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More "Minuteness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... friend, but we are in some hurry. What direction shall we take?" The tavern-keeper gave the desired information, with tedious minuteness. Meanwhile the party at the fireside took sharp notice of the man on horseback, whom they could plainly see in the outshining light of the fire. A tall gentleman, whom the host called "colonel," inspected the ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... side, Frederick Townsend, colonel of Third Regiment of the enemy's forces, after stating with much minuteness the orders and line of march, describes how, "about five or six miles from Hampton, a heavy and well-sustained fire of canister and small-arms was opened upon the regiment," and how it was afterward discovered ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... the adventure of Meung, described the unknown gentleman with the greatest minuteness, and all with a warmth and truthfulness that delighted ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... contrast to the vastness of the cathedral one may cross into North Street and enter the portal of the toy church of St. Olave, which dates from the 14th century, and is remarkable, not only for its minuteness, but as being one of the churches of Chichester which, in my experience, is not normally ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... of this recent knowledge of the true nature of matter, of the minuteness and complexity of the atom, we can now understand how the highly triturated and refined (attenuated) homeopathic remedy may still retain the dynamic force of the element, as Hahnemann has expressed it, and how a remedy so attenuated may still be capable of exerting ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... appearing as if dimly seen through a vast pictorial tube, rapidly receding behind us, variegated with furrows, and intersected with roads running in all directions; the whole reduced to a scale of almost graphic minuteness, and from the fleecy vapour that still partially obscured it, impressing the beholder with the idea of a vision of enchantment, which some kindly genius had, for an instant, consented to disclose. Scarcely had we ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... the shape of food; establish a trade in oil, whalebone, arctic foxes, etcetera, etcetera, if they were to be got; and bring about a reconciliation between the Esquimaux and the Indians of the interior, if that were possible. With the careful minuteness peculiar to documents, Stanley's instructions went on to point out that he was to start from Moose—with two half-sized canoes, each capable of carrying ten pieces or packages of 90 pounds weight each, besides the crew—and bore through the ice, if the ice would allow him, till ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... apparatus for nearly a month, and in its earliest days it led me right in the diagnosis of a microscopical mineral, iolite, not before found in our Irish granite, I think. The unlooked-for characters of the mineral, coupled with the extreme minuteness of the crystals, led me previously astray, until my meldometer fixed its fusibility for me as ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... binary compounds in the way of combining by means of their six sides; for if the atoms possessed no distinction of parts (and hence filled no space), a group of even a thousand atoms would not differ in extension from a single atom, and the different kinds of extension—minuteness, shortness, bigness, length, &c.—would never emerge. If, on the other hand, it is admitted that the atoms also have distinct sides, they have parts and are made up of those parts, and those parts again are made up of their ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... peculiarities Deena had not anticipated; he introduced her to flying fish, and then to the renowned albatross, and he conducted her up the river Platte to Montevideo, which he described with the ponderous minuteness of a guide book. At the end he made a confidence—namely, that even his summer flannels had proved oppressive in that climate—but the intimacy of his letter went no further, and he omitted to mention any personal feelings in regard ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... and more numerous class, evidently piquing themselves not a little upon avoiding this error, fall into another by fancying it necessary to write down to their young readers. They explain everything with a tiresome minuteness of detail, although any observer of children ought to know that a child's mind does not want everything explained. They think that simplicity demands this lengthy discussion of every trivial matter. There is such a thing as a conceited simplicity, and there is a technical simplicity, that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... were largely restricted. A National Children's Bureau, under the charge of Miss Julia Lathrope, has been created at Washington; and Mrs. J. Borden Harriman was appointed to the Industrial Relations Commission. The minuteness and thoroughness of modern legislation for the protection of women may be realised by noting that in 1913 alone New York passed laws that no girl under sixteen shall in any city of the first, second, or third class sell newspapers or magazines or shine shoes in any street or public ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... minute not one of the three men spoke or stirred, but in that time the steady blue eyes of the countryman took in the details of the scene—the luxurious furnishings, the condition of the two men—with the rapidity and minuteness of a sensitized plate. Ironic chance had chosen an unpropitious night for his call. Intoxication surrounding a bar, under the stimulus of numbers, and preceding or following some exciting event, ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... pretend to write this meeting with the method and minuteness of the first ; for that took me so long, that I have not time to spare for such another detail. Besides the novelty is now over, and I have not the same inducement to be so very circumstantial. But the principal parts of the conversation I will ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... went to work with the minuteness of an auctioneer taking an inventory, or a sheriff levying an execution. Accordingly he came back full of notes; he had studied Carolus chiefly in respect ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... would write, with the notion that his letter would have a whole coach and a whole bag to itself, and travel two hundred miles alone, the exclusive object of a red guard's care. The only thing like it now—the deferential minuteness with which one public office writes to another, conscious that the letter will travel on her Majesty's service three doors down the passage—sinks ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... were his brothers; he must show them as such. If their weakness and sins are his also, he must not flinch when it comes to the test; he must make his words good. We may be shocked at the fullness and minuteness of the specification, but that is no concern of his; he deals with the concrete and not with the abstract,—fraternity and equality as a ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... finesse, which is a union of insight and address, to the French. This normal attribute is another proof how the economy of Gallic life is reduced to an art. It is the expression in manners of Rochefoucauld's maxims, of Richelieu's policy, of Talleyrand's cunning. It is favored by the tendency to minuteness of excellence and love of system before noted. To understand what superior range is afforded to such a principle in France, it is only requisite to consult the memoirs of a celebrated woman, or even an old Guide or Picture of Paris, such as in former days the provincial gentlemen ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... He searched through the little clump of trees with the utmost minuteness, till at last, on the farther side, in a bit of soft ground, he found ...
— The Crime of the French Cafe and Other Stories • Nicholas Carter
... the whole thing clear to me in a flash!" Many men could draw with more or less success Norman England, or mediaeval France, but to reconstruct a whole dead civilization in so plausible a way, with such dignity and such minuteness of detail, is, I should think, a most wonderful tour de force. His failing health showed itself before the end of the novel, but had the latter half equalled the first, and contained scenes of such humour as Anna Comnena reading aloud her father's exploits, ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of existence, the physical with the spiritual, we find the horizon of consciousness in the former, is vaguely defined and very much limited; while in the latter, it is sharply defined and widely extended. The more we study and compare, the more readily we understand, that space, duration, size, minuteness, solidity and porosity, are all relative terms which depend for their significance entirely on the standpoint of consciousness. So apparent is this fact, that we soon learn how impossible it is for ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... voices filled the yellow drawing-room. The visitors were repeating what they had just heard, and every now and then one of them would leave a group to ask the three heroes the exact truth with regard to some contested incident. The heroes set the matter right with scrupulous minuteness, for they felt that ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... the Christians, and now for the first time, it is probable, by most of the Romans present, heard, refuted, and explained, did Probus set forth, both with brevity and force; making nothing tedious by reason of a frivolous minuteness, nor yet omitting a single topic or argument, which it was due to the cause he defended, to bring before the minds of that august assembly. He then ended his appeal in the ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... him, and, by detailing some of the wild scenes and incidents of his voyages in the Saskatchewan, of leading them on from truth to exaggeration, and from that to fanciful composition, wherein he would detail, with painful minuteness, all the horrors of Indian warfare, and the improbability of any one who entered those dreadful regions ever ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... the purpose of the poem, which consists of a series of narratives told by a party of travellers gathered in Sudbury Inn, and each suited, either by its scene or its sentiment, to the speaker who recites it. In this also there is a natural reminiscence of Chaucer; and if we miss the rich minuteness of his Van Eyck painting, or the depth of his thoughtful humor, we find the same airy grace, tenderness, simple strength, and exquisite felicities of description. Nor are twinkles of sly humor wanting. The Interludes, and above all the Prelude, are masterly examples of that perfect ease of ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... chiffre over the forehead is characteristic, though it is not definitively proved, receives strong confirmation. The parts which have been lost by the effects of time on one statue can be supplied from the other. Better than all, we gain a test of the minuteness with which the sculptors worked, and an idea of how close the adherence to a type was required to be. Granting once that the two personages are the same (a fact about which I conceive there can be no possible doubt, since the chances in favor are ...
