|
|
|
More "Plebeian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had no idea then that we shouldn't always have servants, and if we'd stayed here, we never should have known anything about housekeeping. And the worst of it is, I like it. I always knew I had plebeian tastes and, now I am used to it, I fairly revel in ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... see who is the fool at last," he hissed, "when I have broken you to my will and your plebeian Yankee stubbornness has cost you all that you hold dear—even the life of your baby—for, by the bones of St. Peter, I'll forego all that I had planned for the brat and cut its heart out before your very eyes. You'll learn what it means to insult ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... bulk did not nearly equal that of a single vertebral joint of the fossil saurians of Eigg. The reptile, since his deposition from the first place in the scale of creation, has sunk sadly in those parts: the ex-monarch has become a low plebeian. ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... dislike of his family to the match. Born in Corsica, Count Rossi was a near relative of the family of Napoleon Bonaparte, and his sister was the Princess de Salm. His relations were opposed to his marriage with one whom they considered a plebeian, though she had been ennobled by the Prussian King, under the name of Von Lauenstein, with a full patent and all the formalities observed on such occasions. Mile. Sontag determined to make a farewell tour through Europe, and retire from the stage. She paid her adieux to her public in the different ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... one of the oldest and best families in the country, if there is any connection between good blood and fine features and a noble expression. Oddly enough, his surname was an uncommon and aristocratic one. His wife, on the other hand, although a very good woman as we found, had a distinctly plebeian countenance. One day she informed us that she came of a different and better class than her husband's. She was the daughter of a small tradesman, and had begun life as a lady's-maid: her husband was nothing but ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... busts of naiads. Undoubtedly it was once a king's! Chichi gravely affirmed that it had been Marie Antoinette's, and the entire family thought that the home on the avenue Victor Hugo was altogether too modest and plebeian to enshrine such a jewel. They therefore agreed to put it in the castle, where it was greatly venerated, although it was useless and solemn as a museum piece. . . . And was he to permit the enemy in their advance toward the Marne to carry off this priceless treasure, as well as the other gorgeous ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... at the feet of a dainty woman, and in every way his work showed his love for her. After he married her, in June 1634, he painted the picture, "Samson's Wedding," "Saskia, dainty and serene, sitting like a princess in a circle of her relatives, he himself appearing as a crude plebeian, whose strange jokes frighten more than they amuse the distinguished company. ... The early years of his marriage were spent in joy and revelry. Surrounded by calculating business men who kept a tight ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... virgins loaded themselves with the sacred things, that they might secure those hallowed treasures from profanation. "They were proceeding" (says Livy lib. V, c. XXII) "along the way which passes over the Sublician bridge, when they were met on the declivity by L. Albinus a plebeian, who was fleeing with his wife and children in a plaustrum or cart: he and his family immediately alighted: then placing in the cart the virgins and sacred things he accompanied them to Caere where they were received with hospitality and respect". ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... were sometimes on four sides of these pews, but oftener on three sides only, thus at least two thirds of the pew occupants did not face the minister. The pew-seats were as narrow and uncomfortable as the plebeian benches, though more exclusive, and, with the high partition walls, quite justified the comment of a little girl when she first attended a service in one of these old-fashioned, square-pewed churches. She exclaimed in dismay, "What! must I be shut up in a closet and sit on a shelf?" Often ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... love-ditties. He had some pathetic little nickel-plated aristocratic instincts, and detested his name, which was Dunlap; detested it, partly because it was nearly as common in that region as Smith, but mainly because it had a plebeian sound to his ear. So he tried to ennoble it by writing it in this way: d'Unlap. That contented his eye, but left his ear unsatisfied, for people gave the new name the same old pronunciation—emphasis on the front end of it. He then did the bravest thing ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... oblivion, in spite of our feeble efforts to recall or retain it in remembrance. The tuneful quartos of Southey are already little better than lumber:—and the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley,—and the fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth,—and the plebeian pathos of Crabbe, are melting fast from the field of our vision. The novels of Scott have put out his poetry. Even the splendid strains of Moore are fading into distance and dimness, except where they have been married to ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... between the Albemarle or Carteret and the Charleston set, the former being from Virginia, while the latter was, as we have seen, a little given to kindergarten aristocracy and ofttimes tripped up on their parade swords while at the plough. Of course outside of this were the plebeian people, or copperas-culottes, who did the work; but Lord Shaftesbury for some time, as we have seen, lived in a baronial shed and had his arms worked on the left breast of ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... any other contrivance that uses steam or electricity as a motor. Indeed, the only motor available at the time of our ascent—that is, for the final climb—was "shank's horses," very useful and mostly safe, even if a little plebeian. We had been wise enough not to plunge at once among the heights, having spent almost a week rambling over the plains, mesas, foothills, and lower ranges, then had been occupied for five or six days more in exploring the valleys and mountain sides in the vicinity of Georgetown, and thus, by ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... by St. Patrick has been singularly fulfilled. "May my Lord grant," he exclaims, "that I may never lose His people, which He has acquired in the ends of the earth!" From hill and dale, from camp and cottage, from plebeian and noble, there rang out a grand "Amen." The strain was caught by Secundinus and Benignus, by Columba and Columbanus, by Brigid and Brendan. It floated away from Lindisfarne and Iona, to Iceland and Tarentum. It was heard on the sunny banks of the Rhine, at Antwerp and Cologne, in Oxford, in Pavia, ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... needs to be very largely supplemented and much ripened and humanised before it can be called satisfactory or wise; but time may bring these fulfilments, and meantime I cannot help thinking it auspicious in the highest degree that, in a time of such impressionistic haste and plebeian looseness of thought, scholastic rigour should suddenly raise its head again, aspiring to seriousness, solidity, and perfection of doctrine: and this not in the interests of religious orthodoxy, but precisely in the most emancipated and unflinchingly radical quarter. It is refreshing and reassuring, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... issue, it would do at least one night's business. The stalls were ablaze with jewelry and crackling with starched shirt-fronts; and expensive scents pervaded the air, putting up a stiff battle with the plebeian peppermint that emanated from the pit. The boxes were filled, and up in the gallery grim-faced patrons of the drama, who had paid their shillings at the door and intended to get a shilling's-worth of entertainment in return, sat and waited stolidly ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... such, were deprived of their divine right to rule and placed on a political level with women. By the practice of these declarations all class and caste distinctions would be abolished, and slave, serf, plebeian, wife, woman, all alike rise from their subject position to the ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... Addison, in one of his latest political and literary efforts, defended the proposed change. He described his pamphlet as the work of an "Old Whig." It was written as a reply to a pamphlet by Steele condemning the Bill, and signed "A Plebeian." Reply, retort, and rejoinder followed in more and more heated and personal style. The excitement created caused the measure to be dropped for the session, but it was brought in again in the session following, ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... finding among them six hundred deserters from the Roman army, he put them to death. When Scipio expressed his dissatisfaction with this, Cato sarcastically answered, that Rome would be greatest if those of high birth and station, and those of plebeian origin like himself, would only contend with one another in virtue. However, as the Senate decreed that nothing that Cato had settled in the province should be altered or rearranged, Scipio found that it was he rather than ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... that the dingy Rue Germain Pillon—with its dirty gamins of both sexes in cropped hair and blouses or white caps and black gowns, its frowsy women slouching in doorways, its succession of odorous cuisines bourgeoises, vile-smelling lavoirs, cheap fruit-shops and plebeian cremeries, its slimy cobblestones, its gutters running not with laughing waters, and sending up scents not of spicy isles ensphered by sun-illumined seas—was a rainbow arch over which she passed with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... narrative not only surprised the widow, which was not unnatural, seeing that it was entirely an invention of the old soldier's, but it appealed to her weakest point. The father of the deceased Scully had been of plebeian origin, so that the discovery in the family of a real major-general—albeit he was dead—was a famous windfall, for the widow had social ambitions which hitherto she had never been able to gratify. Hence she smiled sweetly at the veteran in a ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the same source as the exaggerated statement of Archbishop Des Ursins, that on another occasion Henry promised that his plebeian soldiers should be ennobled and invested with collars of SS. This cannot be taken directly from Des Ursins, whose history of the reign of Charles VI., though written in the fifteenth century, was not ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... his reception was most cordial. Though his person was unknown, the magic of his name was not unfelt, even in the regions of the Kung. A prince of the peacock's feather was no common visitor to the home of a plebeian manufacturer; and when that prince was found to be in addition the leader of the fashions and the idol of the aristocracy, the marvel assumed a miraculous character. The guest was ushered in with many ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... stairway that ascended with chaste dignity to Mrs. De Peyster's noble front door. Swiftly they surveyed the scene. Not a policeman was in sight: no one save, across the way on Washington Square benches, a few plebeian lovers enjoying the soft calm ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... those who ignore them, but shower blessings on their worshippers, even on the obdurate who are at last compelled to do them homage. The language of mythology could not describe more clearly the endeavours of a plebeian ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... not come from a plebeian origin. It was part of his commercial equipment, an asset of his boyhood spent among the peasants on the family estate ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... as several others of them had served under Napoleon, and had even been patronised and promoted by him; but I suppose that being the sons of the ancient noblesse they thought that gratitude to a parvenu like him was rather too plebeian a virtue. Some of them, however, with whom I conversed after dinner seemed to regret the step they had taken. "If we are successful," said they, "it can only be by means of the Allied Armies, and who knows what conditions they may impose on France? If we should be unsuccessful, we are exiled probably ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... reassuringly, and seizing the stub of a pencil attached to the grocer's book, after a moment of concentration, in which she closed her eyes to shut out the material vision before her, she scribbled rapidly on a few blank pages in the back of the plebeian record. After several readings of the lines and sundry interlined revisions, she tore out the sheets, blessed Pegasus for coming in under the wire so nobly, and hurried away to dress. At the appointed time, sheepishly ...
— Edward MacDowell • Elizabeth Fry Page
... and, in a time incredibly short, a goodly red carpet was spread along the gangway, and thence down my lecture-room to the door of the Museum. But still there was a dreadful evil to encounter. What we had done brought out such a rank compound of villanous smells that even my plebeian nose was sorely put to it; so I went to a chemist's, procured certain bottles of sweet odours, and sprinkled them cunningly ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... of good-breeding. An inferior makes a sham attempt to fall on his knees before his superior, and the latter affects a slight motion to raise him. A common salutation has its mode prescribed by the court of ceremonies; and any neglect or default in a plebeian towards his superior is punishable by corporal chastisement, and in men in office by degradation or suspension. In making thus the exterior and public manners of the people a concern of the legislature, society in many respects ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... straitened circumstances compelled them to receive certain people to whom they were under obligations. Among the number of these was Grigory Mihalovitch Litvinov, a young student of Moscow, the son of a retired official of plebeian extraction, who had once lent the Osinins three hundred roubles. Litvinov called frequently at the house, and fell desperately in love with ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... opinion of our hearts, because we think it more advisable to keep the people in outward decency by means of these images. Or if we are less reflective, and ourselves fettered by the bands of authority, then we sink, ourselves, to the true plebeian level, by believing that which, so understood, would be foolish fable; and by finding, in those purely spiritual indications, nothing but the promise of a continuance, to all eternity, of the same miserable existence which we lead ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... The tragedy of Coriolanus is one of the most amusing of our author's performances. The old man's merriment in Menenius; the lofty lady's dignity in Volumnia; the bridal modesty in Virgilia; the patrician and military haughtiness in Coriolanus; the plebeian malignity and tribunitian insolence in Brutus and Sicinius, make a very pleasing and interesting variety: and the various revolutions of the hero's fortune fill the mind with anxious curiosity. There is, ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... conscious of its coarse vulgarity. And "Weng"! Whoever heard of such a name? He certainly had not,—hadn't even known that his father had a partner with such an absurd cognomen! "—& Weng!" There was something terribly plebeian about it. As well as about the obvious desire for symmetry which had led to the addition of that superfluous "N.Y." below the entirely adequate "N.Y. City." But, of course, he'd be glad to do anything his father requested ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... has been constantly alienated from them; and if we pass in review the population of the world, from the oldest to contemporary times, and from savages tribes to the most highly civilized nations, we find the plebeian bowing before the patrician, the poor man serving the wealthy. The conception of human equality before the law is not a congenital endowment, but an accomplishment, arduously acquired and easily forfeited. The first impulse of weakness in the presence of strength is to bow down before it; it is ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... supervitality—you cannot judge of other nations who have not. You had a magnificent system of government. It took you about eight hundred years to build up, and it was the admiration of the world—and now you are allowing your Socialists and ignorant plebeian place hunters to pull it all to pieces and throw it away. That is more foolish surely, than even ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... of the road; and away beyond to the left, through an opening in the hills, can be seen, as through a window, the placid waters of the bay, over whose glittering, sunlit surface white-winged, aristocratic yachts and the plebeian smacks of Greek and Italian fishermen swiftly glide, and fairly vie with each other in giving the ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... base plebeian rabble Dare assail my name at Rome, Where my noble spouse, Octavia, Weeps within her widowed home, Seek her; say the gods bear witness— Altars, augurs, circling wings— That her blood, with mine commingled, Yet shall mount the ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... to put the whole school in touch with the fine gentleman's world of intrigue, cards and duelling: the world in which ladies were subjugated, fortunes lost, adversaries run through and tradesmen ruined with that imperturbable grace which distinguished the man of quality from the plebeian. ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... Raymond, with a curious remnant of that pride of race at which it is the undisputed privilege of low birth and a plebeian temperament to sneer. "I won't have my own name dragged in. I dropped it years ago. I've confessed as Stephens, and I'll die and be buried as Stephens. I'm not going to ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... hopeless. Its only consolation is that it is never blacker than its master. It is well known that the Persians and Angoras are much esteemed in Paris and are, to some extent, bred for sale. In the provinces, French cats are usually low-bred animals, with plebeian heads and tails, the stringlike appearance of the latter not being improved by cropping. Although not generally esteemed as an article of food in France, there are still many people scattered throughout the country who maintain that a civet de chat is as good, ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... repelled at every point. Years had not refined, they had vulgarized him. His clothing careless and not quite fresh, offended her taste; in fact, his whole appearance was of that shabby genteel character, which is far more mean and plebeian than can be given by undisguised working apparel. As Jean was taking note of these things a girl, with a flushed, angry face, spoke to him. She was evidently making a complaint, and Gavin answered her in a manner which ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... Mordecai! How she looked! How she stamped the floor with her dainty foot when I hinted at the fact that my maternal grandfather was neither duke nor lord! How she hushed my 'impertinence,' as she styled it, with such invectives as 'fool, idiot, plebeian'! Heigho! But I felt that it was unmanly in me to provoke mother so, and I begged ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... evolution of character, manners, caprices, etc., has been adapted to the vast mass of human minds. It is a mean element, you say. The revelations of Albert Smith, Dickens, etc., are essentially mean, vulgar, plebeian, not only in an aristocratic sense, but also in a philosophical sense. True, but the minds that are to live and move in it are also mean, essentially mean. Nothing grand in them? Yes, doubtless in the veriest grub as to capacity, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... kingship of Alba and Rome, of which the evidence is of course purely legendary. If the legends represent fact in any sense, they point, if I understand him rightly, to a kingship held by a non-Latin race, or, as he calls it, plebeian. Binder, Die Plebs, p. 403 foll., believes that the original Latin population, i.e. the plebs of ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... folly, sudden as splashes, the law formulated by an oath, and flowers of eloquence on the lips of some soldier-boy, with a shoulder-belt strapped over his bare, shirtless chest. Sometimes, too, a gentleman made his appearance—an aristocrat of humble demeanour, talking in a plebeian strain, and with his hands unwashed, so as to make them look hard. A patriot recognised him; the most virtuous mobbed him; and he went off with rage in his soul. On the pretext of good sense, it was desirable to be always disparaging the advocates, and to make use as often as possible of these ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... power of expression. Again, the Academic tenets were those with which the common sense of the world could have most sympathy[92]. The Academy also was the school which had the most respectable pedigree. Compared with its system, all other philosophies were plebeian[93]. The philosopher who best preserved the Socratic tradition was most estimable, ceteris paribus, and ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... family, unheard of in the thirteenth century, obscure and plebeian in the middle of the fourteenth, and wealthy bankers and leaders of the democratic party at its close, culminated in the early part of the fifteenth in the person of Cosmo. The Pater Patriae,—so called, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... by the presence of "the plebeian." Mrs. Harcourt had done plain sewing for her father, and Lizzie had frequently called there for the work. In this way an acquaintance had been commenced between herself and Ada which had ripened into ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... not quite so triumphant as it ought to have been. To begin with, the resources of Tommy's pockets were somewhat limited. In the end the fare was managed, the lady recollecting a plebeian twopence, and the driver, still holding the varied assortment of coins in his hand, was prevailed upon to move on, which he did after one last hoarse demand as to what the gentleman thought he was ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... discharge of his duties, or doing him any violence, was declared an outlaw, whom any one might kill. That the tribunes might be always easily found, they were not allowed to go more than one mile beyond the city walls. Their houses were to be open night as well as day, that any plebeian unjustly dealt with might flee ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... applied when debased, impure, spurious, alloyed, counterfeit could be used? When mean, despicable, contemptible, shameful, disgraceful, dishonorable, discreditable, scandalous, infamous, villainous, low-minded could be used? When ignoble, servile, slavish, groveling, menial could be used? When plebeian, obscure, untitled, vulgar, lowly, nameless, humble, unknown could ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... teased by a group occupying the farther of the two hearths. Near them play was going on at one table, and primero at a second. In a corner were three or four ladies, in a circle about a red-faced, plebeian-looking man, who was playing at forfeits with one of their number; while the middle of the room seemed dominated by a middle-sized man with a peculiarly inflamed and passionate countenance, who, seated on a table, was inveighing against ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... mixture of better blood, or that the improvements in features due to improved conditions, physical and moral, have gone further. At all events, one may look at a crowd anywhere in England and see only a face here and there of the unmodified plebeian type. In a very large majority the forehead will be less low and narrow, the nose less coarse with less wide-spreading alae, the depression in the bridge not so deep, the mouth not so large nor the jowl so heavy. These ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... worth may be in him. A good many artists have maimed or ruined themselves by pretending that, besides the distinction between good art and bad, there is a distinction between aristocratic art and plebeian. In a sense all art is anarchical; to take art seriously is to be unable to take seriously the conventions and principles by which societies exist. It may be said with some justice that Post-Impressionism is peculiarly anarchical because it insists so emphatically on fundamentals ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... procreation." This reluctance to play his part Washington concluded was a sign of aristocracy, and he wrote a nephew, "If Royal Gift will administer, he shall be at the service of your Mares, but at present he seems too full of Royalty, to have anything to do with a plebeian Race," and to Fitzhugh he said, "particular attention shall be paid to the mares which your servant brought, and when my Jack is in the humor, they shall derive all the benefit of his labor, for labor it appears to be. At present tho' young, he follows what may be supposed to be ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... the empire almost as a sovereign, for Caesar, formerly a laborious and autocratic ruler, shrank from all business. Even before they left Alexandria the plebeian prefect could see that Serapion's prophecy was fulfilling itself. He remained in close intimacy with the soothsayer; but only once more, and just before Caesar's departure, could the magian be induced ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... life, that for so many years had been unsatisfied desires. Not, of course, that she would want Nancy to marry for money, she assured herself virtuously; that, in addition to being an indirect violation of an article of the Decalogue, was so distinctly plebeian. But it would be so comfortable if Nancy's affections could only be engaged in a direction where the coffers were not exactly empty. In other words, money would be no obstacle ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... remedies, and only two, available; failing one of these, something must, soon or later, give way with a crash. Either the anachronistic tradition must make suicidal concessions, or the better-class people must drown all plebeian Australian males in infancy, and fill the ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... Lucy's lips, accompanied with the words, "I wonder who she thinks wants to associate with that plebeian!" ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... society of all those who, for want of a better expression, I may term the humble-minded, those who have no aristocratic or exclusive tastes, very simple in their reading and studies even if well-to-do, and simple in their daily habits, rising early and retiring early, and plebeian in their dinner-hour. It is a peculiar cast of mind that I am trying to describe—a natural frame of mind; these are 'chapel people'—perhaps a phrase will convey the meaning better than explanation. This is their church, and whatever the theology may ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... out of the church with his aristocratic nose elevated even beyond its usual angle. He was so offended by the plebeian tastes of his pastor that he almost failed to notice Banker Lindsley who ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... was nothing intrinsically interesting in the couple before them. They possessed not even the picturesqueness of speech and costume which belongs to the plebeian orders of older civilizations. These were the people that seemed to justify Schopenhauer's cynical contention concerning the economy of Nature, who invests youth with just enough transient beauty to ensure the perpetuation of the race, making men and women serve her purpose under the ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... for her! She smiled, considering him. The events of the night had not ruffled him; his blonde face was still mild, insignificant, plebeian. Of such men slaves are made; their part is to obey orders, to be without responsibility, to be guided, governed, and protected by their betters. Miss Gregory, sister of a Major-General, friend of Colonial Governors, aunt of a Member of Parliament, ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... a territory, must in any age ensure. Of Charlemagne, in an age when as yet the use of infantry was but imperfectly known, it may be said symbollically, that he found the universal people, patrician and plebeian, chieftain and vassal, with the left foot [Footnote 11] in the stirrup—of Napoleon, in an age when the use of artillery was first understood, that he found every man standing to his gun. Both, in short, found war in pro-cinctu—both ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... turning round and round, with a rapidity that is quite inconceivable to an English dancer, the music changes to a slower movement, and then follows a succession of zig-zag minuets, performed by old and young, straight and crooked, noble and plebeian, all at once, from one end of the room to the other. Tallow candles snuffing and stinking, dishes changing, heads scratching, and all sorts of performances going forward at the same moment; the flutes, oboes, and bassoons ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... bearing of the high-born ladies of Castile. Here they take the air as free from snobbish competition as the good society of Olympus, while a hundred paces farther south, just beyond the Mint, the world at large takes its plebeian constitutional. How long, with a democratic system of government, this purely conventional respect will be paid to blue-ness of blood cannot be conjectured. Its existence a year after the Revolution was to me one of ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... sings. And at last to become a duchess, and to have the duke whom I have loved a long while, and be received and admired by everybody. To be rich on my own account and through my husband; to be able to say that I am not a plebeian by birth, like all the celebrities—that is the life, that is the happiness I desire. If I can become his wife without being a cantatrice, I shall be equally well pleased, but I believe that is the only way I shall ...
— Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood) • Marie Bashkirtseff
... Family tabulated. Suffice it here, however, for the present to note that such differentiation does take place, without entering into the classification and comparison of the protean types of patrician and plebeian throughout ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... after the conquest. (Guerras Civiles de Granada, tom. i. p. 350.) Lord Byron, as the reader recollects, has done this ballad into English. The version has the merit of fidelity. It is not his fault if his Muse appears to little advantage in the plebeian ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... here," Norris overheard him saying, "a young swell. He's worth any two in the squad." The words fell on the ears of the discarded son like music; and from that moment, he not only found an interest, he took a pride, in his plebeian tasks. ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... negroes of the community said of them and their offspring is really not worth while. Envy has a sharp tongue, and when has not the aristocrat been the target for the plebeian's sneers? ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... horizontally, before they got a chance to drop; the trees bent down and sprang again, and lashed the air to and fro; chips and leaves and fragments of all strange sorts took the wonderful opportunity and went soaring aloft and onward in a false, plebeian triumph. ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... of civil freedom. The strength of the Cromwellian party lay in the fact that it was composed almost entirely of the laboring and the middle classes, the bone and sinew of the land. Then for the first time in English history the world saw the plebeian pitted against the aristocrat, and the strife which ensued involved not so much the question of kingly prerogative and the 'divine right' of monarchs, as the pent-up feuds of ages—feuds arising from the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Americans of his class. Though on the present voyage sailing from Buenos Ayres, he had avowed himself a native and resident of Chili, whose inhabitants had not so generally adopted the plain coat and once plebeian pantaloons; but, with a becoming modification, adhered to their provincial costume, picturesque as any in the world. Still, relatively to the pale history of the voyage, and his own pale face, there seemed something so incongruous in the Spaniard's apparel, as almost to suggest the image ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... thousands and tens of thousands of them in Rome, in the cities of Italy, in Greece and Asia. There are Christians among the legions and among the pretorians; they are in the palace of Caesar itself. Slaves and citizens, poor and rich, plebeian and patrician, confess that faith. Dost thou know that the Cornelii are Christians, that Pomponia Graecina is a Christian, that likely Octavia was, and Acte is? Yes, that teaching will embrace the world, and it alone is able to renew it. Do not shrug thy ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... class. The slave-holders ruled their States more positively than ever the aristocratic classes ruled England. Besides the distinction of free and slave, or black and white, there was another line of demarcation between white men that was as absolute as the division between patrician and plebeian. The nobles of Poland who dictated the policy of the kingdom were as numerous in proportion to the whole population as the rich class of slave-holders whose decrees governed the policy of their States. It was, in short, an oligarchy which by its combined power ruled the Republic. No President of ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... himself justice, his person and mind were of no plebeian mould. He was a daring, venturous fellow, ready at any emergency, cool and collected in danger, had a pleasure in the excitement created by the difficulty and risk attending his nocturnal pursuits, ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... proportion of a handsome fortune, he would still have a competence left, and that well secured—proposed to visit Saratoga, as usual. There was not a dissenting voice—no objecting on the score of meeting vulgar people there. The painful fact disclosed by Uncle Joseph, of their plebeian origin, and the marriage of Mr. Armand—whose station in society was not to be questioned—with Mary Jones, the watchmaker's daughter, had softened and subdued their tone of feeling, and caused them to set up a new standard of estimation. The old one would not do, for, ...
— Heart-Histories and Life-Pictures • T. S. Arthur
... contemplative genius, it is now the mark of the superficial and unthinking practitioner. It was once reverenced by kings and clothed in the robes of nobility; it is now (according to its true acceptation) abandoned and despised and ridiculed by the vilest plebeian. Permit me, then, my friends, to address you in the ...
— An Essay on the Beautiful - From the Greek of Plotinus • Plotinus
... an exquisite touch of nature, which most married men, whether of noble or plebeian blood, will quickly recognise. During the whole of her daughter's courtship, the good old lady had scarcely spoken, save by expressive smiles and looks of approval. But now that her object is gained, and her daughter fast married (as she thinks), she suddenly assumes ...
— The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman • Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray
... "shall recite the three last chapters, or the three last lines, or the three last words, just before death, with pure mind, his soul will be saved." "Deo gratias ago," said Sechnall. Colman Ela recited it in his refectory thrice. Patrick stood in the middle of the house, when a certain plebeian asked, "Have we no other prayer that we could recite except this?" And Patrick went out afterwards. Cainnech, on the sea, in the south, saw the black cloud of devils passing over him. "Come here on your way," said Cainnech. The demons ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... is Rome in her decline, that the artist touches here so boldly. But what now, if old Rome herself,—plebeian Rome, in the deadliest onset of her struggle against tyranny, Rome lashed into fury and conscious strength, rising from under the hard heel of her oppressors; what if Rome, in the act of creating her Tribunes; or, if Rome, with her Tribunes at her ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... saw nothing but the words, "not a gownsman." Why should he see that I was not a gownsman? Because I was shabbier?—(and my clothes, over and above the ducking they had had, were shabby); or more plebeian in appearance (whatsoever that may mean)? or wanted something else, which the rest had about them, and I had not? Why should he know that I was not a gownsman? I did not wish, of course, to be a gentleman, and an aristocrat; but I was nettled, nevertheless, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... not all of one piece. He was, besides, a mighty toper; he could sit at wine until the day dawned, and pass directly from the table to the bench with a steady hand and a clear head. Beyond the third bottle, he showed the plebeian in a larger print; the low, gross accent, the low, foul mirth, grew broader and commoner; he became less formidable, and infinitely more disgusting. Now, the boy had inherited from Jean Rutherford a shivering delicacy, unequally mated with potential violence. In the playing-fields, ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... class what the temple of Minerva is to the unions of organised labour. It is there that they have their meeting-place, and the temple itself is always their treasury as contrasted with the Saturn temple, the treasury of the state as a whole. The very officers of the Plebeians, the famous Plebeian aediles, get their name from association with this temple (aedes). This political side of her activity is the only real advantage, except the grain itself, connected with her importation; the two form at best a poor economic compensation for ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... a beginning. Try "Blenheim House" (all the houses here either bear ducal, naval, or frankly plebeian names, I observe). Ring: startling effect—grey-mouldy old person, with skeleton hands folded on woollen tippet, glides in a ghastly manner down passage. They really ought to put up a warning to people with nerves, as M. VAN BEERS does at ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... first act as king is evidence that he held the honor of God to be his chief concern, important beyond all else. He refused to accord his father regal obsequies; his remains were buried as though he had been poor and of plebeian rank. Impious as he was, Ahaz deserved nothing more dignified. (48) God had Himself made it known to Hezekiah, by a sign, that his father was to have no consideration paid him. On the day of the dead ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... was holding audience in the parlor, telling wonderful tales of her various acquaintances to whose often plebeian names she added the de as she pleased, ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... of," and then in bold lettering, "Marchands." But Michael has neither the art nor the viands that made Marchands famous, and he is content to say that his most famous dish is tripe—just plain, plebeian tripe. ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... taught her submission. Philosophy had not yet taught her the impossibility of adjusting these allotments of our earthly state, so as to distribute the gifts of fortune in accordance with merit. Little, however, did the proud grandees imagine, as in courtly splendor they swept by the plebeian maiden, enveloping her in the dust of their chariots, that her voice would yet aid to upheave their castles from their foundations, and whelm the monarchy and the aristocracy of France in one ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... office to the entrance of the senate, at first the especial dignitary of the patricians, was subsequently the choice of the people. The less national and less honored deities were usually served by plebeian ministers; and many embraced the profession, as now the Roman Catholic Christians enter the monastic fraternity, less from the impulse of devotion than the suggestions of a calculating poverty. Thus Calenus, the priest of Isis, was of the lowest origin. His relations, though not his parents, were ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... give him his full name—somebody was reading Jack London's "The Road" when he came aboard as a tiny kitten—is a black-and-white tom-cat of plebeian origin. He is an honorary member of our mess and occasionally pays us visits at meal-times, and after nourishment sometimes condescends to occupy the armchair in front of the stove. He ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... patricians or plebeians, were called to defend the State, and were enrolled in the army. The equites, or cavalry, took the precedence in the army, and was composed of the wealthy citizens. There were eighteen centuries of these knights, six patrician and twelve plebeian, all having more than one hundred thousand ases. They were armed with sword, spear, helmet, shield, greaves, and cuirass. The infantry was composed of the classes, variously armed, of which, including equites, there were one hundred and ninety-four centuries, one hundred of whom were of the first ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... Beth, much to Peggy's detriment. For Beth was a lady to her finger tips, born to a natural gentility that put to confusion the mannerisms of the "smart" finishing school which had not succeeded in concealing the strain of a plebeian origin, and Beth's dropped g's and her quaint inversions and locutions were infinitely more pleasing to Peter than Miss Peggy's slang and self-assurance, which reflected the modernity of ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... defended the state against foreign foes, Europe against Islamism; but now, nothing of this remained. Titles had lost their truth and their fitness; nobility, after ceasing to be a magistracy, had even ceased to be an ornament; and power, like glory, was henceforth to spring from plebeian ranks. But whether the aristocracy set more value on their titles than on their privileges, or whether they only awaited a pretext for openly declaring themselves, this last measure, more than any other, decided the emigration and its ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... naturally look for lead and direction. The axe was kept continually striking upon noble necks, and the cord was as continually stretched by ignoble bodies, because the King was bent upon making insurrection a failing business at the best. Men and women, patrician and plebeian, might play at rebellion, if they liked it, but they should be made to find that they were playing the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... down upon him the odium of his circle, but the other would not; and the odium of that circle is the only kind of odium he dreads. Appius Claudius apprehended no odium from his own order—the patrician—from the violation of the daughter of Virginius, of the plebeian order; nor did Sextus Tarquinius of the royal order, apprehend any from the violation of Lucretia, of the patrician order—neither would have been punished by their own order, but they were both punished by the injured orders ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... leading to the dining-room. In winter it served the two as both kitchen and dining-room, having a compromising sort of stove on which one could cook, and which still did not look entirely plebeian and fitted only for the kitchen. Maria saw through the open door the neatly laid table, with its red cloth and Aunt Maria's thin silver spoons and china. Aunt Maria had a weakness in one respect. She liked to use china, and did not keep that which had descended to her from her mother stored away, ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Cicero says the same (Pro Sestio, c. 18). Caesar, according to Dion, was not in favour of the penalties contained in the bill; but he probably did not exert himself to save Cicero. Pompeius, who had presided at the comitia in which Clodius was adrogated into a Plebeian family, in order to qualify him to be a tribune, treated Cicero with neglect (Life of Pompeius, c. 46). Caesar owed Cicero nothing. Pompeius owed him much. And Cicero ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... representative of a very ancient and honourable family, which had been allied to the crown; and requesting that, if he could not be favoured with the species of death which in cases of treason distinguishes the nobleman from the plebeian, he might at least, out of consideration for his family, be allowed to suffer in the Tower, rather than at the common place of execution; but this indulgence was refused. From his return to the Tower to the day of his execution, he betrayed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... plebeian splutter of rage from our well-bred friend there," said Mackworth, pointing contemptuously at Kenrick, who stood with dilated nostrils, still ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... Melvyn, dairy farmer and cocky of Possum Gully. The former had been a man worthy of the name. The latter was a slave of drink, careless, even dirty and bedraggled in his personal appearance. He disregarded all manners, and had become far more plebeian and common than the most miserable specimen of humanity around him. The support of his family, yet not, its support. The head of his family, yet failing to fulfil the obligations demanded of one in that capacity. He seemed to lose all love and interest in his family, and grew cross and silent, ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... admitted plebeians to the consulship, and also required the employment of free labour in agriculture. The decisively democratic measure was the Horticunian law, after another seventy years, giving the exclusively plebeian assembly full legislative power. The practical effect of the changes was to create a new aristocracy, semi-plebeian in origin, and to reduce the personal power of the chief officers of state, while somewhat increasing that of the remodelled Senate; rendering it a body selfish indeed in internal ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... great many of our old Anglo-Saxon words into the shade, faithful friends who served their ancestors well. These self-appointed arbiters of diction regard some of the Anglo-Saxon words as too coarse, too plebeian for their aesthetic tastes and refined ears, so they are eliminating them from their vocabulary and replacing them with mongrels of foreign birth and hybrids of unknown origin. For the ordinary people, however, the ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... but you've found out now that the peasant and clodhopper isn't malleable; he can't be forced down and kept under like the noble. The aristocracy, on behalf of its dignity, would not condescend to common cares, and was therefore dependent on a crowd of plebeian servitors to whom it had to trust for three-fourths of the actions of its own life. That was the reign of stewards and bailiffs, wily fellows, into whose hands the interests of the great families passed, and who fed and grew fat on the parings of the great fortunes they managed. But now-a-days, ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... a wrong direction too. In me too the disintegrating forces predominated; I was greatly deficient, for instance, in family feeling. I remember when still quite little hearing my mother complain of my plebeian tendencies; I always kept with the servants, and took their part against my parents. My family looked more askance at me for upholding the rights of our inferiors than they had done at the idiot who tore everything to pieces, or the spendthrift who made scandals and got into debt. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... democracy and individualism, together with the establishment of great artificial governments. Though the feudal hierarchy was originally based on conquest or domestic subjection, it came to have a fanciful or chivalrous or political force. But gradually the plebeian classes—the burghers—grew in importance, and military allegiance was weakened by being divided between a number of superposed lords, up to the king, emperor, or pope. The stronger rulers grew into absolute monarchs, representatives of great states, and the people became, in ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... way,' writes Varchi, 'the Duke had taken such familiarity with Lorenzo, that, not content with making use of him as a ruffian in his dealings with women, whether religious or secular, maidens or wives or widows, noble or plebeian, young or elderly, as it might happen, he applied to him to procure for his pleasure a half-sister of Lorenzo's own mother, a young lady of marvellous beauty, but not less chaste than beautiful, who was the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... nobility straight from Almighty God"? Upon that depends the future of England. In days gone by, our very Snob bore testimony after his fashion to our scorn of meanness; he at all events imagined himself to be imitating those who were incapable of a sordid transaction, of a plebeian compliance. But the Snob, one notes, is in the way of degeneracy; he has new exemplars; he speaks a ruder language. Him, be sure, in one form or another, we shall have always with us, and to observe his habits ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... Princess Elizabeth, the "Good Queen Bess" of after days, was released from the Tower of London on May 19th, 1554, she went first to a neighbouring church to offer thanks for her deliverance, and then proceeded to the King's Head to enjoy a somewhat plebeian dinner of boiled pork and Pease-pudding. This legend seems to ignore the fact that the freedom of the Princess was comparative only; that she was at that time merely removed from one prison to another; and that the record of her movements on that day speaks of her taking barge at the Tower ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... with keen gray eyes, into the face of each speaker? His cap is in his hands, so you can see the bullet head of crisp brown hair and the wrinkled forehead, as well as the high cheek bones, the short square face, the broad temples, the thick lips, which are yet firm as granite. A coarse plebeian stamp of man: yet the whole figure and attitude are that of boundless determination, self-possession, energy; and when at last he speaks a few blunt words, all eyes are turned respectfully upon him;—for his name is ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... as I did, I noticed the large size, and somehow plebeian shape, of his hands. They did not seem to belong to the same body as the head, indicating merely physical strength and fitness for physical labor. His dress also struck me as peculiar: he was wearing ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... ladyship gave the required promise (intending never to keep it,) you performed the service, and very properly, I own, come to receive your reward. Of course, you perceive the impossibility of a compliance with your wishes. No intrigue can exist between the patrician and the plebeian—you are low-born, she of the noblest blood of the kingdom. Are you so blind, man, that you cannot see—or are you so stupid that you cannot comprehend—the repugnance which her ladyship must naturally feel at the very idea of an amorous intimacy existing between a high-born lady and—good ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... a poor boy. He has risen to be the most powerful of all Californians, although the King he adores never makes him Gobernador Proprietario. I tell him he should be the first to recognize the genius and the ambitions of a Bonaparte. The mere thought horrifies him. But in me that same strong plebeian blood makes another cry, and if my father had but enough men at his back, and the will to make himself King of the Californias—Madre de Dios! how I should ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... "young man." He was sitting in an armchair, quite at his ease, his bare hands laid on his knee (he had not put on the gloves after all), calmly, although not without a certain amount of curiosity, looking around at the furniture and pictures. "I don't understand," she thought, "he's a plebeian—quite a plebeian—and yet behaves so naturally!" Solomin did indeed carry himself naturally, not with any view to effect, as much as to say "Look what a splendid fellow I am!" but as a man whose thoughts and feelings are simple, direct, and strong at the same ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... that Vishnuism, whether as Krishnaism or as Ramaism, is to-day a pantheistic religion. But, while R[a]ma is the god of the philosophical sects, and, therefore, is almost entirely a pantheistic god; Krishna, who was always a plebeian, is continually reverting, so to speak, to himself; that is to say, he is more affected by the vulgar, and as the vulgar are more prone, by whatever sectarian name they call themselves, to worship one idol, it happens that Krishna in the eyes of his following is less of a pantheistic ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... of Baron Benoni here," said the count severely, but hurriedly. "Your observations are beside the mark. The objections to the alliance, as you call it, are that you are a man of the people,—I do not desire to offend you,—a plebeian, in fact; you are also a man of uncertain fortune, like all singers: and lastly, you are an artist. I trust you will consider these points as a sufficient reason for my ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... chief, the latter burst in upon the king's privacy soon after with a demand for vengeance. He had met the woman near the king's house and had struck her dead, as he supposed, that she might not be "degraded" by bearing children to a plebeian immigrant. ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... or sceptical observers were needed than those who frequented the hotel Graslin, to detect the barbaric grandeur, the plebeian force of the People which lay deep-hidden in her soul. If sometimes her friends surprised her in a torpor of meditation either gloomy or merely pensive, they knew she bore upon her heart the miseries of others, and had doubtless that morning been initiated ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... the life she had led the past two weeks—the ceaseless mockery of Miss Catheron's soft, scornful tones, the silent contempt and derision of her hard black eyes. What should she wear? how should she act? What if she made some absurd blunder, betraying her plebeian birth and breeding? What if she mortified her thin-skinned husband? Oh! why was it necessary to ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... Take him, ye cruel and bloodthirsty priests, More merciless than the plebeian mob, Who pity and spare the fainting gladiator Blood-stained in Roman amphitheatres,— Take him, and crucify him if ye will; But if the immortal Gods do ever mingle With the affairs of mortals, which I doubt not, And hold the attribute of justice ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... why do you prohibit any one from burying Ajax? I am a king. I, a plebeian, make no further inquiry. And I command a just thing: but, if I seem unjust to any one, I permit you to speak your sentiments with impunity. Greatest of kings, may the gods grant that, after the taking of Troy, you may conduct your fleet safe home: ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... nobility who crushed, trampled on, or sold their vassals at their pleasure or caprice. The bishopric of Liege offered also the same contrast; the domains of the nobility being governed with the utmost harshness, while those prince-prelates lavished on their plebeian vassals privileges which might have been supposed the fruits of generosity, were it not clear that the object was to create an opposition in the lower orders against the turbulent aristocracy, whom they found it impossible to manage single-handed. The wars of ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... Lowell found in Leather-Stocking "the protagonist of our New World epic, a figure as poetic as that of Achilles, as ideally representative as that of Don Quixote, as romantic in his relation to our homespun and plebeian myths as Arthur in his to his mailed and plumed cycle of chivalry." Americans themselves do not realize how widely, in other countries, Leather-Stocking is still regarded as typical of certain qualities in the American character. Among Americans who had half-forgotten ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... the steps of the hotel, clad in the most exquisite of grays, tapering down to the most brilliant of boots. He had a white rose in his buttonhole, and his great black dog was lying at his feet, having for a wonder found his master, for the beast was given to roaming, or to the plebeian society of Barker's servant. The American's careful attire contrasted rather oddly with his sallow face, and with the bony hand that rested against the column. He was a young man, but he looked any age that morning. Before long his eye twinkled and he changed his position ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... had he read anywhere of so ridiculously slow and tame a proceeding. And on an ox-cart! However, times had changed, and he realized that until he had established the new era of knight-errantry, the most plebeian ways of being captured by enchantment would have to serve. Yet, he did not consider it beneath his dignity to ask Sancho what ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Stolo put himself at the head of the plebeians in their great quarrel with the Senate. They demanded that consuls should be re-established, one of whom should always be a plebeian, and that they should never both be patricians. Tribunes of the people were appointed, but the people would not suffer any election of consuls to be held. As this want of chief magistrates seemed likely to lead to ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... polo ground of the Phoenix park at the match All Ireland versus the Rest of Ireland. My eyes, I know, shone divinely as I watched Captain Slogger Dennehy of the Inniskillings win the final chukkar on his darling cob Centaur. This plebeian Don Juan observed me from behind a hackney car and sent me in double envelopes an obscene photograph, such as are sold after dark on Paris boulevards, insulting to any lady. I have it still. It represents a partially ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... be so To those that want his mercy: My poor lord Made no such covenant with him, to spare me When he was dead. Yield me to Caesar's pride? What! to be led in triumph through the streets, A spectacle to base plebeian eyes; While some dejected friend of Antony's, Close in a corner, shakes his head, and mutters A secret curse on her who ruined him! I'll ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... heavy loads grumbled slowly along, so slowly that it was nearly evening, and their shadows preceded them by rods when they reached the little prairie town. They stopped to water their teams; and Ole, true to the instincts of his plebeian ancestry, went in search of a glass of beer. He returned, quickly, his ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... as to another life. In different persons among them were found, in regard to this subject, superstitious terror, blank indifference, positive unbelief. The current fancy was that the souls of the chiefs were led, by a god whose name denotes the "eyeball of the sun," to a life in the heavens, while plebeian souls went down to Akea, a lugubrious underground abode. Some thought spirits were destroyed in this realm of darkness; others, that they were eaten by a stronger race of spirits there; others still, that they survived there, subsisting upon lizards and butterflies.5 What a piteous life they ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the hand holding some object now lost, which was probably a mirror. The left arm is raised, and with the left hand she presses a lotus lily to her breast. The body is easy and well formed, the figure indicates youth, the face is open, smiling, pleasant, and somewhat plebeian. To modify the unwieldy mass of the headdress was beyond the skill of the artist, but the bust is delicately and elegantly modelled, the clinging garment gives discreet emphasis to the shape, and the action of the hand which holds the flower is rendered with grace and naturalness. All these ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... of the book is revealed in Peak's laconic ambition, 'A plebeian, I aim at marrying a lady.' It is a little curious, some may think, that this motive so skilfully used by so many novelists to whose work Gissing's has affinity, from Rousseau and Stendhal (Rouge et Noire) to Cherbuliez (Secret ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... I have not seen him, but hear often of him from Alsop, who sends me hares and pheasants twice a week. I can hardly take so fast as he gives. I have almost forgotten Butcher's meat, as Plebeian. Are you not glad the Cold is gone? I find winters not so agreeable as they used to be, when "winter bleak had charms for me." I cannot conjure up a kind similitude for those snowy flakes—Let them ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... that she herself hated her name, and saw keenly how ridiculously it sounded after such a name as Beatrice, only made her feel the more indignant with Brandon. "His own name," she thought, bitterly, "is plebeian—not so bad as mine, it is true, yet still it is plebeian. Why should he feel so shocked at mine?" Of course, she knew him only as "Mr. Wheeler." "Perhaps he has imagined that I had some grand name, and, learning my true one, has lost his illusion. ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... was perhaps the most beautiful collie of his generation. Groomed for a show, he made most other dogs look plebeian and shabby. That day, one may say in passing, he was destined to go through the collie classes, to Winners, with a rush; and then to win the award and cup for "Best Dog Of ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... it, my snobbish friend, Your family line you can't ascend Without good reason to apprehend You'll find it waxed at the farther end With some plebeian vocation; Or, what is worse, your family line May end in a loop of stronger twine ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... for her; and I thought that enough to account for her state; but when the children began to tell their eager story, and hold up their grapes to her, she burst again into tears, and cried: 'Oh, my dear sister, if you would be warned. It is making a scandal, indeed it is! They call you a plebeian.' ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... guarantee of independence, the modest and plebeian quality of economy is at once ennobled and raised to the rank of one of the most meritorious of virtues. "Never treat money affairs with levity," said Bulwer; "Money is Character." Some of man's best ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... were more rarely together than when domiciled under the same roof as at Pisa. Indeed, by this time, if one may take Mr Hunt's own account of the matter, they appear to have become pretty well tired of each other. He had found out that a peer is, as a friend, but as a plebeian, and a great poet not always a high-minded man. His Lordship had, on his part, discovered that something more than smartness or ingenuity is necessary to protect patronage from familiarity. Perhaps ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... cause because of any state scruples," Judge Custis put in, in his grandest way. "That is not national; it is not Whig, Brother Clayton." The Judge here gave his entire family power to his facial energy, and expressed the Virginian and patrician in his treatment of the Delaware bourgeois and plebeian. "Granted that this corporation is young and untried: let it be disciplined in time, that it may avoid more expensive mistakes in the future. No cause, to a true lawyer, is like a human cause; the time may come when the talent ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... wrought, and the claws being relieved and modelled with the highest care and most artistic finish. The form of the image, in fact, generally resembles more the beautiful green beetle which I have often caught in the mountains around Rome, than his plebeian and utilitarian cousin, the Scarabaeus pilularius. The contour of the stone beneath the Scarabaeus proper is markedly distinguished from the insect portion, and ornamented with a relieved cornice, more or less elaborate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... of him we shall hear much. A sharp contrast to Chrysantas, the Peer, with his pointed plebeian similes. His speech important again for Xenophon's sympathetic knowledge of children and ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... courage to imitate Luther. He has told us that he wanted courage; he again repeats it: he says that he, a plebeian, trifling as a man, and having but little learning, has nothing in him which could deserve celebrity. And yet he essayed a timid protest in favor of certain Huguenots who had been burned on the public square. "The work," says Prince Masson, "of a double-faced ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... feathers; parterres of exotic blooms such as no earthly garden ever held; hats with bows on 'em and hats with birds on 'em, and hats with beasts on 'em; hats that twitter and hats that squawk; hats of lordly velvet and hats of plebeian corduroy; felt hats, straw hats, chip hats; wide brim and narrow brim; skewered, beribboned, bebowed—finally, again, just hats, hats, hats, a phantasmagoria of primary colors and gewgaws and fallalerie pure and simple, before which the masculine brain fairly reels. ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... though perhaps ominous, mildness: "He is rather like Shelley, I always think, a sophisticated Shelley who had sat at the feet of Pater. Shelley, too, had swarms of children, and it is possible that they were large-mouthed. The plebeian origin that you tell me of rather attracts me. I care, especially, for the fine flame that mounts from darkness; and I, too, on one side, as you will remember, ma bonne, ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... change of political procedure, had the decision at Pharsalia been reversed. On that field Caesar was the nominal champion of the liberal faction, and Pompeius was the nominal champion of the optimates. Had Caesar lost the day, the plebeian Pompeian house would have furnished an imperial line, instead of that line proceeding from the patrician Julii. Pompeius would have been as little inclined to abandon the fruits of his victory to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... the other as he spoke. His voice was full of passion, his eyes flashed fire, and his brow was bathed in sweat. There seemed to be some weird power in his words as in those of the prophets of old. The more than plebeian simplicity of his dress still further increased the pride of his gestures and the impressiveness of his voice. The French Revolution has shown since that in the ranks of the people there was no lack of eloquence or of pitiless logic; but what I saw ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... when he shall there written see, That one of his own ancestry Drove the monks forth of Coventry, Bid him his fate explore. Prancing in pride of earthly trust, His charger hurled him to the dust, And, by a base plebeian thrust, He died his band before. God judge 'twixt Marmion and me; He is a chief of high degree, And I a poor recluse; Yet oft, in Holy Writ, we see Even such weak minister as me May the oppressor ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... miles an hour—for it was anything but an Arabian courser which Lynde had hired of honest Deacon Twombly. She was not a handsome animal either—yellow in tint and of the texture of an ancestral hair-trunk, with a plebeian head, and mysterious developments of muscle on the hind legs. She was not a horse for fancy riding; but she had her good points—she had a great many points of one kind and another—among which was her perfect ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... I keep on the square next my own royal compartment on life's chessboard. To him I would push up another pawn, in the shape of a comely and wise young woman, whom he would of course take—to wife. For all contingencies I would liberally provide. In a word, I would, in the plebeian, but expressive phrase, "put him through" all the material part of life; see him sheltered, warmed, fed, button-mended, and all that, just to be able to lay on his talk when I liked,—with the privilege of shutting it ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... as plebeian as a ripe peach swung in the sun across an old fence, almost and not quite within the grasp of any passer-by. She also inspired appetite, but always somehow escaped plucking and possession. It is doubtful whether anybody ever really tasted her ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... Caswall, M.A., who had an interview with the prophet at Nauvoo, in 1842, thus describes him: "He is a coarse, plebeian, sensual person in aspect, and his countenance exhibits a curious mixture of the knave and the clown. His hands are large and fat, and on one of his fingers he wears a massive gold ring, upon which I saw an inscription. His eyes ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... uneasiness, redness of the face, and a general impression of being all made of hands. They met the four white horses of an ex-harness-maker, and the superb harnesses of an ex-horse-dealer. Behind these came the gayest and most plebeian equipage of all, a party of journeymen carpenters returning from their work in a four-horse wagon. Their only fit compeers were an Italian opera-troupe, who were chatting and gesticulating on the piazza of the great hotel, and planning, amid jest and laughter, ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the exclusion of women from all direct contact with affairs can be made far more perfect in a republic than is possible in a monarchy, where even sex is merged in rank, and the female patrician may have far more power than the male plebeian. But, as matters now stand among us, there is no aristocracy but of sex: all men are born patrician, all women are legally plebeian; all men are equal in having political power, and all women in having none. This is a paradox so evident, and such an anomaly in human progress, that it cannot ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... railway or any other contrivance that uses steam or electricity as a motor. Indeed, the only motor available at the time of our ascent—that is, for the final climb—was "shank's horses," very useful and mostly safe, even if a little plebeian. We had been wise enough not to plunge at once among the heights, having spent almost a week rambling over the plains, mesas, foothills, and lower ranges, then had been occupied for five or six days more in exploring the valleys and mountain sides in the vicinity ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... [61] for the liberation of the commune from its old feudal superiors. Denys they called Frank, among many other nicknames. Young lords prided themselves on saying that labour should have its ease, and were almost prepared to take freedom, plebeian freedom (of course duly decorated, at least with wild-flowers) for a bride. For in truth Denys at his stall was turning the grave, slow movement of politic heads into a wild social license, which ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... situation of affairs had never been revealed before; who had come home triumphant to reign like the doges of old, and, only after the ducal cap was on his head and the palace of the state had become his home, found out that the doge—like the unconsidered plebeian—had been reduced to bondage; his judgment and experience put aside in favor of the deliberations of a secret tribunal, and the very boys, when they were nobles, at liberty to jeer at ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... living. Him would I keep on the square next my own royal compartment on life's chessboard. To him I would push up another pawn, in the shape of a comely and wise young woman, whom he would of course take—to wife. For all contingencies I would liberally provide. In a word, I would, in the plebeian, but expressive phrase, "put him through" all the material part of life; see him sheltered, warmed, fed, button-mended, and all that, just to be able to lay on his talk when I liked,—with the privilege of shutting ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... with men of his own class, he was too well bred to do so with me. But in my anger I saw nothing but the words, "not a gownsman." Why should he see that I was not a gownsman? Because I was shabbier?—(and my clothes, over and above the ducking they had had, were shabby); or more plebeian in appearance (whatsoever that may mean)? or wanted something else, which the rest had about them, and I had not? Why should he know that I was not a gownsman? I did not wish, of course, to be a gentleman, and an aristocrat; but I was nettled, nevertheless, at not being mistaken ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... head, an all-wise and benign father. Thus, by a combination of miter and helmet the church, first in Italy and then throughout the world, shall become not alone the spiritual but the temporal head of government. Instituting this plan, we intend to subdue the plebeian faction now in power ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... a blizzard, and lying open to the view of all was a deserted nest, a pile of coveted stones. All the surrounding rookery made their way to and fro, each husband acquiring merit, for, after each journey, he gave his wife a stone. This was the plebeian way of doing things; but my friend who stood, ever so unconcerned, upon a rock knew a trick worth two of that: he and his wife who sat so ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... mouth, wore the ordinary dinner clothes of civilisation. The contrast between the two men might indeed have afforded some ground for speculation as to the nature of their intimacy. Furley, a son of the people, had the air of cultivating, even clinging to a certain plebeian strain, never so apparent as when he spoke, or in his gestures. He was a Member of Parliament for a Labour constituency, a shrewd and valuable exponent of the gospel of the working man. What he lacked in the higher qualities ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... impudence—that's his confounded impudence,' said Captain Boldwig. 'He's only feigning to be asleep now,' said the captain, in a high passion. 'He's drunk; he's a drunken plebeian. Wheel him away, Wilkins, wheel him away directly.' 'Where shall I wheel him to, sir?' inquired Wilkins, ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... good blood and the privileges of peerage there was, most fortunately for our country, no necessary connection.... There was therefore here no line like that which in some other countries divides the patrician from the plebeian. The yeoman was not inclined to murmur at dignities to which his own children might rise. The grandee was not inclined to insult a class into which his own children must descend.... Thus our democracy was, from an early period, the most aristocratic, ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... incessantly exposed herself, produce the slightest apparent effect upon her; her step never faltered, her eye never quailed. What a partial thing is fame," he continued, "and how poor a motive to duty! The names of Palafox and Zaragoza are forever wedded. How few remember the old plebeian, Tio Jorge, who counseled and spurred on both governor and ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... letter, I was anxious that the fellow should go, not, by heaven, in order to avoid his impeachment—for I am wonderfully keen to try issues with him—but it seemed to me that, if he had secured any popularity by becoming a plebeian, he would thereby lose it. "Well, why did you transfer yourself to the Plebs? Was it to make a call on Tigranes? Tell me: do the kings of Armenia refuse to receive patricians?" In a word, I had polished up my weapons to tear this embassy ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... although we do not disclose the true opinion of our hearts, because we think it more advisable to keep the people in outward decency by means of these images. Or if we are less reflective, and ourselves fettered by the bands of authority, then we sink, ourselves, to the true plebeian level, by believing that which, so understood, would be foolish fable; and by finding, in those purely spiritual indications, nothing but the promise of a continuance, to all eternity, of the same miserable existence ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... my weak spot, all right, partner," he hastened to say in the boldest manner possible. "But really and truly, I have got some things I want to do, though of course they could be postponed if absolutely necessary. Some time perhaps you'll be having my plebeian dish over at your house; then try asking ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... the social rating is largely marked by altitude. The city, lying in the lap of the hills and looking a little down upon the valley—plebeian business together with those who do the work of Fairlands occupies the lowest levels in the corporate limits. The heights are held by Fairlands' Pride. Between these two extremes, the Fairlanders are graded fairly ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... the country, happily for you and me, the judgment of James Buchanan, the patrician, was not the judgment of Abraham Lincoln, the plebeian. He brought his strong common sense, sharpened in the school of adversity, to bear upon the question. He did not hesitate, he did not doubt, he did not falter but at once resolved, at whatever peril, at whatever cost, the Union of the States should be preserved. A patriot himself, ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... closed immediately, yet Eudoxia Pence had a clairvoyant sense of what was going on behind that rather plebeian partition of black walnut and frosted glass. She knew how they must all be hesitating, fumbling, floundering—snared by a problem wholly new and unfamiliar, and readily falling victims to intimidation from the humblest source. ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... for her father, she had encountered the wife of the professor of European History with her beautiful young-lady sister from New York and her two daughters, exquisite little girls in white serge, whose tailored, immaculate perfection made Sylvia's heart heavy with a sense of the plebeian inelegance of her own Saturday-morning play-clothes. Mrs. Hubert, obeying an impulse of curiosity, stopped to speak to the little Marshall girl, about whose queer upbringing there were so many stories current, and was struck with the decorative possibilities of the pretty child, apparent ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... should thwart a lord! Yet not a commoner. A baronet Is fish and flesh. Nine parts plebeian, and Patrician in the tenth. Sir Thomas Clifford! A man, they say, of brains! I abhor brains As I do tools: they're things mechanical. So far are we above our forefathers They to their brains did owe their titles, as Do lawyers, doctors. We to ...
— The Hunchback • James Sheridan Knowles
... temples, the husband with an easy-fitting hat and a coat-collar which rolls so high as to give the impression he has no neck. These are aristocrats who, although untitled and owners only of a few modest acres back in Carmarthenshire, descend from ancestors that looked down on William the Conqueror as a plebeian upstart. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... holding some object now lost, which was probably a mirror. The left arm is raised, and with the left hand she presses a lotus lily to her breast. The body is easy and well formed, the figure indicates youth, the face is open, smiling, pleasant, and somewhat plebeian. To modify the unwieldy mass of the headdress was beyond the skill of the artist, but the bust is delicately and elegantly modelled, the clinging garment gives discreet emphasis to the shape, and the action of the hand which holds ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... interspersed with broad contiguities of forest-shade. Some of the cedars of Lebanon were there,—a growth of trees in which the Warwick family take an hereditary pride. The two highest towers of the castle heave themselves up out of a mass of foliage, and look down in a lordly manner upon the plebeian roofs of the town, a part of which are slate-covered, (these are the modern houses,) and a part are coated with old red tiles, denoting the more ancient edifices. A hundred and sixty or seventy years ago, a great fire destroyed a considerable portion of the town, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... with Etruscans, survived. The ancient aristocracy retained its dominant position in the state and society, and its mores even penetrated downward. They were not stifled by new southern customs welling up from below, at least not until the plebeian element won the support of the founders of the empire, and finally overwhelmed the nobility. At Rome during the Republic there was no question of social inequality between the sexes, for though in law the patriarchal clan-system, imposed by the exigencies of a migrating group, ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... Norris overheard him saying, "a young swell. He's worth any two in the squad." The words fell on the ears of the discarded son like music; and from that moment, he not only found an interest, he took a pride, in his plebeian tasks. ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... circles habitually used gentle tones and gentle manners. For the same reason, those born in the higher circles were called "of gentle blood." Thus it came that a coarse and loud voice, and rough, ungentle manners, are regarded as vulgar and plebeian. ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... what pitiful lacquered counterfeits, what Brummagem paste they had been, compared to the real gem! Mary Anne Kepp had seen varnished boots before the humble flooring of her mother's dwelling was honoured by the tread of Horatio Paget, but what clumsy vulgar boots, and what awkward plebeian feet had worn them! The lodger's slim white hands and arched instep, the patrician curve of his aquiline nose, the perfect grace of his apparel, the high-bred modulation of his courteous accents,—all these had impressed Mary Anne's ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... strikes her welt constantly) Also me. Because he saw me on the polo ground of the Phoenix park at the match All Ireland versus the Rest of Ireland. My eyes, I know, shone divinely as I watched Captain Slogger Dennehy of the Inniskillings win the final chukkar on his darling cob Centaur. This plebeian Don Juan observed me from behind a hackney car and sent me in double envelopes an obscene photograph, such as are sold after dark on Paris boulevards, insulting to any lady. I have it still. It represents a partially nude senorita, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... way. In Europe, women have direct political power; witness Victoria. It is a false democracy which has taken it away. In my more detailed argument, I have cited many instances of these foreign privileges. In monarchical countries the dividing lines are not of sex, but of rank. A plebeian woman has no political power—nor has her husband. Rank gives it to man, and, also, in a degree, to woman. But among us the only rank is of sex. Politically speaking, in Massachusetts all men are patrician, all women plebeian. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... from all that appears, the compensation thus received was honorary or gratuitous merely. Among the early institutions of Rome, the relation of patron and client, which existed between the patrician and plebeian, bound the former to render the latter assistance and protection in his lawsuits, with no other return than the general duty, which the client owed to his patron. As every patrician could not be a sufficiently profound lawyer to resolve all difficulties, which might arise in the progress ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... furnishings, yet will nonchalantly tolerate the incongruity of a miserable fragment of a library made up of the cheapest and meanest editions to be found in the market, such as would be scorned by those of the most limited means and plebeian tastes. These will be found inappropriately housed amid the most sumptuous surroundings. A single rug to adorn the floor, or a single vase resting on a mantle, will often be found to have cost ten times as much as the whole home library. And yet the intellects of these people have ...
— Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs • Henry H. Harper
... the shop, the boat, the street, or the nursery, told the high truths that reason or religion taught, and took possession of his audience by a storm of speech, then poured upon them all the riches of his brave plebeian soul, baptizing every head anew,—a man who with the people seemed more mob than they, and with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... names for the same plant, a low bush, with strong, prickly leaves, growing much like a juniper. The contrast of its very brilliant yellow, pea-shaped blossoms, with the dark green of its leaves, is very beautiful. It grows here in hedges and on commons, and is thought rather a plebeian affair. I think it would make quite an addition to our garden shrubbery. Possibly it might make as much sensation with us as our ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... particularly favored mortals. There was no family, aristocracy to back him up, no melancholy recollections of past grandeur to add the interest of romance to his endeavors. His father had been a poor man of the people, a farmer. And yet Warrington was by no means plebeian. Somewhere there was a fine strain. It had been a fierce struggle to complete a college education. In the summer-time he had turned his hand to all sorts of things to pay his winter's tuition. He had worked as clerk in summer hotels, ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... crossed the room towards the window. He was, it appeared, an eminently practical man, and desired to see the exact spot where Mogente had fallen before the story went any farther. Perro went so far as to push his plebeian head through the bars and look down into the street. It was his misfortune to fall into the fault of excess as it is the misfortune of ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... on his knees. And upon Cicero's lamenting in some trial the miserable condition of the times, he the very same day, by nine o'clock, transferred his enemy, Publius Clodius, from a patrician to a plebeian family; a change which he had long solicited in vain [46]. At last, effectually to intimidate all those of the opposite party, he by great rewards prevailed upon Vettius to declare, that he had been solicited by certain persons to assassinate ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... some few who wished to please the mistress of the house, spoke of him as M. de Rubempre; for his formidable audience he was M. Chardon. Lucien's courage sank under their inquisitive eyes. He could read his plebeian name in the mere movements of their lips, and hear the anticipatory criticisms made in the blunt, provincial fashion that too often borders on rudeness. He had not expected this prolonged ordeal of pin-pricks; it put him still more ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... thither Michelangelo went to wait upon him on the 22nd. This was the last, and not the least imposing, public act of the old Pope, who, six years after his imprisonment and outrage in the Castle of S. Angelo, was now wedding a daughter of his plebeian family to the heir of the French crown. What passed between Michelangelo and his master on this occasion is ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... three last words, just before death, with pure mind, his soul will be saved." "Deo gratias ago," said Sechnall. Colman Ela recited it in his refectory thrice. Patrick stood in the middle of the house, when a certain plebeian asked, "Have we no other prayer that we could recite except this?" And Patrick went out afterwards. Cainnech, on the sea, in the south, saw the black cloud of devils passing over him. "Come here on your way," said Cainnech. The demons subsequently came, stating, "We went ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... windows of Grandma Nichols' "spare room," were rolled up, while the faint glimmer of a tallow candle within, indicated that the room possessed an occupant. Who could it be? Possibly it was John, the proud man, who lived in Kentucky, and who, to please his wealthy bride exchanged the plebeian name of Nichols, for that of Livingstone, which his high-born lady fancied was more aristocratic in ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... did not come from a plebeian origin. It was part of his commercial equipment, an asset of his boyhood spent among the peasants on the family estate ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... proposed as its resemblance. Whatever is remote from common appearances is always welcome to vulgar, as to childish credulity; and of a country unenlightened by learning, the whole people is the vulgar. The study of those who then aspired to plebeian learning was laid out upon adventures, giants, dragons, and enchantments. The Death of Arthur was ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... is but the rude log meeting-house and schoolhouse. Instead of Christmas merriment there is only the noise of axe and hammer or the dreary droning of psalms. It seems a history bleak and barren of poetic inspiration, at once plebeian and prosaic. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... insulted by the gallery, and overlooked by the higher classes. A few persons of rank and fortune are provided with private boxes at the national theatres; but these are usually let by the night to plebeian tenants. It is rare indeed to observe a family of distinction in the dress circle of either Drury Lane or Covent Garden; while the French play is never deficient ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 531, Saturday, January 28, 1832. • Various
... An inferior makes a sham attempt to fall on his knees before his superior, and the latter affects a slight motion to raise him. A common salutation has its mode prescribed by the court of ceremonies; and any neglect or default in a plebeian towards his superior is punishable by corporal chastisement, and in men in office by degradation or suspension. In making thus the exterior and public manners of the people a concern of the legislature, society ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... less native and plebeian in one respect,—the building of his nest. Its coarse material and rough masonry are creditable neither to his skill as a workman nor to his taste as an artist. I am the more forcibly reminded of his deficiency in this respect from observing yonder hummingbird's nest, ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... that was needful; that they had neither lust nor leisure for longer instructions. And this saffron bag,—it came down with such a whack, at every round in the argument! You would have thought my father one of the old plebeian combatants in the popular ordeal, who, forbidden to use sword and lance, fought with a sand-bag tied to a flail: a very stunning weapon it was when filled only with sand; but a bag filled with saffron, it was irresistible! Though my father had two to one against him, they could not ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... family, their mean, servile compliance would have done it.' To his friend, William Nicol, he wrote in the same strain. 'I never, my friend, thought mankind very capable of anything generous; but the stateliness of the patricians in Edinburgh, and the servility of my plebeian brethren (who perhaps formerly eyed me askance) since I returned home, have nearly put me out of conceit altogether with ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... the year 164 B.C. He was one of twelve children, nine of whom died in infancy, himself, his brother Caius, and his sister Cornelia being the only survivors. His family was plebeian, but of high antiquity, his ancestors for several generations having held the highest offices in the Republic. On the mother's side he was the grandson of Scipio Africanus. His father, after a distinguished career as a soldier in Spain ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... that classic company, smiling or frowning upon him from the oaken shelves, where Petronius Arbiter, exquisite, rubbed shoulders with Balzac, plebeian; where Omar Khayyam leaned confidentially toward Philostratus; where Mark Twain, standing squarely beside Thomas Carlyle, glared across the room at George Meredith, Henry Leroux pursued the amazing career ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... been visited by great numbers of persons, bringing chaplets and flowers, during the day, both in the aristocratic and the plebeian quarters, but it was at night that the crowd was greatest and the scene most striking. The night, as it so chanced, was a dark one, which did not make the scene by any means less strange and weird-looking. The greater number of visitors, especially in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... wealth and position and that sort of thing, in which respect you were like the rest of men and women. Like most people, my dear, you have been disappointed; but unlike most of them you persist in quarrelling with the awards of fortune, just as to-day you are quarrelling with this plebeian car of ours. As you speak of Hilaritas, so you speak of me. At breakfast this morning, for example, you reminded me, for perhaps the tenth time since Sunday, that you are chained to a failure. Those were your words, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... this, the fiendish woman gave me, in a coarse plebeian fashion, six or seven ferocious pinches below the shoulders, as if she would like to tear the skin from my back in strips; and then went ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... of one or two of those people whom you see every day, and call "dregs," sometimes,—a dull, plain bit of prose, such as you might pick for yourself out of any of these warehouses or back-streets. I expect you to call it stale and plebeian, for I know the glimpses of life it pleases you best to find; idyls delicately tinted; passion-veined hearts, cut bare for curious eyes; prophetic utterances, concrete and clear; or some word of pathos or fun from the old friends who have endenizened ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... performed the service, and very properly, I own, come to receive your reward. Of course, you perceive the impossibility of a compliance with your wishes. No intrigue can exist between the patrician and the plebeian—you are low-born, she of the noblest blood of the kingdom. Are you so blind, man, that you cannot see—or are you so stupid that you cannot comprehend—the repugnance which her ladyship must naturally feel at the very idea of an amorous intimacy existing between a high-born lady and—good heavens!—a ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... and of him we shall hear much. A sharp contrast to Chrysantas, the Peer, with his pointed plebeian similes. His speech important again for Xenophon's sympathetic knowledge of children and also of the ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... represented in the following selections, which are taken from Obermann's Deutscher Minnesang. The most original is Neidhart von Reuental, who eschewed the conventional hohe Minne and sang lustily of the plebeian maid and the ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... object of ambition to Count Mirabeau to have a seat in this illustrious assembly. To secure this, he renounced his rank, became a plebeian, solicited the votes of the people, and was elected a deputy both from Marseilles and Aix. He chose Aix, and his great career began with the meeting of the States-General at Versailles, the 5th of May, 1789. It was composed of three ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... T. J., Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia; or, The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion, ...
