an ineffective, delicate, ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... suppressed. The Divine Teacher spoke plainly both of the sin and the sinner. He had scathing denunciation for the one, and compassion and mercy for the other. Shall we enforce His teachings against all other forms of evil, and not against this deadliest one of all—and that, too, in the laxity and wide demoralization of our age, when temptation lurks on every hand, and parents are often ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