— Studies in Central American Picture-Writing • Edward S. Holden
... statement of the repulsive tradition communicated by Lord Webb Seymour to Walter Scott, the murder is described with hideous minuteness. ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... the minuteness of investigation employed, that, although the grate had contained a large fire during the night, they proceeded to examine even the very chimney, in order to discover whether escape by it were possible; but ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... was to be omnipotent. He would be Michelangelesque, and that by sheer force of minuteness. He exaggerated scientifically, and made things gigantic by a microscopic fulness of detail. His Hulot was to remain the Antony of modern romance, losing the world for the love of woman, and content to lose it; his Marneffe, ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... tribes, but different persons in the same tribe, gesture the same sign with different degrees of beauty, for there is calligraphy in sign language, though no recognized orthography. It is nevertheless better to describe and illustrate with unnecessary minuteness than to fail in reporting a real distinction. There are, also, in fact, many signs formed by mere positions of the fingers, some of which are abbreviations, but in others the arrangement of the fingers in itself forms a picture. An instance ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... the Icelandic historian's description of King Olaf that wins one's interest—at first as in an acquaintance—and rivets it at last as in a personal friend. The old Chronicle lingers with such loving minuteness over his attaching qualities, his social, generous nature, his gaiety and "frolicsomeness;" even his finical taste in dress, and his evident proneness to fall too hastily in love, have a value in the portrait, as contrasting with the gloomy colours ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... congratulations. In breathless accents, he related to them the marvelous adventures through which the old governor and himself had gone, in making their escape from the clutches of the terrible Amphictyons. But though the Stuyvesant manuscript, with its customary minuteness where anything touching the great Peter is concerned, is very particular as to the incidents of this masterly retreat, the state of the public affairs will not allow me to indulge in a full recital thereof. Let it suffice to say, that, ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... and the two wings with the elytra of a beetle. Bivalve shells are made to open and shut, but on what a number of patterns is the hinge constructed, from the long row of neatly interlocking teeth in a Nucula to the simple ligament of a Mussel! Seeds are disseminated by their minuteness, by their capsule being converted into a light balloon-like envelope, by being embedded in pulp or flesh, formed of the most diverse parts, and rendered nutritious, as well as conspicuously coloured, so as to attract and be devoured by birds, by having hooks and grapnels of many kinds and serrated ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... and my left eye was nearly knocked out of its socket. The facts, leading to this barbarous outrage upon me, illustrate a phase of slavery destined to become an important element in the overthrow of the slave system, and I may, therefore state them with some minuteness. That phase is this: the conflict of slavery with the interests of the white mechanics and laborers of the south. In the country, this conflict is not so apparent; but, in cities, such as Baltimore, Richmond, New Orleans, Mobile, &c., it is seen pretty clearly. The slaveholders, ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... would insure him lasting fame. It is a classic among scientific books of travel. Here is a traveler of a new kind: a natural-history voyager, a man bent on seeing and taking note of everything going on in nature about him, in the non-human, as well as in the human world. The minuteness of his observation and the significance of its subject-matter are a lesson to all observers. Darwin's interests are so varied and genuine. One sees in this volume the seed-bed of much of his subsequent work. He was quite a young man (twenty-four) when ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... or with such other person here as you will point out, or I will transmit it with copies of my vouchers, to be settled by you, or do whatever else with it you shall please to direct. The articles which, from their minuteness, have not admitted the taking vouchers, I shall be ready to prove by my own oath. In this account I have presumed to charge the United States with an outfit. The necessity of this in the case of a minister, resident, and of course obliged to establish a house, is obvious on reflection. There ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... Quiverful might be, he would not allow himself to be talked out of his opinion on this occasion; and proceeded with much minuteness to explain to his wife the tone in which Mr Slope had spoken of Mrs Proudie's interference in diocesan matters. As he did so, a new idea gradually instilled itself into the matron's head, and a new course ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... you cannot be a painter at all. The laying of paint by an insensitive person, whatever it endeavors to represent, is not painting, but daubing or plastering; and that, observe, irrespective of the boldness or minuteness of the work. An insensitive person will daub with a camel's hair-brush and ultramarine; and a passionate one will paint with ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... with some minuteness one of the most extensive silver mines in the world, where an average of 5000 men and unnumbered animals are employed, it will not be necessary to go into details as we notice the many other ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... women, etc. For all this the reader may consult the 19th and 20th chapters of Hyde, "de Religione Veterum Persarum," where the names and attributes of these daily and monthly angels are with much minuteness and erudition explained. It appears from the Zend-avesta that the Persians had a certain office or prayer for every day of the month (addressed to the particular angel who presided over it), ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... new edition of its hand-book, which is published under its auspices. Therein will be found a most detailed account of the steps necessary for the preparation of innumerable dishes, and the different instructions are given with a minuteness which leaves nothing ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... "The minuteness or delicacy of the feeling of difference is the measure of the variety and multitude of our primary impressions and therefore ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... commercial boon that ever was devised; but as the committee of the House of Lords, in the report already quoted, has borne ample testimony in their favour, it is unnecessary for us to dwell with further minuteness on their utility. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... of such tribes as are not mentioned in treaties, and of those whose territorial possessions are not given with sufficient minuteness, early historical accounts are all important. Such accounts, of course, rarely indicate the territorial possessions of the tribes with great precision. In many cases, however, the sites of villages are accurately given. In others the source of information concerning a tribe ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... in the very highest order, the trees and flowers are watched and inspected with the greatest minuteness. An old invalid soldier commands his 500 or 600 men as gardeners and overseers. Every leaf that falls in pond or canal is carefully fished up. They trim and polish the trees and paths in the gardens to the greatest nicety, ...
— A Journey in Russia in 1858 • Robert Heywood
... best, I think—shows the Circumcision, where the painter has set himself various difficulties of architecture and goldsmith's work for the pleasure of overcoming them, every detail being painted with Dutch minuteness and yet leaving the picture big; while the middle panel, which is concave, depicts an Adoration of the Magi that will bear much study. The whole effect is very northern: not much less so than our ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... At last the eyes of the world were upon it. News of the great sensation was flashed to the end of the earth; every detail was gone into with harrowing minuteness. The Hemisphere Company announced by telegraph that it stood ready to hand over the ten thousand dollars; and the sheriff of Bramble County with all the United States deputy marshals within reach raced at once to Tinkletown to stick a finger in ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... Spectroscopy, which then took its rise, is probably that employment of physical knowledge, already won, as a means of further acquisition, which most impresses the imagination. For it has suddenly and immensely enlarged our power of overcoming the obstacles which almost infinite minuteness on the one hand, and almost infinite distance on the other, have hitherto opposed to the recognition of the presence and the condition of matter. One eighteen-millionth of a grain of sodium in the flame of a spirit-lamp may be detected by this instrument; ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... minuteness of Greek work is of course most obvious in the reliefs of coins and in gems. The coins were not primarily meant to please the eye, but to circulate in the fish-market; yet a multitude of the dies are so exquisitely finished that they lose ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... second, it is really a matter of surprise to discover such a close similarity. Father and mother, the only two words which are not identical, are doubtless different expressions, relationship in this, as in most native tongues, being indicated with excessive minuteness. ...
— The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological Relations • Daniel G. Brinton
... smallest of those I can find drawings of. Flowers, blue; lilac in the fringe, and no bigger than pins' heads; the leaves quite gem-like in minuteness and order. ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... foresight by his biographer. This may very well be, though more particular inquiry and demonstration by his letters would be necessary to establish specific orders beyond the general instructions given by him. It is, however, safe to say that such particularity and minuteness of detail would be entirely in keeping with the tenor of his course at this period. His correspondence bears the stamp of a mind comprehensive as well as exact; grasping all matters with breadth of view in their mutual relations, ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... however, that, besides these vague terrors, all predisposing the mind to alarm and exciting the imagination, there was a general belief that another more definite cause for fear existed in the old monastery. With cruel minuteness of detail her guardian had told her the legend which haunted ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... example of Ibsen's minute care is found in the copiousness of his stage directions. Later playwrights have imitated him in this, and we have grown used to it; but thirty years ago such minuteness seemed extravagant and needless. As a fact, it was essential to the absolutely complete image which Ibsen desired to produce. The stage directions in his plays cannot be "skipped" by any reader who desires to follow the dramatist's thought step by step without losing ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... some unfavourable remarks which Reginald Heber makes in his diary on this class of Scott's figures, though the good bishop seems to me to have been rather too severe. But the pictures of Woodstock Palace and Park have that indescribable and vivid charm which Scott, without using any of the 'realist' minuteness or 'impressionist' contortions of later days, has the faculty of communicating to such things. For myself, I can say—and I am sure I may speak for hundreds—that Tullyveolan, Ellangowan, the Bewcastle moor where Bertram rescued Dandie, Clerihugh's, Monkbarns (I do not see Knockwinnock ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... the Blood, fled the Court in alarm, and took refuge in Savoy; while edict after edict was fulminated against the nobles, which threatened all their old and long-cherished privileges. The costume of each separate class was determined with a minuteness of detail which exasperated the magnificent courtiers, who had been accustomed to attire themselves in embroidery and cloth of gold, in rich laces, and plumed and jewelled hats, and who suddenly found themselves ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... starting-point is an analysis of wealth-production as it exists to-day. He begins by insisting on the fact that labour in the modern world is divided with such a general and such an increasing minuteness that each labour produces one kind of product only, of which he himself can consume but a small fraction, and often consumes nothing. His own product, therefore, has for him the character of wealth only because he is able to exchange it for commodities ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... of witches with their familiars were discussed with a relish and a filthy minuteness worthy of Sanchez. Could children be born of these devilish amours? Of course they could, said one party; are there not plenty of cases in authentic history? Who was the father of Romulus and Remus? nay, not so very long ago, of Merlin? Another party denied the possibility of the ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... his strong arms, swelling out his lusty chest. He had never felt better. And with the minuteness of a good-natured grandfather he inquired about all the little displeasures of her life. Her husband spent the day with his friends. She grew tired of staying at home and her only amusement was making calls or going shopping. And ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... put above all the interests of the Church. They were, too, fierce partisans on the controversies about Church music, and had a zeal for the beauty and order of their respective churches that was admirable in its minuteness and its perseverance. They both had a large circle of friends with whom they rejoiced at annual festivities at their Colleges, and with whom they habitually and freely censured their immediate authorities. Those who were warmest in their devotion to the ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... cared only for his skill. In the bust of Mrs. Hudson there was something almost touching; it was an exquisite example of a ruling