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More "Undistinguished" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... neighbouring prince, who imagined that the fame of his exploits had struck the Arabians with terror, and disposed them to submission. The ambassador was introduced to the chief of the tribe, a venerable old man, undistinguished by any mark of ostentation from the rest, who received him sitting cross-legged at the door of his tent. He then began to speak, and, in a long and studied harangue, described the power of his master, the ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... hue, from the jettiest black to the fairest white; they were thoroughly intermingled, and the ready answers ran along the ranks from black to white, from white to brown, from brown to pale, with undistinguished vivacity and accuracy. We were afterwards conducted into the higher department, where lads and misses from nine to fifteen, were instructed in the various branches of academic education. A class of lads, mostly ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... guests, and by reason of this virtue, one not too common, the host and hostess might be pardoned for being a little too well satisfied with themselves and with their last new bibelot. The Fothergill dinners were like all other dinners given by the Fothergills of society. They were costly, utterly undistinguished, and invariably graced by the presence of certain guests who seemed to have been called in out of the street at the last moment. Van der Roet's Japanese menus were curious, and at times inimical to digestion, but the personality of the host was charming. As to Sir John Oglethorpe, ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... I must wish you good morning: your road now lies to the right. I return you my best thanks for your condescension, in accompanying so undistinguished an individual ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... it is not as if Mr. Ablett's appearance were in any way undistinguished. Quite the contrary. I'm sure ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne
... of the literary men of the day. So many years after the event we cannot help wondering why the story was not earlier put in book form; for in its delineation of the character of an adventurer it is as great as VANITY FAIR, while for the local colour of history, if I may put it so, it is no undistinguished ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... upon it, in any colour that he liked, the spots where Englishmen have fought, and English blood has been poured forth, and the treasure of England squandered, scarcely a country, scarcely a province of the vast expanse of the habitable globe would be thus undistinguished. ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... decided that the moment for speech had arrived. He took a step forward upon the soft, pulpy leads. Even then he hesitated before he finally committed himself. About his appearance little was remarkable save the general air of determination which gave character to his undistinguished features. He was something above the medium height, broad-set, and with rather more thick black hair than he knew how to arrange advantageously. He wore a shirt which was somewhat frayed, and an indifferent tie; his boots were heavy and clumsy; he wore also a suit of ready-made clothes with the ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... reading with such attention any notice of the college he can find in the newspaper. My dear, dear brother, how you would work hard if you only knew what a prize success in life might give you. Little as I have seen of her, I could guess that she will never bestow a thought on an undistinguished man. Come down for one day, and tell me if ever, in all your ambition, you had such a goal before ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... time, as a supreme example of the art of "leg-pulling." Amongst the members of the "Grill-room Club" was an elderly bachelor, whom I will call Mr. Smith. "Mr. Smith," who has now been dead for some years, was wholly undistinguished in every way. He ate largely, and spoke little, but Tree had discovered that under his placid exterior he concealed a vein of limitless vanity. One evening "Mr. Smith" startled the club by breaking his habitual silence, and bursting ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... and her beauty the color of cloth of gold, and Hattie in her lowly comedian way not an undistinguished veteran. So they could kiss in the key of a cat ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... that poetical spark which is often entirely wanting in the finished and complete work of other periods. I shall, therefore, divide the whole mass into four groups, each with certain distinguished names at its head, and a crowd of hardly undistinguished names in its rank and file. These four groups are the sonneteers, the historians, the satirists, and lastly, the miscellaneous lyrists ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... were other insurmountable points on the mountain chain of circumstance that lay between him and his heart's dearest wish. The Commodore's inherent reverence for birth and breeding, and his comparative indifference to brain, was one of them. The obstinate pride of Allan's undistinguished and ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... non-combatant community; what handshaking; what embracing; what fervent delight! This unique life is to end; we are to become reasonably clean and quite ordinary mortals again, lost among the world's population of fifteen hundred millions—undistinguished, unknown—that is, if the relief ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... sermon, that, whereas the queasy stomach of this generation will not bear a discourse long enough to make a separate volume, those religious and godly-minded children (those Samuels, if I may call them so) of the brain must at first lie buried in an undistinguished heap, and then get such resurrection as is vouchsafed to them, mummy-wrapt with a score of others in a cheap binding, with no other mark of distinction than the word "Miscellaneous" printed upon the back. Far be it from me to claim any credit for the quite unexpected popularity which I am pleased ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... because he feared his own people wouldn't train her hard. She had worked for ordinary wages and ordinary hours, and at the end of the day, she mentioned casually, a large automobile with two menservants and a trustworthy secretary used to pick her out from the torrent of undistinguished workers that poured out of the Synoptical Building. This masculinization idea had also sent her on a commission of enquiry into Mexico. There apparently she had ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... 4th (King's Own) Regiment, had married twice, and at the time of his retirement from active service was for the second time a widower. Blindness—contracted by exposure and long marches over the snows of Galicia—had put an end to a career by no means undistinguished. In his last fight, at Corunna, he had not only earned a mention in despatches from his brigadier-general, Lord William Bentinck, but by his alertness in handling his half-regiment at a critical moment, and refusing its right to an outflanking line of French, had been privileged to win almost ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... not just beautiful?" cried Ellen. And indeed at last it was beautiful, and warranted that excited gait, that hopping from leg to leg and puppyish kicking up of dead leaves with which she had come along the road from Balerno station. It had seemed to Yaverland an undistinguished pocket of the country, and there had been nothing that caught his attention save the wreck of a ropeworks close by the village, which had been gutted by fire two or three nights before and now stood with that Jane Cakebread ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... edition of Rogers's poems. You have there a sky blazing with sunbeams; but they all begin a long way from the sun, and they are accounted for by a mass of dense clouds surrounding the orb itself. Turn to the 7th page. Behind the old oak, where the sun is supposed to be, you have only a blaze of undistinguished light; but up on the left, over the edge of the cloud, on its dark side, the sunbeam. Turn to page 192,—blazing rays again, but all beginning where the clouds do, not one can you trace to the sun; and observe how carefully ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... she thought the binding was very pretty. The author had shuddered no less at the little paragraphs that the publisher had inserted in the newspapers concerning his birth and education, wherein he was bracketed with other well-known writers whose careers at the University had been equally undistinguished. But now that, like Byron, he found himself famous among the bacon and eggs, he was in no mood to remember these past vexations. As soon as he had finished breakfast he withdrew himself to his study and wrote half an essay on the Republic ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... superiority, but because it was extremely difficult to pitch on any other candidate to whom to pin ones faith. Peradventure II was the favourite, not in the sense of being a popular fancy, but by virtue of a lack of confidence in any one of his rather undistinguished rivals. The brains of clubland were much exercised in seeking out possible merit where none was very obvious to the naked intelligence, and the house-party at Lady Susan's was possessed by the same uncertainty and irresolution ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... was always an alien. She had plenty of acquaintances, but no friends. Very few people whom she met were significant to her. They seemed part of a herd, undistinguished. She did not ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... but I believe that "Tahoma," proposed by the Rotary Club of Seattle, would be a justifiable compromise, and satisfy nearly everybody. Its adoption would free our national map from one more of its meaningless names—the name, in this case, of an undistinguished foreign naval officer whose only connection with our history is the fact that he fought against us during the American Revolution. Incidentally, it would also free me from the need of an apology for using the hybrid "Rainier-Tacoma"! ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... too, though the latter should fail in his undertakings from concurrences that might have happened to the wisest man, yet his failure being no more than might have been expected and accounted for from his folly, it lays no hold on our attention, but fleets away among the other undistinguished waves, in which the stream of ordinary life murmurs by us, and is forgotten. Had it been as true as it was notoriously false, that those all-embracing discoveries, which have shed a dawn of science on the art of chemistry, and give no obscure promise of some one ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... met with in the annals of Denmark. A singular anecdote is connected with one of the bravest individuals who ever bore the name—the renowned Admiral Tordenskiold, of the days of Frederick IV. While he was yet a young and undistinguished naval officer, he chanced to be in the hall of the royal palace at the time that the king, wearied with the flatteries of some courtiers, who were congratulating him on the success of his war with Sweden, exclaimed, "Ay, I know what you will say, but I should like to know the opinion of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... is very unscientific; for even in the spinal cord, which is more easily studied, we do not find such separation between the widely distinct functions of sensibility and motility. Their nerve fibres run together undistinguished, and it is only by the study of pathological changes that we have been able to distinguish the course of the motor fibres, which to the most careful inspection are ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... supreme confidence in common men that was the keynote to the wonderful power of Dickens in making characters from those who were in a world sense undistinguished. On this position Chesterton lays great stress. It was this, he thinks, that made him an optimist. It was the same position that made Browning an optimist. It is the disbelief in the Divine image in Man that makes ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... growth. Just as, on the argument advanced in our first chapter, gods and fetishes have gradually been differentiated from some conception, prior to them, and indeterminate; just as magician and priest, eventually distinguished, were originally undistinguished, for a man of power was potentially both and might become either; so spell and prayer have come to be differentiated, to be recognised as different and fundamentally antagonistic, though originally the two categories ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... be unfair to take these crude productions of Branwell Bronte's boyhood as implying that he had no possibilities in him of anything better, but judging from the fact that his letters, as a man of eight and twenty, are as undistinguished as his sister's are noteworthy at a like age, we might well dismiss Branwell Bronte once and for all, were not some epitome of his life indispensable in an account ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... undistinguished Colonials and others of British race from all regions of the earth, who annually visit these shores on business or for pleasure or some other object, how many there must be who come with some such memory or dream or aspiration in their hearts! ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... but was especially eloquent in speech, and effective, even against the best Athenian opponents. He was modest, unambitious, patriotic, intellectual, contented with poverty, generous, and disinterested. When the Cadmea was taken, he was undistinguished, and his rare merits were only known to Pelopidas and his friends. He was among the first to join the revolutionists, and was placed by Pelopidas among the organizers of ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... situation when, one day, Herr von Karlstadt had himself presented to her. He was a captain of industry; international reputation; ennobled; the not undistinguished son of a great father. He had not hitherto been found in the market of love, but it was said of him that notable women had committed follies for his sake. All in all, he was a man who commanded the general interest in quite a different ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... presently LOKE—the first dressed like a Norwegian peasant, with a hunting-spear in his hand; the other undistinguished. ...
— The Death of Balder • Johannes Ewald
... that the original notes of Horace Walpole are throughout retained, undistinguished by any signature; whereas, those of the various editors are indicated by a characteristic initial, which is explained in the progress ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... car a mere average man, undistinguished but by a lack of especial distinction, sober of habit, economical of gesture, dressed in a simple lounge suit such as anybody might wear, beneath a rough and ready-made motorcoat. When the car stopped he had stood up in his place beside ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... yet speaks to us to be loving and helpful to one another. Her common and undistinguished love to us all was such that it could never be said which of us she loved the best, and it speaks to us, now that she is gone, to "love one another with a pure heart fervently." We know very well that our unity was the joy of her heart while living, and many a time she hath with us blessed God ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... to the dignity of her situation, and the purse of her lover, and his credit into the bargain, are taxed to the utmost to fit her out in becoming style. The wife of a free trapper to be equipped and arrayed like any ordinary and undistinguished squaw? Perish the grovelling thought! In the first place, she must have a horse for her own riding; but no jaded, sorry, earth-spirited hack, such as is sometimes assigned by an Indian husband for the transportation of his ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... prepared for the event; indeed the tedium of his confinement had been much relieved by the composition of lofty and heart-stirring addresses, in which he, the noble cavalier, laid his precious self and fortune at the feet of this undistinguished, but rich ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... absolutism, had now put an end to the employment of literary men in public life, and though Johnson's poem 'London,' a satire on the city written in imitation of the Roman poet Juvenal and published in 1738, attracted much attention, he could do no better for a time than to become one of that undistinguished herd of hand-to-mouth and nearly starving Grub Street writers whom Pope was so contemptuously abusing and who chiefly depended on the despotic patronage of magazine publishers. Living in a garret or even walking the streets at night for ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands. He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of ...
