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More "Unvarnished" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... twenty-four hours since I sat here in the same place (at your desk in the front window, of course), trying my best to put the situation before you, as a plain, unvarnished tale. ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... ashore. He has already began to busy himself with the condition of 'our roadside arabs,' as he calls them. We fear Mr. Smith in prosecuting this good work of his is doomed to perform a serious act of disenchantment. The ideal Gipsy is destined to be scattered to the winds by the unvarnished picture which Mr. Smith will cause to be presented to our vision. He does not pretend to show us the romantic, fantastically-dressed creature whose prototypes have long been in the imaginations of many of us as types of the Gipsy species. Those ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... to them likewise the wisdom of an all-merciful Providence revealed the fact of a northern sea of open water, that they might be additional witnesses in the hour of need. We cannot do better than read the plain unvarnished tale of the gallant American—a tale of calm heroism under no ordinary trials, which stamps the document as the truthful narration of a gentleman and a sailor. He says, after describing the being beset by young ice ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... this plain, unvarnished account of an Oriental battle might feel inclined to criticise Santa Coloma's tactics; for his men were, like the Arabs, horsemen and little else; they were, moreover, armed with lance and broadsword, weapons requiring a great deal of space to be used effectively. Yet, considering all the circumstances, ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... divined behind the quiet front of her favourite. But with the doctor himself she had no reserves, it being one of her many maxims that "what you up and say to a person's face doesn't hurt them any." The doctor was made well aware that her unvarnished opinion of his prospective marriage was at ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... better teach you your new trade now. You've got to learn to cane chairs, so the warden says. If you want, we can begin right away." But without waiting for Cowperwood to acquiesce, he went off, returning after a time with three unvarnished frames of chairs and a bundle of cane strips or withes, which he deposited on the floor. Having so done—and with a flourish—he now continued: "Now I'll show you if you'll watch me," and he began showing Cowperwood how the strips were to be laced ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... beginning to turn, so I was beginning to be slightly insane, and was haunted with a desire to say some horribly improper or wicked thing which should start them all out of their chairs. Though never given to profane expressions, I perfectly hankered to let out a certain round, unvarnished, wicked word, which I knew would create a tremendous commotion on the surface of this enchanted mill pond,—in fact, I was so afraid that I should make some such mad demonstration, that I rose at an early hour and begged leave to retire. Emmy sprang up with apparent relief, and offered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... when I left off my plain unvarnished tale and took to maundering, that precise point in it which exhibits Roger in the act of replacing his hat upon his even then slightly greyish head and striding on. It seems to me that he would not have checked in his stride ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... an electro-plater, and should be applied to by his companions in the shop in all emergencies under the name of the "Encyclopaedia." Suppose a long procession of such cases, and then consider that these are not suppositions at all, but are plain, unvarnished facts, culminating in the one special and significant fact that, with a single solitary exception, every one of the institution's industrial students who have taken its prizes within ten years, have since climbed to higher situations in ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... as most people imagine, consists in telling one truth—unvarnished, unadorned truth—he is indeed a friend: yet, hang it, I must be candid, and say I have had many other, and more agreeable, proofs of Hobhouse's friendship than the truths he always told me; but the fact is, I wanted him to sugar them ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... home, and before Clarges Street was reached Percy had told his friend an unvarnished story of the follies of the last few days, and enlisted his support in his ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... face turned rosier. He was not used among his docile Canadians to any such speech as this. The unvarnished fashions of New England honesty ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... broadly gifted masculine mind, devoting its unstinted energies to depicting certain aspects of society and civilization, which are powerfully representative of the tendencies of the day. "Here is the unvarnished fact—give heed to it!" is the unwritten motto. The author avoids betraying, either explicitly or implicitly, the tendency of his own sympathies; not because he fears to have them known, but because he holds it to be his office simply to portray, ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... nonsense, but unvarnished truth. I might have been saved easily enough, and Mr. Ferrars need have suffered no inconvenience save a wetting, but