sense of beauty. The poor lady's small, neat, timorous face had certainly no great character, but Roderick had reproduced its sweetness, its mildness, its minuteness, its still maternal passion, with the most unerring art. It was perfectly unflattered, and yet admirably tender; it was the poetry of fidelity. Gloriani stood looking at it a long time most intently. Roderick wandered away ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... times go, who set afloat the phrase that since the death of Thackeray and Dickens fiction has become a finer art. If Mr. Howells had meant what many people supposed him to mean, the saying would have been merely impudent He used the word 'finer' in its literal sense, and meant only that a fashion of minuteness in investigation and in style had come upon us. There is a sense in which the dissector who makes a reticulation of the muscular and nervous systems of a little finger is a 'finer' surgeon than the giant of the hospitals whose diagnosis is an inspiration, and whose knife carves unerringly to the ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... determination, and the next day, when he sat in judgment, he marked off a whole company of the plaintiffs as well as of the accused, as were mentioned by name, and had them brought before him. Yue-ts'un examined them with additional minuteness, and discovered in point of fact, that the inmates of the Feng family were extremely few, that they merely relied upon this charge with the idea of obtaining some compensation for joss-sticks and burials; and that the Hsueeh family, presuming on their prestige and confident of patronage, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... invisible but omnipotent spirit of religious and political liberty in the Netherlands, of trampling out the national existence of France and of England, and of annexing those realms to his empire: It has been my task to relate, with much minuteness, how miserably his ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... eyebrow. There was a large lock of hair torn out by the roots at the front of the head, and the palm and fingers of the right hand were cut. This evidence having been taken, the jury once more repaired to the chamber where the body lay, and proceeded with much minuteness to examine the room, with a view to ascertain, if possible, more particularly the ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... that, though elementary, were of a higher cast than Lenny could have found within his reach at Hazeldean. Riccabocca knew the English language well, better in grammar, construction, and genius than many a not ill-educated Englishman; for he had studied it with the minuteness with which a scholar studies a dead language, and amidst his collection he had many of the books which had formerly served him for that purpose. These were the first works he had lent to Lenny. Meanwhile Jackeymo ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... of these books.... The events are described with minuteness and care. The result is a very ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... the shams of society to the realities of war, and sets before us with a graphic power and minuteness the inner life of that great struggle in which Count Tolstoi took part.... A thrilling tale of besieged Sebastopol. All is intensely real, intensely life-like, and doubly striking from its very simplicity. We have before our eyes war as it ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... of the siege of Byzantium by Mahommed with dangerous minuteness, the danger of course being from the critic. We have posted the warders on their walls, and over against them set the enemy in an intrenched line covering the whole landward side of the city. We have planted Mahommed's guns, and exhibited their power, making it a certainty that a breach ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... sat in my darkened chamber, recalling with a sad persistence her gestures, her motions, the tones of her voice, through all the past back to my first remembrance. The places she inhabited, her opinions and her actions I commented on with a minuteness that allowed no detail to escape. When my thoughts turned from her, it seemed as if she were newly lost in the vast and wandering Universe of the Dead, ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... Midhurst over the border into Hampshire, the village of Selborne is reached, one of the smallest but best known places in England from the care and minuteness with which Rev. Gilbert White has described it in his Natural History of Selborne. It is a short distance south-east of Alton and about fifty miles south-west of London, while beyond the village the chalk-hills rise to a height of three hundred feet, having a long hanging wood ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... Giorgione is the abstract thought, the dreaminess of look, the almost furtive glance. The minuteness of finish reminds us of Antonello, and the turn of the head suggests several of the latter's portraits. The delicacy with which the features are modelled, the high forehead, and the lighting of the face are points to be noted, as we shall find ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... in the freest manner, and sometimes of their refusing supply when disgusted with any circumstance of public conduct. It is, however, certain, that this power, though essential to parliaments, may easily be abused, as well by the frequency and minuteness of their remonstrances, as by their intrusion into every part of the king's counsels and determinations. Under color of advice, they may give disguised orders; and in complaining of grievances, they may draw to themselves every power of government. Whatever measure is ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... stars of the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth magnitudes, nearly three hundred nebulae, and globular and other clusters, of all degrees of resolvability, and smaller scattered stars innumerable of every inferior magnitude, from the tenth to such as by their multitude and minuteness constitute irresolvable nebulosity, extending over tracts of many square degrees. Were there but one such object, it might be maintained without utter improbability that its apparent sphericity is only an effect of foreshortening, and that in reality a much greater proportional ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... [19] A nonsensical minuteness was followed here, and many trivialities were emphasized. Juvenal tells us, in his Seventh Satire, written about 130 A.D., that "a teacher was expected to read all histories and know all authors as well as his finger ends. ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... the Astronaut rushing out with a force which actually created a draught through the whole vessel, to the great discomfiture of the birds, which roughed their feathers and fluttered about in dismay. The pressure gauge fell with astonishing rapidity, despite the minuteness of the aperture; and in a few minutes indicated about 24 barometrical inches. I then checked the exit of the air for a time, while I proceeded to loosen the cement around the window by which I had entered, and prepared for my exit. Over a very ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... describes Lartigue; Dufresne; Richard; Phelan; Bonin; Comte; Bourget; McMahon; Kelly; Demers; Roux; Roque; Sauvage; Tabeau; Marcoux; Morin; Durocher; and all the Roman Priests around Montreal, with the utmost minuteness of accuracy; while the Chaplain of the Ursuline Nunnery at Quebec, Father Daule, is as exactly depicted by her, as if her whole life had been passed under his surveillance. Some of the appellatives ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... thought of selling another cripple! Oh! that would not do. Mr. Keepum had a lien on them; Mr. Keepum was a man of iron-heart. Suddenly it flashed upon her mind that she had already been guilty of a legal wrong in selling old Molly. Mr. Soloman had doubtless described her with legal minuteness in the bond of security for the two hundred dollars. Her decrepid form; her corrugated face; her heavy lip; her crutch, and her piety-everything, in a word, but her starvation, had been set down. Well! Mr. Soloman might, she thought, overlook in the multiplicity of business so small a discrepancy. ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... in Rhode Island, August 23, 1785. The late Commodore Mackenzie, of the navy, who possessed what we may term a fine biographical faculty, has traced in his interesting narrative of the Life of Perry, with fond minuteness, the early incidents of the boy's career. The chief characteristics, he tells us, "were an uncommon share of beauty, a sweetness and gentleness of disposition which corroborated the expression of his countenance, and a perfect disregard of danger, amounting to apparent unconsciousness." ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... London Poor, by HENRY MAYHEW, is issued by Harper and Brothers, and will be found to increase the interest with which that remarkable series has been received by the public. His pictures of the condition of the laboring classes in London have a minuteness and vividness of detail which would not ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... the same thing that on the large Atlantic liners the bowsprit has been removed, or at any rate a notice put up: "Authors are requested not to lie prostrate on the bowsprit." But even without this advantage, three or four generations of writers have chronicled with great minuteness their sensations during the transit. I need only say that my sensations were just as good as theirs. I will content myself with chronicling the fact that during the voyage we passed two dolphins, one ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... and I shall never be able to give it up till a better one supplies its place, and that I think hardly possible. You have now fairly beaten Spencer on his own ground, for he really offered no solution of the difficulties of the problem. The incomprehensible minuteness and vast numbers of the physiological germs or atoms (Which themselves must be compounded of numbers of Spencer's physiological units) is the only difficulty, but that is only on a par with the difficulties in all conceptions of matter, space, ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... was much in request among the great modistes of London, to whom it found its way through the agency of Miss Semper. So that all this had enabled her, for years, to provide every necessary comfort of life for herself and her blind protector. And her care for the old man was beautiful in its minuteness, its vigilance. Wherever her heart was interested, there never seemed a deficiency of mind. Vaudemont was touched to see how much of affectionate and pitying respect she appeared to enjoy in the neighbourhood, ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... now are. Their composition is not that of a great historical picture, but rather that of a frieze, or of some rich festoon entwined among groups of picturesque figures. And precisely as in the figures or tendrils of a frieze we do not look for minuteness of execution in the individual forms, or for distant perspectives and different planes, so we must as little expect anything of the kind ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... Glyndon continued immersed in employments which strained to the utmost all the faculties of his intellect. Even the most partial success depended so entirely on the abstraction of the mind, and the minuteness of its calculations, that there was scarcely room for any other thought than those absorbed in the occupation. And doubtless this perpetual strain of the faculties was the object of Mejnour in works that did not seem ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the people. Man faced his God and his fate without any intervention of Pope or priest. Even the very earth beneath his feet began to move. Instead of a universe with dimensions known and circumscribed with Dantesque minuteness, the mystic glow of the unknown had settled down on the whole face of Nature, who offered her secrets to the first comer. No wonder the Elizabethans were filled with an exulting sense of man's capabilities, when they ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... close to him, until he could see their features with perfect distinctness. By the changing expression of their faces he could tell they were laughing and chatting; but, singularly enough, he could not hear a word that they were saying, which, considering the minuteness with which he saw everything, struck him as being ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... illustration of the sagacity which Bradley manifested, even at the very commencement of his astronomical career, is contained in a remark of Halley's, who says: "Dr. Pound and his nephew, Mr. Bradley, did, myself being present, in the last opposition of the sun and Mars this way demonstrate the extreme minuteness of the sun's parallax, and that it was not more than twelve seconds nor less than nine seconds." To make the significance of this plain, it should be observed that the determination of the sun's parallax is equivalent to the determination of the distance from the earth to the sun. At ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... of the latter artist's pictures,—those of the former being quite changed from what he intended them to be by the effect of time on his pigments. Mr. Brown showed us some drawings from nature, done with incredible care and minuteness of detail, as studies for his paintings. We complimented him on his patience; but he said, "O, it's not patience,—it's love!" In fact, it was a patient and most successful wooing of a beloved object, which at last rewarded him by yielding ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... fungi, probably scarcely less numerous than all the flowering plants, and the immense number of spores which some of the individuals produce, they must be exceedingly plentiful and widely diffused, though from their minuteness not easy to be discerned. It has been attempted to estimate the number of spores which might be produced by one single plant of Lycoperdon, but the number so far exceeds that which the mind is accustomed ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... as the outlines of a plate are etched; and the intent of an aquatint engraving is, as the reader may or may not know, to produce the effect of a drawing in Indian ink.