— The Declaration of Independence of The United States of America • Thomas Jefferson
... imparted—suggested excellent son-in-lawlike qualities to Mr. and Mrs. Barnes. He had the promise of a fair moustache, but his complexion generally was colourless. His features, except for a certain regularity, were undistinguished. His speech was modest and correct. His manner varied with his company. To-night it had been pronounced, ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... some days subsequently, invited to breakfast with the Earl of Cavan, who commanded in the district in which they had been landed. Tone, who up to that time, had escaped recognition, was one of the party, and sat undistinguished among them, until Sir George Hill, who had been a fellow-student of his in Trinity College, entered the room and accosted him by his name. This was done, not inadvertently, but with the intention of betraying him. ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... destitute of all that renders the name of Ausonia thrilling, or her champaigns beautiful, beyond the mere splendor of climate; and even that splendor is unshared by the mountain; its cold atmosphere being undistinguished by any of that rich, purple, ethereal transparency which gives the air of the plains its depth of feeling,—we can ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... extent it will be readable by strangers I cannot say, but to me it is intensely interesting, and if you can arrange for a few dozen reprints in paper wrappers I shall be glad to have them. I had, of course, some knowledge of my ancestors, but I had no idea that we were quite such an undistinguished rabble of groundlings for so long. That drunken whipper-in to Lord Dashingham in the seventeen-seventies ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... interests which the world supposes every man to have, and which therefore are properly enough termed worldly; but the world is apt to make an erroneous estimate: ignorant of the dispositions which constitute our happiness or misery, they bring to an undistinguished scale the means of the one, as connected with power, wealth, or grandeur, and of the other with their contraries. Philosophers and poets have often protested against this decision; but their arguments have been despised as declamatory, or ridiculed ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... of any other European country, and though it is at least probable that some of the greatest achievements of literature, French in language, are English in nationality, the vernacular should for long have been a little scanty and a little undistinguished in its yield. Periods of moulting, of putting on new skins, and the like, are never periods of extreme physical vigour. And besides, this Anglo-Saxon itself had (as has been said) been distinctly on the wane as a literary language for more than a century, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... one of the principal streets, is so intimately associated with this garden that it is necessary at this point to give a short account of him. Sir Hans Sloane was born in Ireland, 1660. He began his career undistinguished by any title and without any special advantages. Very early he evinced an ardent love of natural history, and he came over while still a youth to study in London. From this time his career was one long success. When he was only twenty-seven ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... greatest influences which transformed Doggie into a fairly efficient though undistinguished infantryman was a morbid social terror of his officers. It saved him from many a guard-room, and from many a heart-to-heart talk wherein the zealous lieutenant gets to know his men. He lived in dread lest military delinquency or civil accomplishment should be the ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... was "mother dear," and as persons under fifteen are always pressed for time and uniformly breathless, this appellation was shortened to "Motherdy," and Peter being unable to struggle with that term, had abbreviated it into "Muddy." "Muddy" in itself is undistinguished and even unpleasant, but when accompanied by a close strangling hug, pats on the cheek, and ardent if somewhat sticky kisses, grows by degrees to possess delightful associations. Mother Carey enjoyed it so much from Peter that she even permitted it ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... wards and outlying sections, and even, on occasion, in the business heart, behold the marching clubs—those sinister, ephemeral organizations which on demand of the mayor had cropped out into existence—great companies of the unheralded, the dull, the undistinguished—clerks, working-men, small business men, and minor scions of religion or morality; all tramping to and fro of an evening, after working-hours, assembling in cheap halls and party club-houses, and drilling themselves to what end? That they might march to the city hall on ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... whom my character is an heir-loom—that no obloquy shall follow me to the grave, for none have I merited. On the day these volumes see the light, this resolution will be partially fulfilled. On that day I shall have completed the eighty-third year of a career strangely chequered, yet not undistinguished; and, therefore, the opinions of either Chilians or Brazilians are now of small moment to me in comparison with a reputation which has been demmed worthy of belonging to history. None of the present ruling powers ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... a country gentleman of an undistinguished kind. The county gentry of England is a very comprehensive class. It includes the very best and most delightful of English men and English women, the truest nobility, the finest gentlemen; but it also includes a number of beings the most limited, dull, ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... or small Indian turban, and even the queer head-dress of the Parsee, is far from being a stranger in our assemblies. We doubt whether the name of Akhbar Khan himself, proclaimed at the foot of a staircase, would excite the same sensation in the present day, as the announcement of the most undistinguished wearer of the turban some ten or twenty years ago; but of the "Tours" and "Narratives" which are usually the inevitable result of such an influx of pilgrims, our Oriental visitors have as yet produced hardly their due proportion. For many years, the travels ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... therefore, to steal away from the company, which appeared no difficult matter, from the undistinguished part I acted in it. I resolved to return to the town, and pay another visit to Mr. John the following morning, and, at the same time, make some inquiries of him relative to the extraordinary man in grey, provided I could command sufficient ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... yellow beard, by name James Blount. With him also was the more insignificant figure of the priest from the neighbouring Roman Church; for the colonel's late wife had been a Catholic, and the children, as is common in such cases, had been trained to follow her. Everything seemed undistinguished about the priest, even down to his name, which was Brown; yet the colonel had always found something companionable about him, and frequently asked ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... pepper-and-salt mixture, breeches and gaiters complete, Mr. Chifney pricked forward soberly on his handsome gray cob. The boys called to one another now and then, admonished a fretful horse breaking away from the string. One of them whistled shrilly a few bars of that then popular but undistinguished tune, "Pop goes the weazel." And Richard craned far out, steadying himself against the stone mullion on either side with uplifted hands, heedless alike of his mother's presence and of the heavy drops of rain which splattered ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... servant problem," an undistinguished voice remarked two hours later; and the Poet, settling to an uneasy sleep in his chair, mentally ruled ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... world is at last larger and more populous and various than the world of schoolmasters. The Shoesmiths and Naylors who had been the aristocracy of City Merchants' fell into their place in my mind; they became an undistinguished mass on the more athletic side of Pinky Dinkyism, and their hostility to ideas and to the expression of ideas ceased to limit and trouble me. The brighter men of each generation stay up; these others go down to propagate their tradition, as the ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... the compliment, my Lord Duke," said Christian, entering the apartment in somewhat a more courtly garb, but with the same unpretending and undistinguished mien, and in the same placid and indifferent manner with which he had accosted Julian Peveril upon different occasions during his journey to London. "It is precisely my present object to pipe to you; and you may dance to your ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... (which possibly may have been long known to the public,) on the ground that even George III. would not have differed so widely from princes in general as to leave a brother of his own, however unaspiring, wholly undistinguished by public honors. But having since ascertained that a naval officer, well known to my own family, and to a naval brother of my own in particular, by assistance rendered to him repeatedly when a midshipman in changing ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... stunned by the noise and offended by the crowds. Instruction had not yet so prevailed over habit but that they wondered to see themselves pass undistinguished along the streets, and met by the lowest of the people without reverence or notice. The Princess could not at first bear the thought of being levelled with the vulgar, and for some time continued in her chamber, where she ...
— Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia • Samuel Johnson
... right people for present-giving at precisely the right moment previous to your wedding, when they know you neither too little nor too much. By long experience I have learnt to fix it to a day. But I am not going to compete with this undistinguished lavishness. I give you my picture to stand in your drawing-room as an artist puts his signature to a completed masterpiece, so that when you look around upon the furniture, the silver, the cut glass, the clocks, the ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... who pass you on the streets all smile and nod, stranger though you are. And if you happen to be at the little undistinguished depot just as the 6:10 pulls in, you will see pouring joyously out of it the Green Valley men, those who every day go to the great city to work and every night come thankfully back to their little ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... Sand's return from Italy in August 1834, was a time of transition, both in her outer and inner life. If undistinguished by the production of any novel calculated to create a fresh sensation, it shows no abatement of literary activity. This, as we have seen, had become to her a necessity of nature. Neither vicissitudes without nor commotions ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... pup, silken-haired; his Scandinavian cheeks like petals at an age when his companions' faces were like maps of the moon; stubborn and healthy; wearing a celluloid collar and a plain black four-in-hand; a blue-eyed, undistinguished, awkward, busy proletarian of sixteen, to whom evening clothes and poetry did not exist, but who quivered with inarticulate determinations to see Minneapolis, or even Chicago. To him it was sheer romance to parade through town with a tin haversack ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... no soul. How could they have? They were made by machines for undistinguished millions." She broke off this discussion. "I am eager for a run through the park. Won't you go? Hugh is my engineer. Reckless as he looks, I find him quite reliable as a tinker, and you know the auto is still in the ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... Anne's, Alderney, when I accompanied the Bishop to the ceremony: and some memorable stanzas about the decent expediency of the Bailiff and Jurats being robed for official uniform, since ornamentally adopted; but before I wrote they wore mean and undistinguished "mufti." ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... with the other hand, so as to make it catch a nail higher up. The same operation he performed on behalf of the other leg, and so on alternately. And thus he climbed, nail by nail, step by step, and stirrup by stirrup, till his starting-point was undistinguished from the golden surface, and the spire had dwindled in his embrace till he ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... than in our daily words, if only we knew how to put forth our hands and make it our own. 'What riches,' one exclaims, 'lie hidden in the vulgar tongue of our poorest and most ignorant. What flowers of paradise lie under our feet, with their beauties and their parts undistinguished and undiscerned, from having ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... yon undistinguished grave Erects its grassy pile on One who to all Experience gave An ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... Growling of bears, grunting of hogs, braying of donkeys, gobbling of turkeys, hissing of geese, the catcall, and the loud shrill whistle, were heard in one mingling concatenation of excellent imitation and undistinguished variety: During which, Tom led the way to the upper Boxes, where upon arriving, he was evidently disappointed at not meeting the party who had been seen occupying a seat on the left side of the House, besides having sacrificed a front seat, to be now compelled to take one at the very ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... looks forward, and makes necessary, as its completion, that coming which still lies in the future. These three stand up, like linked summits in a mountain. We can understand none of them unless we embrace them all. If the story of the birth is true, a life so begun cannot end in an undistinguished death like that of all men. And if the Ascension from Olivet is true, that cannot close the history of His relations to men. The creed which proclaims He was 'born of the Virgin Mary' must go on to say '... He ascended up into heaven'; ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Bourbons, while undistinguished by great events, was not fruitless in great men. On the fall of Napoleon, a crowd of authors, editors, orators, and statesmen issued from their retreats, and attracted notice by the brilliancy of their writings and speeches. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... Mina Raff's parents had died when she was a young girl, and the Groves had rescued her from the undistinguished evils of improvidence; she had lived with them until, against their intensest objections, she had gone into moving pictures. Probably the Groves' opposition had lasted until Mina's success; or, in other words, their support had been withheld ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... was a tall, sinewy young Englishman, with ruddy hair and beard, grave blue eyes, and an unmistakable air of good breeding. He wore a blue flannel shirt and high boots like Clarence's, yet somehow he made Clarence look a little rough and undistinguished. He was quiet in speech, reserved in manner, and seemed depressed and under a cloud; but Clover liked his face at once. He looked both ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... merchants, circumnavigating Africa, discovering Great Britain, and trading with India, ten centuries before Christ, had no equals on the ocean until the time of the Portuguese discoveries, twenty-five centuries after. The Arabs alone, of the seven Semitic families, remained undistinguished and unknown till the days of Mohammed. Their claim of being descended from Abraham is confirmed by the unerring evidence of language. The Arabic roots are, nine tenths of them, identical with the Hebrew; and a similarity of grammatical ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... Regardless of the past services of Fregellae and of the fact that the passion for the franchise was the most indubitable sign of the loyalty of the town, the government ordered that the walls of the surrendered city should be razed and that the town should become a mere open village undistinguished by any civic privilege.