— Mother Earth - Land Grants in Virginia 1607-1699 • W. Stitt Robinson, Jr.
... was thinking of Pierre Delarue, who had just taken honors at the Polytechnic school, and who seemed to have a brilliant career before him. This woman, humbly born, was proud of her origin, and sought a plebeian for her son-in-law, to put into his hand a golden tool powerful enough to ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... too much to tell in detail all the movements that followed. The search for Prince Charles continued with unrelenting severity. Daily, noble and plebeian officers of the defeated army were seized. The country was being scoured, high and low. Frequently the prince saw the forms or heard the voices of those who sought him diligently. But "Will Jones," the woodman, was not easily to be recognized as Charles Stuart, ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... done) our market-man driving by our old buggy and cheap horse on holidays, with a barouche and span, we enjoy the sight very much; and when I say (for the other occupant of the buggy has a little taste for two horses, which I am so plebeian as not to share, having never been able to understand why one is not enough for anybody): "But would you be the span-owner—for the span?" we see the end of the ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... originals, with a happy obstinacy of temper, whether derived from Mowbray or Scrogie I know not, but which led them so often into opposition, that the offended father, Reginald S. Mowbray, turned his recusant son Scrogie fairly out of doors; and the fellow would have paid for his plebeian spirit with a vengeance, had he not found refuge with a surviving partner of the original Scrogie of all, who still carried on the lucrative branch of traffic by which the family had been first enriched. I mention these particulars to account, in so far as I can, for ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... merchants, of naval officers, of scholars; it has produced some of the greatest ornaments of their time; and the feeling among the boys themselves is, that it is a medium, between the patrician pretension of such schools as Eton the Westminster, and the plebeian submission of and charity schools. In point of University honors, it claims to be equal with the best; and though other schools can show a greater abundance of eminent names, I know not where many will be ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... utmost Hell Many a dark League, reduc't in careful Watch Round thir Metropolis, and now expecting Each hour their great adventurer from the search 440 Of Forrein Worlds: he through the midst unmarkt, In shew plebeian Angel militant Of lowest order, past; and from the dore Of that Plutonian Hall, invisible Ascended his high Throne, which under state Of richest texture spred, at th' upper end Was plac't in regal lustre. ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... do it? As well say to the poet who exhausts himself, and whose genius is consuming his health, 'Pause in the midst of the inspiration which carries you away!' No! I could not; I—I! abdicate this royalty which I exercised, and return, ruined, ashamed, mocked, to the state of a plebeian—unknown; give this triumph to my rivals, whom I had until then defied, ruled, crushed! No, no, I could not! not voluntarily, at least. The fatal day came, when, for the first time, my money was wanting. I was as surprised as if this moment never could ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... great tribute; for the plebeian may boast his ancestors but he dare not paint them; and many a pioneer aristocrat hath compassed his undoing because he thus tried to put new wine into old bottles. Wishing to found a family, he proceeds to find one, and ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... underneath, sitting on a tub and cutting up some vegetables. She had her hair bunched up like an onion, a fashion which, as we all know, appealed to the Dutch in the seventeenth century, or at any rate to the plebeian Dutch. I must also tell you the name of this squire before I go any further: his name was Hammer—Paul ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... stood. The bishops took seats, and for a while no word was said, for it was their prerogative to speak first, and they were so astonished to see what a child it was that was making such a noise in the world and degrading personages of their dignity to the base function of ambassadors to her in her plebeian tavern, that they could not find any words to say at first. Then presently their spokesman told Joan they were aware that she had a message for the King, wherefore she was now commanded to put it into words, briefly and without waste of time ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of Coriolanus is one of the most amusing of our author's performances. The old man's merriment in Menenius; the lofty lady's dignity in Volumnia; the bridal modesty in Virgilia; the patrician and military haughtiness in Coriolanus; the plebeian malignity and tribunitian insolence in Brutus and Sicinius, make a very pleasing and interesting variety: and the various revolutions of the hero's fortune fill the mind with anxious curiosity. There is, ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... knows that they were expiated truly!" croaked an old woman from a booth by the road. "Who does not know that, as Varro says, your patrician magistrates would rather lose a battle than that a plebeian consul should triumph! Varbo, the butcher, dreamed last night that his son's blood was drenching his bed, and when he awoke, it was water from the roof; and Arates, the Greek soothsayer, says that Varbo's son has been slain in the water, ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... months elapsed before we were married. I had all the foolish vanity of a young woman, unused to the world, who was entitled to call herself a Princess, and it seemed to my flighty mind that the fact of my son bearing a different name to my own would always advertise my plebeian origin; for I was quite a woman of the people, the daughter of a storekeeper in Pueblo. I cast aside my old and tried acquaintances, placed my affairs in trustworthy hands, and, when we set up an establishment in Paris, my infant son came to be known as a Prince ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... which Collins escaped—yet both committed the same offence. In later times Gibbon traced the rise of Christianity, and about the same time Paine accomplished another portion of the same risk—and the Government which prosecuted the plebeian, flattered the patrician. But Collins's time was rapidly drawing nigh. On the 13th of December, 1729, he expired, aged fifty-three years; and to show the esteem in which his character was held, the following notice was inserted in the newspapers ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... And what renders them more deserving of admiration than Alexander, or any king, is, that some of these acted in the office of dictator, which lasted only ten, or it might be twenty days, none, in a charge of longer duration than the consulship of a year; their levies obstructed by plebeian tribunes; often late in taking the field; recalled, before the time, on account of elections; amidst the very busiest efforts of the campaign, their year of office expired; sometimes the rashness, sometimes the perverseness ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... sufficient misery to know that any one should have conceived, far less passed through; and yet with that stamp of truth which takes precedence in the human heart before actual experience. The flippant, fifth-rate, plebeian actress has vanished, and only a noble, high-souled woman, bound to us by the reality of her sorrow, and yet raised above us by the strength of her will, stands in actual life before us. If this be Jane Eyre, the author has done her ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... of human development. There is a common though wholly unfounded belief knocking about the world, that the aristocrat is better in intelligence, in culture, in arts, in manners, than the ordinary plebeian. The fact is, being, like all barbarians, a boastful creature, he has gone on so long asserting his own profound superiority by birth to the world around him—a superiority as of fine porcelain to common clay—that the world ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... At this Madame Loiseau's plebeian tendencies got the better of her. "But surely we are not going to sit down calmly here and die of old age! As that is her trade, I don't see that she has any right to refuse one man more than another. Why, she took anybody she ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... true believers that "the spirits were out of temper about something." Said —— had a great party on Sunday, when it was rumoured "a count was going to raise the dead." I stayed till the ghostly hour, but the rumour was unfounded, for neither count nor plebeian came up to the spiritual scratch. It is really inexplicable to me that a man of his calibre can be run away with by ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... modelled with the highest care and most artistic finish. The form of the image, in fact, generally resembles more the beautiful green beetle which I have often caught in the mountains around Rome, than his plebeian and utilitarian cousin, the Scarabaeus pilularius. The contour of the stone beneath the Scarabaeus proper is markedly distinguished from the insect portion, and ornamented with a relieved cornice, more or less ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... Romulus, and the Vestal virgins loaded themselves with the sacred things, that they might secure those hallowed treasures from profanation. "They were proceeding" (says Livy lib. V, c. XXII) "along the way which passes over the Sublician bridge, when they were met on the declivity by L. Albinus a plebeian, who was fleeing with his wife and children in a plaustrum or cart: he and his family immediately alighted: then placing in the cart the virgins and sacred things he accompanied them to Caere where they were received with ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... pipe has followed triumphantly in their wake; but the last ditch of the old prejudice has been found in the convention, which, in certain places and at certain times, admits the cigar and cigarette of fashionable origin, but bars the entry of the plebeian pipe—the pipe which for two centuries was practically the only mode ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... see the Barrymores through. There was a train, to be sure, that passed through Lund in the middle of the night; but that was the De Luxe, standard and drawing-room sleepers, and disdained stopping to pick up plebeian local passengers. ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... usual, bore an important part. Addison, in one of his latest political and literary efforts, defended the proposed change. He described his pamphlet as the work of an "Old Whig." It was written as a reply to a pamphlet by Steele condemning the Bill, and signed "A Plebeian." Reply, retort, and rejoinder followed in more and more heated and personal style. The excitement created caused the measure to be dropped for the session, but it was brought in again in the session following, and it passed through all its stages in the Lords ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... only a little less than his plebeian name, which she had not succeeded in persuading him to change, because, forsooth, there had been Dubbins in Mark Lane for many generations. All previous Dubbins had lived over their warehouses and offices; but her ladyship had brought Thomas Dubbin from Mark Lane to my Lord Bedford's Piazza ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... there were some men and women who out of wide knowledge or a natural justice recognized and loved the people of the whole land. But too frequently, in those days, the Southerner saw in the North only a mass of plebeian laborers excited by political and religious fanaticism; while the Northerner looked south to a group of tyrannical and arrogant slaveholders lording it over their victims. To the one, the typical figure of the North ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... towards purple-black heartseases, and thin-filmed silvery pods of honesty; tall white lilies mingled with the blossoms of currant bushes, and at their feet the narcissi of old classic legend pressed their warm-hearted paleness into the plebeian thicket of the many-striped gardener's garters. It was a lovely type of a commonwealth indeed, of the garden and kingdom of God. His whole mind was flooded with a sense of sunny wealth. The farmer's neglected garden blossomed into higher glory in ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... harp. M.C.O.' I arrived at New Burlington street without my harp and with a beating heart, and I heard the high-sounding titles of princes and ambassadors and dukes and duchesses announced long before my poor plebeian name puzzled the porter and was bandied from footman to footman. As I ascended the marble stairs with their gilt balustrade, I was agitated by emotions similar to those which drew from a frightened countryman his frank ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... that the Venetian girl has done the deed," said Manutoli, whose opinion was no doubt in some degree warped by his desire that the criminal should turn out to be a foreign plebeian rather than a Ravenna noble. "After all Leandro is not the man to do such a deed. He is such a poor creature. Besides, it seems to me that the girl's motive for hate was the stronger. I don't know that wounded vanity has had many such crimes to answer for, whereas jealousy—and such ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... very ancient and honourable family, which had been allied to the crown; and requesting that, if he could not be favoured with the species of death which in cases of treason distinguishes the nobleman from the plebeian, he might at least, out of consideration for his family, be allowed to suffer in the Tower, rather than at the common place of execution; but this indulgence was refused. From his return to the Tower ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... nobility on every person derived from the common stock. Indeed the difference of conditions, and the contempt with which persons of the lowest rank are treated, are owing merely to the distance from the common root; which makes us forget that the meanest plebeian, when his descent is traced back to the source, is equally noble with those of the most elevated rank ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... the mother of our hero his wife, but he adopted her son as his son and heir—changing, at the same time, the name of the boy. In place of his former plebeian appellation of Ahenobarbus, he gave him now the imposing title of Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus Germanicus. He has since generally been known in history, however, by the ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... a stranger, exclaimed, "Why, certainly," and proceeded to climb up on the car, from whence he cast down with remarkable celerity more than enough chunks to fill their baskets. Then as though not caring to linger any longer amid such plebeian company, he hastened across the network of tracks and was lost ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... principal event of that golden holiday-summer was the falling in love with each other of Everett's sister and Everett's friend. Agnes was the only daughter and special pride of a rich and well-born man. Barclay was of plebeian birth, with nothing in the world to depend on but his own talents, which he had abused, and the before-named patrimony, which was already nearly exhausted. It will at once be seen that there could hardly be a more felicitous conjunction ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... an element in my enjoyment that was yielded neither by the sights, the adventures, nor the chewing-candy. I had a keen feeling for the sociability of the crowd. All plebeian Chelsea was abroad, and a bourgeois population is nowhere unneighborly. Women shapeless with bundles, their hats awry over thin, eager faces, gathered in knots on the edge of the curb, boasting of their ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... of his house turn o'er, And when he shall there written see, That one of his own ancestry Drove the monks forth of Coventry, Bid him his fate explore. Prancing in pride of earthly trust, His charger hurled him to the dust, And, by a base plebeian thrust, He died his band before. God judge 'twixt Marmion and me; He is a chief of high degree, And I a poor recluse; Yet oft, in Holy Writ, we see Even such weak minister as me May the oppressor bruise: For thus, inspired, did Judith slay The mighty in his sin, And Jael thus, and Deborah" - Here ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... in his life he was brought face to face with the tragedy of hopeless ignorance for an inquiring mind, and the shock stunned him, at the moment, past the power of speech. Until knowing Pinetop he had, in the lofty isolation of his class, regarded the plebeian in the light of an alien to the soil, not as a victim to the kindly society in which he himself had moved—a society produced by that free labour which had degraded the white workman to the level of the serf. At ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... The sun-browned rugged plebeian, whose mind, by the influence of an unexampled political change, has been long alienated from all the noble feelings which religion and humanity inspire, is here seen, with his arms rudely folded over his breast, ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... being carried along passively in the whirl of Milly's enterprise and hardly knew what she was about, it was all so unfamiliar; but she kept her mouth shut and her eyes open and was learning all the time. She had already found out that their cake shop was not to be a plebeian provision business, but an affair of fashion and taste—or, as she called it,—for the "swells," and had her first instinctive misgivings on that score. And that ten thousand dollars, which had seemed to her a substantial sum, she saw would look very small indeed by the time the doors ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... we hadn't had those lessons in cooking. I had no idea then that we shouldn't always have servants, and if we'd stayed here, we never should have known anything about housekeeping. And the worst of it is, I like it. I always knew I had plebeian tastes and, now I am used to it, I fairly revel ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... latter case they found the Greek forms ready to their hand, and addressed themselves —as the interest of their subject stretching far beyond the bounds of Latium naturally suggested—primarily to the cultivated foreigner. The former plan was adopted by the plebeian authors, the latter by those of quality; just as in the time of Frederick the Great an aristocratic literature in the French language subsisted side by side with the native German authorship of pastors and professors, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... defendants were accused of this heinous sin; this brilliant passage concluded with a direct allusion to the "very aristocratic trio before him." Mr. Stanley was declared to be no aristocrat; he was pronounced thoroughly plebeian in all his actions and habits. "Like the individual who has now the honour of addressing you, gentlemen, Mr. Stanley is entirely free, in all his habits and opinions, from the hateful stain of aristocracy." He continued, following his client's steps down to the ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... remarked Hough dryly. "Next time you depict a plebeian scene you can remember this ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... Of course we never associated with such characters, and plenty of estimable people besides ourselves frequented Bertrand's. The place was not in bad odor at all, but merely a little miscellaneous, and suited our plebeian fancies all the more on that account. If young fellows want to be really comfortable in life, we thought, and see a little at first hand just what sort of people make up the world, they must not be too particular. So we used ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... began my sister; "'L'honorable A. Declouet'; 'Le comte Louis le Pelletrier de la Houssaye'! Ah!" she cried, throwing the packet upon the table, "the aristocrats! I am frightened, poor little plebeian that ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... inclosure, resting one hand on the cross-bar and waving the other as he spoke. His voice was full of passion, his eyes flashed fire, and his brow was bathed in sweat. There seemed to be some weird power in his words as in those of the prophets of old. The more than plebeian simplicity of his dress still further increased the pride of his gestures and the impressiveness of his voice. The French Revolution has shown since that in the ranks of the people there was no lack of eloquence or of pitiless logic; but what I saw at that moment was so ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... domiciled under the same roof as at Pisa. Indeed, by this time, if one may take Mr Hunt's own account of the matter, they appear to have become pretty well tired of each other. He had found out that a peer is, as a friend, but as a plebeian, and a great poet not always a high-minded man. His Lordship had, on his part, discovered that something more than smartness or ingenuity is necessary to protect patronage from familiarity. Perhaps intimate acquaintance had also tended to enable him to appreciate, ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... twenty-seven thousand livres for which he received lands and castles as security.[609] Fortunately the Royal Council included a number of Jurists and Churchmen who were good business men. One of them, an Angevin, Robert Le Macon, Lord of Treves, of plebeian birth, had entered the Council during the Regency. He was the first among those of lowly origin who served Charles VII so ably that he came to be called The Well Served (Le Bien Servi).[610] Another, the Sire de Gaucourt, had ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... the sunlight on my right. Not far off, to the left, was the Tower of the Capitol. Triumphal arches, the falling walls of many temples, strewed the ground at my feet. I strove, I resolved, to force myself to see the Plebeian multitude and lofty Patrician forms congregated around; and, as the Diorama of ages passed across my subdued fancy, they were replaced by the modern Roman; the Pope, in his white stole, distributing benedictions to the kneeling ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... had become, as it were, a part of the family. This was much honour to the dean, not only as the bishop was his superior in the Church, but was of that part of the bench whose blood is ennobled by a race of ancestors, and to which all wisdom on the plebeian side crouches in ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... his love for her. After he married her, in June 1634, he painted the picture, "Samson's Wedding," "Saskia, dainty and serene, sitting like a princess in a circle of her relatives, he himself appearing as a crude plebeian, whose strange jokes frighten more than they amuse the distinguished company. ... The early years of his marriage were spent in joy and revelry. Surrounded by calculating business men who kept a tight grasp on their money bags, he assumed the role of an artist scattering ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... pawnbrokers' shops of a very superior description. There are grades in pawning as in everything else, and distinctions must be observed even in poverty. The aristocratic Spanish cloak and the plebeian calico shirt, the silver fork and the flat iron, the muslin cravat and the Belcher neckerchief, would but ill assort together; so, the better sort of pawnbroker calls himself a silver-smith, and decorates his shop with handsome trinkets and expensive ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... most able Kabalist of modern times, and it constituted the corner-stone upon which was built his greatness. Someone not familiar with the faith of the plebeian Israelites would suppose that the population of Szybow was a branch of a numerous gloomy sect of Hassid, which puts at the head of all religious and secular learning, the Kabala. No; the inhabitants of Szybow did not consider themselves heretics. On the contrary, they ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... found, in regard to this subject, superstitious terror, blank indifference, positive unbelief. The current fancy was that the souls of the chiefs were led, by a god whose name denotes the "eyeball of the sun," to a life in the heavens, while plebeian souls went down to Akea, a lugubrious underground abode. Some thought spirits were destroyed in this realm of darkness; others, that they were eaten by a stronger race of spirits there; others still, that they survived there, subsisting upon lizards and butterflies.5 What a piteous ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... dost thou shake? Dishonour not the vengeance I designed: A queen, and own a base Plebeian mind! Let it drink deep in thy most vital part; Strike home, and do me reason ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... her earlier career, she now, at least, did not want wealth to back her pretensions. Nevertheless, all the dispensers of fashion concurred in refusing their support to the Honourable Mrs. Avenel. One might suppose it was solely on account of her plebeian husband; but indeed it was not so. Many a woman of high family can marry a low-born man not so presentable as Avenel, and, by the help of his money, get the fine world at her feet. But Mrs. Avenel had not ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... we come nearer our meaning, if we say that in Goethe we discover by far the most striking instance, in our time, of a writer who is, in strict speech, what Philosophy can call a Man. He is neither noble nor plebeian, neither liberal nor servile, nor infidel nor devotee; but the best excellence of all these, joined in pure union; 'a clear and universal Man.' Goethe's poetry is no separate faculty, no mental handicraft; but the voice of the whole harmonious manhood: nay it ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... expected from a court whose deeds are done in the darkness of the recluse courts of the Spanish Inquisition? when that darkness is solemnised by an oath on the Bible? when an oligarchy of epaulets sits upon the bench, and a plebeian top-man, without a jury, stands judicially naked ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... performance, and in the possibility that public and manager were playing at cross- purposes. There we were in the pit, an assemblage of hard-working Yankees of decently moral lives and simple traditions, country-bred many of us and of plebeian stock and training, vulgar enough perhaps, but probably not depraved, and, excepting the first lady's friends, certainly not educated to the critical enjoyment of such spectacles; and there on the stage were those mistaken women, in ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... of the doge, and Filippo Calendaro, a seaman of great repute, were summoned to conference immediately. It was agreed to communicate the design to six other associates; and, during many nights successively, these plebeian assassins arranged with the doge, under the roof of his own palace, the massacre of the entire aristocracy, and the dissolution of the existing government. "It was concerted that sixteen or seventeen ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... sound The cheek-distending oath, not to be praised As ornamental, musical, polite, Like those which modern senators employ, Whose oath is rhetoric, and who swear for fame. Behold the schools in which plebeian minds, Once simple, are initiated in arts Which some may practise with politer grace, But none with readier skill! 'Tis here they learn The road that leads from competence and peace To indigence and rapine; till at last Society, grown weary of the load, Shakes her encumbered lap, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... had never been known as a defaulter. The knowing ones declared this man worthy to rank high amongst the best of them; but no one knew where he lived, or what he was. He was rarely known to miss a race; and he was conspicuous amongst the crowd in those mysterious purlieus where the plebeian bookmen, who are unworthy to enter the sacred precincts of Tattersall's, mostly do congregate, in utter defiance of the police. No one had ever heard the name of this man; but in default of any more particular cognomen, they had ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... seeing their elders, equally with themselves, in the power of the elephant. Milo being of the number, and in his foolish exhilaration and sportive approbation of Sapor's feats having gone up to him and patted him on his side, the beast, receiving as an affront that plebeian salutation, quickly turned upon him, and taking him by one of his feet, held him in that displeasing manner—-his head hanging down—and paraded leisurely round the green, Milo making the while hideous outcry, and the whole company, especially the slaves and menials, filling the air with screams ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... carried off in such a way! Never had he read anywhere of so ridiculously slow and tame a proceeding. And on an ox-cart! However, times had changed, and he realized that until he had established the new era of knight-errantry, the most plebeian ways of being captured by enchantment would have to serve. Yet, he did not consider it beneath his dignity to ask Sancho what he ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... disappear, and two-story brick with a cast-iron fence in front of it take its place; we should have seen a three-globed gas-chandelier grow down from the parlor ceiling; we should have seen the homely rag carpet turn to noble Brussels, a dollar and a half a yard; we should have seen the plebeian fireplace vanish away and a recherche, big base-burner with isinglass windows take position and spread awe around. And we should have seen other things, too; among them the buggy, the lap-robe, the stove-pipe hat, and ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... on a knoll, as do most gulch cabins, in order that occasional freshets might pass below, and the knoll looked as though it had been clipped with a pair of scissors. Not a crooked little juniper bush was allowed to intrude its plebeian sprawl among the dignified pines and the gracefully infrequent bushes. In front of the cabin itself was a "rockery" of pink quartz, on which were piled elk antlers. The building was L-shaped, of two low stories, had a veranda with a railing, and possessed various ornamental wood edgings, all ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... however, at an implied comparison between himself and the plebeian Marquis de Vandriere. He replied, with ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... seen in his tent at midnight, on his knees before a crucifix with eyes and hands uplifted. He ate no meat in Lent, and used extraordinary diligence to discover and to punish any man, whether courtier or plebeian, who failed to fast during the whole forty days. He was too good a politician not to know the value of broad phylacteries and long prayers. He was too nice an observer of human nature not to know how easily mint ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... been environed by very plebeian surroundings. Being ignorant of her birth-right, her sympathies were wholly with her associates. Not that as yet they had had any occasion for active development; only the tendencies were there. In a vague, indefinite way she had heard of kings and queens, of lords and ladies, grand personages, ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... the future of England. In days gone by, our very Snob bore testimony after his fashion to our scorn of meanness; he at all events imagined himself to be imitating those who were incapable of a sordid transaction, of a plebeian compliance. But the Snob, one notes, is in the way of degeneracy; he has new exemplars; he speaks a ruder language. Him, be sure, in one form or another, we shall have always with us, and to observe his habits ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... advance a reconnoissance. Feline artifice was in every line and motion. A ray of misty moonlight lay athwart the entrance to the garden. The gate was propped open. As the cat crossed it, we recognized a wily and wicked old Tom from the stable, a disreputable plebeian prowler, never tolerated in the house grounds. I hardly smothered an ejaculation as dainty Preciosa glided into the illuminated area and took part in the furtive inspection of the preparations made for the reception of last night's marauders. A third, and yet a fourth, miscreant ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... second centuries of the Christian era], from which Roman pride shrank contemptuously, but, by industry, shrewdness, and speculative daring, they are becoming great capitalists and landowners on a senatorial scale."[787] "The plebeian, saturated with Roman prejudice, looking for support to the granaries of the state or the dole of the wealthy patron, turned with disdain from the occupations which are in our days thought innocent, if not honorable."[788] "After all reservations, the ascent of the ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... had noticed that Rodney Prescott listened with marked attention to the captain's cousin, a Virginia lady, as she advanced a theory that Jeannette had negro blood in her veins. 'Those quadroon girls often have a certain kind of plebeian beauty like this pet of yours, Mrs. Corlyne,' she said, with a slight sniff of her high-bred, pointed nose. In vain I exclaimed, in vain I argued; the garrison ladies were all against me, and, in their presence, not a man dared ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... enlarging—Quintus finds his pleasure. A few are Jews from the ghetto beyond the Tiber, till the persecution of Claudius drives them forth. More are of the varied nationalities met in that commercial and luxurious center. Most are of plebeian blood. There are smiths and mechanics; there are stone cutters, workers in mosaics, and decorators. There are slaves from the very palace of Tiberius. There is Amon from Egypt, who sells his jewelry down in the Nova Via. There is Polemon, ...