[C] Still there is much in these pictures to delight the Cruikshankian connoisseur,—infinite variety in physiognomy, wonderful minuteness and accuracy in detail, and here and there sparkles of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... was a female form, much resembling the first in shape and proportions, which slowly emerged from the floor. Her dress was also of red samite, fantastically cut and flounced, as if she had been dressed for some exhibition of mimes or jugglers; and with the same minuteness which her predecessor had exhibited, she passed the lamp over her face and person, which seemed to rival the male's in ugliness. But with all this most unfavourable exterior, there was one trait in the ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... their breath, looked down, as the three men of the hour, pale and haggard with imprisonment and torture, were brought up amid the hoots and obscene jests of the populace. Savonarola first was led before the tribunal, and there, with circumstantial minuteness, endued with all his priestly vestments, which again, with separate ceremonies of reprobation and ignominy, were taken from him. He stood through it all serene as stood his Master when stripped of His garments on Calvary. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... can generalize with tolerable accuracy, if the reader will pardon an uncouth and new-coined word. There is, I should say, not seldom a matter-of-factness in certain poems. This may be divided into, first, a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the representation of objects, and their positions, as they appeared to the poet himself; secondly, the insertion of accidental circumstances, in order to the full explanation of his living characters, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... work of classification Peter the Great especially distinguished himself. With his insatiable passion for regulation, he raised formidable barriers between the different categories, and defined the obligations of each with microscopic minuteness. After his death the work was carried on in the same spirit, and the tendency reached its climax in the reign of Nicholas, when the number of students to be received in the universities ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... conversation with a watchmaker, whom he astonished by the extent and minuteness of his knowledge as to the parts of a watch. The watchmaker knew him to be an eminent engineer, and asked him how he had acquired so extensive a knowledge of a branch of business so much out of his sphere. "It is very easy to be explained," said Mr. Stephenson; "I worked long at ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... occasion to upbraid myself, that soon after our return to the main land, I allowed indolence to prevail over me so much, as to shrink from the labour of continuing my journal with the same minuteness as before; sheltering myself in the thought, that we had done with the Hebrides; and not considering, that Dr. Johnson's Memorabilia were likely to be more valuable when we were restored to a more polished society. Much has thus been ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... absolute despair had been the firm consciousness of his own rectitude. In that lay his only comfort, his only hope, his one, strong-built fabric of defence. If that was undermined, if that was eaten away, what was there left for him? Carefully, painfully, and with such minuteness as he could command, he went over the whole affair from beginning to end, forcing his unwilling mind—so unaccustomed to such work—to weigh each chance, to gauge each opportunity. If this were so, if that had been done, ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... theme with all Australian writers, and one of which the female novelists have so far made the most effective use. One could wish that Boldrewood had made himself as far as possible an exception to the rule—that he had aimed at a praiseworthy provinciality by matching with the elaborate minuteness of his local colour some finished and ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... entire uprooting of the new religion, ended with the edict of toleration of 311 and the tragical ruin of the persecutors. Galerius died soon after of a disgusting and terrible disease (morbus pedicularis), described with great minuteness by Eusebius and Lactantius. 'His body,' says Gibbon, 'swelled by an intemperate course of life to an unwieldy corpulence, was covered with ulcers and devoured by innumerable swarms of those insects which have given their name to a most loathsome disease.' Diocletian had withdrawn from the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... as being that in which King Rene was born. It is recorded that Wellington received a part of his military education in Angers. If so, it is probable that he studied this military defence with some care and minuteness. To us, at least, who have not been educated with respect to military fortification, it seems to fill all demands that are likely to be made upon a building of its class. Doubtless it could have been besieged successfully, and even battered ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... of Bilin is stated by M. Ehrenberg to form a 'series' of strata fourteen feet in thickness, entirely made up of the siliceous shells of 'Gaillonellae', of such extreme minuteness that a cubic inch of the stone contains forty-one thousand millions! The 'Bergmehl' ('mountain meal' or 'fossil farina') of San Fiora, in Tuscany, is one mass of animalculites. See the interesting work of G. A. Mantell, 'On the ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... to prove that Romanism and the Pope were Anti-Christ, but this cannot be, you will see at a glance. The beast has its own character; that was long ago written out by the prophets, and up to the present time it has filled in the outlines with a marvellous minuteness. In these things many good and wise men have erred in making prophecies fit certain persons, and nations, and times, instead of waiting for these things to fit on to prophecy. Let us not be prophetic forgers. Let no one deceive you in these matters. Adventism, Millerism, Shakerism, Spiritualism, ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... round the front and rear of the various bodies, and inspected them with a minuteness and attention which showed that his years had not dulled his soldier's faculties, the Mayor faced round with the evident intention of addressing us. His clerk instantly darted in front of him, and waving his arms began to shout 'Silence, good people! Silence for his ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... belonged to Columba, is unquestionably the most elaborately executed MS. of early art now in existence, far excelling, in the gigantic size of the letters in the frontispieces of the Gospel, the excessive minuteness of the ornamental details, the number of its decorations, the fineness of the writing, and the endless variety of initial capital letters with which every page is ornamented, the famous Gospels of Lindisfarne in the Cottonian ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... on an expedition which was to last for one or two months. The annals of the time describe this expedition with great particularity, presenting a scene of pomp almost surpassing credence. Some allowance must doubtless be made for exaggeration; and yet there is a minuteness of detail which, accompanied by corroborative evidence of the populousness and the power of these Tartar tribes, invests the narrative with a good degree of authenticity. We are informed that several hundreds of thousands of men were in movement; that each soldier was clothed ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... into the yard, and, looking out, saw that Mr Hill's servant had arrived, bringing up the horse perfectly restored. Mr Hill did not fail to return thanks, and begged his fellow-traveller to consider whether the minuteness of his prayers had deserved the censure which ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... Society who compiled a Moral Theology from twenty-four of our fathers.” This book, which Pascal says he “read twice through,” was the great repository from which he gathered the details of Jesuit doctrine which he exposes with such minuteness. Escobar, like so many of the chief Jesuit writers, was a Spaniard, born at Valladolid in 1589. His name became a sort of proverb in connection with their casuistical system, and “escobarder” came to signify “to palter in ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... obedience, style of dress, the reading of the mass, baptism, simony (the selling of benefices or obtaining them by fraud), but especially the care of the revenues of the chapter. All his duties were detailed therein with the greatest precision and minuteness. An article was afterwards added, which made it the duty of the people's priest not to leave the city during seasons ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... books and talking with the people, I became convinced that the aboriginal tracker's performances evince a craft, a penetration, a luminous sagacity, and a minuteness and accuracy of observation in the matter of detective-work not found in nearly so remarkable a degree in any other people, white or colored. In an official account of the blacks of Australia published by the government of Victoria, one reads that the aboriginal not only notices the faint marks left ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... accustomed to beg his bread from door to door. His garb was all, however, which he possessed of sanctity, and he had passed his time in contemplating the weak points in the defences of the city with much more minuteness than those in his own heart. Upon the breaking out of hostilities in Italy, the instincts of his old profession had suggested to him that a good speculation might be made in Flanders, by turning to account as a spy the observations ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... found admirers in England and Scotland when his popularity in Germany has departed, and he, like the philosophers whom he criticizes, is of the past. No other thinker has ever dissected the human mind with equal patience and minuteness. He has lightened the burden of thought because he has shown us that the chains which we wear are of our own forging. To be able to place ourselves not only above the opinions of men but above their modes of thinking, is a great ...
— Sophist • Plato
... he turned others' leaves it was quite literally looking in his heart that he wrote. He analyses the sequence of his feelings with a vividness and minuteness which assure us of their truth. All that he tells is the fruit of ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... attempt Henry Grantly then made, thinking that he could not do better than follow closely the example of so excellent a father, need not be explained with minuteness. But I think that his first effort was not successful. Grace was embarrassed and retreated, and it was not till she had been compelled to give a direct answer to a direct question that she submitted to allow his arm round her waist. But when she had answered that question she was ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... long, become impossible for the newspapers to furnish the reports of the proceedings in and about commencement which they now lay before their readers with such profuseness. The long letters describing with wearisome minuteness what has been described already fifty times will undoubtedly before long be given up. So also, we fancy, will the reports of the "baccalaureate sermons," if these addresses are to retain their value as pieces ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... insects. The care with which the many thousand varieties have been classified by zoologists, and the minuteness with which the habits of each variety have been traced, have raised these insects to a conspicuous position in the great Animal Kingdom. Their beauty, as they lie here in vast numbers before the spectator, is dazzling. Every colour ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... larger number of deaconess institutions that have since arisen, so that to understand the spirit and usages prevailing in them it is well to give these rules some study. They are contained in a book numbering one hundred and seven pages,[36] treating with great minuteness every question that affects the daily lives of the deaconesses. The qualities that the office demands are first dwelt upon as they are described in Acts vi, 3, and 1 Tim. iii, 8, 9. The sisters are reminded that their life is ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... no longer boast of the carefulness of the modern physician; the ceremonies and directions of the Anglo-Saxon doctor were just as painstaking in minuteness and accuracy. When you feel the evil spirits entering you, immediately seek shelter under a linden tree; for out of linden wood were not battle-shields made? Long before Christianity had brought its gentler touches ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... Balzac has of private life a very deep and fine sentiment which goes even to minuteness of detail and of superstition. He knows how to move you and make you palpitate from the first, simply in depicting a garden-walk, a dining-room, a piece of furniture. He divines the mysteries of provincial life; sometimes he makes them. Most often he ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... perfect finish and pure design rather than force of shade or breadth of parts; and further, the intensity of Italian sunshine articulated by perfect gradations, and defined by sharp shadows at the edge, such inner anatomy and minuteness of outline as would have been utterly vain and valueless under the gloom of a northern sky; while again the fineness of material both admitted of, and allured to, the precision of execution which the climate ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Channel Islands, part of Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Monmouthshire, and the six southern Welsh counties. In this way I had an opportunity of seeing a considerable portion of Great Britain, with a minuteness which few have enjoyed. And I did my business after a fashion in which no other official man has worked at least for many years. I went almost everywhere on horseback. I had two hunters of my own, and here and ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... self-styled minstrel might not in reality be a man of that worth which he assumed. There was certainly something in his conversation, at least more grave, if not more austere, than was common to those of his calling; and when he recollected many points of Sir John de Walton's minuteness, a doubt arose in his mind, that the governor might not approve of his having introduced into the castle a person of Bertram's character, who was capable of making observations from which the garrison might afterwards feel much danger and inconvenience. Secretly, therefore, he regretted ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... folds. So in Mynshul's Essays, 4to, 1618. "I vndertooke a warre when I aduentured to speake in print, (not in print as Puritan's ruffes are set.)" The term of Geneva print probably arose from the minuteness of the type used at Geneva. In the Merry Devil of Edmonton, a comedy, 4to, 1608, is an expression which goes some way to prove the correctness of this supposition:—"I see by thy eyes thou hast bin reading little Geneva print;"—and, that small ruffs were worn by the puritanical ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... Charles Pinckney, of slaveholding South Carolina, laid before the Convention what was called "A Draft of a Federal Government, to be agreed upon between the Free and Independent States of America," an elaborate paper, marked by considerable minuteness of detail. Here are provisions, borrowed from the Articles of Confederation, securing to the citizens of each State equal privileges, in the several States, giving faith to the public records of the States, and ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... the Periplus did not enter the Gulf of Persia, he certainly stretched over, with the monsoon, either to Karmania, or directly to Scindi, or to the Gulf of Cambay; for at these places the minuteness of information which ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... the mystery of minuteness are here brought face to face. What wonders of creation exist between these two extremes! The thoughtful mind is awed by the contemplation of this scene, and when the reflection comes that these vast spaces are but grains ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... believe, has never been translated into English. I have never seen it, if it has been. That work I suppose to be at present the starting point in the history of the Iroquois and New France, as regards minuteness of detail. ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... easily dazzled with the sight of ready money; but they were gentlefolk besides, and that in a way which curiously unfitted them to combat Yankee craft. Suppose they have a paper to sign, they would think it a reflection on the other party to examine the terms with any great minuteness; nay, suppose them to observe some doubtful clause, it is ten to one they would refuse from delicacy to object to it. I know I am speaking within the mark, for I have seen such a case occur, and the Mexican, in spite of the advice ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the word seems to have found its way to the maritime parts of the continent of India), bras when deprived of the husk, and nasi after it has been boiled; besides which it assumes other names in its various states of growth and preparation. This minuteness of distinction applies also to some other articles of common use, and may be accounted for upon this principle: that amongst people whose general objects of attention are limited, those which do of necessity occupy them are liable ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... arrow; also two hundred yeomen, armed cap-a-pie, who fought with pike and battle-axe—men robust of frame and of prodigious strength. The worthy padre Fray Antonio Agapida describes this stranger knight and his followers with his accustomed accuracy and minuteness. ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... large and expensive works, with a host of annotations from the journals of recent travellers and other volumes which bear upon the main subject. This part of the series, describing vegetable substances used for the food of man, is executed with considerable minuteness. A Pythagorean would gloat over its accuracy, and a vegetable diet man would become inflated with its success in establishing his eccentricities. The contents are the Corn-plants, Esculent Roots, Herbs, Spices, Tea, Coffee, &c. &c. In such a multiplicity of facts ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 546, May 12, 1832 • Various
... Schiller himself, on meeting with his early comrade (the late Dr. Elwert of Kantstadt) for the first time since their boyhood, reminded him of the adventure, recounting the circumstances with great minuteness and glee. It is as follows: Once in 1768, Elwert and he had to repeat their catechism together on a certain day publicly in the church. Their teacher, an ill-conditioned, narrow-minded pietist, had previously threatened ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... to examine the canvas, and make sure there were no rents or holes by which the water might escape. This was done with all the minuteness and care that the circumstances called for; and when the sailor at length became satisfied that the tarpauling was waterproof, he took the hand of his youthful protege in his own, and both kneeling upon ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... sentiments. But the essence of Christianity, as of everything else, is the whole of it; and the genuine nature of a seed is at least as well expressed by what it becomes in contact with the earth and air as by what it seems in its primitive minuteness. It is quite true, as the modernists tell us, that in the beginning Christian faith was not a matter of scholastic definitions, nor even of intellectual dogmas. Religions seldom begin in that form, and paganism was even less intellectual and ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... of 1831 - and not the least interesting circumstance connected with it is, that Johnson himself read, from time to time, Boswell's record of his sayings and doings; and, so far from being displeased with its minuteness, expressed great admiration of its accuracy, and encouraged the chronicler to proceed with his grand ulterior proceeding. See Life, vol. i. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Willie here diverged into a graphic account of the fire in Beverly Square, and, seeing that Ziza listened with intense earnestness, he dilated upon every point, and went with special minuteness into the doings ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... the balcony, and, drawing in their breath, looked down, as the three men of the hour, pale and haggard with imprisonment and torture, were brought up amid the hoots and obscene jests of the populace. Savonarola first was led before the tribunal, and there, with circumstantial minuteness, endued with all his priestly vestments, which again, with separate ceremonies of reprobation and ignominy, were taken from him. He stood through it all serene as stood his Master when stripped of His garments on Calvary. There is a momentary hush of voices and drawing in of breaths ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... calmed her, swinging his strong arms, swelling out his lusty chest. He had never felt better. And with the minuteness of a good-natured grandfather he inquired about all the little displeasures of her life. Her husband spent the day with his friends. She grew tired of staying at home and her only amusement was ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... reign of Domitian, and there studied rhetoric and grammar. Under Hadrian he fell into disgrace and went into exile: the period of his death is unknown. Suetonius wrote the lives of the twelve Caesars, ending with Domitian. His language is good, and he paints with uncommon minuteness the vices as well as the virtues of his subjects; he abounds, too, in particulars which throw light upon the manners of the Romans. Suetonius also wrote several short treatises, while various biographies ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... could think of with the least discomfort, yet for some unaccountable reason it was the one on which he found it most difficult to fix his thoughts. Whenever he did so, the room jerked him back into the circle of its insistent associations. It was extraordinary with what a microscopic minuteness of loathing he hated it all: the grimy carpet and wallpaper, the black marble mantel-piece, the clock with a gilt allegory under a dusty bell, the high-bolstered brown-counterpaned bed, the framed card of printed rules under the electric light switch, and the door ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... in striking contrasts of light and shade. But the style here adopted by the unconscious artist is rather that in which Richardson the novelist painted his pathetic picture of Clarissa Harlowe. With slow, laborious touches, with delicate gradations of colour, sometimes with almost tedious minuteness and iteration, the gradual growth of a strangely composite character is presented, surrounded by the influences which controlled or moulded its development, and traced through all the varieties of ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... noted in the passage we are considering, is the careful provision made by Camillus for the safety of Rome both within and without the city. And, truly, not without reason do wise historians, like our author, set forth certain events with much minuteness and detail, to the end that those who come after may learn how to protect themselves in like dangers. Further, we have to note that there is no more hazardous or less useful defence than one conducted without method or system. This is shown in Camillus causing ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... but do you observe anything particular in me"? For, really, he appeared to be taking down, either my travelling-cap or my hair, with a minuteness that was a liberty. ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... little foreseen, have unfolded themselves, in all their grandeur, to the eyes of the present age. It is a common amusement of speculative minds to contrast the magnitude of the most important events with the minuteness of their primeval causes, and the records of mankind are full of examples for such contemplations. It is, however, a more profitable employment to trace the constituent principles of future greatness in their kernel; to detect in the acorn at our ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... city planning have been worked out theoretically with much minuteness of detail, and are known to every student of the science of cities, but very little of it all has been realized in a practical way—certainly not on this side of the water, where individual rights are held so sacred that a property owner may commit any ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... regarded as mere words. The aim of his logic is represented as having been the devising of rules for the discovery of syllogistic middle terms; this system for aiding slow-witted persons became known as the pons asinorum. The parts of logic which he treated with most minuteness are modal propositions and modal syllogisms. In commenting on Aristotle's Ethics he dealt in a very independent manner with the question of free will, his conclusions being remarkably similar to those of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... accomplished traveller; well-informed, exact to minuteness, patient, courageous, and endowed with an upright and energetic character. His writings are of great value; the narrative of his voyage in Arabia—of which he unfortunately could not explore the interior—is so complete and precise, that owing to it that country was then better ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... have them, so they be not exorbitant," said the Constable. And the honest Fleming, among whose good qualities scrupulous delicacy was not the foremost, hastened to detail, with great minuteness, the particulars of his request or petition, long pursued in vain, but to which this interview was the means of ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... not only deals in incessant matters of fact, but in matters of fact of the most familiar, the least animating, and the most unpleasant kind; but he relies for the effect of novelty on the microscopic minuteness with which he dissects the most trivial objects—and for the interest he excites, on the unshrinking determination with which he handles the most painful. His poetry has an official and professional air. He is called in to cases of difficult births, of fractured limbs, or breaches ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... deal of beautiful embroidery is to be met with, in silk and gold thread upon quite common stuffs; Persian and Moorish embroidery for instance, both remarkable for their delicacy and minuteness, and executed upon ordinary linen, or ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont
... to the earth afford us opportunities for making a careful telescopic scrutiny of his surface. It must not be expected that the details on Mars could be inspected with the same minuteness as those on the moon. Even under the most favourable circumstances, Mars is still more than a hundred times as far as the moon, and, therefore, the features of the planet have to be at least one hundred ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... proportions, which slowly emerged from the floor. Her dress was also of red samite, fantastically cut and flounced, as if she had been dressed for some exhibition of mimes or jugglers; and with the same minuteness which her predecessor had exhibited, she passed the lamp over her face and person, which seemed to rival the male's in ugliness. But with all this most unfavourable exterior, there was one trait ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... scientific books of travel. Here is a traveler of a new kind: a natural-history voyager, a man bent on seeing and taking note of everything going on in nature about him, in the non-human, as well as in the human world. The minuteness of his observation and the significance of its subject-matter are a lesson to all observers. Darwin's interests are so varied and genuine. One sees in this volume the seed-bed of much of his subsequent work. He was quite a young man (twenty-four) when ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... in his Memoirs, entitled "Literary Industries" (New York, 1891, 16mo), analyses with sufficient minuteness some practical consequences of the imperfection of the methods of research. He considers the case of an industrious writer proposing to write the history of California. He easily procures a few books, reads ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... her again; and as consciousness affirmed itself he felt an intense fear of losing the sense of her nearness. But she was still close to him; her presence remained the sole reality in a world of shadows. All through his working hours he was re-living with incredible minuteness every incident of their obliterated past; as a man who has mastered the spirit of a foreign tongue turns with renewed wonder to the pages his youth has plodded over. In this lucidity of retrospection the most trivial detail had its ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... rise, is probably that employment of physical knowledge, already won, as a means of further acquisition, which most impresses the imagination. For it has suddenly and immensely enlarged our power of overcoming the obstacles which almost infinite minuteness on the one hand, and almost infinite distance on the other, have hitherto opposed to the recognition