[489] A portion of its territory was during the next year employed for the foundation of the citizen colony of Fabrateria.[490] The new settlement was the typical Roman garrison in a disaffected country. But it proved the weakness of the present regime that ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... David Arnold Hanson, the famed engineer, no task was impossible. But quite a few things were impossible to that engineer's obscure and unimportant nephew, the computer technician and generally undistinguished man who had been christened Dave. They'd gotten the right man for the name, all right. But the ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... this time Eric came out eighth only instead of first, and, therefore, on the prize day, was obliged to sit among the crowd of undistinguished boys. He saw that his parents were disappointed, and his own ambition was grievously mortified. But he had full confidence in his own powers, and made the strongest resolutions to work hard the next half-year, when he had got out of "that ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... line to Alresford was not then made, and I had to post part of the way from London to The Grange. My chaise companion was a man very well known in 'Society'; and though not remarkably popular, was not altogether undistinguished, as the following little tale will attest. Frederick Byng, one of the Torrington branch of the Byngs, was chiefly famous for his sobriquet 'The Poodle'; this he owed to no special merit of his own, but simply to the accident of his thick curly head of hair. Some, who spoke feelingly ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... providential, this rarely allotted portion, this crowning incident of an heroic career, it is after all but an incident. It the man has not contrived; but to it he has contributed much, without which his passing hour would have faded to memory, undistinguished among those of the myriads, great and small, who have died as nobly and are forever forgotten. A sun has set; but before its setting it has run a course, be it long or short, and has gathered a radiance which fixes upon its parting ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... home from the churches to which they had been dutifully escorting their un-emancipated wives and sisters. Max Schurz kept open house for all on Sunday evenings, and there was not a drawing-room in London better filled than his with the very advanced and not undistinguished set who alone had the much-prized entree of ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... back, the figure had partially risen. Hastily dismounting, I was soon beside it, excitedly asking, 'Who, in the name of wonder, are you?' He answered, 'I am King, sir.' For a moment I did not grasp the thought that the object of our search was attained, for King being only one of the undistinguished members of the party, his name was unfamiliar to me. 'King?' I repeated. 'Yes,' he said; 'the last man of the exploring expedition.' 'What, Burke's?' 'Yes.' 'Where is he—and Wills?' 'Dead—both dead, long ago;' and again he fell to the ground. Then I knew who stood ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... pastures and open fields for pasture purposes, when they had in reality no legal claim whatever to such use. A poor man whose cow, donkey, or flock of geese had picked up a precarious livelihood on land of undistinguished ownership now found the land all enclosed and his immemorial privileges withdrawn without compensation. Naturally there was much dissatisfaction. A popular piece of ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... galleries, as they were originally, the richer burgesses were buried, though not one of their memorial stones remains; into the open space were flung the poor proletariat, who had gone through life marked with a yellow cross upon their arms, and found in death an undistinguished and promiscuous burial. Looking down upon them all in their last troubled sleep, were the figures carved in high relief upon each pillar, groups that are so mutilated now that only by the careful drawings and descriptions left by M. Langlois long ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... miserably the ceremony had been performed. I have been this evening to hear Peel move the address of condolence to the King, which Canning would have done if he had been here; and it is a pity he was not, for Peel did it very ill: it was poor and jejune, and undistinguished by eloquence or the appearance of deep feeling. I was greatly disappointed, for I expected to hear a worthier tribute to his merits. Canning was very anxious to have been here to have performed this duty himself. The letters which he wrote to the Royal Family abroad ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... to the State. One poet had been made a Peer. One man of science had been made a Privy Councillor, and another a Peer; two painters had been made baronets; and the humble distinction of Knight Bachelor, which had been tossed contemptuously to city sheriffs, provincial mayors, and undistinguished persons who used back-stairs influence to get the title, was now brought into better consideration by being shared by a few musicians, engineers, physicians, and others. Nothing could more clearly show the real contempt in which literature ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... rushing blood were dyed. Still unsubdued though wounded oft The shattered trunk he raised aloft, And down with well-directed aim On Jambumali's chest it came. There crushed upon the trampled grass He lay an undistinguished mass, The foeman's eye no more could see His head or chest or arm or knee. And bow and car and steeds(875) and store Of glittering ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... is: it is nothing but a degradation and exaggeration at once of certain things in Romance itself. Nor do I think that there is the slightest difficulty in showing that every form of novel-writing which we have been surveying in this book—that the work of every one of those distinguished or undistinguished writers who have been, with or without regret, declined—is still essentially Romantic. It is Romantic in its inflexible resolution to choose subjects for itself and not according to rule; Romantic in its wise or unwise individuality ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... part of the town, on a little hillock, stands the third fort, called el Castillo del Rosario, which is furnished with six pieces of cannon. The churches of Valparaiso are exceedingly plain and simple, undistinguished either for architecture or ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... came to the Gournay-Martin house, a wide-fronted mass of undistinguished masonry, in an undistinguished row of exactly the same pattern. There were no signs that any one was living in it. Blinds were drawn, shutters were up over all the windows, upper and lower. No smoke came from any of its chimneys, though indeed it ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... block, subject to one control,—which temper, which demand, the world may not be bound to gratify at all. In every outwardly verifiable and practical respect, a world in which the alternatives that now actually distract your choice were decided by pure chance would be by me absolutely undistinguished from the world in which I now live. I am, therefore, entirely willing to call it, so far as your choices go, a world of chance for me. To yourselves, it is true, those very acts of choice, which to me are so blind, opaque, and external, are the opposites of this, for you are within them and ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... unfolded; read the mournful tale Her hapless sister told, and wonderous! sate In silence; grief her rising words repress'd: Indignant, chok'd, her throat refus'd to breathe, The angry accents to her plaining tongue. To weep she waits not, in turmoil confus'd, Justice and flagrance undistinguished lie; Her mind sole bent for vengeance ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... daughter to an undistinguished father. Necessity may unite a young and elegant woman to an old and vulgar husband, but a liaison, such as that attributed to the young girl and the bourgeois of the terrace, can only result from love or interest. Now between these ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... Montcalm arrived in Canada and won his first victory at Oswego. In 1757 Wolfe distinguished himself by formulating the plan which, if properly executed, would have prevented the British fiasco at Rochefort on the coast of France. But Carleton remained as undistinguished as before. He simply became lieutenant-colonel commanding the 72nd Foot, now the Seaforth Highlanders. In 1758 his chance appeared to have come at last. Amherst had asked for his services at Louisbourg. But the king had neither forgotten ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... regard was had to the lineal descent, lastly confirmed by the Pope himself, should be soon deserted and opposed by those very persons who had been the most instrumental to promote him. But, beside his defective title, and the undistinguished liberty of building castles, there were three circumstances which very much contributed to those perpetual revolts of the nobles against him: first, that upon his coming to the crown he was very liberal in distributing lands and honours to several young gentlemen of noble birth, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... toys, wood blocks and so on, many elementary solid forms. It is matter of regret that in common language we have no easy, convenient words for many of these forms, and instead of being learnt easily and naturally in play, they are left undistinguished, and have to be studied later under circumstances of forbidding technicality. It would be quite easy to teach the child in an incidental way to distinguish cube, cylinder, cone, sphere (or ball), prolate spheroid (which might be called "egg"), oblate spheroid (which might be called ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... gathering that consisted of a very old lady with an extremely wrinkled skin and a deep voice who was wearing what appeared to Ann Veronica's inexperienced eye to be an antimacassar upon her head, a shy, blond young man with a narrow forehead and glasses, two undistinguished women in plain skirts and blouses, and a middle-aged couple, very fat and alike in black, Mr. and Mrs. Alderman Dunstable, of the Borough Council of Marylebone. These were seated in an imperfect semicircle about a very copper-adorned fireplace, ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... existence of that city has persisted, yet there is no absolutely authentic account of it having ever been reached, although hundreds, possibly thousands—if one could but know the whole truth—have most diligently and painfully sought it. And at last its discovery falls to the lot of two very undistinguished people, an Englishman and an American, as is quite in accordance with the fitness of things. Now let us make use of our remaining daylight to get down to a lower level, for, with the setting of the sun, it will be bitterly cold up here, and ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... of his sensations, impressions, emotions, and the events in which he is concerned. But experience crowds in upon him at every point, without order and without relation; the daily round of living is for most men a humdrum thing. Yet it is just this rudimentary and undistinguished mass of experience which is transmuted into literature; by the alchemy of art the representation of that which is without interest becomes interesting. And it happens on this wise. Life is humdrum only in so far as it is meaningless; men can endure any amount drudgery and monotony ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... nor stayed its course: and massive stones Cast by the beams of mighty engines fell; As from the mountain top some time-worn rock At length by winds dislodged, in all its track Spreads ruin vast: nor crushed the life alone Forth from the body, but dispersed the limbs In fragments undistinguished and in blood. But as protected by the armour shield The might of Rome drew nigh beneath the wall (The front rank with their bucklers interlaced And held above their helms), the missiles fell Behind their backs, nor could the toiling ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... mentioned in most of the Kaffir fights of his time.... Socially, he has always lived in a somewhat humble position, and it is to the credit of his nature as a man that he bears not the slightest trace of the parvenu. Plain and undistinguished in appearance, he combines the advantages of a prodigious memory with a remarkable aptitude for reading his fellow-man, and this last quality would be more valuable were it not leavened by a weakness in resisting flattery and adulation. ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... which had been laid aside on entering the saloon, as was the custom of the Romans in their own families, or among private friends, hung on the back of an armed chair; of ample size and fine material, but undistinguished by the marks of senatorial or equestrian rank. Such was the aspect, such the bearing of the youth, who might be safely deemed the girl's permitted suitor, from his whole air and manner, as he listened to the soft voice of his ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... highly mischievous tendency, if they were not rendered ridiculous by the manner in which they are expressed. The singularity of these productions excited a good deal of sensation, and, if we believe her own words, she was placed by them "in a definite rank among authors, and in no undistinguished circle of society." In some of the principal journals, however, the lady was severely taken to task, at the same time that she was counselled to obtain for herself a partner in weal and wo, by which she might be brought down from her foolish vagaries, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... of delubris that it bore some relation to diluvium or deluge, you imparted the result of your half-baked lucubrations to Winton who seems to have been lost enough to have accepted it. Observing next, your companion's fall, from the presumed security of your undistinguished position in the rear-guard, you took another pot-shot. The turbid chaos of your mind threw up some memory of the word "dilapidations" which you have pitifully attempted to disguise under ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... running abreast in the pursuit of honour. I believe that his disappointment at this crisis damped his ardour. Unfortunately, at that period there was no classical Tripos; so that if a person did not obtain the classical medal, he was thrown back among the totally undistinguished; and it was not allowable to become a candidate for the classical medal, unless you had taken a respectable degree in mathematics. Coleridge had not the least taste for these, and here his case was hopeless; so that he ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... contract their heart, and close it to all interests but their own. It is by no means to be opposed to mercy, but always accompanies it: the distinction between them is only that the former leads our thoughts to a more promiscuous and undistinguished distribution of favours; to those who are not, as well as those who are, necessitous; whereas the object of compassion is misery. But in the comparison, and where there is not a possibility