for my own fault; for he was there long before the water reached the place where I ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... kindly and tactful in setting forth the Protestant emphasis in the Catholic-Protestant fabric of his church. He argued that the word "Protestant" in the title is there to protect the right of every sort of churchman. His candor was disarming, and he could get away with such unvarnished statements as this: "As you know I am a Protestant of the Protestants. I do not belong to the Catholic party in the Episcopal Church. I belong to the Protestant party. I believe in Protestantism; I do not believe in Catholicism, I never have, and please God, I never will. I believe ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... every English child, no general reader is aware of the valuables it contains, nor indeed will the door open to any but Arabists. Before parting we agreed to "collaborate" and produce a full, complete, unvarnished, uncastrated copy of the great original, my friend taking the prose and I the metrical part; and we corresponded upon the subject for years. But whilst I was in the Brazil, Steinhaeuser died suddenly of apoplexy at Berne in Switzerland ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... apparently, only for professional purposes, and merely to get the curtain down decently. It is a point, which it takes the key of the play—Lord Bacon's key, of 'Times,' to put in. It wants but a comma, but then it must be a comma in the right place, to make English of it. Plain English, unvarnished English, but poetic in its fact, as any prophecy that Merlin was ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... yet not much, to talk the colonel over. He did not go to see the house, and Esther did not press that he should; he took her report of it, which was an unvarnished one, and submitted himself to what seemed the inevitable. But his daughter knew that her task would have been harder if the colonel's imagination had had the assistance of his eyesight. She was sure that the move must be made, and if it were once effected she was almost ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... it is no fairy tale, but the unvarnished truth. The page of the princess listened, and immediately repeated all ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... made the primitive Christians victorious alike over inward sinful affection and outward persecution. To every one who reads the gospel narratives in the exercise of his sober judgment, it is manifest that they are intended to be plain unvarnished statements of facts. The question is, Are these statements reliable? Here new arguments can hardly be expected; the old are abundantly sufficient. Reserving for another place those general arguments which apply to the gospel ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... explain what I mean," said the Chief. "There is a type of man who is quite incapable of telling the plain, unvarnished truth. That type of fellow might have the most extraordinary adventure happen to him and yet be unable to let it stand on its merits. When he narrates it, he trims it up with all kinds of embroidery. Is Strangwise ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... prerogatives of age? Off goes the child, corporally smarting, but morally rebellious. Were there ever such unthinkable deities as parents? I would give a great deal to know what, in nine cases out of ten, is the child's unvarnished feeling. A sense of past cajolery; a sense of personal attraction, at best very feeble; above all, I should imagine, a sense of terror for the untried residue of mankind; go to make up the attraction that he feels. No wonder, poor little heart, with such a weltering world ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the junior who has a facility for thinking an idea through and then expressing it comprehensively in clear, unvarnished phrases. Moreover, even when they are stilted in their own manner of expression, they will warm to the man whose style achieves strength through its ease and naturalness. They will quickly make note of any young officer ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... Miss Killigrew, but I have no suitable clothes." Which was plain unvarnished truth. "And I do not possess an opera-hat." ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... Swithin's emancipation from a trammelling body had been effected by the telescope, and he was well away in space, she felt her influence over him diminishing to nothing. He was quite unconscious of his terrestrial neighbourings, and of herself as one of them. It still further reduced her towards unvarnished simplicity in ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... the Witches."] We could have dispensed with many of the flowers of rhetoric with which the pages of this discovery are strewed, if Master Potts would have favoured us with a plain, unvarnished account of what occurred at this execution. It is here, in the most interesting point of all, that his narrative, in other respects so full and abundant, stops short, and seems curtailed of its just proportions. The "learned ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... face, the wanness of his features, and the slightly wearied look he bore, were all imparting intelligence to me—the knowledge I craved for so much ever since I heard the words, 'Take what you want, but find Livingstone,' What I saw was deeply interesting intelligence to me and unvarnished truth. I was listening and reading at the same time. What did these dumb ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... The unvarnished and unbowspritted and unjib-boomed tale was pretty much as follows: Mr. Langenau had found himself in the middle of the river, when the storm came on. I am afraid he could not have been thinking very much about the clouds, not to have noticed that a storm was rising; though every one agreed ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... and I am their chief," was the remark made by the Dey of Algiers to the English Consul in 1641, and the man spoke the plain unvarnished truth. Yet at this time the Algerines had no more than sixty-five ships, and no organisation which could have held out for twenty-four hours against such attacks as had been successfully resisted on many occasions in ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... must not ape ornaments and indulge in bombast or rhodomontade which stamp a writer as not only superficial but silly. There is no room for such in the everyday newspaper. It wants facts stated in plain, unvarnished, unadorned language. True, you should read the best authors and, as far as possible, imitate their style, but don't try to literally copy them. Be yourself on ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... looking down upon my bleeding knuckles, "I am not Sir Maurice Vibart. It seems my fate to be mistaken for him wherever I go. My name is Peter, plain and unvarnished, and I am very humbly your servant." Now as I spoke, it seemed that the Daemon, no longer the jovial companion, was himself again, horns, hoof, and tail—nay, indeed, he seemed a thousand times more foul and hideous than before, as he mouthed and jibed at ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... day, discovered that she was on the very brink of meeting with the persons she most dreaded to see; but, however temptingly romantic such an incident would have been, we must, according to our duty as faithful historians, deliver a plain unvarnished tale. ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... short journey to the landlord's, commenced, in her own way, a lecture upon agricultural economy, which, though plain and unvarnished, contained excellent and practical sense. She also pointed out to him when to speak and when to be silent; told him what rent to offer, and in what manner he should offer it; but she did all this so dexterously and sweetly, that honest Peter thought the new and corrected views which she furnished ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... plain unvarnished account of the late transactions in Servia, in which the true character of Russian policy, and the means by which it is carried out, have been unveiled before the eyes of Europe in a manner sufficient to enlighten those ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... (regularity) 80; conformity to rule; nicety. orthology^; ipsissima verba [Lat.]; realism. plain truth, honest truth, sober truth, naked truth, unalloyed truth, unqualified truth, stern truth, exact truth, intrinsic truth; nuda veritas [Lat.]; the very thing; not an illusion &c 495; real Simon Pure; unvarnished tale, unvarnished truth; the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth; just the thing. V. be true &c adj., be the case; sand the test; have the true ring; hold good, hold true, hold water. render true, prove true &c adj.; substantiate &c (evidence) 467. get at the truth &c (discover) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... in the proceeding," observed the old gentleman, after Rolf had given him a true, unvarnished account of the affair. "He's a handsome gallant, and she's a very fine lassie, there's no denying that; but at the same time, God's blessing does not alight on marriages contracted without the parent's consent; and it's my opinion that Miss Wardhill should have ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... co-exist with attainments of an exceptional order, there was a revulsion in her sentiments from all that she had formerly clung to in this kind: honesty, goodness, manliness, tenderness, devotion, for her only existed in their purity now in the breasts of unvarnished men; and here was one who had manifested them towards her from his ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... at least one man spoke out the whole truth and nothing but the truth about it in the last century: Francis, the great Social Reformer—Francis Newman, who was no time-server, no prophesier of smooth things; but, as much as in him lay, desired more than anything else to lay the whole unvarnished truth before his fellow men, things that concerned the weaker members of the community. In lecture after lecture he turned things to the "rightabout-face" which had hitherto been done sub rosa in India. He did ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... the human soul, with its awful shadow, makes all things sacred." So in writing a biography it is impossible for us to tell what did and what did not powerfully influence the character. It is safer simply to tell the unvarnished truth. The lily builds up its texture of delicate beauty from mould and decay. So how do we know from what humble material a soul grows in strength ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... of promise is the burden of my song. Perhaps you’ve heard him lecture, and blow about it strong; To hear him talk you’d think it was a heaven upon earth, But listen and I’ll tell you now the plain unvarnished truth. ...
— The Old Bush Songs • A. B. Paterson