of the presence and the condition of matter. One eighteen-millionth of a grain of sodium in the flame of ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... light does our Professor, as Poets are wont, look back on his childhood; the historical details of which (to say nothing of much other vague oratorical matter) he accordingly dwells on with an almost wearisome minuteness. We hear of Entepfuhl standing "in trustful derangement" among the woody slopes; the paternal Orchard flanking it as extreme outpost from below; the little Kuhbach gushing kindly by, among beech-rows, through river after river, into the Donau, into the Black Sea, into the Atmosphere and Universe; ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... the lawyer, who was so chary of his praise, had said that old Master Pucklechurch and his wife were absolutely trustworthy. They had managed the farm in the interregnum, and brought him weekly accounts in their heads, for neither could write, with the most perfect regularity and minuteness. And his face did indeed bespeak confidence in his honesty, as he touched his hat ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rifling of a church, the sacking of a convent! You would have thought you heard some gormandizer dilating upon the roasting of a savory goose at Michaelmas,[4] as he described the roasting of some Spanish don to make him discover his treasure,—a detail given with a minuteness that made every rich old burgher present turn uncomfortably in his chair. All this would be told with infinite glee, as if he considered it an excellent joke, and then he would give such a tyrannical leer in the face of his next neighbor that the poor man would be ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... increasing fame, but he felt that his own aims and destiny were different. Rossetti, a few years later, took Pauline to be the work of an unconscious pre-Raphaelite; and there is enough of subtle simplicity, of curious minuteness, in the details to justify the error. In the meantime many outward circumstances conspired to promote the "advance" which every line of it foretold. His old mentor of the Incondita days, W.J. Fox, in some sort a Browningite before Browning, reviewed Pauline in The Monthly Repository ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... from this," Henley said to himself. Yes, that was obvious. Trenchard had described the prison-house of despair, where the two victims of a strange, desolating habit shut themselves up to sink, with a curious minuteness. He had even devoted a paragraph to the tall iron gate, whose round handle he had written of as "bald, and exposed to the wind from the river, the paint having long since been worn off it." In the twilight Henley bent down and examined the handle of the gate. The paint ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... nature to make one character give a description, over a hundred pages long, repeating at length, word for word, long conversations which he has never heard, marking the changes of colour which he has not seen—and all this with a minuteness which even the firmest memory and the most loquacious tongue could not recall? Does not this give an unreality to the style incompatible with art, which ought to be the mainspring of all imaginative work? This, however, is not Mrs. Shelley's error alone, ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... first place, we must beg leave to protest, in the name of a very numerous class of readers, against the insufferable number, and length and minuteness of those descriptions of antient dresses and manners, and buildings; and ceremonies, and local superstitions; with which the whole poem is overrun,—which render so many notes necessary, and are, after all, but imperfectly understood ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... there was a portrait of that worthy, about a third of the size of life, carved in relief, with his cloak, band, and wig, in excellent preservation, all the buttons of his waistcoat being cut with great minuteness,—the minister's nose being on a level with his cheeks. It was an upright gravestone. Returning home, I held a colloquy with a young girl about the right road. She had come out to feed a pig, and was a little suspicious that we were making fun of her, yet answered ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... might be, he would not allow himself to be talked out of his opinion on this occasion; and proceeded with much minuteness to explain to his wife the tone in which Mr Slope had spoken of Mrs Proudie's interference in diocesan matters. As he did so, a new idea gradually instilled itself into the matron's head, and a new course of action presented itself to her judgement. ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... obvious that an accurate description of nature, or a beautiful work of art, is not poetical. On the other hand, in proportion as the minuteness of the description is increased, the poetry vanishes. The traveller who should give us the exact dimensions of the pyramids, the precise height of the terraces, the width and height of the inner passages, would give us much more definite ideas of those structures than he who should paint to ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... a hodman mixes his mortar, and managing to make the clearest and brightest of them quite muddy. His triumph consisted, however, in combining exactness with awkwardness; he displayed all the naive minuteness of the primitive painters; in fact, his mind, barely raised from the clods, delighted in petty details. The stove, with its perspective all awry, was tame and precise, and in colour as ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... story is told with such naturalness and minuteness of detail that it seems to be a narrative of actual occurrences rather than a creation of the ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... it is really a matter of surprise to discover such a close similarity. Father and mother, the only two words which are not identical, are doubtless different expressions, relationship in this, as in most native tongues, being indicated with excessive minuteness. ...
— The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological Relations • Daniel G. Brinton
... see the little fleet with sails spread, winging its way to the unknown country, its safe arrival at its destination, the meeting with the natives, the animated palavering, the consent to exchange freely accorded; and thanks to the minuteness with which the smallest details have been portrayed, we can as it were witness, as if on the spot, all the phases of life on board ship, not only on Egyptian vessels, but, as we may infer, those of other Oriental nations generally. For we may ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... believed that the passage of the sap in plants is conducted in a manner precisely similar to that of the blood in man, from the regular contraction and expansion of the vessels; but, on account of their extreme minuteness, it is almost an impossibility to be certain upon this point. Numerous observations made with the microscope show that their diameter seldom exceeds a 290th part of a line, or a 3,000th part of an inch. Leuwenhoeck reckoned 20,000 vessels in a morsel of oak about ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... their verse. They had the ambition to write poetry rather than the call; a slight bent towards the country, heightened by a vague dissatisfaction and weariness with the artificial luxury of Rome, led them to choose pastoral poetry. They make up for depth of observation by a shallow minuteness. In the seven eclogues of Calpurnius may be found a larger assortment of vegetables, of agricultural implements and operations, than in the Bucolics of Vergil, but there is little poetry, pastoral or otherwise. ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... which ought to ensure them from the reproach of being ladies' men. They may display traits of weakness, but these are due to no faltering on the author's part. In Christy Carew the men are in a minority as far as minuteness of portraiture goes, and the most elaborate touches are bestowed on the two young girls who act as heroines, for the one is as prominent as the other. Christy and her friend Esther O'Neil present two types of girlhood. Esther, devote and gentle, is a very tender, lovable figure, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... lay, approximately, a mile and a half from the station, quite by itself, and set well back from the road. Jimmie Dale could have found it with his eyes blindfolded—the Tocsin's directions had lacked none of their usual explicit minuteness. The road was quite deserted. Jimmie Dale met no one. Even in the houses that he passed the lights were in nearly ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... Furbour for a new scabbard of a sword for young lord Henry," and "1s. 6d. for three-fourths of an ounce of tissue of black silk bought at London of Margaret Stranson for a sword of young lord Henry." Whilst we cannot but be sometimes amused by the minuteness with which the expenditure of the smallest sum in so large an establishment as John of Gaunt's is detailed, these little incidents prepare us for the statement given of Henry's early youth by the chroniclers,—that ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... be joined in one sentence of condemnation with the editor of Filmer, was too much. How deeply Burnet was wounded appeared many years later, when, after his death, his History of his Life and Times was given to the world. In that work he is ordinarily garrulous even to minuteness about all that concerns himself, and sometimes relates with amusing ingenuousness his own mistakes and the censures which those mistakes brought upon him. But about the ignominious judgment passed by the House of Commons on his Pastoral Letter he has preserved ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... cup to the baron, with a low bow, that nobleman could not find sufficient words to express his admiration. He sighed with rapture, and examined the cup from every side with the utmost minuteness. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... mules to a wagon, particularizing every article of their furniture, straps, rings, staples, and even the tying of the knots that kept all together. HOMER, who writes always to the eye, with all his sublimity and grandeur, has the minuteness of a Flemish painter. ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... sundry places, and my left eye was nearly knocked out of its socket. The facts, leading to this barbarous outrage upon me, illustrate a phase of slavery destined to become an important element in the overthrow of the slave system, and I may, therefore state them with some minuteness. That phase is this: the conflict of slavery with the interests of the white mechanics and laborers of the south. In the country, this conflict is not so apparent; but, in cities, such as Baltimore, Richmond, New Orleans, Mobile, &c., it is seen pretty ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... into his study, where he found him with the sword in his hand, which he had taken from over the mantel-piece, and was holding it drawn, examining the hilt and blade with great minuteness; the hilt being wrought in openwork, with certain heraldic devices, doubtless belonging to the family ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... irregular imperfect guidance ceases. Perhaps, although deficient in minuteness of detail, this pot pourri of gossip, history, description, anecdote, suggestion, and opinion, may not only amuse the traveller by railway, but assist him in choosing routes leading to those scenes or those pursuits in which ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... the dying gladiator; and he would have died in his natural vocation. But it was ordered otherwise; his death was destined to private malice, and to an ignoble hand. And much obscurity still rests upon the motives of the assassins, though its circumstances are reported with unusual minuteness of detail. One thing is evident, that the public and patriotic motives assigned by the perpetrators as the remote causes of their conspiracy, cannot have been the true ones. The grave historian may sum up his character of Commodus by saying that, however richly endowed with natural gifts, he ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... had often been with young Stanley at his father's house, but he was at the time too young a child to have preserved any distinct recollection of him. Mr. Wyllys was the only one of the three individuals most interested, who remembered his person, manner, and character, with sufficient minuteness to rely on his own memory. The particular subjects upon which the sailor should be questioned, had been also agreed upon beforehand, by Harry and his friends. In reply to Mr. Reed's inquiry, Mrs. Stanley asked to see the papers which had ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... they should have suffered more from time and the elements in one part of the country than in another," it seems to us impossible to reject in so summary a fashion the testimony of early writers, given, not in mere general terms, but with a minuteness of description rivalling his own. Possibly, the explanation may be found partly in the fact that the roads in one part of the country were generally more ancient than in the other—many of them, as we know, dating from a period anterior ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... event which Father Medina mentions with as much minuteness as candor, two important points must not be overlooked by the judicious reader, which were the cause of this unfortunate deed. One was the extreme harshness of the provincial in his government, which must have been very excessive.... The imposition of new commands must have been very ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... exception. If you are without strong passions, you cannot be a painter at all. The laying of paint by an insensitive person, whatever it endeavors to represent, is not painting, but daubing or plastering; and that, observe, irrespective of the boldness or minuteness of the work. An insensitive person will daub with a camel's hair-brush and ultramarine; and a passionate one will paint with mortar and ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... have just attempted of what I have called the negative side of the American social situation, than to those reminding themselves of its fine compensations. Hawthorne's entries are to a great degree accounts of walks in the country, drives in stage-coaches, people he met in taverns. The minuteness of the things that attract his attention and that he deems worthy of being commemorated is frequently extreme, and from this fact we get the impression of a general vacancy in the field of vision. "Sunday evening, going by the jail, the setting sun kindled up the windows most cheerfully; ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... stars, from the immensity of the universe to the minuteness of the electron, in living things no less than in lifeless ones, science recognizes everywhere the inevitable sequence of cause and effect, the universality of natural processes, the reign of natural law. Man also is a part of Nature, ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... perhaps I should have said the bag aforesaid, which I thought I had described with sufficient minuteness. The bag had originally contained shot, if the words printed on it ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic
... have been remarkable at once for the grasp and minuteness of their knowledge. Great astronomers seem to know every iota of the Knowable. The Great Duke, when at the head of armies, could give all the particulars to be observed in a cavalry charge, and took care to have food ready for all his troops. Men ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... Hampshire could not earn two thousand. The chief employment of Daniel Webster, during the first year or two of his practice, was collecting debts due in New Hampshire to merchants in Boston. His first tin sign has been preserved to the present day, to attest by its minuteness and brevity the humble expectations of its proprietor. "D. Webster, Attorney," is the inscription it bears. The old Court-House still stands in which he conducted his first suit, before his own father as presiding judge. Old men in that part ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... any new rules of conduct pointed out, our author gives a minute detail of two cases, where any ancient female of ordinary capacity could have decided as well as himself, and relates with laboured minuteness the contrary opinions of some eminent physicians on a late memorable occasion in this country." Pinel an old woman! It will probably be new to most, if not all, of our readers that this illustrious man was regarded in this light by the leading Review of our country, ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... alone takes advantage of all others, and ends by absorbing them all. I have sometimes watched closely those who are especially fond of dainties; who, as soon as they awoke, were thinking of what they should eat during the day, and could describe a dinner with more minuteness than Polybius uses in describing a battle; and I have always found that these supposed men were nothing but children forty years old, without any force or steadiness of character. Gluttony is the vice of men ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... every thing he could, stepping as lightly as a fawn, his shoulders bending low, while he scrutinized the leaves with a minuteness which would have detected a pin lying on top of them. A faint trail leading through the wilderness is sometimes plainer a few steps distant than it is beneath one's own feet. The disturbance of the vegetation, the rumpling of the leaves resulting in the turning of ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... pilot, but—which is infinitely more significant—he changed from a callow, indolent, unobservant lad, with undeveloped faculties, to a man, a master of the river, with a knowledge which, in its accuracy and minuteness, was, for its ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... was of the Greek. It consists of a continuous stem throwing out alternately on either side branches which curl into spirals and are richly adorned with rosettes, acanthus-leaves, scrolls, tendrils, and blossoms. In the best examples the detail was modelled with great care and minuteness, and the motive itself was treated with extraordinary variety and fertility of invention. Aderived and enriched form of the anthemion was sometimes used for bands and friezes; and grotesques, dolphins, griffins, ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... turning around Saint Sulpice, he succeeded in forming another connection there, upon which he built greater expectations. This society of priests was beginning to distinguish itself, and from a seminary of a Paris parish to extend abroad. Ignorance, the minuteness of their practices, the absence of all patrons and of members at all distinguished in any way, inspired them with a blind obedience to Rome and to all its maxims; with a great aversion for everything that passed for Jansenism, ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... after a close election, disputed by Chapin. The enemy practised a good thing on him. During one of the delegate elections, when his ambition seemed to tower higher than it now does, he published a sort of memorabilia, like that of Dr. Mitchell, in which was set forth, with much minuteness of detail, all that he had ever done, and much of all he ever thought, for the good of this poor territory. Such, for instance, as that in 1802, he was appointed town-clerk of Hamtramck; that he offered, in 1811, his ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... the latter navigator, who proceeded entirely by his own attention and sagacity, in a sea unknown to himself and those who were with him, which, if not wholly unexplored, had not, however, been surveyed before with equal minuteness ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... tourist from Germany at precisely the same epoch, touches with equal minuteness on English characteristics. It may be observed, that, with some discrepancies, there is also much similarity, in the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the subject, however, it is necessary first to give in as few words as possible some intelligible account of the formal regulations and method of holding the conclave and electing the pontiff. All the regulations, which have been made with extreme minuteness, together with the subsequent modifications of them by different pontiffs, would occupy far too much space to be given here. The following rules seem to be the essential points. Ten days, including that of the pope's death, are to be allowed for the coming of absent ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... from the point A; there being no movement beyond this wave, though there will be in the space which it encloses, namely in parts of the particular waves, those parts which do not touch the sphere DCF. And all this ought not to seem fraught with too much minuteness or subtlety, since we shall see in the sequel that all the properties of Light, and everything pertaining to its reflexion and its refraction, can be explained in principle by this means. This is a matter which has been quite unknown to those who hitherto have begun to consider the waves ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... for commencing work in the morning, I took my leave, and retired to my own room, intent upon carrying out with more minuteness the survey I had already commenced: several cupboards in the wall, and one or two doors, apparently of closets, had especially attracted my attention. Strange was its look as I entered—as of a room hollowed out of the past, for a memorial of dead times. The fire had sunk low, ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... if not in detail, at least in the wider sense that all his books contain pictures more or less accurate of himself and his own experiences. No plot runs through them; they simply analyse and describe with extraordinary minuteness the feelings of a nervous and morbid boy—a male Marie Bashkirtseff. They are tales rather of the developments of the thoughts, than of the life of a child, with a pale background of men and events. The distinct charm lies in the sincerity with ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... any minuteness the course of Mr. Tazewell through more than three of the most anxious months of his life would far exceed my present limits, and as I have already treated this topic in a separate work, and have been required to treat it again, I shall simply ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... us clear of any withholding. It was the same year in which Shakspeare died, in a house built by Sir Hugh Clopton, a member of the same family-connection with Thomasine. Hour by hour, almost minute by minute, the stages of her transition are reported with infinite minuteness. Her own prayers, and those of a steady succession of religious friends, are noted; the melting intonations of her own utterances of anxiety or peace; the parting counsels or warnings addressed to her dependants; the last breathings of affection to those dearest; the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... are the worst offenders of all. For if the astronomer has set before us the infinite magnitude of space, and the practical eternity of the duration of the universe; if the physical and chemical philosophers have demonstrated the infinite minuteness of its constituent parts, and the practical eternity of matter and of force; and if both have alike proclaimed the universality of a definite and predicable order and succession of events, the workers in biology have not only accepted all these, but have added more ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... by agreeable words." He had to provide clean cloths and towels, cups without flaws, spoons of silver, mattresses, blankets and untorn sheets, pillows, quilts, etc. His duties are laid down with much minuteness; every morning he was required to go through the inventory, ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... these compounds as are the smaller animals. But even if their relative susceptibility be assumed to be the same, the lethal dose given the rabbit is equivalent to giving a 140-pound man one dose containing the furane-alcohol content of over 5,000 cups of coffee. Thus, in view of the very apparent minuteness of the quantity of this compound present in one cup of coffee, together with the fact that it is not cumulative in its physiological action, the importance of its toxic properties becomes very inconsequential to even the most profuse and inveterate ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... is not only possible but manifest, that there actually are animals whose eyes are by nature framed to perceive those things which by reason of their minuteness escape our sight. What think you of those inconceivably small animals perceived by glasses? must we suppose they are all stark blind? Or, in case they see, can it be imagined their sight hath not the same use in preserving their bodies ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley
... widely advertised professional fiction-blacksmiths of the day. Mr. Whittier's style is that of a careful and sincere scholar, and we believe that his work will become notable in this and the succeeding amateur journalistic generation. The minuteness of the preceding criticism has been prompted not by a depreciatory estimate of his powers, but rather by an appreciative survey of his possibilities. "Say, Brother", by Mrs. Renshaw, is a poem describing life ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... distinctive character of his language that he never attended a Trial. The description given, in his Life of Phips, of what was exhibited and declared by the "afflicted children," at the Examinations, exhibits a minuteness and vividness, seeming to have come from an eye-witness; but there is not a particular word or syllable, I think, in the account, from which an inference, either way, can be drawn whether, or not, he was present at them, personally. This is observable, I repeat, inasmuch as ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... architecture, paintings and mosaics, streets and fountains, private houses, villas, and tombs; and, moreover, on the art of baking, and the forms of domestic utensils. We are, therefore, led through hall, parlour, bath, kitchen, and shop, with amusing minuteness; and, in the account of furniture and domestic implements, it is curious to observe, how far we are indebted to the ancients for the forms of similar contrivances now in use. One of the best passages in this portion of the work is the following, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... folio upon the finest vellum; and being interleaved with blue paper, is read as easily as the best print. The labour and patience bestowed in its completion must have been excessive, especially when the precision and minuteness of the letters are considered. The general execution, in every respect, is indeed admirable; and the vellum is of the most delicate and costly kind. Rodolphus II. of Germany offered for it, in 1640, 11,000 ducats, which was probably equal to 60,000 ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 237, May 13, 1854 • Various
... into every hole and corner, she examined Bonypart, the Living Skeleton, very closely through her glasses, looking critically at his features, and was equally curious with the monkeys. She even inspected Professor Thunder with such minuteness, and with such an air of one who has at last detected a shameful imposition, that at length the celebrated showman exclaimed with some grandeur: "Excuse me, ma'am, but ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... child not ten years old. Another and more numerous class, evidently piquing themselves not a little upon avoiding this error, fall into another by fancying it necessary to write down to their young readers. They explain everything with a tiresome minuteness of detail, although any observer of children ought to know that a child's mind does not want everything explained. They think that simplicity demands this lengthy discussion of every trivial matter. There is such a thing as a conceited simplicity, and there is a technical simplicity, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... except the rats and ghosts aforesaid, had not been better employed than in shedding them), to see her rake out a bed of fresh and glowing coals, and proceed to broil the mackerel. Her usually pale cheeks were all ablaze with heat and hurry. She watched the fish with as much tender care and minuteness of attention as if,—we know not how to express it otherwise,—as if her own heart were on the gridiron, and her immortal happiness were involved in its being done precisely ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... iii. 614-618, 667. Clarendon's narrative is so frequently inaccurate, that it is unsafe to give credit to any charge on his authority alone; but in the present instance he relates the discovery of the treachery of Willis with such circumstantial minuteness, that it requires a considerable share of incredulity to doubt of its being substantially true; and his narrative is confirmed by James II. (Mem. i. 370), and other documents ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... have occasion to upbraid myself, that soon after our return to the main land, I allowed indolence to prevail over me so much, as to shrink from the labour of continuing my journal with the same