of both, mercy is to have the preference: the affection of compassion ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... Kenelm's cousin. Altogether that was a very happy day for Sir Peter. He enjoyed greatly his dinner at the Garrick, where he met some old acquaintance and was presented to some new "celebrities." He observed that Gordon stood well with these eminent persons. Though as yet undistinguished himself, they treated him with a certain respect, as well as with evident liking. The most eminent of them, at least the one with the most solidly established reputation, said in Sir Peter's ear, "You may be proud ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... middle-class society. If she had not much education, she was altogether free from pretence, and the possession of property (which always works very decidedly for good or for evil) saved her from that excess of deference which would have accentuated her social shortcomings. Undistinguished as she might seem at the first glance, Miss Shepperson could not altogether be slighted by any one who had been in her presence for a few minutes. And when, in the course of the evening, she found courage to converse more freely, giving ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... and friends to one another; and they take it as a grave affront, whenever any distinction is drawn between them in any point but one. I am not of consequence enough to claim for myself so much as an undistinguished place among the select theologians who at this day have declared war on heresies: but this I know, that, puny as I am, I run no risk while, supported by the grace of Christ, I shall do battle, with the aid ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... reckoned as genuine Pleiades. The great majority were relegated, by Pickering's[1565] and Stratonoff's[1566] counts of the stellar populace in and near the cluster, to the position of outsiders from it. They are undistinguished denizens of the abysmal background ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... pursued his studies, as it is called, in a ratio inverse and descending, he might have gone on from bad to worse; and so, as many do, putting a grave face upon it, he might have had his degree. But his animal spirits, and love of bustle, could not go off thus undistinguished; and so, after coolly attempting to throw a tutor into the Cam—after shaking all Cambridge from its propriety by a night's frolic, in which he climbed the sign-posts, and changed the principal signs, he was rusticated; till the good-humour of the university returning, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... uses secret remedies. And it is one of the most encouraging things for all who speculate upon human possibility to consider the multitude of men in the last three centuries who have been content to live laborious, unprofitable, and for the most part quite undistinguished lives in the service of knowledge that has transformed the world. Some names indeed stand out by virtue of gigantic or significant achievement, such names as Bacon, Newton, Volta, Darwin, Faraday, Joule; but these are ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... many far more important cases. I incline to believe that certain nervous qualities, many of great value to humanity, tend to be latent in women, just as haemophilia does. Two women may appear very similar in mind and capacity, but one may come of a distinguished stock, and the other of an undistinguished. In the first woman, herself unremarkable, high ability may be latent, and her sons may demonstrate it. It is therefore every whit as important that the daughters of able and distinguished stock shall marry as that the sons shall. It remains true ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... of more stirring interest. The ordinary traveler, who has no time to dive very deep beneath the surface of human life, is not satisfied to find things nearly as he finds them at home; streets, shops, and houses undistinguished by any peculiarity save the inconveniences and oddities of age; people every where around him who dress like all other civilized people, and possess the standard virtues and weaknesses of humanity; the proprieties of life decently observed, and loyalty to forms and time-honored usages ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... Oft to the mountain's airy tops advanced, The frisking Satyrs on the summit danced. Alcides [1] here, here Venus graced the shore, Nor loved her favourite Lacedaemon more. Now piles of ashes, spreading all around, In undistinguished heaps deform the ground. The gods themselves the ruined seats bemoan, And blame the ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... Could hold in dreadful thrall the labouring moon, Or draw the fix'd stars from their eminence, And still the midnight tempest. Then anon Tell of uncharnel'd spectres, seen to glide Along the lone wood's unfrequented path, Startling the 'nighted traveller; while the sound Of undistinguished murmurs, heard to come From the dark centre of the deepening glen, Struck on ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... sight? If you continue in your belief as to his character—that he is to be a king as Herod was—of course you will keep on until you meet a man clothed in purple and with a sceptre. On the other hand, he I look for will be one poor, humble, undistinguished—a man in appearance as other men; and the sign by which I will know him will be never so simple. He will offer to show me and all mankind the way to the eternal life; the beautiful pure ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... the rue de Dunkerque stands the Hotel Railleux. It is a tall and narrow house, somewhat dirty and entirely undistinguished; there is nothing to recommend it save perhaps an air of privacy, a certain insignificance that wedges it between the surrounding buildings in a manner tempting to one anxious ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... French. Ordinary Englishmen would only have thought him a little old-fashioned; imperialistic Englishmen would really have mistaken him for the old John Bull of the caricatures. He was stout; he was quite undistinguished; and he had side-whiskers, worn just a little longer than John Bull's. He was by name Pierre Durand; he was by trade a wine merchant; he was by politics a conservative republican; he had been brought up ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... draw the follies of my brother from oblivion a culpable one. I am willing to rely, for my justification from malicious charges, on the general tenor of my actions, and am scarcely averse to buy my brother's reputation at the cost of my own. The censure of the undistinguishing and undistinguished multitude gives me little uneasiness. Indeed, the disapprobation of those who have no particular connection with us is a very faint, dubious, and momentary feeling. We are thought of, now and then, by chance, and immediately forgotten. Their happiness is unaffected ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... created out of fantasy; and this is supplemented by poetry of the domestic affections, the simple sorrows, all "that has been and may be again" in daily human lives, and by prose similarly related to a well-ordered life. If it is undistinguished by any work of supreme genius, it reflects broadly and happily and in enduring forms the national tradition and character of the land in its dawning ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... born February 12, 1809, in Hardin county, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families—second families perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks, some of whom now reside in Adams and others in Macon county, Illinois. ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... Mr Pickering with furtive side glances. He was not handsome, nor, on the other hand, was he repulsive. 'Undistinguished' was the adjective that would have described him. He was inclined to stoutness, but not unpardonably so; his hair was thin, but he was not aggressively bald; his face was dull, but certainly not stupid. There was nothing in his outer man ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... know—while thus the quiet-coloured eve Smiles to leave 50 To their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece In such peace, And the slopes and rills in undistinguished gray Melt away— That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair Waits me there In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul For the goal, When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... Spartan in the station. It rotated fast enough to give weight, but even on the outer skin that was only one-half Earth gravity. A couple of silent Martians prepared undistinguished meals and did housework in the quarters. There were no films or other organized recreation, though Lancaster was told that the forbidden sector included a ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... could not indeed boast of noble ancestry, nor was even a landed proprietor; but he was a not-undistinguished member of Parliament, of irreproachable character, and ample fortune inherited from a distant kinsman, who had enriched himself as a merchant. It was on both sides a marriage ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... young man's character was a high and abstracted ambition. He could have borne to live an undistinguished life, but not to be forgotten in the grave. Yearning desire had been transformed to hope, and hope, long cherished, had become like certainty that, obscurely as he journeyed now, a glory was to beam on all his pathway, though not, perhaps, while he was treading ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... moment often call forth talents and energies, the existence of which was wholly unsuspected by their possessors. For aught we know, many a hero may be now among the ranks, and many a gallant officer now before the mast, undistinguished from lack of opportunity, unknown because circumstances have not developed his dormant powers. How then can the hour be hastened, and the opportunity of developing our musical powers be afforded? The answer is, by the establishment of a National Opera. It has been observed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... then, Marguerite, the coloured hired girl, came to clear off the table. Missy regarded her capable but undistinguished figure. ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... after the great generals have had their monuments, and long after the abstract soldier's-monuments have been reared on every village green, we have chosen to take Robert Shaw and his regiment as the subjects of the first soldier's-monument to be raised to a particular set of comparatively undistinguished men. The very lack of external complication in the history of these soldiers is what makes them represent with such typical purity the profounder meaning ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... annually the universal butt and laughing-stock of the whole Senate-House. He is the last of those young men who take honors, in his year, and is called a Junior Optime; yet, notwithstanding his being in fact superior to them all, the very lowest of the [Greek: oi polloi], or gregarious undistinguished bachelors, think themselves entitled to shoot the pointless arrows of their clumsy wit against the wooden spoon; and to reiterate the stale and perennial remark, that "Wranglers are born with gold spoons in their mouths, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... poetical fury; and in these peculiar moments of inspiration, his amanuensis, who was generally his daughter, was summoned by the bell to arrest the verses as they came, and to commit them to the security of writing.... Some days would elapse undistinguished by a verse, while on others he would dictate thirty or forty lines.... Labor would often be ineffectual to obtain what often would be gratuitously offered to him; and his imagination, which at one instant ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... hour was aghast at faults which now entertain us, and was blind to sterling merits which we are now ready to acknowledge. Shortly after his death, perhaps his most brilliant apologist was fain to admit that if Disraeli had been undistinguished as a speaker, his novels would have been "as the flowers of the field, charming for the day which was passing over them, and then forgotten." It is only since the beginning of the present century that a conviction has been ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... aestumo, quoniam de utraque siletur. When Ovid says, Bene qui latuit, bene vixit, and Horace, Nec vixit male, qui vivens moriensque fefellit, they merely signify that he has some comfort in life, who, in ignoble obscurity, escapes trouble and censure. But men thus undistinguished are, in the estimation of Sallust, little superior to the brute creation. "Optimus quisque," says Muretus, quoting Cicero, "honoris et gloriae studio maxime ducitur;" the ablest men are most actuated by the desire of honor and glory, and are more solicitous about the character which ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... Bishop of Bath and Wells, was nominated by the pope with the king's consent on the recommendation of Chichele. He also held the office of chancellor for ten years, but was undistinguished in either office. He lies in the south aisle ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... whole host of things which make up the externals of his life, depend upon far other conditions than any that he brings to them. But yet on the whole it is true that what a man does, and is, settles how he fares. And this is the mystical importance and awful solemnity of the most undistinguished moments and most trivial acts of this awful life of ours, that each of them has an influence on all that comes after, and may deflect our whole course into altogether different paths. It is not only the moments that we ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... plain of the north, undistinguished by great hills, open to the torment of the sky, the gods had traced an arena wherein were to be fought out the principal battles ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... and while he studiously extolled the plays of Lord Orrery, as affording an exception to his general sentence against rhyming plays, he does not extend the compliment to Dryden, whose defence of rhyme was expressly dedicated to that noble author. Dryden, not much pleased, perhaps, at being left undistinguished in the general censure passed upon rhyming plays by his friend and ally, retaliates in the Essay, by placing in the mouth of Crites the arguments urged by Sir Robert Howard, and replying to them in the person ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... of Italy are known, Where none but only dead men wear a gown, On theatres of turf, in homely state, Old plays they act, old feasts they celebrate; * * * * * The mimic yearly gives the same delights; And in the mother's arms the clownish infant frights. Their habits (undistinguished by degrees) Are plain alike; the same simplicity Both on the stage and in the pit you see. In his white cloak the magistrate appears; The country bumpkin the ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... funeral—Sala, Sampson, Hood, Reid, and the undistinguished others, including this present Sole Survivor of the group. As each cast his handful of earth upon the coffin I am very sure that, like Lord Brougham on a somewhat similar occasion, we all felt more than we cared to express. On the death of a political antagonist whom ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... gallery had culminated in 1874, and in 1875 the ceremony was held in the Divinity School. But the noise is as prevalent as ever, and it must be confessed that undergraduates' wit has suffered severely from the feminine infusion. However, our visitors, distinguished and undistinguished alike, appreciate the disorder, and it certainly has plenty of precedent for it in all stages ...