— An Easter Disciple • Arthur Benton Sanford
... published by a French traveller, his bird's-eye view of the country as he went through Kent just after landing would make you think the place a desert; he seems to have thought the hedges a sign of agricultural decay. The same foreigner will discover a plebeian character in the Commons and an aristocratic one in the House of Lords, though he shall have heard but four speeches in each, and though every one of the eight speeches shall have been delivered by members of one family ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... from the same source as the exaggerated statement of Archbishop Des Ursins, that on another occasion Henry promised that his plebeian soldiers should be ennobled and invested with collars of SS. This cannot be taken directly from Des Ursins, whose history of the reign of Charles VI., though written in the fifteenth century, ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... the temple of patrician, and that of plebeian modesty. At the foot of this hill is seen the temple of Vesta, which yet remains whole, though it has been often menaced by the inundations of the Tiber. Not far from thence is the ruin of a prison for debt, where it is said a fine trait of filial piety was ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... love, he packed up his money in what were, though he knew it not, rouleaux, but to his plebeian eyes looked more like golden sausages: and he would take it to the bank, and they should bow to him, and Sir him, and give him forthwith more than he had brought; and if those summary gains were middling great—say twice as much, to be moderate—he thought he might afford himself a chaise ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Film Plot," which appeared in a recent issue of Punch, has quoted an "authority" (anonymous) for the approval of his scenario. It is quite evident that this "authority" (so-styled) must belong to the plebeian ranks of the film-world. It cannot ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... Tunis, of my two palaces at the Bardo, of my vessels in the harbour of La Goulette, of my diamonds, of my precious stones, which are worth certainly more than the double. And you know," he added, with his kindly smile and in his hoarse, plebeian voice, "when that is done there will ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... road; and away beyond to the left, through an opening in the hills, can be seen, as through a window, the placid waters of the bay, over whose glittering, sunlit surface white-winged, aristocratic yachts and the plebeian smacks of Greek and Italian fishermen swiftly glide, and fairly vie with each other in giving the finishing touches ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... with love, and wounded to the core by hatred. He responds to praise, but is depressed by sneers to a degree which the ordinary man is unable to comprehend. Thus his daily life is pierced with a thousand exquisite emotions to which your well-fed plebeian is stranger indeed. He lives on more exalted heights and yet sinks to inconceivably greater depths. Life truly consists more in our wealth of impression than in the length of our days, and therefore the artist lives at greater intensity, and consequently ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... noiselessly opened, and a tall, powerful young man appeared. He was dressed in a common gray blouse and velvet cap, but his carefully arranged hair, beard and mustache, all of the richest and glossiest black, ill accorded with his plebeian attire. After casting a rapid glance around him, in order to assure himself that he was unobserved, he entered by the small gate, and, carefully closing and securing it after him, proceeded with a hurried ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... it may, the Athenian people not only interpreted and applied its own laws, but it insisted on being paid for so doing. The result was that the poorest citizens sat judging all day long, as all others were unwilling to sacrifice their whole time for a payment of six drachmas. This plebeian tribunal continued for many years. Its most celebrated feat was the judgment which condemned Socrates to death. This was perhaps matter for regret, but the great principle, the sovereignty ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... Illustre Docteur Matheus, by Erckmann-Chatrian. How very boorish! There are two nuts, who have very plebeian souls. ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... proposed to lend him Frank while a certain other animal was put in training for the difficult office he required of a horse. One of the men was sent for Frank, and in the mean time my friend was shown some gaunt and graceful thoroughbreds, and taught to see the difference between them and the plebeian horse. But Frank, though no thoroughbred, eclipsed these patricians when he came. He had a little head, and a neck gallantly arched; he was black and plump and smooth, and though he carried himself with a petted air, and was a dandy to the ...
— Buying a Horse • William Dean Howells
... history of nations and individuals was once the most trivial, and vice versa. The plebeian, who is called to-day the man-in-the-street, can never see and understand the significance of the hidden seed of things, which in time must develop or die. A garter dropt in the ballroom of Royalty gives birth to an Order of Knighthood; ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... Krishna and R[a]ma as still further types of the All-god. Thus it is that Vishnuism, whether as Krishnaism or as Ramaism, is to-day a pantheistic religion. But, while R[a]ma is the god of the philosophical sects, and, therefore, is almost entirely a pantheistic god; Krishna, who was always a plebeian, is continually reverting, so to speak, to himself; that is to say, he is more affected by the vulgar, and as the vulgar are more prone, by whatever sectarian name they call themselves, to worship one idol, ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... about them, is unbounded, and they put him down (why, it is difficult to say) as the aristocratic, and therefore impartial champion of Demus. Whenever we fell into the bilious moods to which our plebeian nature is addicted, we were gravely admonished of his bright example, and assured that to speak evil of the Republic was the infirmity of vulgar minds. There is, it would appear, a sympathy betwixt "great ones;" a kind of free-masonry betwixt the sovereign ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... gorgeously embroidered gloves, were all deemed necessary to the official state of men assuming the reins of power, and were readily allowed to individuals dignified by rank or wealth, even while sumptuary laws forbade these and similar extravagances to the plebeian order. In the array of funerals, too—whether for the apparel of the dead body, or to typify, by manifold emblematic devices of sable cloth and snowy lawn, the sorrow of the survivors—there was a frequent and characteristic ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... not the courage to imitate Luther. He has told us that he wanted courage; he again repeats it: he says that he, a plebeian, trifling as a man, and having but little learning, has nothing in him which could deserve celebrity. And yet he essayed a timid protest in favor of certain Huguenots who had been burned on the public square. "The work," says Prince Masson, "of a double-faced writer, a Catholic in his writings ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... that's speckled Like a common milking-maid's, Whom the sun hath freckled. Then the Wild-Rose is a flirt; And the trillium Lily, In her spotless gown, 's a prude, Sanctified and silly. By her cap the Columbine, To my mind, 's too merry; Gossips, I would sooner wed Some plebeian Berry. And the shy Anemone— Well, her face shows sorrow; Pale, goodsooth! alive to-day, Dead and gone to-morrow. Then that bold-eyed, buxom wench, Big and blond and lazy,— She's been chosen overmuch!— Sirs, I mean the Daisy. Pleasant ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... reached the age when the financial phase of the question was appreciated, and his prejudice was not unnatural, for unconsciously, especially at first, Mr. Hearn had treated them all as inferiors. He now was learning to know them better, however. There was nothing plebeian in Adah's beauty, and he would have been untrue to himself had he not ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... common people I mean are not only to be found low down in the social scale; they crawl and swarm all around us—even in the highest social positions. You have only to look at your own fine, distinguished Mayor! My brother Peter is every bit as plebeian as anyone that walks in ...
— An Enemy of the People • Henrik Ibsen
... enters, is such a courtly seigneur that he seems to bring the eighteenth century with him; you feel that his sedan chair is at the door. He stoops over MAGGIE's plebeian hand.] ...
— What Every Woman Knows • James M. Barrie
... she seemed contented as long as I remained with her. There was plenty of milk and cream, and she caught a great many mice. She was far too dainty to eat them, but she had an inherent pleasure in catching mice, just like her more plebeian sisters; and she enjoyed presenting them to Mr. McGinty or me, or some other ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... petticoat with big feet showing underneath, sitting on a tub and cutting up some vegetables. She had her hair bunched up like an onion, a fashion which, as we all know, appealed to the Dutch in the seventeenth century, or at any rate to the plebeian Dutch. I must also tell you the name of this squire before I go any further: his name was ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... the Lord Mayor of Dublin, a Baronet, and a Knight. It appears that the members are mostly men of the middle classes, who labor in some profession or trade for a living. Only two men with titles are on the list. The plebeian calling and humble origin of so many of the new Irish members has thrown the English aristocrats into a frightful state of mind, and the landed gentry who are to be rubbed against by these mudsills in St. Stephen's have lashed themselves into a fury upon the subject. To ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... so great and good! Hail, ye plebeian underwood! Where the poetic birds rejoice, And for their quiet nests and plenteous food Pay with their ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... was perhaps the Count of Narbonne, knight of honor of one of the daughters of Louis XV., Minister of War under Louis XVI. The most rigid, the most precise etiquette prevailed in the Imperial residences. The high dignitaries and marshals concealed their plebeian names under pompous titles of princes and dukes. Madame de Mailly, the widow of a marshal of the royal period, had been admitted to the rank and privileges of the wives of the grand officers of the crown, and had figured as a marshal's widow, at the reception of January ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... For the Avenue as the expression of the city's wealth and magnificence and aristocracy the late O. Henry had little love. The glitter and pomp and pageantry were not for "the likes of him." He preferred the more plebeian trails, the department-store infested thoroughfare to the west, with the clattering "El" road overhead; or Fourth Avenue to the east, beginning at the statue of "George the Veracious," running between the silent and terrible mountains, ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... old aristocrat with a taking drawl, a drawl that was high-bred and patrician, not rustic and plebeian, which her famous son inherited. All the women of that ilk were gentlewomen. The literary and artistic instinct which attained its fruition in him had percolated through the veins of a long line of silent singers, of poets and painters, unborn to ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... wheeling through the air on the approach of a storm, and exhibits unmistakable signs of exultation when it is going to thunder. It is not a bird of song, but is unsurpassed as a screamer. To the common Kite, a plebeian member of the genus, has been ascribed an attribute which in fact belongs exclusively to this Banner species. The Kite, according to Dr. FRANKLIN, draws the lightning from the clouds, but this, in reality, is the proud prerogative of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... What conglomerate plebeian speech of our time could utter the stately grandeur of these Lucretian words, every one of which is noble, and ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... doubt, was the unwitting cause of much unhappiness to many a young lady in her teens. Hook pere was an organist at Norwich. He came up to town, and was engaged at Marylebone Gardens and at Vauxhall; so that Theodore had no excuse for being of decidedly plebeian origin, and, Tory as he was, he was not fool enough to aspire ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... own part I think a little warm drink before going to bed upon a night when owls hoot and chimnies are to be blown down, prepared by the small hands that one loves, and that all admire; where a dimple takes place of what in a plebeian hand is a knuckle, and the round fingers taper gently off toward points that are touched with damask and bordered with little rims of ivory; where bright eyes beam with kindness as well as wit; and words fall in silvery tones from a beautifully-formed mouth, like the renewal of life upon the soul ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... later, gives four points of departure from the Cambridge polity by the Reforming Synod. First, occasional officiations of ministers outside their own churches were authorized; secondly, there was a movement to revive the authority and office of ruling elder and other officers; thirdly, "plebeian ordination," or lay ordination, ordination by the hands of the brethren of the church in the absence of superior officers, was no longer allowed;[d] and fourthly, there was a variation from the "personal and public confession" in favor of a private examination by the pastor of ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... the dust of the Churchyard into the Church, and the man sweeps out the dust of the Church into the Churchyard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again and to pronounce, This is the Patrician, this is the noble flowre [flour], this the yeomanly, this the Plebeian bran? So is the death of Iesabel (Iesabel was a Queen) expressed. They shall not say This is Iesabel; not only not wonder that it is, nor pity that it should be; but they shall not say, they shall ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... from the rest by the beauty of his face. But even he did not rouse in me the feeling which I should have expected. I do not know his works, and he is a man of no family. Whatever the genius and the merits of a plebeian or a commoner, he could never stir my blood. Besides, this man was obviously so much more taken up with himself than with anybody else, that I could not but think these great brain-workers must look on ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... were driven to extortion. Cities became bankrupt, pledged their revenues, or sold themselves to the highest bidder.[1] Indescribable misery oppressed the poorer classes and the peasants. A series of obscure revolutions in the smaller despotic centers pointed to a vehement plebeian reaction against a state of things that had become unbearable. The lower classes of the burghers rose against the 'popolani grassi,' and a new class of princes emerged at the close of the crisis. Thus the plebs forced the Bentivogli on Bologna and the Medici on Florence, and Baglioni ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... to ameliorate the relations of oppressor and oppressed, and permitted no kindness to exist but in the guise of severity or the tenderness of a good man for his beast; which boasted itself an aristocracy, and was an oligarchy of plebeian ignorance and meanness; which either dulled men's brains or chilled their hearts. In the presence of this system, Harry Dudley lingers long enough to rescue a slave and to die by the furious hand of the master,—a man ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... extensively worn in Southern than in Northern Europe; more, as it is, in Southern England than in Northern Scotland. Hence, although we find many iron skull-caps, like hats, used by the military in the fifteenth century; and although we find traces of hats even in the plebeian costumes of the middle ages—yet we look upon the Spanish and Italian hat of the sixteenth century, as the more immediate origin of its degenerate successor, the actual chapeau. We need not trace ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... country which had produced a Charles Fox, who took at the passing of the Separation Act so opposite a view of human nature. Doubtless, the habitants are precisely, even at this day, as Sir James represented them to be. But it was superlative impudence in a man of plebeian extraction to say that he could not associate with members of Parliament, who followed the occupation of shopkeeping for a living. It surely was enough for Buonaparte to have stigmatized England as a nation of shopkeepers. ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... Gibbon has called attention to the extreme respect paid to long descent in the Roman Empire, and to the strange fact that, in the fourth century, no ingenuity of pedigree makers could deny that all the great families of the Republic were extinct, so that the second-rate plebeian family of the Anicii, whose name did appear in the Fasti, enjoyed a prestige far greater than that of the Howards and Stanleys in this country. Our own peerage consists chiefly of parvenus. Only six of our noble families, it is said, can ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... of than the whole body of those Ixionides—not bad fellows, here and there, he reflected, tolerantly, half laughing at some of their clownish fun. Gower Woodseer and he had not quarrelled? No, they had merely parted at one of the crossways. The plebeian could teach that son of the, genuflexions, Lord Feltre, a lesson in manners. Woodseer was the better comrade and director of routes. Into the forest, up on the heights; and free, not locked; and not parroting day and night, but quick for all that the world has learnt and can tell, though two-thirds ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... painfully wrought bands, and gorgeously embroidered gloves, were all deemed necessary to the official state of men assuming the reins of power; and were readily allowed to individuals dignified by rank or wealth, even while sumptuary laws forbade these and similar extravagances to the plebeian order. In the array of funerals, too,—whether for the apparel of the dead body, or to typify, by manifold emblematic devices of sable cloth and snowy lawn, the sorrow of the survivors,—there was a frequent and characteristic demand for such labor as Hester ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... says in his Federal Government, the citizen "looked down upon the vulgar herd of slaves, the freedmen and unqualified residents, as his own plebeian fathers had been looked down upon by the old Eupatrides in the days of Cleisthenes and Solon." Whatever phase of this Greek society we discuss, we must not forget that there was a large class excluded ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... disclose the true opinion of our hearts, because we think it more advisable to keep the people in outward decency by means of these images. Or if we are less reflective, and ourselves fettered by the bands of authority, then we sink, ourselves, to the true plebeian level, by believing that which, so understood, would be foolish fable; and by finding, in those purely spiritual indications, nothing but the promise of a continuance, to all eternity, of the same miserable existence which we lead ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... no hereditary distinction before he distinguished himself; whilst on the other hand the tramp and the street-walker may have as "royal" blood in their veins as any lineal princely personage. It is records, therefore, that differentiate "civilized" from uncivilized people, blue blood from plebeian; and as we see millions of people living without records to-day in various parts of the world, notwithstanding that for centuries, or even for millenniums, they have been surrounded by or in immediate contact with neighbours ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... Mannering?' echoed the Baronet, considerably shaken in his opinion. 'My good sir,' apart to Glossin, 'the young man with a dreadfully plebeian name and a good deal of modest assurance has nevertheless something of the tone and manners and feeling of a gentleman, of one at least who has lived in good society; they do give commissions very loosely and carelessly and inaccurately in India. I think we had better pause till Colonel ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... it. Try as I may, it is impossible for me to keep it long before my eyes; for that thought is at once obliterated by her beauty, her grace, her virtue, and modesty, which tell me that, beneath that plebeian husk, must be concealed some kernel of extraordinary worth. In short, be it what it may, I love her, and not with that common-place love I have felt for others, but with a passion so pure that it knows no wish beyond that of serving her, and prevailing on her to love me, and return in ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... shame. People boast here of the equality of our institutions, and then try their best to break up the social level. In a genuine Aristocracy, where they have endeavored to preserve a gulf-stream of noble blood in the midst of the plebeian Atlantic, and a man holds his distinction by the color of the bark on his family tree, and the kind of sap that circulates through it, there is no danger of any unpleasant mistakes. The hard palm of Labor may cross the gloved hand of Leisure, ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... was as plebeian as a ripe peach swung in the sun across an old fence, almost and not quite within the grasp of any passer-by. She also inspired appetite, but always somehow escaped plucking and possession. It is doubtful whether anybody ever really tasted her soul—if she had one. Her flavor was that ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... of tying up, never so skilfully set about, there is likewise no possibility of prospering; but the Behemoth-Briareus snaps your cords like green rushes. Tie up? Alas, Messieurs! And then, as for your chivalry rapiers, valour and wager-of-battle, think one moment, how can that answer? The plebeian heart too has red life in it, which changes not to paleness at glance even of you; and 'the six hundred Breton gentlemen assembled in arms, for seventy-two hours, in the Cordeliers' Cloister, at Rennes,'—have to come out again, wiser than they entered. ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... up for the inferiority of his birth on account of the plebeian origin of his mother Tii,* by his marriage with Nofrititi, a princess of the pure solar race.** Tii, long accustomed to the management of affairs, exerted her influence over him even more than she had done over her husband. Without ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... and best families in the country, if there is any connection between good blood and fine features and a noble expression. Oddly enough, his surname was an uncommon and aristocratic one. His wife, on the other hand, although a very good woman as we found, had a distinctly plebeian countenance. One day she informed us that she came of a different and better class than her husband's. She was the daughter of a small tradesman, and had begun life as a lady's-maid: her husband was nothing but a ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... regret to say, is often spoken of as a "profession," and while we may accept the plebeian word "journalism," as describing a daily labor, I sincerely desire to enter a protest against its designation as a profession. It seems entirely proper to me that this word be relegated to the pedagogue, the chiropodist, and the barn-storming actor who so boldly assert ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... were at first only separated into two ranks; the Patrician and Plebeian; but afterwards the Equites or Knights were added; and at a later period, slavery was introduced—making in all, four classes: Patricians, ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... slavery, and since we have found the courage to point our cannon more directly against the heart of that, they may rejoice so far; but do they desire to establish the subordination of any government to the rights of the very meanest of its subjects? Are they in love with our plebeian heresy, that all the magnificent civil machinery of nations is but so much base clay in the hands of the multitude of royal potters? We are now testing the practical possibilities of democratic theories; and there are those who would a thousand times rather see these shattered ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the Opposition, Addison with the Ministers. Steele, in a paper called the Plebeian, vehemently attacked the bill. Sunderland called for help on Addison, and Addison obeyed the call. In a paper called the Old Whig, he answered, and indeed refuted, Steele's arguments. It seems to us that the premises of both the controversialists ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... matter, as in all such matters, we lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus ourselves. This trivial romantic literature is not especially plebeian: it is simply human. The philanthropist can never forget classes and callings. He says, with a modest swagger, 'I have invited twenty-five factory hands to tea.' If he said 'I have invited twenty-five chartered accountants to tea,' everyone would see the humour of so simple ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... memories of the nectar of his fatherland, shall chant in rhyme the virtues of his national drink. Yet though its merit has inspired neither of the sister graces, poetry and song, to strike the lyre in its honor, it has had, none the less, an important mission to perform. To its plebeian sister beer, as a healthful beverage, wine must yield the palm. As a common drink, suited to human nature's daily need, it has never been surpassed. If it has nerved no hand to deeds of daring, or struck the scintillating sparks of genius from the human ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... precedent with the most ingenious rigor; since the exclusion of women from all direct contact with affairs can be made far more perfect in a republic than is possible in a monarchy, where even sex is merged in rank, and the female patrician may have far more power than the male plebeian. But, as matters now stand among us, there is no aristocracy but of sex: all men are born patrician, all women are legally plebeian; all men are equal in having political power, and all women in having none. This is a paradox so evident, and such an anomaly in human progress, that ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... allusion to that peculiar phase of Australian life—nobblerising; but, if I am not mistaken, the impression left on your mind will be that the nobbler is either of aristocratic champagne or plebeian beer. But there are two other liquids—whisky and brandy—which play an important part in nobblerising. The quantity of spirits drunk in Australia is appalling. Whisky is the favourite spirit, then brandy, and rarely Schiedam, schnapps, or gin. And what about drunkenness? Statistically ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... obsolete emotions exposed to the eager ears of twelve perfect strangers. It is customary nowadays for unmarried elder sons of our most aristocratic families to express their appreciation of the qualities of fascinating bachelor girls over the sensible, though plebeian, telephone.} ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... hand holding some object now lost, which was probably a mirror. The left arm is raised, and with the left hand she presses a lotus lily to her breast. The body is easy and well formed, the figure indicates youth, the face is open, smiling, pleasant, and somewhat plebeian. To modify the unwieldy mass of the headdress was beyond the skill of the artist, but the bust is delicately and elegantly modelled, the clinging garment gives discreet emphasis to the shape, and the action of the hand which holds the flower is ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... surrounded him were also of the people. Thus the communication between him and them had been prompt, electric, and, so to speak, on a level. The haughty air of the Flemish hosier, by humiliating the courtiers, had touched in all these plebeian souls that latent sentiment of dignity still vague and indistinct in the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... Across the Chasm, At Anchor, Honored in the Breach, Magnificent Plebeian, A Beautiful ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... in which the population at large have any voice in governing, always has been, and probably always will be divided, the upper and the lower; or, as they were called in those days, the patrician and the plebeian. Sylla was the patrician; the higher and more aristocratic portions of the community were on his side. Marius was the favorite of the plebeian masses. In the contests, however, which they waged with each other, they did not trust to the mere influence of votes. They relied much more upon the soldiers ...