minuteness as before; sheltering myself in the thought, that we had done with the Hebrides; and not considering, that Dr. Johnson's Memorabilia were likely to be more valuable when we were restored to a more polished society. Much has thus been ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... it, with its face to the wall. I ventured to take that up too. It was the portrait of a gentleman in the full prime of youthful manhood—handsome enough, and not badly executed; but if done by the same hand as the others, it was evidently some years before; for there was far more careful minuteness of detail, and less of that freshness of colouring and freedom of handling that delighted and surprised me in them. Nevertheless, I surveyed it with considerable interest. There was a certain individuality in the features and expression that stamped it, at once, a successful likeness. The bright ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... in his embrace, honoured him with the title of his deliverer, and asked him by what miracle he had discovered the place of his confinement. The lawyer began to unfold the various steps he had taken with equal minuteness and self-complacency, when Crowe, dragging the doctor still by the collar, shook his old friend by the hand, protesting he was never so overjoyed since he got clear of a Sallee rover on the coast of Barbary; and that two glasses ago he would have started all the ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... unbroken gloom which they had seemed. The snow shone through their stems, and the inky river at their feet lay a motionless extent of white. As his carriole slipped lightly over it, Northwick had a fantastic sense of his own minuteness and remoteness. He thought of the photograph of a lunar landscape that he had once seen greatly magnified, and of a fly that happened to traverse the expanse of plaster-like white between the ranges of ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... Garschine, whose society and that of their children was to do so much to cheer Stevenson during his remaining months on the Riviera. The French painter Robinet (sometimes in his day known as le Raphael des cailloux, from the minuteness of detail which he put into his Provencal coast landscapes) was a chivalrous and affectionate soul, in whom R. L. S. delighted in spite of his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... single instance, he had so fearfully transgressed one of the most sacred of them. But this had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose. Since that wretched epoch, he had watched, with morbid zeal and minuteness, not his acts,—for those it was easy to arrange,—but each breath of emotion, and his every thought. At the head of the social system, as the clergymen of that day stood, he was only the more trammelled by its regulations, its principles, and even its prejudices. As a priest, the framework ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the sake of building cottages, or making those inclosures for their cabbages, which the islanders call crubs. They have been pulling down the Pictish castle, on the little island in the fresh-water loch called Cleikimin, near Lerwick, described with such minuteness by Scott in his journal, till very few traces of its original construction are left. If the inclosing of lands for pasturage and cultivation proceeds as it has begun, these curious monuments of a race which ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... Inordinate anxiety was felt by all for the ills of the one; and for days the "I" would be forgotten if any member of the home-circle was "sick." And the concerns of the patient, whether suffering from a cold, sore eyes, a sprained ankle, or "had her tonsils out," were discussed with minuteness of detail worthy an International Conference. How the patient slept, what the doctor said, the effect of the new medicine, how the heart was standing the strain, what the visiting neighbors thought of the case, in fact the whole subject ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... as if she were listening to him, all the facts without forgetting a single detail, mentioning the most trivial matters with the minuteness of a countryman. And the child still kept assailing him, ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... litigation, and the advantages which the rich thus obtained over the poor. But if delays and forms led to an expensive and vexatious administration of justice, these were more than compensated by the checks which a complicated jurisprudence gave to hasty or partial decisions. It was in the minuteness and precision of the forms of law, and in the foresight with which questions were anticipated in the various transactions of business, that prove that the Romans, in their civil and social relations, were very much ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... good deal of Robert Brown, "facile Princeps Botanicorum," as he was called by Humboldt. He seemed to me to be chiefly remarkable for the minuteness of his observations, and their perfect accuracy. His knowledge was extraordinarily great, and much died with him, owing to his excessive fear of ever making a mistake. He poured out his knowledge to me in the most unreserved manner, yet was strangely jealous on some points. I called on ...
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - From The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin • Charles Darwin
... artistic graces, also, and the structural subtilties of a more developed literary period, we must not, of course, look in 'Beowulf.' The narrative is often more dramatic than clear, and there is no thought of any minuteness of characterization. A few typical characters stand out clearly, and they were all that the poet's turbulent and not very attentive audience could understand. But the barbaric vividness and power of the poem give it much more than a merely historical interest; and the careful reader cannot fail ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... Christians under Diocletian and Galerius, which was aimed at the entire uprooting of the new religion, ended with the edict of toleration of 311 and the tragical ruin of the persecutors. Galerius died soon after of a disgusting and terrible disease (morbus pedicularis), described with great minuteness by Eusebius and Lactantius. 'His body,' says Gibbon, 'swelled by an intemperate course of life to an unwieldy corpulence, was covered with ulcers and devoured by innumerable swarms of those insects which have given their name ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... He rose and went toward his portrait on the easel, and examined it long, with a curious minuteness. Then he returned to his chair, and continued to look at it. "I suppose that it resembles me a great deal," he said, "and yet I do not feel like that. I hardly know what is the fault. It is as I should be if I were like other ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... the walls of dirt or smoke as there is on the low walls of the catacombs. There is absolutely nothing to tell us how they lighted these vast buildings up, how they even introduced sufficient light to paint them by or to build them. Look at the minuteness of ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... greedily. A single gesture from her quelled their squabbles. She seemed to know their good or their evil character at a glance; and related such long tales about the tiniest chick, with such an abundance and minuteness of detail, as to astound those to whom one chicken was exactly like any other. Her farmyard had thus become a country, as it were, over which she reigned; a country complex in its organisation, ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... these books. . . . The events are described with minuteness and care. The result is a very ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... kind words and tones, the touch of hands, and the touch of lips; the breath of flowers and those that love them; pleasant are the thousand infinitesimals, like the motes of the sun-beam, not less bright because of their minuteness; and pleasant the thought that sufficient as this heaven may be, there is another one above. And doubtless it is pleasant to breathe as usual, and feel the heart send round its currents with a touch of joy; but oh, pleasanter than all, to have no sigh ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... These writers, claiming to be the revealers of the will of God, almost always commenced their messages with the words, "Thus saith the Lord." That they were not deceived in their claims is evident from the minuteness and detail as to names, times and places which characterized their messages, and from the literal fulfillment of these oracles ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... following morning, the cook, while engaged in her most matutinal duties, was disturbed by a ring at the front door. She, and she only of the household, was up, and as she had not completed her toilet with much minuteness, she was rather embarrassed when, on opening the door, she saw ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... be regretted that William Still, the author of the U. G. R. R., failed to give any account of its origin, organization, workings, or the number of persons helped to freedom. It is an interesting narrative of many cases, but is shorn of that minuteness of detail so indispensable to ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... tend towards the brain), the weaker and less agitated parts must necessarily be driven aside from that point by the stronger which alone in this way reach it I had expounded all these matters with sufficient minuteness in the treatise which I formerly thought of publishing. And after these, I had shown what must be the fabric of the nerves and muscles of the human body to give the animal spirits contained in it the power to move the members, as when we see heads shortly ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... ignore the investigations of Luthardt and others, which (as 'apologists' venture to think) show that the whole texture of the language in the Fourth Gospel is Hebraic? Why again, when he alludes to 'the minuteness of details' [14:4] in this Gospel as alleged in defence of its authenticity, is he satisfied with this mere caricature of the 'apologetic' argument? Having set up a man of straw, he has no difficulty in knocking him down. He has only to declare that 'the identification of an eye-witness by ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... perceive that my description, which was proceeding with the minuteness of a passport, has been ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... could talk of nothing else when he got home. Father, and mother, and sister, had to listen to the fullest details of the struggle and its surprising issue, and Bert fairly outdid himself in the vigour and minuteness of his description. When the fountain of his eloquence at last ran dry, Mr. Lloyd had a chance to say, with one of his ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... Pentelicus and Paros. Even the exterior of the temples glowed with the richest harmony of colours, and was decorated with the purest gold; an atmosphere peculiarly favourable both to the display and the preservation of art, permitted to external pediments and friezes all the minuteness of ornament—all the brilliancy of colours; such as in the interior of Italian churches may yet be seen—vitiated, in the last, by a gaudy and barbarous taste. Nor did the Athenians spare any cost upon ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Such minuteness and simplicity would, in ordinary cases, not be necessary. I go into it here, merely to show, how, by simply subdividing the steps, a subject ordinarily perplexing, may be made plain. The reader will observe that in the above, there are ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... probabilities, so enlivened with imagery, and heightened with illustration." But we have some difficulty in going along with him when he adds—"The account of Shakspeare may stand as a perpetual model of encomiastic criticism, exact without minuteness, and lofty without exaggeration. The praise lavished by Longinus on the attestation of the heroes of Marathon by Demosthenes, fades away before it. In a few lines is exhibited a character, so sublime in its comprehension, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... over." Before I had time to answer, the landlord, a well-dressed, good-looking man, made his appearance with the ostler; he bore the letter in his hand. Without glancing at me, he betook himself at once to consider the horse, going round him, and observing every point with the utmost minuteness. At last, having gone round the horse three times, he stopped beside me, and keeping his eyes on the horse, bent his head towards his right shoulder. "That horse is worth some money," said he, turning towards ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... quote say that they "cannot express" the excessive minuteness of the granules in question, and they estimate their diameter at less than 1/200000 of an inch. Under the highest powers of the microscope, at present applicable, such specks are hardly discernible. Nevertheless, particles of this size are massive when compared to physical molecules; ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... great public character, whose name he had forgotten, making a particularly happy reply to another eminent and illustrious individual whom he had never been able to identify. He enlarged at some length and with great minuteness upon divers collateral circumstances, distantly connected with the anecdote in hand, but for the life of him he couldn't recollect at that precise moment what the anecdote was, although he had been in the habit of telling the story ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... and the West. It would seem as if the modernizing of Japan had been providentially delayed until the last half of the nineteenth century with its steam and electricity, annihilators of space and time, in order that her evolution might be studied with a minuteness impossible in any previous age, or by any previous generation. It is almost as if one were conducting an experiment in human evolution in his own laboratory, imposing the conditions and ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... through. Once more I have to record the fact, which I think is not without interest, that precisely as my life ceases to be solitary, it ceases to be distinct. I have no difficulty in recalling, with the minuteness of a photograph, scenes in which my Father and I were the sole actors within the four walls of a room, but of the glorious life among wild boys on the margin of the sea I have nothing but vague and broken impressions, delicious ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
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