— The Oxford Degree Ceremony • Joseph Wells
... the wisest way. Recollect that in Poesy as in every other human business, the more there are who practise it the greater will be the chance of someone's reaching perfection. It is the impetus of the undistinguished host that flings forward a Diomed or a Hector. And when you point with pride to Milton's and those other mulberry trees in your Academe, bethink you 'What poets are they shading to-day? Or are their leaves but feeding worms to spin gowns ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... of the number. Next morning the earl of Oxford presented himself with an air of confidence, as if he had expected to receive some particular mark of his majesty's favour; but he had the mortification to remain a considerable time undistinguished among the crowd, and then was permitted to kiss the king's hand without being honoured with any other notice. On the other hand, his majesty expressed uncommon regard for the duke of Marlborough, who had lately ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... dissension. This was followed immediately by a general attack upon the monuments and remains of antiquity throughout all France. The sepulchres of the great of past ages, of the barons and generals of the feudal ages, of the paladins, and of the crusaders, were involved in one undistinguished ruin. It seemed as if the glories of antiquity were forgotten, or sought to be buried in oblivion. The tomb of Du Gueselin shared the same fate as that of Louis XIV. The skulls of monarchs and heroes were tossed about like foot balls ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... twice, and at the time of his retirement from active service was for the second time a widower. Blindness—contracted by exposure and long marches over the snows of Galicia—had put an end to a career by no means undistinguished. In his last fight, at Corunna, he had not only earned a mention in despatches from his brigadier-general, Lord William Bentinck, but by his alertness in handling his half-regiment at a critical moment, and refusing its right to an outflanking line of French, ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... their common parentage, they wish to be brothers and friends to one another; and they take it as a grave affront, whenever any distinction is drawn between them in any point but one. I am not of consequence enough to claim for myself so much as an undistinguished place among the select theologians who at this day have declared war on heresies: but this I know, that, puny as I am, I run no risk while, supported by the grace of Christ, I shall do battle, with the ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... vain, to find friends, in the huge mass of slain,—fathers to recognize their sons. The mournful gratification of bending over the lifeless bodies of dear relations and gazing with intense anxiety on their pallid features, was denied them. Undistinguished, though not unmarked, all were alike consigned to the silent grave, amid sighs of ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... magnitude of Cavour's part in the play, even in the hour when the interest seemed transferred to the battlefield, and when an emperor and a king moved among them as liberators. At Milan, after the victory of Magenta had opened its gates, the most permanent enthusiasm gathered round the short, stout, undistinguished figure in plain clothes and spectacles—the one decidedly prosaic appearance in the pomp of war and the glitter of royal state. Victor Emmanuel said good-humouredly that when driving with his great subject, he felt just ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... whose name is revered in Chelsea and perpetuated in one of the principal streets, is so intimately associated with this garden that it is necessary at this point to give a short account of him. Sir Hans Sloane was born in Ireland, 1660. He began his career undistinguished by any title and without any special advantages. Very early he evinced an ardent love of natural history, and he came over while still a youth to study in London. From this time his career was one long success. When he was only twenty-seven he was selected by the Duke of Albemarle, who had been ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... make sense. So Calhoun listened politely until he found an undistinguished medical man who wanted some special information about gene-selection as practised halfway across the galaxy. He invited that man to the Med Ship, where he supplied the information not hitherto available. He saw his guest's eyes shine a little with that joyous ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... the son of Caius Laelius, who was the life-long friend of Scipio Africanus the Elder, was born B.C. 186, a little earlier in the same year with his friend Africanus the Younger. He was not undistinguished as a military commander, as was proved by his successful campaign against Viriathus, the Lusitanian chieftain, who had long held the Roman armies at bay, and had repeatedly gained signal advantages over them. He was known in the State, at first as leaning, though ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... strong necessity demands. But our Order is not so 'inclosed' that, if Duty calls, we cannot advance to its beckoning, and there are certain times when both I and those of my fraternity mingle with men in common, undistinguished from the ordinary inhabitants of cities either by dress, customs, or manners,—as you see!"—and he laughingly touched his overcoat, the dark rough cloth of which was relieved by a broad collar and revers of rich sealskin,—"Would you ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... qualities and characteristics, but in his absorption with Miss Axewright's he did not notice them. He saw again the pretty, pathetic face, the gentle brown eyes, the ordinary brown hair, the sentient hands, the slight, graceful figure, the whole undistinguished, unpretentious presence, which had taken his fancy at Boston, and which he now perceived had kept it, under whatever erring impressions, ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... mischievous tendency, if they were not rendered ridiculous by the manner in which they are expressed. The singularity of these productions excited a good deal of sensation, and, if we believe her own words, she was placed by them "in a definite rank among authors, and in no undistinguished circle of society." In some of the principal journals, however, the lady was severely taken to task, at the same time that she was counselled to obtain for herself a partner in weal and wo, by which ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... with them and lay thick upon them. Well down over their eyes were drawn the broad-rimmed hats. One of them wore sun goggles and both of them had their lower faces covered by silk bandannas as if to keep out the thick dust their ponies stirred. For the rest their costumes were the undistinguished chaps, spurs, shirt, neckerchiefs, ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... the east wind sobs and sighs, And drowns the turret bell, Whose sad note, undistinguished, dies Unheard, like ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... largely than in our daily words, if only we knew how to put forth our hands and make it our own. 'What riches,' one exclaims, 'lie hidden in the vulgar tongue of our poorest and most ignorant. What flowers of paradise lie under our feet, with their beauties and their parts undistinguished and undiscerned, from ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... whether it was safe for him to approach the house, or whether he had better remain hidden among the leaves. If you go now to look for the tree, it is indeed plain and easy to be seen. But though now so shorn and lonely, there is no doubt that two hundred years ago it stood undistinguished among a thousand others that thronged the woodland about the ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... cold, but a calm man, still more subdued by disease—a man of few words and of an unassuming modesty in general intercourse, but with something uncommon in the whole of his person which set him apart from the undistinguished lot of our sixty passengers. His eyes had a thoughtful, introspective look. In his attractive reserved manner and in a ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... but poetry was his delight, and he early resolved to devote himself to it. He accordingly sought the society of the contemporary poets, and was acquainted with Horace and saw Virgil, though the latter died when Ovid was yet too young and undistinguished to have formed his acquaintance. Ovid spent an easy life at Rome in the enjoyment of a competent income. He was intimate with the family of Augustus, the emperor, and it is supposed that some serious offence given to some member of that family was the cause of an event ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... Dreiser gets anything properly describable as pleasure out of this dogged accumulation of threadbare, undistinguished, uninspiring nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, participles and conjunctions. To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies—the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said—there is in writing ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... country, and though it is at least probable that some of the greatest achievements of literature, French in language, are English in nationality, the vernacular should for long have been a little scanty and a little undistinguished in its yield. Periods of moulting, of putting on new skins, and the like, are never periods of extreme physical vigour. And besides, this Anglo-Saxon itself had (as has been said) been distinctly on the wane as a literary language for more than a century, while (as has not ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... could they have? They were made by machines for undistinguished millions." She broke off this discussion. "I am eager for a run through the park. Won't you go? Hugh is my engineer. Reckless as he looks, I find him quite reliable as a tinker, and you know the auto is ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, ...
— A Short History of the United States • Edward Channing
... the lowly brave, who bled While cheerly following where the Mighty led—[309] Who sleep beneath the undistinguished sod Where happier comrades in their triumph trod, To us bequeath—'tis all their fate allows— The sireless offspring and the lonely spouse: She on high Albyn's dusky hills may raise The tearful eye in melancholy gaze, Or view, while shadowy auguries disclose The Highland ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... Tusa's stream, Where, [45] 'mid dim towers and woods, her [M] waters gleam. From the bright wave, in solemn gloom, retire The dull-red steeps, and, darkening still, aspire To where afar rich orange lustres glow 160 Round undistinguished clouds, and rocks, and snow: Or, led where Via Mala's chasms confine The indignant waters of the infant Rhine, Hang o'er the abyss, whose else impervious gloom [46] His burning eyes ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... a notion," answered Father Brown. "I want you to find out; I ask it as a favour. He went down there"—and he jerked his thumb over his shoulder in one of his undistinguished gestures—"and can't have passed three lamp-posts yet. I only want to ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... be pardoned for being a little too well satisfied with themselves and with their last new bibelot. The Fothergill dinners were like all other dinners given by the Fothergills of society. They were costly, utterly undistinguished, and invariably graced by the presence of certain guests who seemed to have been called in out of the street at the last moment. Van der Roet's Japanese menus were curious, and at times inimical to ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... Cupid with his bow; That half your locks are turn'd to gray? I'll ne'er believe a word they say. 'Tis true, but let it not be known, My eyes are somewhat dimmish grown; For nature, always in the right, To your decays adapts my sight; And wrinkles undistinguished pass, For I'm ashamed to use a glass: And till I see them with these eyes, Whoever says you have them, lies. No length of time can make you quit Honour and virtue, sense and wit; Thus you may still be young to ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... of the year 1705, a party of four was assembled in the Neuhaus, the seldom-used country mansion of Madame de Ruth, an important personage at Stuttgart's court, and of Monsieur de Ruth, an undistinguished character, who played no role that we know of, save to bequeath his ancient ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... was very pretty. The author had shuddered no less at the little paragraphs that the publisher had inserted in the newspapers concerning his birth and education, wherein he was bracketed with other well-known writers whose careers at the University had been equally undistinguished. But now that, like Byron, he found himself famous among the bacon and eggs, he was in no mood to remember these past vexations. As soon as he had finished breakfast he withdrew himself to his study and wrote half an essay on the ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... the field of battle. Warwick, contrary to his more usual practice, engaged that day on foot, resolving to show his army that he meant to share every fortune with them, and he was slain in the thickest of the engagement; and as Edward had issued orders not to give any quarter, a great and undistinguished slaughter was made in the pursuit. There fell about one thousand five hundred on the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... wouldn't train her hard. She had worked for ordinary wages and ordinary hours, and at the end of the day, she mentioned casually, a large automobile with two menservants and a trustworthy secretary used to pick her out from the torrent of undistinguished workers that poured out of the Synoptical Building. This masculinization idea had also sent her on a commission of enquiry into Mexico. There apparently she had really done ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... unappeased, decided that the moment for speech had arrived. He took a step forward upon the soft, pulpy leads. Even then he hesitated before he finally committed himself. About his appearance little was remarkable save the general air of determination which gave character to his undistinguished features. He was something above the medium height, broad-set, and with rather more thick black hair than he knew how to arrange advantageously. He wore a shirt which was somewhat frayed, and an indifferent tie; his boots were heavy and clumsy; he wore also a suit of ready-made ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... oblivion a culpable one. I am willing to rely, for my justification from malicious charges, on the general tenor of my actions, and am scarcely averse to buy my brother's reputation at the cost of my own. The censure of the undistinguishing and undistinguished multitude gives me little uneasiness. Indeed, the disapprobation of those who have no particular connection with us is a very faint, dubious, and momentary feeling. We are thought of, now and then, by chance, ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... December, 1859, to Mr. Fell, who had interrogated him with an eye "to the possibilities of his being an available candidate for the presidency in 