— History of Julius Caesar • Jacob Abbott
... the room, but the universe with a fury of sound. There were times when Gabriella felt that she could stand anything if only her mother would fly into a rage—when she positively envied Florrie Spencer because her plebeian parent scolded her at the top of her voice instead of maintaining a calm and ladylike reticence. But Mrs. Carr was one of those women who never, even in the most trying circumstances, cease to be patient, who never lose for an instant so much as the palest or the thinnest ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... churches and devotional establishments under the ancient dominion of the popes than have been kept intact in subsequent ages; the tower and facade of a church, for instance, form the front of a carpenter's shop, or some such plebeian place. The church where Laura lay has quite disappeared, and her tomb along with it. The town reminds me of Chester, though it does not in the least resemble it, and is not nearly so picturesque. Like Chester, it is entirely surrounded ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... one of the great men; I was a poor plebeian, whose chief misfortune, at that time, consisted in my not having a father or a great-grandfather a better man than myself! His money did the work, and I was bought and beat out of my election, which ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... Raleigh, the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Southampton, the Duke of York, and no end of others with equally sonorous titles. As for mere lords and baronets, and such small deer, there was nothing so plebeian present, and they were evidently looked upon by the distinguished assembly, like small beer in thunder, with pity and contempt. The ladies, too, were all duchesses, marchionesses, countesses, and ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... they kept their word, too. They shot him that same evening, on very little other charge than his own name! If I have retained the old sound of my name, I have given it a more plebeian spelling, which is, perhaps, just as much of an alteration as any man need submit to for a period that will pass away ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... infallibly be lost in allusion and authority; but, in point of fact, the new poets are just as great borrowers as the old; only that, instead of borrowing from the more popular passages of their illustrious predecessors, they have preferred furnishing themselves from vulgar ballads and plebeian nurseries. ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... lead to endless disputes and tumults, and to drive the nobles into dangerous and desperate courses. In instance whereof might be cited the case of Rome itself, wherein the tribunes of the people being vested with this authority, not content to have one consul a plebeian, insisted on having both; and afterwards laid claim to the censorship, the praetorship and all the other magistracies in the city. Nor was this enough for them, but, carried away by the same factious spirit, they began after a time to pay court to such men as they thought able to attack ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... yet sensitive mouth, wore the ordinary dinner clothes of civilisation. The contrast between the two men might indeed have afforded some ground for speculation as to the nature of their intimacy. Furley, a son of the people, had the air of cultivating, even clinging to a certain plebeian strain, never so apparent as when he spoke, or in his gestures. He was a Member of Parliament for a Labour constituency, a shrewd and valuable exponent of the gospel of the working man. What he lacked in the higher qualities ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... readiness and vivacity of mind; a circumstance which determined his father to breed him up to the "magistracy," as it was termed in France—a profession midway, as it were, between the career of arms peculiar to the noble, and the labours of the bar confined to persons of plebeian origin, and from which many of the greatest men, and nearly all the distinguished statesmen of France took their rise. Montesquieu entered with the characteristic ardour of his disposition into the studies suited for that destination; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... Albemarle or Carteret and the Charleston set, the former being from Virginia, while the latter was, as we have seen, a little given to kindergarten aristocracy and ofttimes tripped up on their parade swords while at the plough. Of course outside of this were the plebeian people, or copperas-culottes, who did the work; but Lord Shaftesbury for some time, as we have seen, lived in a baronial shed and had his arms worked on the ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... Pomptine land the matter was pressed by Lucius Sicinius, plebeian tribune, on the people, who now attended in greater numbers, and more readily aroused to the desire of land than they had been. And mention having been introduced in the senate regarding war against the Latins and Hernicians, the matter was deferred in consequence ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... a good sound drubbing from the enraged father, and has been kicked out of the house, and the outraged mamma has locked the young lady in her chamber, and repelled the attempted storming on the part of the desperate lover by the armed domestics of the house, and when plebeian fists have even entertained no shyness of the very finest cloth" (here the canon sighed somewhat), "then this fermented prose of miserable vulgarity must evaporate in order that the pure poetic unhappiness of love may settle as sediment You have been fearfully scolded, my dear ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... him and pointed him out for an example. "I've a new chum, up here," Norris overheard him saying, "a young swell. He's worth any two in the squad." The words fell on the ears of the discarded son like music; and from that moment, he not only found an interest, he took a pride, in his plebeian tasks. ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... shall be set the no less picturesque peasants sowing the seed, whose harvest is at once waving grain and a regenerated Israel. The stains of sordid traffic shall be cleansed by the dews and the rains. In the Jewish peasant behold the ideal plebeian of the future; a son of the soil, yet also a son of the spirit. And what fair floriage of art and literature may not the world gain from this great purified nation, carrying in its bosom ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of those two silly children until I heard of it from their grandfather's lips; nor could have believed he would sanction such folly. They ought to make Elsie stay where she is, and if young Leland dies it will but rid the family of a prospective plebeian alliance." ...
— Grandmother Elsie • Martha Finley
... country he is regarded as plebeian, just a common cur, he is by no means a mongrel. That he is of ancient lineage is proved by the fact that he always breeds true to type. He yields to the Pekinese Spaniel the claim to be the Royal dog of China, yet his ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... immediately in the Retinospora Precipera Aurea of '80, yet the rival 'nymphs with golden hair' were both soon forced to forsake their withered tenements; Mr. Hunnewell's exotics, after another trial or two, being succeeded by plebeian hemlocks." ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... Driffield, when the moment at last arrived for showing the guests to their rooms, had passed off safely, Lucy throwing out an agitated 'Thank you!' when Lady Driffield had even gone so far as to open a door with her own bediamonded hand, which had Mrs. Grieve's plebeian appellations written in full upon the card attached ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... known that Lady Macbeth was the personification of crime, it would still have seemed to him a profanation to bring her into contact with the plebeian commonness ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... in his hatred of Clay. In proportion as Clay rose in the estimation of his countrymen, did Randolph's hate increase. Clay sprang from the plebeian stock of his native Virginia. He had come as the representative of the rustics of Kentucky. He was not sanctified by a college diploma. He boasted no long line of ancestry, and yet he had met, and triumphed over, the scions of a boasted line—had bearded the aristocrat ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... a rough sketch of one or two of those people whom you see every day, and call "dregs," sometimes,—a dull, plain bit of prose, such as you might pick for yourself out of any of these warehouses or back-streets. I expect you to call it stale and plebeian, for I know the glimpses of life it pleases you best to find; idyls delicately tinted; passion-veined hearts, cut bare for curious eyes; prophetic utterances, concrete and clear; or some word of pathos or fun from the old friends who have endenizened themselves ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... are two remedies, and only two, available; failing one of these, something must, soon or later, give way with a crash. Either the anachronistic tradition must make suicidal concessions, or the better-class people must drown all plebeian Australian males in infancy, and fill the vacancy ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... pronounce before them all, that Marcius was condemned to die by the tribunes of the people, and bid the Aediles take him to the Tarpeian rock, and without delay throw him headlong from the precipice. When they, however, in compliance with the order, came to seize upon his body, many, even of the plebeian party, felt it to be a horrible and extravagant act; the patricians, meantime, wholly beside themselves with distress and horror, hurried with cries to the rescue; and persuaded them not to despatch him by any sudden violence, but refer the cause to the general suffrage of the people. But when ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... stockholders could be made out, during which time the public impatience rose to a pitch of frenzy. Dukes, marquises, counts, with their duchesses, marchionesses, and countesses, waited in the streets for hours every day before Mr. Law's door to know the result. At last, to avoid the jostling of the plebeian crowd, which, to the number of thousands, filled the whole thoroughfare, they took apartments in the adjoining houses, that they might be continually near the temple whence the new Plutus was diffusing wealth. Every day the value of the old shares increased, and the fresh ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... exclaimed, "Why, certainly," and proceeded to climb up on the car, from whence he cast down with remarkable celerity more than enough chunks to fill their baskets. Then as though not caring to linger any longer amid such plebeian company, he hastened across the network of tracks and was lost ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... amiable nobleman for not writing a book about them, is unbounded, and they put him down (why, it is difficult to say) as the aristocratic, and therefore impartial champion of Demus. Whenever we fell into the bilious moods to which our plebeian nature is addicted, we were gravely admonished of his bright example, and assured that to speak evil of the Republic was the infirmity of vulgar minds. There is, it would appear, a sympathy betwixt ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... de Blanc!'" began my sister; "'L'honorable A. Declouet'; 'Le comte Louis le Pelletrier de la Houssaye'! Ah!" she cried, throwing the packet upon the table, "the aristocrats! I am frightened, poor little plebeian that ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... Varchi, 'the Duke had taken such familiarity with Lorenzo, that, not content with making use of him as a ruffian in his dealings with women, whether religious or secular, maidens or wives or widows, noble or plebeian, young or elderly, as it might happen, he applied to him to procure for his pleasure a half-sister of Lorenzo's own mother, a young lady of marvellous beauty, but not less chaste than beautiful, who was the wife of Lionardo Ginori, and lived not far ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the mind sets flesh and blood and life again on all that dead osseous framework, fills the circus with the 90,000 spectators which it could hold, marshals the games and the combats of the arena, gathers a whole civilisation together, from the emperor and the dignitaries to the surging plebeian sea, all aglow with the agitation and brilliancy of an impassioned people, assembled under the ruddy reflection of the giant purple velum. And then, yet further, on the horizon, were other cyclopean ruins, the baths of Caracalla, standing there like relics ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... spirits were John van der Dors, the commander, better known by his Latinized name of Dousa; and Peter van der Werf, the burgomaster. Plebeian names these, but loftier natures never possessed the hearts of kings or nobles! Beside their deeds, the chivalry of knighthood looks trivial and mean. Under the management of these two men every precaution was adopted for the defense ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... prerogatives in order to marry a physician of the name of Dr. Willim, who had attended her father in his last illness. She could not, however, bring herself to descend to the social level of her husband, who is of plebeian origin, and a mere commoner, but thought that she had done enough in that direction when she contented herself with the name and title of Baroness Kirchbach, which she now bears. Of late years she has become a convert to socialism, much to the dismay ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... striving, are offered as valuable wares, if man has once begun to break the bond between himself and his living Creator and Master. For this reason, not only the anti-teleological monists meet the fate of Nihilism, whether they appear in the plebeian roughness of Buechner or in the aristocratic gentility of Strauss, but also such a brilliant advocate of teleology as Eduard von Hartmann does not know of any other final end to offer to the world and mankind ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... in presidential awe, To give the song-smit generation law; Who wield Apollo's delegated rod, And shake Parnassus with your sovereign nod; A pensive Pilgrim, worn with base turmoils, Plebeian cares, and mercenary toils, Implores your pity, while with footsteps rude, He dares within the mountain's pale intrude; For, oh! enchantment through its empire dwells. And rules the spirit with Lethean spells; By hands unseen aerial harps are hung, And Spring, like Hebe, ever fair and ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... knocking; she took tea in bed in the morning, and tea in the afternoon in the drawing-room. She would have instituted dinner at seven, but she was a wise woman, and realized that too much tyranny often means revolution and the crumbling of-thrones; therefore the ancient plebeian custom of high tea at six was ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... loaded themselves with the sacred things, that they might secure those hallowed treasures from profanation. "They were proceeding" (says Livy lib. V, c. XXII) "along the way which passes over the Sublician bridge, when they were met on the declivity by L. Albinus a plebeian, who was fleeing with his wife and children in a plaustrum or cart: he and his family immediately alighted: then placing in the cart the virgins and sacred things he accompanied them to Caere where they were ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... the three last chapters, or the three last lines, or the three last words, just before death, with pure mind, his soul will be saved." "Deo gratias ago," said Sechnall. Colman Ela recited it in his refectory thrice. Patrick stood in the middle of the house, when a certain plebeian asked, "Have we no other prayer that we could recite except this?" And Patrick went out afterwards. Cainnech, on the sea, in the south, saw the black cloud of devils passing over him. "Come here on your way," said Cainnech. The demons ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... he would not consent to be a good boy. This would be quicker and better than summoning an officer. But the manager got the big stone in the pit of his stomach just as he had raised his hand to beckon, and he and his dignity collapsed together, with a most plebeian grunt. As he had not closed the door, he quickly rolled inside, where he lay on the floor with his hands on his stomach and listened to the joyous yelps of the crowd outside. This was too much ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... These are plebeian models, but sometimes artists' friends recommend amateur models—a broken-down gentleman or some other poor relation—and when you are drawing social modern subjects, of course these are really of more use than the ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... much," echoed Gwenda. Will was in danger of losing his head as well as his heart. To have his name (from which, by the by, he had dropped the plebeian "s") bracketed with Miss Gwenda Vaughan's was a state of things which, though occasioned only by a simple coincidence, elated him beyond measure. He had indeed, he thought, stepped out of the old order of things and made his way into a higher grade of life by an easy bound. He was ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... return from exile, and certainly before Mme de Sable's retreat to Port Royal in 1659. It is very noticeable in La Rochefoucauld's letters to Esprit—most of which belong to the year 1660—that he treats the academician—who was of plebeian birth and not many months older than himself—with extreme deference. The Duke adopts the style of a pupil to a master, and he submits his sketches or experiments in maxim-making to Esprit for a severe criticism, which he accepts, and for advice, which he adopts. The probability seems to be that ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... among South Americans of his class. Though on the present voyage sailing from Buenos Ayres, he had avowed himself a native and resident of Chili, whose inhabitants had not so generally adopted the plain coat and once plebeian pantaloons; but, with a becoming modification, adhered to their provincial costume, picturesque as any in the world. Still, relatively to the pale history of the voyage, and his own pale face, there seemed something so incongruous in the ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... the energy and business skill which characterize the French women, they are at least no more indolent and easy-going than their male companions. The women of the nobility are often less educated than their plebeian sisters, and for the most part lead a very narrow and petty existence, which produces little but vanity and selfishness and discontent. There are exceptions, however, and here and there may be seen a gentlewoman ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... fishermen, however, got over the difficulty by always calling the father Jemmy and his son Young 'un; but this did not suit Vince and Mike, with whom there had always been a feud, the fisherman's lad having constantly displayed an intense hatred, in his plebeian way, for the young representatives of the patricians on the isle. The manners in which he had shown this, from very early times, were many; and had taken the forms of watching till the companions were below cliffs, and then stealing to the top and dislodging ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... sign of truth and beauty. They proposed to adapt to poetry the ordinary language of conversation, such as is spoken in the middle and lower classes, and to replace studied phrases and a lofty vocabulary by natural tones and plebeian words. In place of the classic mould, they tried stanzas, sonnets, ballads, blank verse, with the roughness and subdivisions of the primitive poets. . . . Some had culled gigantic legends, piled up dreams, ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... immediately took up his residence in the capital. He saw that his son cut a fine figure in the highest circles of society, and expressed his gratification in the most emphatic terms. If he had known, however, that Ralph was in the habit of visiting, with alarming regularity, at the house of a plebeian merchant in a somewhat obscure street, he would, no doubt, have been more chary of his praise. But the Colonel suspected nothing, and it was well for the peace of the family that he did not. It may have been cowardice in Ralph that ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... love Great Britain at all; at least my people do not, and I do not. A common language! It has been made the vehicle of an incessant torrent of abuse and misrepresentation of our men, our manners, and our institutions, and even our women—it might be vulgar to designate our plebeian girls as ladies—have not escaped it; and all this is popular, and ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... afford to pay for swearing as well as e'er a justice in the county, and repeated his challenge of the wager, which our adventurer now accepted, protesting, at the same time, that it was not a step taken from any motive of pride, but entirely with a view to punish an insolent plebeian, who could not otherwise be chastised without a breach of the peace. Twenty guineas being deposited on each side in the hands of Mr. Elmy, Prickle, with equal confidence and despatch, produced a canvas bag, containing two hundred and seventy pounds, which, being spread ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... sorrow; but one could never picture it in a ball-room. It was a face of girlish, saintly purity, of fairest loveliness—a face where innocence, poetry, and passion all seemed to blend in one grand harmony. There was nothing commonplace about it. One could not mistake it for a plebeian face; "patrician" ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... affects one like music; it is melody to the eye as the song is to the ear; it is visible harmony. This bird cannot do an ungraceful thing. It has the bearing of a bird of fine breeding. Its cousin the robin is much more masculine and plebeian, harsher in voice, and ruder in manners. The wood thrush is urban and suggests sylvan halls and courtly companions. Softness, gentleness, composure, characterize every movement. In only a few instances among our birds does ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... death and discussing esthetic canons over a cup of tea in a little chamber nine feet square, there was a radical difference." But it must also have appealed keenly to his fancy that he, a veritable upstart, by birth a plebeian and by habit a soldier, should ultimately set the lead in artistic fashions to the greatest aristocrats in the empire in a ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... a low bush with prickly leaves growing like a juniper. The contrast of its very brilliant yellow pea shaped blossoms with the dark green of its leaves is very beautiful. It grows in hedges and on commons and is thought rather a plebeian affair. I think it would make quite an addition to our garden shrubbery. Possibly it might make as much sensation with us (Americans) as our mullein does ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... God had given a heart to feel and a voice to speak, was to be the teacher to whom men were to listen; and great actions were not to remain the privilege of the families of the Norman nobles, but were to be laid within the reach of the poorest plebeian who had the stuff in him to perform them. Alone, of all the sovereigns in Europe, Elizabeth saw the change which had passed over the world. She saw it, and saw it in faith, and accepted it. The England of the Catholic Hierarchy and the Norman Baron, was to cast its shell and to become the ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... glorious Incarnation of the Son of God, the Signory was composed of fourteen Magistrates chosen from among the hosiers, butchers, locksmiths, shoemakers, and stonemasons, who together formed a Great Council known as the Mount of the Reformers. They were a plebeian band, rough and hard as the bronze She-Wolf, emblem of their city, which they loved with an affection at once filial and formidable. But the People, which had set them up over the Commonwealth, had suffered another body to continue in existence, though subordinate to them, ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... the Cardinal, "of an aged man of no plebeian mien or bearing, albeit most shabbily attired in the skins, now fabulously cheap, of the vermin that torment us; who, professing to practise as an herbalist, some little time ago established himself in an obscure street of no good repute. A tortoise hangs in his needy shop, nor are stuffed alligators ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... he found Desiree standing where he had left her. Glancing at her, he scratched his grey head in a plebeian way, and ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... the Maine settlers in 1634, and proved thoroughly unsuitable and undurable; but probably no china—not even Delft ware—came over on the Mayflower. For when the Pilgrims made their night trip through the Delft-producing cities, no such wares were seen on the tables of plebeian persons. Early mentions of china are in the estate of President John Davenport in 1648—"Cheney L5," and of Martha Coteymore ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... policy that the nobility, by degrees, became annihilated, as we now see them. The pen and the robe people, on the other hand, were exalted; so that now things have reached such a pretty pass that the greatest lord is without power, and in a thousand different manners is dependent upon the meanest plebeian. It is in this manner that things hasten from one extreme to ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... survived. The ancient aristocracy retained its dominant position in the state and society, and its mores even penetrated downward. They were not stifled by new southern customs welling up from below, at least not until the plebeian element won the support of the founders of the empire, and finally overwhelmed the nobility. At Rome during the Republic there was no question of social inequality between the sexes, for though in law the patriarchal clan-system, imposed by the exigencies of a migrating group, made the father ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... his thanks. "Before this time to-morrow, the skill of the American doctors, as they will insist upon calling you, will be so magnified, that there is no disease that they will not insist you can cure. Two branches of business are now offered you—that of a professional gentleman, and the more plebeian one of a storekeeper." ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... upon a closer glance unexpected imagination. I once saw him coming through a little pine grove near The Wayside with my father; it was after our return from England. He was so short, sturdy, phlegmatic of exterior, and plebeian, that I was astonished at my father's pleasure in his company, until I noticed a certain gentleness in his manner of stepping, and heard the modulations of his voice, and caught the fragrance of ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... All free citizens, whether patricians or plebeians, were called to defend the State, and were enrolled in the army. The equites, or cavalry, took the precedence in the army, and was composed of the wealthy citizens. There were eighteen centuries of these knights, six patrician and twelve plebeian, all having more than one hundred thousand ases. They were armed with sword, spear, helmet, shield, greaves, and cuirass. The infantry was composed of the classes, variously armed, of which, including equites, there were one hundred and ninety-four centuries, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... kinds and descriptions has come under that little instrument! At its fall the ancestral acres of how many spendthrift heirs have passed away from their families forever into the hands of wealthy plebeian parvenus! By a few strokes Dives's splendid mansion, and Croesus's magnificent country-seat, and Phaeton's famous fast horses become the property of others. At its tap human beings have been sold ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... come the aristocrat," answered Mikhalevich good-humoredly; "but rather thank God that in your veins also there flows simple plebeian blood. But I see you are now in need of some pure, unearthly being, who might rouse you ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... was from early times a plebeian element in the population of the city, though forming at first no part of the political people. Their origin is not very certain, nor their original position in the city. Historians give different ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... majesty, remonstrating, that he was the representative of a very ancient and honourable family, which had been allied to the crown; and requesting that, if he could not be favoured with the species of death which in cases of treason distinguishes the nobleman from the plebeian, he might at least, out of consideration for his family, be allowed to suffer in the Tower, rather than at the common place of execution; but this indulgence was refused. From his return to the Tower to the day of his execution, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... the depths with him when he goes off to swallow the bait. The fishermen understand well the ways of the aristocrat pickerel when he swallows a proletariat minnow. No lordly capitalist ever took in a plebeian inventor with more grace—and finality. Often the flag just drops from the support and lies on the surface of the water while the two get acquainted. The pickerel has the minnow, but his grip is not what he wants. He is particular ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... the Prince of Kingsland—poor little Sybilla Silver! My good Mr. Parmalee, what an absurd idea! You do me proud even to hint that, the blue blood of all the Kingslands could by any chance flow in these plebeian veins! Oh, no, indeed! I am only an upper servant in that great house, and would lose my place within the hour if its lordly master dreamed I was here talking ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... them to the guests, a gate-keeper, a major-domo, a steward (worthy men who spent the rest of the week in semi-independence in their own domains, dined there by themselves like small shopkeepers, and might to-morrow lapse to the plebeian service of some successful doctor or industrial magnate), scrupulous in carrying out to the letter all the instructions that had been heaped upon them before they were allowed to don the brilliant livery ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... either inalienable or innate. The history of mankind shows that it has been constantly alienated from them; and if we pass in review the population of the world, from the oldest to contemporary times, and from savages tribes to the most highly civilized nations, we find the plebeian bowing before the patrician, the poor man serving the wealthy. The conception of human equality before the law is not a congenital endowment, but an accomplishment, arduously acquired and easily forfeited. The first impulse of weakness in the presence of strength is to bow ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... etiquette prescribed a scratch on the door, like that of a pet animal; the knock was too rough and plebeian ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... he wrote for Nicocles, king of Cyprus. Still, from all that appears, the compensation thus received was honorary or gratuitous merely. Among the early institutions of Rome, the relation of patron and client, which existed between the patrician and plebeian, bound the former to render the latter assistance and protection in his lawsuits, with no other return than the general duty, which the client owed to his patron. As every patrician could not be a sufficiently ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... and consul, of plebeian birth, author of several laws intended to minimise the distinction politically between patrician and plebeian, in office ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... well, really now, Katsey Cavanagh is a splendid girl, a fine animal, no doubt of it; all her points are good, but, at the same time, Mr. Burke, a trifle too plebeian ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... expected that," said Mrs. H. B. Donnell, in a tone which implied that gratitude in children was not to be looked for in this degenerate age. "That boy has such plebeian tastes, Miss Shirley. When he was born I wanted to call him St. Clair . . . it sounds SO aristocratic, doesn't it? But his father insisted he should be called Jacob after his uncle. I yielded, because Uncle Jacob was a rich old ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... After this, Mutines and such others as had rendered any services to the Roman people were introduced into the senate, and all received honorary rewards in fulfilment of the consul's engagement. Mutines was also made a Roman citizen, a proposition to that effect having been made to the commons by a plebeian tribune, on the authority of the senate. While these things were going on at Rome, Marcus Valerius Messala, arriving on the coast of Africa before daylight, made a sudden descent on the territory of Utica; and after ravaging ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... was the latter time of the republic, a few years after the fell democratic persecutions of the plebeian Marius had drowned the mighty city oceans-deep in patrician gore; after the awful retribution of the avenger Sylla had rioted in the destruction of ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... yielded. We were standing side by side in the silence of the morning, the dimness fading round us, the air taking a golden tinge. My surroundings were plebeian; my costume was comic; yet I felt ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... was put in training for the difficult office he required of a horse. One of the men was sent for Frank, and in the mean time my friend was shown some gaunt and graceful thoroughbreds, and taught to see the difference between them and the plebeian horse. But Frank, though no thoroughbred, eclipsed these patricians when he came. He had a little head, and a neck gallantly arched; he was black and plump and smooth, and though he carried himself with a petted air, and was a dandy to the tips of his hooves, ...