1860:" "My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families,—second families, perhaps I should say. My mother ... was of a family of the name of Hanks, some of whom now remain in Adams, some others in Macon, counties, Illinois. My paternal grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, emigrated from Rockingham ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... marriage was not a story but a fact, and, somehow, the romance of it did not drift away, although the very house wherein she lived was infested by these conjoints, and the streets wherein she walked were crowded with undistinguished couples.... Those gray-lived, dreary-natured people had a spark of fire smoldering somewhere in their poor economy. Six feet deep is scarcely deep enough to bury romance, and until that depth of clay has clogged our bones the fire can ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... Sunday morning, she had been a quivering jelly of fear; positively annoyed with Rose for her serene assurance that 'the Pater would pull it off all right.' She had never quite fathomed her daughter's faith in the shy, undistinguished man for whom she cherished an affection secretly tinged with contempt. In this case it was justified. He had returned to tiffin quite unruffled; had vouchsafed no details; simply assured her she need not worry. Thank God, they had a strong L.G. That ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... tale Her hapless sister told, and wonderous! sate In silence; grief her rising words repress'd: Indignant, chok'd, her throat refus'd to breathe, The angry accents to her plaining tongue. To weep she waits not, in turmoil confus'd, Justice and flagrance undistinguished lie; Her mind sole bent ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... west front of York Minster is free from the two faults most common to the facades of most English cathedrals. It is not a mere undistinguished ending to the church, like those at Norwich and Winchester, and it is not a magnificent misrepresentation of the height or width of the building itself, like the west fronts at Peterborough and Lincoln. Most of the English cathedrals ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... give a charming daughter to an undistinguished father. Necessity may unite a young and elegant woman to an old and vulgar husband, but a liaison, such as that attributed to the young girl and the bourgeois of the terrace, can only result from love or interest. Now between these two there could be no love; and as to interest, ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... School. In the Class-room below were two platforms, now disappeared, the one by the door for the Usher's desk, the one by the Library for the Master. The Modern Language Room opened into it. There were two doors, one the main entrance chiefly used by the boys, the other smaller and undistinguished for the Masters only. It led into the Library and into a Tower, where the School bell was. The Library was not very big but a long narrow room, and inset in the wall was a fire-proof safe, for the better preservation of the Charter and other documents. It alone has ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... costume could make a crowd something other than the mass of sooty colour—dark without depth—and the multiplication of undignified forms that fill the streets, and demonstrate, and strike, and listen to the democrat. For the undistinguished are very important by their numbers. These are they who make the look of the artificial world. They are man generalised; as units they inevitably lack something of interest; all the more have they cumulative ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... in the business heart, behold the marching clubs—those sinister, ephemeral organizations which on demand of the mayor had cropped out into existence—great companies of the unheralded, the dull, the undistinguished—clerks, working-men, small business men, and minor scions of religion or morality; all tramping to and fro of an evening, after working-hours, assembling in cheap halls and party club-houses, and ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... miracle has just occurred in our district," wrote M. Marais, a worthy if undistinguished citizen of France, from his home at L'Aigle, under date of "the 13th Floreal, year 11"—a date which outside of France would be interpreted as meaning May 3, 1803. This "miracle" was the appearance of a "fireball" in broad daylight—"perhaps it was wildfire," says the naive chronicle—which ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... one of keen interest in life. Lincoln eventually stands out as a surprising figure from among the other lawyers and little politicians of Illinois, as any great man does from any crowd, but some tribute is due to the undistinguished and historically uninteresting men whose generous appreciation gave rapid way to the poor, queer youth, and ultimately pushed him into a greater arena ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... there is another equally contemptible Brook, making towards Oder, and turning the so-called Krebsmuhle, which became still more famous to the whole European Public twenty years hence. KREBS-MUHLE (Crab-Mill), as yet quite undistinguished among Mills; belonging to a dusty individual called Miller Arnold, with a dusty Son of his own for Miller's Lad: was it at work this day? Or had the terrible sound from ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... any that are useless and unnecessary? If I offer myself to you because I think we have a fair chance of being happy together, and because by your help I may get for both of us a good place and a not undistinguished name, why ask me to feign raptures and counterfeit romance, in which neither of us believe? Do you want me to come wooing in a Prince Prettyman's dress from the masquerade warehouse, and to pay you compliments like ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... alternative—then we alter the case altogether. The government of a modern Utopia will be no perfection of intentions ignorantly ruling the world.... [Footnote: In the typical modern State of our own world, with its population of many millions, and its extreme facility of movement, undistinguished men who adopt an alias can make themselves untraceable with the utmost ease. The temptation of the opportunities thus offered has developed a new type of criminality, the Deeming or Crossman type, base men who subsist and feed their heavy ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... I am reminded) an ode on the consecration of St. Anne's, Alderney, when I accompanied the Bishop to the ceremony: and some memorable stanzas about the decent expediency of the Bailiff and Jurats being robed for official uniform, since ornamentally adopted; but before I wrote they wore mean and undistinguished "mufti." ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... steadiness which they imparted—suggested excellent son-in-lawlike qualities to Mr. and Mrs. Barnes. He had the promise of a fair moustache, but his complexion generally was colourless. His features, except for a certain regularity, were undistinguished. His speech was modest and correct. His manner varied with his company. To-night it had been pronounced, ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... distance, and he must remain part of the immense question which London continues for the inquirer to the last; but it is safe to say that he looked distinguished. Out of season, the London type of man looked undistinguished, but when the season began to make London over, the pavement of Piccadilly sprouted in a race of giants who were as trees walking. They were mostly young giants, who had great beauty of complexion, of course, ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... excellences, of Mr. Wordsworth's published poems. The first characteristic, though only an occasional defect, is the inconstancy of style; the sudden and unprepared transitions from lines or sentences of peculiar felicity to a style not only unimpassioned, but undistinguished. He sinks too often, too abruptly, into the language of prose. The second defect is a certain matter-of-factness in some of his poems, consisting in a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the representations ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... man who uses secret remedies. And it is one of the most encouraging things for all who speculate upon human possibility to consider the multitude of men in the last three centuries who have been content to live laborious, unprofitable, and for the most part quite undistinguished lives in the service of knowledge that has transformed the world. Some names indeed stand out by virtue of gigantic or significant achievement, such names as Bacon, Newton, Volta, Darwin, Faraday, Joule; but these are but the culminating ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... seen; and the Tyrian merchants, circumnavigating Africa, discovering Great Britain, and trading with India, ten centuries before Christ, had no equals on the ocean until the time of the Portuguese discoveries, twenty-five centuries after. The Arabs alone, of the seven Semitic families, remained undistinguished and unknown till the days of Mohammed. Their claim of being descended from Abraham is confirmed by the unerring evidence of language. The Arabic roots are, nine tenths of them, identical with the Hebrew; and a similarity of grammatical forms shows a plain glossological relation. But while the ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... wrote them down at the time, as a supreme example of the art of "leg-pulling." Amongst the members of the "Grill-room Club" was an elderly bachelor, whom I will call Mr. Smith. "Mr. Smith," who has now been dead for some years, was wholly undistinguished in every way. He ate largely, and spoke little, but Tree had discovered that under his placid exterior he concealed a vein of limitless vanity. One evening "Mr. Smith" startled the club by breaking his habitual silence, and bursting into poetry. Apropos of nothing ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... while thus entangled by a bond of enduring material, a bait for a fierce brute which eagerly pressed forward to snap at me. Believe me, boys, this was not the happiest moment of my life. I knew no reason why I should resignedly submit to so undistinguished a fate. My knife, however, was in the boat, so that my release could only be attained by extreme exertion. Accordingly I writhed and jerked with my 'best violence,' all the time denouncing the whole race of bears, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... one of whom was the grandfather of Petrarch. Diminutives being customary to the Tuscan tongue, Pietro, the poet's father, was familiarly called Petracco, or little Peter. He, like his ancestors, was a notary, and not undistinguished for sagacity. He had several important commissions from government. At last, in the increasing conflicts between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines—or, as they now called themselves, the Blacks and the Whites—Petracco, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... marked, special; eminent, illustrious, famous, celebrated, renowned, noted; transcendent, extraordinary, supreme, consummate, conspicuous. Antonyms: undistinguished, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... lodger must have lived somewhere during his forty-odd years of life. She did not even know if Mr. Sleuth had any brothers or sisters; friends she knew he had none. But, however odd and eccentric he was, he had evidently, or so she supposed, led a quiet, undistinguished kind of life, ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... of the brilliant Themistocles he had a persistent opponent, Aristides, a man, like him, born of undistinguished parents, but who by moral strength and innate power of intellect won the esteem and admiration of his fellow-citizens. He became the leader of the aristocratic section of the people, as Themistocles did of the democratic, ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... easy it is to misjudge your so-called 'common man'! That fat, undistinguished-looking Briton in the corner of the omnibus is as likely as not Mr. So-and-So, the distinguished poet; and who but those with the divining-rod of a kind heart know what refined sensibility and nobility of character may lurk under ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... drove across her surface. The melancholy and uncertain gleams that she shot from between the passing shadows fell full upon the rifted arches and shafted windows of the old building, which were thus for an instant made distinctly visible in their ruinous state, and anon became again a dark, undistinguished, and shadowy mass. The little lake had its share of these transient beams of light, and showed its waters broken, whitened, and agitated under the passing storm, which, when the clouds swept over the moon, were only distinguished by their sullen and murmuring plash against the beach. ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... young Guardsman was undistinguished among the brilliant character-groups which represented old fairy tales and nursery rhymes. There were 'The White Cat and her Prince,' 'Puss-in- Boots and the Princess,' 'Little Snowflake and her Bear,' ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Coleridge slip, chasing forth Shelley, is, after all, not the wisest way. Recollect that in Poesy as in every other human business, the more there are who practise it the greater will be the chance of someone's reaching perfection. It is the impetus of the undistinguished host that flings forward a Diomed or a Hector. And when you point with pride to Milton's and those other mulberry trees in your Academe, bethink you 'What poets are they shading to-day? Or are their leaves but feeding worms to spin gowns ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... to be extraordinarily French. Ordinary Englishmen would only have thought him a little old-fashioned; imperialistic Englishmen would really have mistaken him for the old John Bull of the caricatures. He was stout; he was quite undistinguished; and he had side-whiskers, worn just a little longer than John Bull's. He was by name Pierre Durand; he was by trade a wine merchant; he was by politics a conservative republican; he had been brought up a Catholic, had always thought and acted as an agnostic, ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... who survived the action, and had been made prisoners of war, were, some days subsequently, invited to breakfast with the Earl of Cavan, who commanded in the district in which they had been landed. Tone, who up to that time, had escaped recognition, was one of the party, and sat undistinguished among them, until Sir George Hill, who had been a fellow-student of his in Trinity College, entered the room and accosted him by his name. This was done, not inadvertently, but with the intention of betraying ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... shall we know him at sight? If you continue in your belief as to his character—that he is to be a king as Herod was—of course you will keep on until you meet a man clothed in purple and with a sceptre. On the other hand, he I look for will be one poor, humble, undistinguished—a man in appearance as other men; and the sign by which I will know him will be never so simple. He will offer to show me and all mankind the way to the eternal life; the beautiful ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... foreign lands by reminiscent imagination, or symbolically created out of fantasy; and this is supplemented by poetry of the domestic affections, the simple sorrows, all "that has been and may be again" in daily human lives, and by prose similarly related to a well-ordered life. If it is undistinguished by any work of supreme genius, it reflects broadly and happily and in enduring forms the national tradition and character of the land in its dawning ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... more impressive instance of the contrast, familiar to biographers, between the apparent insignificance and the real importance of their hero in undistinguished youth. To any one considering Wordsworth as he then was,—a rough and somewhat stubborn young man, who, in nearly thirty years of life, had seemed alternately to idle without grace and to study without advantage,— it might well have seemed incredible that he could have anything new or valuable ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... Westminster does to London, being still possessed of the palace of the sovereign, as it formerly was dignified by the residence of the principal nobility and gentry. I may therefore, with some propriety, put the same motto at the head of the literary undertaking by which I hope to illustrate the hitherto undistinguished ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... guests no one especially claimed his interest. The men were nice but undistinguished—athletic schoolmasters, doctors snatching a holiday, good fellows all; the women, equally various—the clever, the would-be-fast, the dare-to-be-dull, the women "who understood," and the usual pack of jolly dancing girls and ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... adopted the ideas of absolute authority and undistinguished equality during the five centuries between Caesar and Clovis, that the people could never be reconciled to the new system. Feudalism remained a foreign importation, and the feudal aristocracy an alien race, and the common people of France sought ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... arms of Tired Nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep. Meditation, avaunt! Respected (tho' unknown) Sir,—Out of the abundant store of your immutable condescension graciously deign to pardon the bold assurance and presumptuous liberty of an animated mass of undistinguished dust, whose fragile composition is most miraculously composed of congenial atoms so promiscuously concentred as to personify in an abstracted degree the beauteous form of man, to convey by proxy to ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... dream of breaking. You may break every moral law there is—or rather, was—and still remain a man. You may be a bully, a cad, a coward and a fool, in the poor heart and brains of you; but so long as you wear the mock regimentals of contemporary manhood, and are above all things plain and undistinguished enough, your reputation for manhood will be secure. There is nothing so dangerous to a reputation for manhood ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... cordially polite to Kenelm's cousin. Altogether that was a very happy day for Sir Peter. He enjoyed greatly his dinner at the Garrick, where he met some old acquaintance and was presented to some new "celebrities." He observed that Gordon stood well with these eminent persons. Though as yet undistinguished himself, they treated him with a certain respect, as well as with evident liking. The most eminent of them, at least the one with the most solidly established reputation, said in Sir Peter's ear, "You may be proud of ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... seventeen. The muster roll gave his name as Isaac Franks, the simple record holding no promise of the day when the Jewish boy, a distinguished veteran of the Revolution, should entertain President Washington as his guest. Today young Franks stood undistinguished among the other eager patriots and the future president was only the leader of an army of untrained "rebels", knowing full well that a traitor's death awaited him if his campaign against the British ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... ceremony had been performed. I have been this evening to hear Peel move the address of condolence to the King, which Canning would have done if he had been here; and it is a pity he was not, for Peel did it very ill: it was poor and jejune, and undistinguished by eloquence or the appearance of deep feeling. I was greatly disappointed, for I expected to hear a worthier tribute to his merits. Canning was very anxious to have been here to have performed this duty himself. The letters which he wrote ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... course; They break through all, for William leads the way, Where fires rage most, and loudest engines play. Namur's late terrors and destruction show What William, warmed with just revenge, can do: Where once a thousand turrets raised on high Their gilded spires, and glittered in the sky, 80 An undistinguished heap of dust is found, And all the pile lies smoking on the ground, His toils, for no ignoble ends design'd, Promote the common welfare of mankind; No wild ambition moves, but Europe's fears, The cries of orphans, and ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... can find in the newspaper. My dear, dear brother, how you would work hard if you only knew what a prize success in life might give you. Little as I have seen of her, I could guess that she will never bestow a thought on an undistinguished man. Come down for one day, and tell me if ever, in all your ambition, you had such a goal before ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... their homes, serving them for playthings and for picture-galleries. 'Happy is the man that has his quiver full of them.' The stray bastard is contended for by rival families; and the natural and the adopted children play and grow up together undistinguished. The spoiling, and I may almost say the deification, of the child, is nowhere carried so far as in the eastern islands; and furthest, according to my opportunities of observation, in the Paumotu group, the so-called Low or Dangerous ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... descended from David. St. Matthew shows that St. Joseph was of Davidic descent. Again, the Jews would say that in any case the Messiah would not be likely to be connected with a humble carpenter and his folk. The evangelist's reply is that David himself was descended from comparatively undistinguished men and from women who were despised. Thus St. Matthew meets both points ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... northern part of the town, on a little hillock, stands the third fort, called el Castillo del Rosario, which is furnished with six pieces of cannon. The churches of Valparaiso are exceedingly plain and simple, undistinguished either ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... established, is more potent even than that of a war chief. The dignity and profit of the position are baits sufficient to command the attention and ambition of the ablest men; yet it is not unfrequently the case that persons otherwise undistinguished are noted for clear and strong ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... more. And this is the home of misfortune, but not like the squalid place of rage, idiocy, imbecility, drunkenness, where I was born. How many times I have blushed to remember that native home! But not of late! I have struggled; I have fought; I have triumphed. The unknown boy has come to be no undistinguished man! His ancestry, should he ever reveal himself to them, need not ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... although it was first heard with amazement, it soon became general, The Prince was laid under the ban of several successive popes, and the name of Machiavelli passed into a proverb of infamy. His bones lay undistinguished for nearly two centuries, when a monument was erected to his memory in the church of Santa Croce, through the influence of ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... fix'd stars from their eminence, And still the midnight tempest. Then anon Tell of uncharnel'd spectres, seen to glide Along the lone wood's unfrequented path, Startling the 'nighted traveller; while the sound Of undistinguished murmurs, heard to come From the dark centre of the deepening glen, Struck on his ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... character by Goldsmith in the poem "Retaliation," as "the scourge of impostors, the terror of quacks." I have gone over the names of those who might be Smith's contemporaries at Balliol as they appear in Mr. Foster's list of Alumni Oxonienses, and they were a singularly undistinguished body of people. Smith and Douglas themselves are indeed the only two of them who seem to have made any mark ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... laid aside on entering the saloon, as was the custom of the Romans in their own families, or among private friends, hung on the back of an armed chair; of ample size and fine material, but undistinguished by the marks of senatorial or equestrian rank. Such was the aspect, such the bearing of the youth, who might be safely deemed the girl's permitted suitor, from his whole air and manner, as he listened to the soft voice of his beautiful mistress. For ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... Betty. "I told you what I thought right. I love the club, and every single member of it—except my cousin, Fanny Crawford. I don't love Fanny, and she doesn't love me—I say so quite plainly; therefore, once again, I break Rule I. You see, girls, I cannot stay. I must become again an undistinguished member of this great school. Don't suppose it will hurt my vanity; but it will touch deeper things in me, and I shall never, never forget your kindness. I can by no possibility do more than I have done. Good-bye, dear Margaret; I am more than sorry that ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... Honourable Richard Fitzpatrick was the only brother of the last Earl of Upper Ossory, and prominent in fashion, in politics, and in elegant literature, and not undistinguished as a soldier. He sat in nine successive parliaments (in two which I knew him). As early as 1782 he was Secretary for Ireland, and in 1783 Secretary-at-War, which office he again filled in 1806. In the galaxy of opposition wits, when opposition was ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various
... of worship was of the Methodist, Episcopal, or Baptist creed, whether it had a chancel or altar, or painted windows? Whether the pews had doors to them and were cushioned or not? Whether the minister wore a gown and bands, or plain suit of black, or was undistinguished in his dress? Will it not suffice if I tell you, as the very belief of my soul, that it was a christian house, that there were seats for all, that things were well intended and decently ordered, and that with a hymn sung with ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... guest. But, dearest Sal! the flames that you impart, Like chop on gridiron, broil my tender heart! Which if thy kindly helping hand be n't nigh, Must like an up-turned chop, hiss, brown, and fry; And must at least, thou scorcher of my soul, Shrink, and become an undistinguished coal." ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... Simmons. He was a tall, healthy figure, strong, but a little slouching, and there was in his walk something between a slight swagger and a seaman's roll; he commonly had his hands in his pockets. His hair was dark, straight, and undistinguished; and his face, if one saw it after his figure, was something of a surprise. For while the form might be called big and braggart, the face might have been called weak, and was certainly worried. It was a hesitating ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... the train pulled in at Perkinsville. The town was as undistinguished as I expected. I was too hungry to care about castles at the moment, so I took the 'bus for the Commercial Hotel, an establishment that seemed to live up to its name, both in sentiment and in accommodation. The landlord, ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... force of scenic dialogue his transcript of the evidence in a popular and exciting case of adultery and murder. The one figure on the stage of this author which stands out sharply defined in our recollection against a background of undistinguished shadows is the figure of the adulterer and murderer. This most discreditable of Browns has a distinct and brawny outline of his own, a gait and accent as of a genuine and recognisable man, who might have put to some better profit his shifty ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Nutcracker-Teeth Makers' Union, but you rub shoulders at a conference with men whose names are a household word throughout the whole of Great Britain, amongst those who have houses. The distinguished and the undistinguished lay their heads together; the spat-wearing get their feet mixed with the non-spat-wearing; though there is rather a fake, mind you, about this spat-wearing business, for it may simply mean that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... being fought Edward was lingering in the South courting the young widow of Sir John Grey, usually known by her maiden name as Elizabeth Woodville. His marriage to her gave offence to his noble supporters, who disdained to acknowledge a queen of birth so undistinguished; and their ill-will was increased when they found that Edward distributed amongst his wife's kindred estates and preferments which they had hoped to gain for themselves. The queen's father became Earl Rivers and ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... spoke of himself in any way that one heard from him few of those experiences of the distinguished man in contact with the undistinguished, which he must have had so abundantly. But he told, while it was fresh in his mind, an incident that happened to him one day in Boston at a tobacconist's, where a certain brand of cigars was recommended to him as the kind Longfellow smoked. "Ah, then I must have some of them; and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... man. So, too, though the latter should fail in his undertakings from concurrences that might have happened to the wisest man, yet his failure being no more than might have been expected and accounted for from his folly, it lays no hold on our attention, but fleets away among the other undistinguished waves, in which the stream of ordinary life murmurs by us, and is forgotten. Had it been as true as it was notoriously false, that those all-embracing discoveries, which have shed a dawn of science on the art of chemistry, and give no obscure promise of some ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... having their politics logical demand to know the why of Harding. Why was a man of so undistinguished a record as he first chosen as a candidate for President ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... And Owen and Evelyn went into the house. "I do hope, Owen, that Eliza's cooking will not seem to you too utterly undistinguished." ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... were beginning to disappear beneath the expressionless mask of concrete. It was all changed since his father's or his grandfather's day; it was all obvious and cheap, he thought; it was all ugly and naked and undistinguished—yet the tide of the new ideas was still rising. Democracy, relentless, disorderly, and strewn with the wreckage of finer things, had overwhelmed the world of established ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... the Artist has failed. For, if there be but one in a thousand to whose mind it recalls the deep stillness of Night, gradually broken by the awakening stir of Day, with its myriad forms of life emerging into motion, while their lengthened shadows, undistinguished from their objects, seem to people the earth with gigantic beings; then the dim, gray monotony of color transforming them to stone, yet leaving them in motion, till the whole scene becomes awful and mysterious as with moving statues;—if ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... loftiness of a soul are put to a perilous test when something passes by that is of the highest rank, but is not yet protected by the awe of authority from obtrusive touches and incivilities: something that goes its way like a living touchstone, undistinguished, undiscovered, and tentative, perhaps voluntarily veiled and disguised. He whose task and practice it is to investigate souls, will avail himself of many varieties of this very art to determine the ultimate value of a soul, the unalterable, innate order of rank to which ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... proposed by the Rotary Club of Seattle, would be a justifiable compromise, and satisfy nearly everybody. Its adoption would free our national map from one more of its meaningless names—the name, in this case, of an undistinguished foreign naval officer whose only connection with our history is the fact that he fought against us during the American Revolution. Incidentally, it would also free me from the need of an apology for ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is undistinguished destruction of ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... the rudest fragment of barbaric history, spoke the language of elevation, harmony and hope. The circle, of which he was the beloved centre, was composed of men equally sincere, resolute and hopeful; there was not one of them undistinguished. Some of them had now the first literary distinction. The character of each was remarkable for some distinctive and bold feature of originality. I, of course, exclude myself from this description. I know not to what circumstance I owe the happiness of their trust and friendship. ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... separated by membranous walls or obvious changes of structure, is very unscientific; for even in the spinal cord, which is more easily studied, we do not find such separation between the widely distinct functions of sensibility and motility. Their nerve fibres run together undistinguished, and it is only by the study of pathological changes that we have been able to distinguish the course of the motor fibres, which to the most careful inspection are ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... conversation of the learned, but was especially eloquent in speech, and effective, even against the best Athenian opponents. He was modest, unambitious, patriotic, intellectual, contented with poverty, generous, and disinterested. When the Cadmea was taken, he was undistinguished, and his rare merits were only known to Pelopidas and his friends. He was among the first to join the revolutionists, and was placed by Pelopidas among the organizers ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... Gregory presents so amusingly and so truly in her modern farce comedy. "Kincora" (1903) takes us all the way back to the eleventh century, deriving its name from Brian's Seat on the Shannon and ending with his death at Clontarf. It is undistinguished melodrama. "The White Cockade" (1905) is better only in so far as it involves farce, farce in the kitchen of an inn on the Wexford coast just after the Battle of the Boyne. "Devorgilla" (1908) is of a time between the times of the two other historical plays, ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... gripped each other. But now Larry was seeing more than just Maggie. He was also taking in the room. It was close kin to the room in which he had left Miss Grierson: ornate, undistinguished, and very expensive. He noted one slight difference: a tiny hallway giving on the corridor, ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... was "born at Edinburgh, on the 18th of February, at 30 minutes past 3 a.m." But this accuracy was not inherited, although the son was brought up to assist his father on the friezes which he executed on Burton's Arch at Hyde Park Corner, and on the Athenaeum Club-house. His drawing was loose and undistinguished; his sense of humour, such as it was, unrefined; and his fun exaggerated and false. He was a Bohemian, but not of the type of his brother-in-law Kenny Meadows, preferring a class of entertainment less exalted than those who so warmly welcomed his sister's husband. Mr. Sala tells me ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... Life of Bacon, I see he mentions that he was privately buried at St. Michael's church, near St. Alban's; and it adds, 'The spot that contains his remains lay obscure and undistinguished, till the gratitude of a private man, formerly his servant' (Sir Thomas Meautys), 'erected a monument to his name and memory.' This makes it probable that the likeness ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... more mitigated scepticism or academical philosophy, which may be both durable and useful, and which may, in part, be the result of this Pyrrhonism, or excessive scepticism, when its undistinguished doubts are, in some measure, corrected by common sense and reflection. The greater part of mankind are naturally apt to be affirmative and dogmatical in their opinions; and while they see objects only on one side, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... first, the glimpse of our Lord's early life. They bring before us the quiet, undistinguished home and the long years of monotonous labour. We owe to Mark alone the notice that Jesus actually wrought at Joseph's handicraft. Apparently the latter was dead, and, if so, Jesus would be the head of the house, and probably the 'breadwinner.' One of the fathers preserves the tradition ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... climactic triumph of the event. And he was Missy's own inspiration. She had been racking her brains for some way to eliminate the undistinguished Marguerite, to conjure through the very strength of her desire some approach to a proper servitor. If only they had ONE of those estimable beings in Cherry vale! A butler, preferably elderly, and "steeped ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... back to him: Mina Raff's parents had died when she was a young girl, and the Groves had rescued her from the undistinguished evils of improvidence; she had lived with them until, against their intensest objections, she had gone into moving pictures. Probably the Groves' opposition had lasted until Mina's success; or, in other words, their support had been withheld from her through the ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... condition, and the coldness of the wealthy or the titled. The epistles of other poets owe some of their fame to the rank or the reputation of those to whom they are addressed; those of Burns are written, one and all, to nameless and undistinguished men. Sillar was a country schoolmaster, Lapraik a moorland laird, Smith a small shop-keeper, and Rankine a farmer, who loved a gill and a joke. Yet these men were the chief friends, the only literary associates of the poet, during those early years, in which, with ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... is the disparity, in this regard, between him and the other dramatic writers of his whole period,—Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Kyd, Lilly, Chapman, Jonson, Middleton, Marston, Ford, Webster, Massinger, and the undistinguished crowd. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... the passage accompanied by ERICH SPITTA, a young man of twenty-one, spectacled, with keen and not undistinguished features, SPITTA passes as a student of theology and is correspondingly dressed. He does not hold himself erect and his development shows the influence of over-study ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... Rogers's poems. You have there a sky blazing with sunbeams; but they all begin a long way from the sun, and they are accounted for by a mass of dense clouds surrounding the orb itself. Turn to the 7th page. Behind the old oak, where the sun is supposed to be, you have only a blaze of undistinguished light; but up on the left, over the edge of the cloud, on its dark side, the sunbeam. Turn to page 192,—blazing rays again, but all beginning where the clouds do, not one can you trace to the sun; and observe how carefully the long shadow on the ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... down the rue de Dunkerque stands the Hotel Railleux. It is a tall and narrow house, somewhat dirty and entirely undistinguished; there is nothing to recommend it save perhaps an air of privacy, a certain insignificance that wedges it between the surrounding buildings in a manner tempting to one anxious ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... with hair in it, who taught a pack of girls up there at the school, and looked as if she were born for a teacher,—the very best foil that she could have chosen; and here was this man, polite enough to herself, to be sure, but turning round to that very undistinguished young person as if he rather preferred her conversation of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... generally been the sword. The Gospel has met and mastered them all. It, and it only, has had power to draw men to itself out of every faith. The ancient gods who bewitched Israel, the gods of Greece, the gods of our own ancestors, the gods of the islands of the South Seas, lie huddled together, in undistinguished heaps, like corpses on a battlefield, and the deities of India and the East are wounded and slowly bleeding out their lives. 'Bel boweth down, Nebo stoopeth, the idols are upon the beasts,' all packed up, as it were, and ready ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... won't take you long to listen to it, for, Miss Clifford, like Canning's needy knife-grinder, I have really none to tell. You see before you one of the most useless persons in the world, an undistinguished member of what is called in England the 'leisured class,' who can do absolutely nothing that is worth ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... superscription of one of them, and saw—"George Denbigh, Esq." in the well known hand-writing of Dr. Ives.—Mrs. Wilson felt herself overcome to a degree that compelled her to lower a glass of the carriage for air. She sat gazing on the letters until the characters swam before her eyes in undistinguished confusion; and with difficulty she rallied her thoughts to the point necessary for investigation. As soon as she found herself equal to the task, she examined the letters with the closest scrutiny, and opened them both to be sure there was no mistake. ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... driveway stood the "Comet" and behind him at a respectful distance, like a servant behind his master, stood another car of an undistinguished character, hired in Tokyo. Into this last climbed Miss Campbell and Mr. Buxton, while Mr. Campbell took the front seat to run ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... own exertions, and less annoyed by that derision and contempt which often defeat even more generous efforts, Antonio had drawn nearer to the crowd of nameless competitors. Though undistinguished in this narrative, there were seen, in that group of gondoliers, faces well known on the canals of Venice, as belonging to watermen in whose dexterity and force the city took pride. Either favored by his isolated position, or availing himself of the embarrassment ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... convey what Gray's ploughman is achieving for one evening, but not what the rude forefathers have achieved for eternity. From the ploughman and the simple annals of the poor the poem diverges to reproach the proud and great for their disregard of undistinguished merit, and moves on to praise of the sequestered life, and to an epitaph applicable either to a "poeta ignotus" or to Gray himself. The epitaph with its trembling hope transforms the poem into something like a personal yet universal requiem; and for one villager—perhaps ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... mow Where erst sat Cupid with his bow; That half your locks are turned to grey; I'll ne'er believe a word they say. 'Tis true, but let it not be known, My eyes are somewhat dimish grown; For nature, always in the right, To your decays adapts my sight, And wrinkles undistinguished pass, For I'm ashamed to use a glass; And till I see them with these eyes, Whoever ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... whole history of them as well. The Author is an Englishman named Lindsey, Parson by profession, and Tutor to the young Prince Poniatowski, the King of Poland's Nephew,"—Nephew Joseph, Andreas's Son, NOT the undistinguished Nephew: so we will believe for poor loud Lindsey's sake! "It was at the instigation of the Czartoryskis, Uncles of the King, that Lindsey composed this Satire,—in English first of all. Satire ready, they perceived that ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the orator himself, he held up one maimed hand and leaned over the edge of the platform, and his undistinguished face glowed with the white light of a great passion within. The ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... another phase of his inheritance—his need was not material, concrete, it had no worldly, graspable implications, and his general contempt was not less but greater. He wished to bring a final justification to his isolation rather than lose himself in the wide, undistinguished surge of living. ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the greatest influences which transformed Doggie into a fairly efficient though undistinguished infantryman was a morbid social terror of his officers. It saved him from many a guard-room, and from many a heart-to-heart talk wherein the zealous lieutenant gets to know his men. He lived in dread lest military delinquency or civil accomplishment should be the means of revealing the ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... the franchise was the most indubitable sign of the loyalty of the town, the government ordered that the walls of the surrendered city should be razed and that the town should become a mere open village undistinguished by any civic privilege.[489] A portion of its territory was during the next year employed for the foundation of the citizen colony of Fabrateria.[490] The new settlement was the typical Roman garrison in a disaffected country. But it proved the weakness ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... Irish affairs? Be this as it may, we know that in 1580, Spenser, then in his twenty-seventh year, accompanied Lord Grey De Wilton into Ireland as secretary; and that he had been there before, in some official capacity not undistinguished, is evidenced by the fact, that the Lord Justice, previously to his arrival, speaks of him as "having many ways deserved some consideration ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... of undistinguished Colonials and others of British race from all regions of the earth, who annually visit these shores on business or for pleasure or some other object, how many there must be who come with some such memory or dream or aspiration ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
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