— Buying a Horse • William Dean Howells
... to the boy. He still sat, rather dazed and white, looking disgustedly at his injured arm. "Say," she began hesitatingly; she wished she knew his name—"say" was so plebeian; "—are you too badly hurt to ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... purple-black heartseases, and thin-filmed silvery pods of honesty; tall white lilies mingled with the blossoms of currant bushes, and at their feet the narcissi of old classic legend pressed their warm-hearted paleness into the plebeian thicket of the many-striped gardener's garters. It was a lovely type of a commonwealth indeed, of the garden and kingdom of God. His whole mind was flooded with a sense of sunny wealth. The farmer's neglected garden blossomed into ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... affectation, nor can it either conceive or bring forth, unless it has been steeped in the vast flood of literature. Every word that is what I would call 'low,' ought to be avoided, and phrases far removed from plebeian usage should be chosen. Let 'Ye rabble rout avaunt,' be your rule. In addition, care should be exercised in preventing the epigrams from standing out from the body of the speech; they should gleam with the brilliancy woven into the fabric. Homer is an example, and the lyric poets, and our Roman ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... considered plebeian; the crease proved that the garment had lain upon a shelf, and hence was "ready-made"; these betraying trousers were called "hand-me-downs," in allusion to the shelf. In the early 'eighties, while bangs and bustles were having their way with women, that variation of dandy known as the "dude" ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... decemvir and patrician in 451 B.C.; outraged Virginia, a beautiful plebeian damsel, whom her father, on discovering of the crime, killed with a knife snatched from a butcher's stall, rousing thereby the popular rage against the decemvir, who was cast into prison, where he put an end ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... heedless young man; "I am one of a profession which the world has never been able to do without, and will far less endure to want for half a century to come; and my good old uncle may tack his good estate and his plebeian name to your apron-string if he pleases, Mary, and you may wed this new favourite of his if you please, and you may both of you live quiet, peaceable, well-regulated lives, if it pleases Heaven. My part is takenI'll fawn on no man for an inheritance which ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... disease with all despatch. That the physicians of Napoleon did otherwise is evidence that at the beginning of the century the disease in question enjoyed a very different status. At that time itch, instead of being a most plebeian malady, was, so to say, a court disease. It enjoyed a circulation, in high circles and in low, that modern therapeutics has quite denied it; and the physicians of the time gave it a fictitious added importance by ascribing to its influence the existence of almost any obscure ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Wilkinson, suavely, rising, nevertheless,—"and yet this is, in the plebeian phrase of the world of trade, my busy day. To be sure I have other occasional days when I handle transactions that run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars; but I don't mind admitting to you that these usually take place in the last ineffable ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... muscular in their strength; it is still stranger, what can have weakened these too delicate Tuscans so. As they are very rich, and might be very happy under the protection of a prince who lets slip no opportunity of preferring his plebeian to his patrician subjects; yet here at Leghorn they have a tender frame and an unhealthy look, occasioned possibly by the stagnant waters, which tender the environs unwholesome enough I believe; and the millions of live creatures ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... that shoot aloft, worked by the gnomes from the mines of the mountains of Taunus; but of the strange inhabitants that from time to time they came upon. They found in one solitary cell, lined with dried moss, two misshapen elves, of a larger size than common, with a plebeian working-day aspect, who were chatting noisily together, and making a pair of boots: these were the Hausmannen or domestic elves, that dance into tradesmen's houses of a night, and play all sorts of undignified tricks. They were very civil ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... see," said Nattie merrily, taking account of stock. "Two pounds of steak—the first cut of the sirloin, I think you said?—waiting, expectant of making glad our hearts, on the rocking-chair, potatoes in plebeian lowliness under the table, tomatoes and two pies on your trunk, Charlotte Russes—delicious Charlotte Russes—where? Ah!—on your bonnet-box, in a plate ordinarily used as a card receiver, and sugar, butter, et cetera, and et cetera lying around almost anywhere, and the figs, oranges and ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... not; and the odium of that circle is the only kind of odium he dreads. Appius Claudius apprehended no odium from his own order—the patrician—from the violation of the daughter of Virginius, of the plebeian order; nor did Sextus Tarquinius of the royal order, apprehend any from the violation of Lucretia, of the patrician order—neither would have been punished by their own order, but they were both punished by the ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... by the side of the burgesses a second community in Rome: out of the clients arose the Plebs. This change of name is significant. In law there was no difference between the client and the plebeian, the "dependent" and the "man of the multitude;" but in fact there was a very important one, for the former term brought into prominence the relation of dependence on a member of the politically privileged class; the latter ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Nothing is known of sacks or bags. To any spectator at Buffalo this becomes immediately a matter of course; but this should be explained, as we in England are not accustomed to see wheat traveling in this open, unguarded, and plebeian manner. Wheat with us is aristocratic, and travels always in ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... so-called polite society, are relegating a great many of our old Anglo-Saxon words into the shade, faithful friends who served their ancestors well. These self-appointed arbiters of diction regard some of the Anglo-Saxon words as too coarse, too plebeian for their aesthetic tastes and refined ears, so they are eliminating them from their vocabulary and replacing them with mongrels of foreign birth and hybrids of unknown origin. For the ordinary people, however, the man in the street or in the field, the woman in the kitchen or ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... quite safe, for Mrs. Groome, when free of social duties, retired on the stroke of nine with a novel, and turned off the gas at ten. She never read the society columns of the newspapers, choked as they were with unfamiliar and plebeian names; and her friends, regarding Alexina's gay disobedience as a palatable joke on "poor old Maria," and sympathetic with youth, would have been ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... creatures, however, and Silvia on rare occasions managed to break parole and make adroit escape from surveillance. Then she would speed to the top of the boundary wall that separated the stable precincts from an alluring alley which was the playground of the plebeian progeny ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... "The English nation have very queer and plebeian ways about them; it's very plebeian to take the least notice of servants, except to ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... Madame Loiseau's plebeian tendencies got the better of her. "But surely we are not going to sit down calmly here and die of old age! As that is her trade, I don't see that she has any right to refuse one man more than another. Why, she ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... enough money now to get Mary and Maud as good husbands as they deserve." And Mary and Maud took the same view. It was in this plebeian household that Rickie spent part of the Christmas vacation. His own home, such as it was, was with the Silts, needy cousins of his father's, and combined to a peculiar degree the restrictions of hospitality ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... the beauty of the prettiest woman in Forstadt." And she added, "The creature's as plebeian as she can be." ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... in this prezioes style is like a person who dresses himself up to avoid being mistaken for or confounded with the mob; a danger which a gentleman, even in his worst clothes, does not run. Hence just as a plebeian is recognised by a certain display in his dress and his tire a quatre epingles, so is an ordinary writer ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... was of yore the head, of the world, there dwelt a young man, Pietro Boccamazza by name, a scion of one of the most illustrious of the Roman houses, who became enamoured of a damsel exceeding fair, and amorous withal—her name Agnolella—the daughter of one Gigliuozzo Saullo, a plebeian, but in high repute among the Romans. Nor, loving thus, did Pietro lack the address to inspire in Agnolella a love as ardent as his own. Wherefore, overmastered by his passion, and minded no longer to endure the sore ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... girl! Don't flatter yourself that either 'Lady Veronica' or 'Lady Marjorie' is a member of the aristocracy," chuckled Bessie Kirk. "They're probably most plebeian and dowdy-looking individuals living in Bloomsbury boarding-houses, with pasty complexions and freckled noses, and they get a percentage on the preparations they recommend. If you notice, they always tell you to use Mrs. ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... me of her? I can't bear it. You know I cannot. You do well to taunt me with the plebeian blood in your veins—you, of all men alive. Oh! why did you ever see this designing girl? Why did she ever ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... of a dun, and proves how handsomely such ugly things can be done when one has to deal with a noble instead of a plebeian creditor. ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... spread along the gangway, and thence down my lecture-room to the door of the Museum. But still there was a dreadful evil to encounter. What we had done brought out such a rank compound of villanous smells that even my plebeian nose was sorely put to it; so I went to a chemist's, procured certain bottles of sweet odours, and sprinkled them cunningly where ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... Thus the character of the English esquire of the seventeenth century was compounded of two elements which we seldom or never find united. His ignorance and uncouthness, his low tastes and gross phrases, would, in our time, be considered as indicating a nature and a breeding thoroughly plebeian. Yet he was essentially a patrician, and had, in large measure both the virtues and the vices which flourish among men set from their birth in high place, and used to respect themselves and to be respected by others. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... banished!) might have termed the very matins of Cupid. Hard and inexorable was the fate that sent thee thither, Piercie Shafton, to waste thy wit upon country wenches, and thy valour upon hob-nailed clowns! But that insult—that affront—had it been offered to me by the lowest plebeian, he must have died for it by my hand, in respect the enormity of the offence doth countervail the inequality of him by whom it is given. I trust I shall find this clownish roisterer not less willing to deal ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... phaetons, stanhopes, and vehicles of every description, glide smoothly on. The promenades are filled with loungers on foot, and the road is thronged with loungers on horseback. Persons of every class are crowded together, here, in one dense mass. The plebeian, who takes his pleasure on no day but Sunday, jostles the patrician, who takes his, from year's end to year's end. You look in vain for any outward signs of profligacy or debauchery. You see nothing before you but a vast number of people, the denizens of a large and crowded city, ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... is another fault in Rousseau that springs from this lack of complete artistic integrity. He is something plebeian: he suffers a slightly self-complacent good-fellowship to creep into his pictures. Occasionally there grins through his design, and ever so little disfigures it, a touch of fatuity. He cannot help being glad that he is so simple and so good, nor quite resist telling ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... particular, Marcius Coriolanus, an enemy to tribunitian power, says, "If they desire the former rate of provisions, let them restore to the senators their former rights. Why do I, after being sent under the yoke, after being, as it were, ransomed from robbers, behold plebeian magistrates, and Sicinius invested with power? Shall I submit to these indignities longer than is necessary? Shall I, who would not have endured King Tarquin, tolerate Sicinius. Let him now secede, let ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... claimed. The tradition has it that when the Princess Elizabeth, the "Good Queen Bess" of after days, was released from the Tower of London on May 19th, 1554, she went first to a neighbouring church to offer thanks for her deliverance, and then proceeded to the King's Head to enjoy a somewhat plebeian dinner of boiled pork and Pease-pudding. This legend seems to ignore the fact that the freedom of the Princess was comparative only; that she was at that time merely removed from one prison to another; and that the record of her movements on that day speaks of her ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... the birthplace of true patriotism; and a true patriotism is one of the first and most important characteristics in the upbuilding of any nation. It is not the wild plebeian instinct that goes for our country right or wrong, which forms the real element of our strength. Love of country, to be a real help and safeguard, must be a sentiment great enough to be moral in its range and quality. Neither the power of numbers, nor mere oaths ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... him be so To those that want his mercy: My poor lord Made no such covenant with him, to spare me When he was dead. Yield me to Caesar's pride? What! to be led in triumph through the streets, A spectacle to base plebeian eyes; While some dejected friend of Antony's, Close in a corner, shakes his head, and mutters A secret curse on her who ruined him! ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... secure those hallowed treasures from profanation. "They were proceeding" (says Livy lib. V, c. XXII) "along the way which passes over the Sublician bridge, when they were met on the declivity by L. Albinus a plebeian, who was fleeing with his wife and children in a plaustrum or cart: he and his family immediately alighted: then placing in the cart the virgins and sacred things he accompanied them to Caere where they were received with ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... looked! How she stamped the floor with her dainty foot when I hinted at the fact that my maternal grandfather was neither duke nor lord! How she hushed my 'impertinence,' as she styled it, with such invectives as 'fool, idiot, plebeian'! Heigho! But I felt that it was unmanly in me to provoke mother so, and I ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... on the cross-bar and waving the other as he spoke. His voice was full of passion, his eyes flashed fire, and his brow was bathed in sweat. There seemed to be some weird power in his words as in those of the prophets of old. The more than plebeian simplicity of his dress still further increased the pride of his gestures and the impressiveness of his voice. The French Revolution has shown since that in the ranks of the people there was no lack of eloquence or ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... them, too, men, as such, were deprived of their divine right to rule, and placed on a political level with women. By the practice of those declarations all class and caste distinction will be abolished; and slave, serf, plebeian, wife, woman, all alike, bound from their subject position to the ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... to the bar by my own blood, and be borne false witness against before the plebeian people? Shall I be made to stultify myself by what I never said—and shall the strength of your testimony turn upon me? "If"—"If Japanese Art is right in confining itself to what can be broidered upon the fan" ... and again ... "that he really believes the highest expression of his art to be realized ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... little ragged urchin came And plucked the juicy berries from the bough Of teeming Alder, trading with the same, Thus earning oft an honest meal, I trow: But stuck-up Poplar glanced with pride supreme At such low doings—such plebeian ties— Cocked up his nose, and thought—oh! fatal dream!— To grow, and grow, ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... it now. The Princess and her escort—the plebeian upstart—were quite near at hand, and, to the dismay of the smokers, apparently were unaware of their presence in the shadows. Chase's heart was boiling with disappointed rage. His idol had fallen, from a tremendous height to a ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... china-blue eyes, and canary-coloured hair, to the divine image cut in ebony, as some one piously and prettily says, but I doubt that I have felt quite in this way before. Yet she is not clever, as she says, and is only a poor shop-girl, her surname Affleck—that quaint, plebeian name with its curious associations! I must not forget to ask Merton to tell me her history. I shall certainly see him to-morrow, although perhaps for the last time. Fifty pounds should be enough to pay ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... we must certainly mention— 'Tis Mr. McFudgins, who claims our attention. In mould of plebeian he never was cast (His caste was of gentlemen, wealthy and 'fast'). Not noted for morals, nor even sobriety, He always had moved in the 'highest society.' I had seen him so 'high' as to hiccough and stutter, And once I had noticed him low in the gutter; Yet he ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... inspired her with a naive curiosity and an admiration mingled with fear. Since her lover was unwilling to speak to her of his mother, she attributed his reserve to a certain aristocratic arrogance, even to a lack of consideration, for her, at which the pride of the freewoman and the plebeian was up in arms. She was wont to say to ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... we ascend in the social scale, the process of discriminating and being discriminated by hearing increases in difficulty, partly because voices are assimilated, partly because the faculty of voice-discrimination is a plebeian virtue not much developed among the Aristocracy. And wherever there is any danger of imposture we cannot trust to this method. Amongst our lowest orders, the vocal organs are developed to a degree more than correspondent with those of hearing, so that an Isosceles can easily feign the voice ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... Leslie I am a little ahead of you in this. You know her side. I know all you have told me of her, also I know what he has told me; while putting what I have seen, and heard at the office, and him here with the boys, in a house she would consider too plebeian for words——" ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... Protector for indulgence, and to whom they now advised the Protector to grant it, was the author of the most vehement and bitter book that had ever been written on the Royalist side, the man who had abused the Commonwealth men as "robbers, traitors, parricides" and "plebeian scoundrels," who had written of Cromwell "Verily an egg is not liker an egg than Cromwell is like Mahomet," and who had capped all his other politenesses about Milton by calling him "more vile than Cromwell, damned ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... and importance was a fellow-citizen of Koltzoff, Ivan Savitch Nikitin (1824-1861). Perhaps the most interesting thing about him is that Count L. N. Tolstoy took a lively interest in this gifted plebeian, and offered to bear the cost of publishing his poems, regarding him as a new Koltzoff. Count Tolstoy has since arrived at the conclusion that all poetry is futile and an unnecessary waste of time, as the same ideas can be much better expressed in prose, and with ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... who most pleased the Emperor was perhaps the Count of Narbonne, knight of honor of one of the daughters of Louis XV., Minister of War under Louis XVI. The most rigid, the most precise etiquette prevailed in the Imperial residences. The high dignitaries and marshals concealed their plebeian names under pompous titles of princes and dukes. Madame de Mailly, the widow of a marshal of the royal period, had been admitted to the rank and privileges of the wives of the grand officers of the crown, and had figured as a marshal's widow, at the reception of January ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... to be found low down in the social scale; they crawl and swarm all around us—even in the highest social positions. You have only to look at your own fine, distinguished Mayor! My brother Peter is every bit as plebeian as anyone that walks in two shoes— (laughter ...
— An Enemy of the People • Henrik Ibsen
... regiments it was usual to promote one or two deserving sergeants every year. In others the necessary certificate of birth could be signed by any nobleman and was often obtained from greed or good-nature. Moreover, an order of 1750 had provided that officers of plebeian extraction should sometimes be ennobled for distinguished services. But in 1781, a new rule was established. No one could thenceforth receive a commission as second lieutenant who could not show four generations of nobility on his father's side, counting ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... anti-natural, out of Nature's oneness drawing distinctions of castes, of priestly orders. Not only do they count the spirit noble, and the body ignoble; but even parts of the body are called noble, while others are not, being evidently plebeian. In like manner heaven is noble, and hell is not; but why?—"Because heaven is high up." But in truth it is neither high nor low, being above and beneath alike. And what is hell? Nothing at all. Equally foolish are ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... whether as Krishnaism or as Ramaism, is to-day a pantheistic religion. But, while R[a]ma is the god of the philosophical sects, and, therefore, is almost entirely a pantheistic god; Krishna, who was always a plebeian, is continually reverting, so to speak, to himself; that is to say, he is more affected by the vulgar, and as the vulgar are more prone, by whatever sectarian name they call themselves, to worship one idol, it happens that Krishna in the eyes of his following is less ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... never could be made to love the Duke of Marlborough, nor to forget those stories which he used to hear in his youth regarding that great chiefs selfishness and treachery)—"there were men at Blenheim as good as the leader, whom neither knights nor senators applauded, nor voices plebeian or patrician favored, and who lie there forgotten, under the clods. What poet ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... someone loved them and they were of no account. The husk of the immortality of the poet and the hero has been thrust upon the mean and disgusting clay of the stockbroker; the grocer, horribly wrapped in everlasting marble, has put on ignominy for evermore; while the plebeian, bewildered by the tyranny of life, crouches over his dead wife, for ever afraid lest death tap him too on the shoulder. How the wind whistles among these immortal jests, where the pure stone of the Carrara hills has been fashioned to the ugliness of the middle classes. This is the supreme ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... sat by Mrs Merton, asked her in a whisper, which was loud enough to be heard all over the room, whether that was the little ploughboy whom she had heard Mr Barlow was attempting to breed up like a gentleman. Mrs Merton answered it was. "I protest," said the lady, "I should have thought so by his plebeian look and vulgar air. But I wonder, my dear madam, that you will suffer your son, who, without flattery, is one of the most accomplished children I ever saw in my life, with quite the air of fashion, ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... equality, and stamped, in their opinion, a nobility on every person derived from the common stock. Indeed the difference of conditions, and the contempt with which persons of the lowest rank are treated, are owing merely to the distance from the common root; which makes us forget that the meanest plebeian, when his descent is traced back to the source, is equally noble with those of the most ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... betwixt the Tongue and the Heart." Lingua Toscana in bocca Romana is the Italian proverb; and that of poets should be, The tongue of the people in the mouth of the scholar. We intend here no assent to the early theory, or, at any rate, practice, of Wordsworth, who confounded plebeian modes of thought with rustic forms of phrase, and then atoned for his blunder by absconding into a diction more Latinized than that of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... women help in their husbands' shops, as in France, and while they may not always possess the energy and business skill which characterize the French women, they are at least no more indolent and easy-going than their male companions. The women of the nobility are often less educated than their plebeian sisters, and for the most part lead a very narrow and petty existence, which produces little but vanity and selfishness and discontent. There are exceptions, however, and here and there may be seen a gentlewoman who has studied and travelled, and ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... placed the temple of patrician, and that of plebeian modesty. At the foot of this hill is seen the temple of Vesta, which yet remains whole, though it has been often menaced by the inundations of the Tiber. Not far from thence is the ruin of a prison for ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... not to be seen on any of their countenances. A certain moroseness and melancholy seemed to brood like a delayed storm among them, and to cloud the very atmosphere they breathed, but apart from this, intellectuality was the dominant spirit suggested by their outward looks and bearing. Plebeian faces and vulgar manners are, unfortunately, not rare in representative gatherings of men whose opinions are allowed to sway the destinies of nations, and it was strange to see a group of individuals who were sworn to upset existing law and government so distinguished ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... idea of a plebeian like Dan supposing he could ever ride a horse! He! why, even the cats and the chickens laughed when they saw him go by. Of course, he would be thrown off. Of course, any well-bred horse wouldn't let a common, underbred person like Dan stay on his back! ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Armour's family, their mean, servile compliance would have done it.' To his friend, William Nicol, he wrote in the same strain. 'I never, my friend, thought mankind very capable of anything generous; but the stateliness of the patricians in Edinburgh, and the servility of my plebeian brethren (who perhaps formerly eyed me askance) since I returned home, have nearly put me out of ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... numbered, I suppose, some adherents even in the aristocratic and governing classes,—thousands, no doubt, among the working and laboring millions; but its central strength was in that backbone of English philanthropic effort, the more plebeian section of the well-to-do middle class,—that section which gravitates towards Dissent, in religion, towards Radicalism in politics, towards Bible Societies, Temperance Movements, "Bands of Hope," and Exeter Hall. If this section of the British community ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... the world over, either reading or absorbed, never taking any notice of the crowds and glitter which I find so fascinating. More men in red, and then the crowd closes up again, to be again divided by a plebeian chair like mine, or by pariahs running with a coffin fifteen feet long, shaped like the trunk of a tree, or by coolies carrying burdens slung on bamboo poles, uttering deafening cries, or by a marriage procession with songs and music, or by a funeral procession with weeping and wailing, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... almost as a sovereign, for Caesar, formerly a laborious and autocratic ruler, shrank from all business. Even before they left Alexandria the plebeian prefect could see that Serapion's prophecy was fulfilling itself. He remained in close intimacy with the soothsayer; but only once more, and just before Caesar's departure, could the magian be induced to raise the spirits of the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... country, happily for you and me, the judgment of James Buchanan, the patrician, was not the judgment of Abraham Lincoln, the plebeian. He brought his strong common sense, sharpened in the school of adversity, to bear upon the question. He did not hesitate, he did not doubt, he did not falter but at once resolved, at whatever peril, at whatever cost, the Union of ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... be dissatisfied. And what renders them more deserving of admiration than Alexander, or any king, is, that some of these acted in the office of dictator, which lasted only ten, or it might be twenty days, none, in a charge of longer duration than the consulship of a year; their levies obstructed by plebeian tribunes; often late in taking the field; recalled, before the time, on account of elections; amidst the very busiest efforts of the campaign, their year of office expired; sometimes the rashness, sometimes ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... of Addison amid political discords; but on that occasion Steele showed that his taste for literature could not be injured by political animosity. It was at the close of Addison's life, and on occasion of the Peerage Bill, Steele published "The Plebeian," a cry against enlarging the aristocracy. Addison replied with "The Old Whig," Steele rejoined without alluding to the person of his opponent. But "The Old Whig" could not restrain his political feelings, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... life's chessboard. To him I would push up another pawn, in the shape of a comely and wise young woman, whom he would of course take—to wife. For all contingencies I would liberally provide. In a word, I would, in the plebeian, but expressive phrase, "put him through" all the material part of life; see him sheltered, warmed, fed, button-mended, and all that, just to be able to lay on his talk when I liked,—with the privilege of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... church, and the man sweeps out the dust of the church into the church-yard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again, and to pronounce;—this is the patrician, this is the noble, flour, and this the yeomanly, this the plebeian, ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... Court against the Court, probably inwardly chuckling, the same as the peasant in a blouse on getting ahead of his well-duped landlord, or as the Frank, whom the ancient historian describes as leering on pocketing Roman gold the better to make war against Rome.—The graft on this plebeian seedling has not taken; in our modern garden this remains as in the ancient forest; its vigorous sap preserves its primitive raciness and produces none of the fine fruits of our civilization, a moral sense, honor and conscience. Danton has no ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... life. But how much less rich and complex is Weber's music, in spite of its nervous brilliance and dreaming poetry. Above all, Weber is much more mundane and more of a classicist; he lacks Berlioz's revolutionary passion and plebeian force; he is ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... position was plebeian, though there are no indications of its having been one of poverty. He came originally from Devonshire. Inquiry as to the descent of the artist's mother is balked by the widely differing stories that present themselves. ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... movements; while only the refined circles habitually used gentle tones and gentle manners. For the same reason, those born in the higher circles were called "of gentle blood." Thus it came that a coarse and loud voice, and rough, ungentle manners, are regarded as vulgar and plebeian. ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... to book in a most uncompromising fashion; a fashion that betrays unmistakably her plebeian origin. Dysart, listening, admires her for it. Her rough and ready honesty seems to him preferable to the best ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... under the same roof as at Pisa. Indeed, by this time, if one may take Mr Hunt's own account of the matter, they appear to have become pretty well tired of each other. He had found out that a peer is, as a friend, but as a plebeian, and a great poet not always a high-minded man. His Lordship had, on his part, discovered that something more than smartness or ingenuity is necessary to protect patronage from familiarity. Perhaps intimate acquaintance had also tended to enable him to appreciate, with greater accuracy, ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... passing from lip to lip until every one in the street knew that Mr. So-and-So, Mrs. This-or-That, the What-do-you-call-ems and others of the city's most exclusive but most garishly advertised society leaders had entered the house of mourning. It was a great show for the plebeian spectators. Much better than Miss So-and-So's wedding, said one woman who had attended the aforesaid ceremony as a unit in the well-dressed mob that almost wrecked the carriages in the desire to see the terrified bride. Better than ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... time of the republic, a few years after the fell democratic persecutions of the plebeian Marius had drowned the mighty city oceans-deep in patrician gore; after the awful retribution of the avenger Sylla had rioted in the destruction of ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... beaks, and feet. They fly in troops, and at night perch upon the trees. They are not republican, nor do they appear inclined to declare their independence, having kings, to whom it is said they pay so much respect, that if one of the royal species arrives at the same time with a plebeian sopilote, in sight of a dead body, the latter humbly waits till the sovereign has devoured his share, before ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... truth; her ladyship gave the required promise (intending never to keep it,) you performed the service, and very properly, I own, come to receive your reward. Of course, you perceive the impossibility of a compliance with your wishes. No intrigue can exist between the patrician and the plebeian—you are low-born, she of the noblest blood of the kingdom. Are you so blind, man, that you cannot see—or are you so stupid that you cannot comprehend—the repugnance which her ladyship must naturally feel at the very idea of an amorous intimacy existing between a high-born ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... Henry Caswall, M.A., who had an interview with the prophet at Nauvoo, in 1842, thus describes him: "He is a coarse, plebeian, sensual person in aspect, and his countenance exhibits a curious mixture of the knave and the clown. His hands are large and fat, and on one of his fingers he wears a massive gold ring, upon which I saw an inscription. His eyes appear deficient in that open and straightforward expression which ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... to hear La Favorita seventeen times during the winter, may feel at times the need of a violent distraction, and go to drink white wine with his servant. Amedee will be full of indulgence, only one must pardon him for his plebeian heart and native uncouthness; for at the moment when he shall have fathomed the emptiness and vanity of this worldly farce, he will keep all of his sympathy for those who retain something like nature. He will esteem infinitely more the poorest ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... was no family, aristocracy to back him up, no melancholy recollections of past grandeur to add the interest of romance to his endeavors. His father had been a poor man of the people, a farmer. And yet Warrington was by no means plebeian. Somewhere there was a fine strain. It had been a fierce struggle to complete a college education. In the summer-time he had turned his hand to all sorts of things to pay his winter's tuition. He had worked as clerk in summer hotels, as a surveyor's ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... all of one piece. He was, besides, a mighty toper; he could sit at wine until the day dawned, and pass directly from the table to the Bench with a steady hand and a clear head. Beyond the third bottle, he showed the plebeian in a larger print; the low, gross accent, the low, foul mirth, grew broader and commoner; he became less formidable, and infinitely more disgusting. Now, the boy had inherited from Jean Rutherford a shivering delicacy, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the 22nd. This was the last, and not the least imposing, public act of the old Pope, who, six years after his imprisonment and outrage in the Castle of S. Angelo, was now wedding a daughter of his plebeian family to the heir of the French crown. What passed between Michelangelo and his master on ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... association of men and women in refined circles shall be frank without freedom, friendly without familiarity. "Flirting" is a plebeian diversion. Every well-bred woman is a queen, for whose sake every well-bred man will hold ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... up and engaged Mr. Park in conversation, while another ran off with his fowling-piece, and on his attempting to pursue him, the first took the opportunity of seizing his great coat. Orders were now given to fire on all depredators, royal or plebeian; and after a few shots had been discharged without producing any fatal effects, the thieves hid themselves amongst the rocks, and were merely ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... coin and flung out a strong and fending hand against his fellow covering it. Under the brightening day, the lowering profile of the old plebeian emperor Vespasian showed distinctly on ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... her "Memoirs of Europe towards the Close of the Eighth Century," has something very characteristic to say on this subject. Speaking of Somers under the name Cicero, she says: "Cicero, Madam, is by birth a plebeian" ... "Cicero himself, an oracle of wisdom, was whirled about by his lusts, at the pleasure of a fantastic worn-out mistress. He prostituted his inimitable sense, reason, and good nature, either to revenge, or reward, as her caprice directed; and ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... sure he picked her up at Rome; but never mind where—somewhere. Now (this is entirely between ourselves), is she very plebeian?' ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... the divisions in the Whig party alienated him from his oldest friend. The Peerage Bill, introduced in February 1719, was attacked, on behalf of the opposition, in a weekly paper called the Plebeian, written by Steele. Addison answered the attack in the Old VVhig, and this belum plusquam civile—as Johnson calls it—was continued, with increased acrimony, through two or three numbers. How Addison, who was dying, felt after this painful controversy ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... hope I never shall, for, in the present shattered state of my nerves, I am afraid it would be too much for me. There—loosen the lace of my stays a little, for really this plebeian practice of eating—Not too loose—consider my shape. That will do. And I desire that you bring me no more stories of ghosts; for, though I do not believe in such things, yet, when one is awake in the night, one is apt, if one thinks of them, to ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... I ever saw in an American home were in a thereby glorified hen-house. They had been taken from the discarded front door of a remodelled old Falmouth house. The hens and their owner were not of antiquarian tastes, and relinquished the windows for a machine-made sash more suited to their plebeian tastes and occupations. Many colonial doors had door-latches or knobs of heavy brass; nearly all had a knocker of wrought iron or polished brass, a cheerful ornament that ever seems to resound a welcome to the visitor as well as a ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... annihilated, the robbers themselves being executed with axe or sword or thrown overboard. The piracy of that age reached its acme in the notorious "Society of Equal Sharers" or "Brotherhood of Victuallers." This consisted of an incongruous aggregation of noble and plebeian blades, who, despite their excessive brutality, nevertheless possessed some genuine knightly characteristics, the hardihood and bravery of the true mariner, and a boundless love of adventure. Formed during the eighth decade of the fourteenth century for the purpose of assisting ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... music of the hounds allured him onward in his impetuous career. The sun glanced between the trees as they passed the cottage door. Then came the Magistrate's Clerk, faultlessly attired, with florid face and glittering eyeglass, who, in an ambitious youth, finding his name too suggestive of plebeian blood, changed a vowel in it, and thereby gave an aristocratic flavour to the title of his partnership, and who acquired, with this new dignity, the taste for a monocle, a horse, and a good cigar. ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... arrived; it was quite an event for the little town, and all classes of society were in a state of the greatest excitement. The pretty, plebeian girls, with her whom the Prince had first noticed at their head, appeared in all their innocence, in plain, washing dresses, according to the Prince's orders, with their hair plainly dressed, and without any ornaments, except their own fresh, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... ballad is hardly one of the forms of high art, like the epic, the tragedy, the Pindaric ode. It is simple and not complex like the sonnet: not of the aristocracy of verse, but popular—not to say plebeian—in its associations. It is easy to write and, in its commonest metrical shape of eights and sixes, apt to run into sing-song. Its limitations, even in the hands of an artist like Coleridge or Rossetti, are obvious. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... obscene. Here a musical form reels hilariously and cuts capers and dances on bald heads. The variation of "Don Quixote" that describes with wood-wind and tambourine Dulcinea del Toboso is plump and plebeian and good-natured with her very person, is all the more trenchantly vulgar and flat for the preceding suave variation that describes the knight's fair, sonorous dream of her. There is no music more plaintively stupid than that which in the same work figures the "sheep" against which Don ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... future of England. In days gone by, our very Snob bore testimony after his fashion to our scorn of meanness; he at all events imagined himself to be imitating those who were incapable of a sordid transaction, of a plebeian compliance. But the Snob, one notes, is in the way of degeneracy; he has new exemplars; he speaks a ruder language. Him, be sure, in one form or another, we shall have always with us, and to observe his habits is to note the tenor of the time. If he have at the back of his dim mind ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... Protestant churches suffer in comparison with the grand church of San Sebastian—set up from the iron plates made in Belgium—and the churches of the various religious orders. Magnificence and show appeal most strongly to the Filipino. He is taught to look down on the Protestant religion as plebeian; the priests regard the Protestant with condescending superciliousness. Until the transportation facilities can be extended there will be no general coming together of Americans even on Sunday morning, ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... worship of that goddess, though her temple had been actually destroyed by authority in the reign of Tiberius. Her singular and in many ways beautiful ritual was now popular in Rome. And then—what the enthusiasm of the swarming plebeian quarters had initiated, was sure to be adopted, sooner or later, by women of fashion. A blending of all the religions of the ancient world had been accomplished. The new gods had arrived, had been welcomed, and found their places; though, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... of the philosophy of Coleridge. This will so approve itself to your conscience, your intellect, and your imagination, that there can be no risk of its being ever supplanted in a mind like yours by "plebeian"[79] systems of philosophy. Few have now any difficulty in perceiving the infidel tendencies of that of Locke, especially with the assistance of his French philosophic followers, (with whose writings, for ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... was so interested at this juncture that she leant forward with parted lips, listening eagerly. The Honourable Mrs. Harrington allowed herself the plebeian pleasure of returning the stare with a questioning glance which broke off into a ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... suffice in bringing them to an end. Mr. Copple was odious to her. She could not have explained why clearly, yet she knew. And she would have blushed in the attempt to explain why; it would have revealed a detestation of her lot. Clara had lately discovered the meaning of the word "plebeian"; more, she believed she comprehended its applicableness. The word was a burr in her thoughts. Mr. Copple was the personification of the word. Clara had not repulsed him. You do not do that sort of thing in a small town. She knew intuitively that ...
— Different Girls • Various
... and shame. People boast here of the equality of our institutions, and then try their best to break up the social level. In a genuine Aristocracy, where they have endeavored to preserve a gulf-stream of noble blood in the midst of the plebeian Atlantic, and a man holds his distinction by the color of the bark on his family tree, and the kind of sap that circulates through it, there is no danger of any unpleasant mistakes. The hard palm of Labor may cross the gloved hand of Leisure, ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... declared this man worthy to rank high amongst the best of them; but no one knew where he lived, or what he was. He was rarely known to miss a race; and he was conspicuous amongst the crowd in those mysterious purlieus where the plebeian bookmen, who are unworthy to enter the sacred precincts of Tattersall's, mostly do congregate, in utter defiance of the police. No one had ever heard the name of this man; but in default of any more particular cognomen, they had christened ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... charmed life, baffle every device of the besiegers. At length the citizens capture the brother of the duke's general, and the besiegers capture the tall knight, who turns out to be no knight after all, but just a plebeian hosier. The duke's general is on the point of ordering the tradesman who has made so much trouble to be shot, but the latter still remains master of the situation; for, as he dryly observes, if any harm comes to him, the enraged citizens will hang the ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... Dishonour not the vengeance I designed: A queen, and own a base Plebeian mind! Let it drink deep in thy most vital part; Strike home, and do ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... localities; particularly the old town. In its ancient "wynds and closes," now tenanted by the veriest of the plebeian race, in former days resided men of the most distinguished rank and celebrity. Before the stupendous improvements of later times had justly entitled the Scottish metropolis to the appellation of the modern Athens, the princes and nobles of the land, its ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 388 - Vol. 14, No. 388, Saturday, September 5, 1829. • Various
... the Comptroller-General out of the lower-born members of the Council of State; a needy young plebeian with his fortune to make, and a stranger to the province, was, in spite of his greed, ambition, chicane, arbitrary tyranny, a better man—abler, more energetic, and often, to judge from the pages of De Tocqueville, with far more sympathy and mercy for the wretched peasantry—than ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... furze; these are two names for the same plant, a low bush, with strong, prickly leaves, growing much like a juniper. The contrast of its very brilliant yellow, pea-shaped blossoms, with the dark green of its leaves, is very beautiful. It grows here in hedges and on commons, and is thought rather a plebeian affair. I think it would make quite an addition to our garden shrubbery. Possibly it might make as much sensation with us as our ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... element of uncertainty appealed to his sporting instincts. But fishing he had stricken utterly from his list. It was too hard and too dirty. Slogging at the heavy trawls and afterward dressing the catch was too plebeian a business for ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... was carried to the greatest extreme, and a noble would blush to enter into any friendly relations whatever with a plebeian. The nobles considered all business degrading excepting war, and spent the weary months, when not under arms, in indolence in their castles. The young women of the higher families were in a deplorable state of captivity. Etiquette did not allow them to mingle with society, or ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... sleepy and cross, for, having lingered after the reception to have a word and several drinks with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, he had come forth to find neither coach nor automobile in attendance. There had been nothing for it but the plebeian trolley. Accordingly, when he heard a foreign voice of feminine timbre and felt a light pressure against his knee, he only snorted. What he next felt against his knee was the impact of a half-shove, half-blow, brisk enough to slue him around. The ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... were ever upon him in adoring, dog-like fidelity and it irritated him. Her appearance had altered amazingly, she no longer called him "Mister Symes," and by repeated corrections he had succeeded in inducing her to refrain from folding her hands upon her abdomen, but the plebeian strain, the deficiency of gentle birth betrayed itself in a dozen little ways, by indelicacies none the less irritating because ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... the bastard son of an aristocratic Englishwoman who in early youth was forced by her father into a loveless union with a rich plebeian. The single fault of the mother's life is confessed after twenty years, when the husband in a moment of anger strikes her high-spirited and obstinate son. The latter consents to leave his home for ever, and relinquish the name he has borne. On these terms the wife is spared. ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... into a broken-nosed pitcher on the kitchen window-sill, different from that of the same carefully disposed in an elegant receptacle on the drawing-room table? The nosegay is bright and fragrant in either place. Why then do not the plebeian and patrician bouquets equally please? In the one case, you say, the charms are inharmoniously dispersed, and nearly neutralized by meaner surroundings, while in the other they are enhanced by every advantage of position and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... twinkling, and set aside a knowledge of his parents and their habits of thought and life that should have warned him. He might have known that his father could have overlooked anything but this—the debasing of the Foote blood by mingling with it a plebeian, boarding-house strain; he might have comprehended that his mother, Mrs. Bonbright Foote VI, no less, could have excused crime, could have winked at depravity, but could never tolerate a daughter-in-law of such origin; would never acknowledge ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... high-spirited children to be so misunderstood. Pop lacked refined tastes. It was a harsh thing to say of one's parent, but when you came right down to it Pop was a hopeless plebeian. ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... in, in his grandest way. "That is not national; it is not Whig, Brother Clayton." The Judge here gave his entire family power to his facial energy, and expressed the Virginian and patrician in his treatment of the Delaware bourgeois and plebeian. "Granted that this corporation is young and untried: let it be disciplined in time, that it may avoid more expensive mistakes in the future. No cause, to a true lawyer, is like a human cause; the time may come when the talent of the American bar will be the parasite ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... beauty of my idea," said Perkins. "The plebeian sighs for aristocratic blood to enable him to hold his own in his novel surroundings; the aristocrat could do with a little bright red fluid to help him to turn an honest penny. So it is merely a case of cross-transfusion; no waste, no suffering, no ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... before; who had come home triumphant to reign like the doges of old, and, only after the ducal cap was on his head and the palace of the state had become his home, found out that the doge—like the unconsidered plebeian—had been reduced to bondage; his judgment and experience put aside in favor of the deliberations of a secret tribunal, and the very boys, when they were nobles, at liberty to jeer at ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... social order was unsettled and changing, and well Mazarin knew it. He knew the pieces with which he played his game of chess: the king powerless, the queen mighty, the bishops unable to take a single straightforward move, and the knights going naturally zigzag; but a host of plebeian pawns, every one fit for a possible royalty, and therefore to be used shrewdly, or else annihilated as soon as practicable. True, the game would not last forever; but after ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... Jessie, if we hadn't had those lessons in cooking. I had no idea then that we shouldn't always have servants, and if we'd stayed here, we never should have known anything about housekeeping. And the worst of it is, I like it. I always knew I had plebeian tastes and, now I am used to it, I fairly revel ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... which is higher in rank than any other office in the gift of the imperial court. Hitherto this title had been borne exclusively by members of the Fujiwara family, and it must have been a severe blow to their aristocratic pride to have a humble plebeian who had risen solely by his own talents thus elevated by imperial appointment to this dignified position. He also received at this time the name of Toyotomi(163) by which he was afterward called, and in recognition of his successful ...
— Japan • David Murray
... Porcius Cato was born in 234 B.C.[29] at the ancient Latin town of Tusculum. Little is known of his family except that it was plebeian, and possessed a small patrimony in the territory of the Sabines, close to the farm of M'. Curius Dentatus, one of Cato's great heroes and models. The heads of the family, so far as memory extended, had distinguished themselves as tough warriors and hardy ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... send out a swarm a month or two later: but a swarm in July is not to be despised; it will store no clover or linden honey for the "grand seignior and the ladies of his seraglio," but plenty of the rank and wholesome poor man's nectar, the sun-tanned product of the plebeian buckwheat. Buckwheat honey is the black sheep in this white flock, but there is spirit and character in it. It lays hold of the taste in no equivocal manner, especially when at a winter breakfast it meets its fellow, the russet buckwheat ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... Monsieur Jules Sandeau has written his admirable comedy, 'Le Gendre de Monsieur Poirier': with this difference, however: Monsieur Legouve has taken, not a ruined and brilliant noble who marries the daughter of a plebeian, but a young man, the architect of his own fortunes, with a most vulgar name, who, on the score of talents, energy, delicacy of head and heart, is loved by a young lady of noble birth, is accepted by her family, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... gentle (or it may be plebeian) reader, how eagerly must thou be looking forward to this preface, expecting to find there retaliation, scolding, and abuse against the author of the second Don Quixote—I mean him who was, they say, begotten at Tordesillas and born at Tarragona! Well then, the truth is, I am not going to give ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... chant in rhyme the virtues of his national drink. Yet though its merit has inspired neither of the sister graces, poetry and song, to strike the lyre in its honor, it has had, none the less, an important mission to perform. To its plebeian sister beer, as a healthful beverage, wine must yield the palm. As a common drink, suited to human nature's daily need, it has never been surpassed. If it has nerved no hand to deeds of daring, or struck the scintillating sparks of genius ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... human force can her strict laws withstand: Her cruel rigour no one spares, The blooming cheek, and hoary hairs, Alike submit to her victorious hand. O'er all she bears unbounded sway, All her impartial scythe relentless mows: Th' ill-manner'd tyranness no difference shows, Betwixt imperial and plebeian clay. ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... the argument and, instead, said in a tone of mock-pity: "Poor fallen queen—to marry beneath her. How she must have fought against the idea of such a plebeian partner." ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