... before us in the natural order of their ascertainment, and narrates instead of enumerating. The story to be told leaves the marvels of imagination far behind, and requires no embellishment from literary art or high-flown phrases. Its best ornament is unvarnished truthfulness, and this, at least, may confidently be claimed to be bestowed upon ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... to us to be perhaps the best contribution to the literature of the war that has yet been written. It is a plain soldierly narrative of what the writer actually did and saw, set down in unvarnished language, yet in English which it is a pleasure to read for its straightforward fluency.'—St. ...
— Mr. Edward Arnold's New and Popular Books, December, 1901 • Edward Arnold
... pure and classical poets of his mother tongue. It is quite ridiculous to see how the vanity of these Cockneys makes them overrate their own importance, even in the eyes of us, that have always expressed such plain unvarnished contempt for them, and who do feel for them all, a contempt too calm and profound, to admit of any admixture of any thing like anger or personal spleen. We should just as soon think of being wroth with vermin, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... true. Duty to the brave dead, to the heroic living, who have endured the pangs of a hundred deaths for their country's sake; duty to the government which depends on the wisdom and constancy of its good citizens for its support and perpetuity, calls for this "round, unvarnished tale" of suffering endured ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... come to an end somewhere, let it be here. To quote Lord Bacon again, take my "round, unvarnished tale," and perhaps the world will yet acknowledge that some good ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... was a new side of Monsieur de St. Gre, and I reflected rather ruefully upon the unvarnished truth of what Mr. Wharton had told me,—ay, and what Colonel Clark had emphasized long before. It was my fate never to be treated as a young man. It struck me that Monsieur de St. Gre had never even considered me in the light of a possible ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the varnishes of modern times. It is said that many instruments having the name of Pique in them are the work of Lupot, and this misnomer is accounted for by the story that Pique purchased them in an unvarnished state, and varnished them with his preparation. Be this as it may, it is certain that the varnish of Pique could not serve to benefit such instruments; on the contrary, it would reduce their value. The tone of ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... considered by his friends to be a cynic; and a French cynic is not without cruelty. He once told Wanda that he had seen men and women do much worse than throw their lives away, which was probably the unvarnished truth. But there must have been a weak spot in his cynicism. There always is a weak spot in the vice of the most vicious. For he sat alone in his room at the Hotel de l'Europe, at Warsaw, long into the night, smoking cigarette after cigarette, and thinking thoughts which ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... can't promise that, Ken. Just think of the fascinating Frenchmen I shall probably meet, with their waxed moustaches and their dandified manners. How can I help liking them better than a plain, unvarnished American boy?" ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... healthy from inflamed tissues, and run down, grab, and give one dexterous fatal shake to a tissue of lies. One of Dr. Brown's terriers is not more swift, exact, and uncompromising after vermin. This excellent sense for unvarnished realities has been attributed by some to their habit of visiting so many interiors—of men and of their houses—whose swell-fronts are pervious to the sincerity of pain. We never see a doctor's chaise anchored at a door but we imagine the doctor taking in freight up-stairs. In these days he is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... This is the unvarnished truth. A mysterious power dealt the cards for me with unfailing instinct; a fortunate combination of events placing in my hands, precisely at the moment of their greatest value, clear opportunities that none but a hopeless blunderer ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... that will have to happen some day, be the disintegration of the existing organisations in order to build up a more perfect habitation of God through the Spirit? I do not wish to exaggerate. God knows there is no need for exaggerating. The plain, unvarnished story, without any pessimistic picking out of the black bits and forgetting ail the light ones, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... obliged to know better. I love you as my cousin, love you somewhat as I love Uncle Eric, love you as the sole young relative left to me, as the only companion of my lonely childhood; but other love than this I never had, never can have for you. Hugh, my cousin, look fearlessly at the unvarnished truth; neither you nor I have one spark of that affection which alone can ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... in which we are led to discern very primitive witness behind Acts, do not indeed give to such witness the value of shorthand notes or even of abstracts based thereon. But they do support the theory that our author meant to give an unvarnished account of such words and deeds as had come to his knowledge. The perspective of the whole is no doubt his own; and as his witnesses probably furnished but few hints for a continuous narrative, this perspective, especially in things chronological, may sometimes be faulty. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... he would lose not an instant in broaching the important subject. He was happy to think he had a friend in the old lady. Perhaps she might bring about the desired interview. But although this thought was encouraging, he could not but tremble when he remembered the very plain and unvarnished way she ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... therefore, the Parnassian lyre, Or winged war-horse shod with heavenly fire; Harsh numbers flow from throats whose thirst has been A whole life long unslaked of Hippocrene; But I will e'en go on as best I can And let the story end as it began,— A plain, straightforward man's unvarnished word, Part sad, part ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... It is a plain unvarnished tale and entirely innocent of those arts by the practice of which authors please their public. There is no eloquence, no rhetoric, no fine writing of any sort. The two or three really dramatic events in Priestley's career are not handled with a view to producing dramatic effect. There ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... old days he would have said for effect; but it carried conviction now. Absinthe, erst but a point in the 'personality' he had striven so hard to build up, was solace and necessity now. He no longer called it 'la sorciere glauque.' He had shed away all his French phrases. He had become a plain, unvarnished, Preston man. ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... them with a cynicism from which the conscience of the veriest Philistine of our industrial middle-class would recoil in affright. And when, with the natural sympathy of aristocracies for firm dealing with the multitude, and his uneasiness at our feeble dealing with it at home, an unvarnished young Englishman of our aristocratic class applauds the absolute rulers on the Continent, he in general manages completely to miss the grounds of reason and intelligence which alone can give any colour of justification, any possibility of existence, to those rulers, and applauds them on grounds ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... his customary attention to details, he saw that the nail was one of several which had fastened a narrow strip of molding around the cabinet. About two feet of this molding had been torn away, leaving the nails protruding from the cabinet and Tom noticed not only that the unvarnished strip which the molding had covered was clean and white, but that the exposed parts of the nails ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... account—bald, simple, unvarnished. Then came mysterious messages from the Central Press about the absence of any clue to identify the stranger. He hadn't entered the house by any regular way, it seemed; unless, indeed, Mr. Callingham had brought him home himself and let him in with the latchkey. None of the servants had ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... sympathetic feeling for that savage. For several reasons: in the first place he liked audacious, pushing fellows, lucky adventurers. Was he not one himself? And then the Nabob amused him; his accent, his unvarnished manners, his flattery, a trifle unblushing and impudent, gave him a respite from the everlasting conventionality of his surroundings, from that scourge of administrative and court ceremonial which ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... Professor, are my unvarnished sentiments: I was a little surprised to find them so extreme, and therefore ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... good conscience, yes. The motto with which I began states the truth somewhat strongly, perhaps (it must be remembered where I got it), but aside from that one bit of harmless borrowed hyperbole, I have delivered a plain, unvarnished tale. For all that, however, I do not expect my industrious fellow-citizens to fall in at once with my opinion that winter is a pleasant season at the seashore (it would be too bad they should, as far as my own enjoyment ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... hands with crime, but I honestly believe that the extraordinary features of my own life-romance are as strange as, if not stranger than, any hitherto recorded. Even my worst enemy could not dub me egotistical, I think; and surely the facts I have set down here are plain and unvarnished, without any attempt at misleading the reader into believing that which is untrue. Mine is a plain chronicle of a chain of extraordinary circumstances which led to an ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... also of our friends to whom we tell the plain, unvarnished truth, if they come here will be disappointed, as they will not see with our eyes. One cannot expect the luxuries of palatial hotels at five dollars per day; such would be out of ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... be those who will object that the plain, unvarnished tale of my friend "Hy" Smith, which follows, is lacking in the robust qualities that truth alone can bring; to them I recommend the attitude of the Injun. But I must add this: Heaven forbid that I should have to stand good for any of Hy's stories! Still, some of what I considered ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... impossible relative in the person of an aunt came to spend the month of August with Sara—her father's sister. She was a true, unvarnished Gooch. Booth shuddered at times when she emerged flat-foot from the background and revelled in the Goochiness that would not stay put, no matter how hard she tried to subdue it. She was a good soul,—much ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... unvarnished tale of the travel in Midian, undertaken by the second Expedition, which, like the first, owes all to the liberality and the foresight of his Highness Ismail I., Khediv of Egypt, forms the subject of these volumes. ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... any joke here it seems to lie in the contrast with Wilson's actual habits, which were very simple. For instance, he gives us a gorgeous description of the apparatus of North's solitary confinement when writing for Blackwood; his daughter's unvarnished account of the same process agrees exactly as to time, rate of production, and so forth, but substitutes water for the old hock and "Scots pint" (magnum) of claret, a dirty little terra-cotta inkstand for the silver utensil of the Noctes, and ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... her own unconsidered act, she was forcing upon him, at the least, a public recognition of their marriage; an acknowledgment that might make further separation difficult, if not impossible, for the present. All her pride and independence of spirit revolted against this unvarnished statement of fact; and the memory of Michael's random remark heightened her nervous apprehension. Yet, on the other hand, Love—who is a born peace-maker—argued that, after all, he might not be sorry to have his hand forced by so clear a proof ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... woodwork was concerned, in smoked or dark-stained oak to represent an old English interior, its walls covered with long-stemmed pipes and pictures of English hunting and drinking scenes, its black-stained but unvarnished tables littered with riding, driving and country-life society papers, to give it that air of sans ceremonie with an upper world of which its habitues probably possessed no least inkling but most eagerly craved. Here, along with a goodly group of his latter-day friends, far different ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... wand'ring to and fro, Like restless spirits; scaling mountain heights; Dwelling among the countless, rare delights Of lands historic; turning dusty pages, Stamped with the tragedies of mighty ages; Gazing upon the scenes of bloody acts, Of kings long buried—bare, unvarnished facts, Surpassing wildest fictions of the brain; Rubbing against all people, high and low, And by this contact feeling Self to grow Smaller and less important, and the vein Of human kindness deeper, seeing God, Unto the humble delver of the sod, And to the ruling monarch on the throne, ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... is probably much to be said on the other side. The unhappiest feature of drifting into a habit of positive and continuous talk is that one has few friends faithful enough to criticise such a habit and tell one the unvarnished truth; if the habit is once confirmed, it becomes almost impossible to break it off. I know of a family conclave that was once summoned, in order, if possible, to communicate the fact to one of the circle that he was in danger of becoming a bore; the head of the family was finally ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... in the pulpit, he simply led you captive by his earnestness and evident thorough belief in all that he uttered; so that "those who came to scoff, remained to pray." No hard, metallic repetition by rote was his; but the plain, unvarnished story of the gospel which he felt and of whose truth he was assured, animated by a broad spirit of Protestantism that led him to extend a raising hand to every erring brother, and see religion in other creeds besides ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... is Sir Victor Catheron of Catheron Royals, with a rent-roll of twenty thousand a year, and more, and a name that is older than Magna Charta. If there be any virtue in truth, there—you have it, plain, unvarnished. I like him—who could help it; but love him—no!" She clasped her hands above her head, and gazed dreamily out at the sparkling sunlit scene. "I shall be very fond of him, very proud of him, when I am his wife—that I know. He will enter Parliament, and make speeches, ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... believe that the bare truth, unvarnished by flattery, will be acceptable to the majority, amongst whom may be counted all those educated Americans whose impartiality is superior to their personal interest in the ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... of Christian missions arises from the vices and sins of Christendom; fifthly, an acknowledgment of the indirect influences of Christianity through legislation and civilization; sixthly, the newly awakened perception of the duty of making exact, unvarnished, impartial statements on this subject; seventhly, the testimony borne by missionary experience to the common elements and essential principles of ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... victory. Such men are always dangerous in delicate cases. He should not wait for his accuser to get in all his case if the substantial part of it is already before the court, because his answer ought not, as in a court of law, to cover the complaint simply and no more. It ought to contain a plain unvarnished tale of the whole transaction, and not those parts only which the accusation may have touched, because his object is not only to wrest a verdict of "not proven" from his judges, but to satisfy even the timid and sensitive souls whose faith in their idols is so large ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... morning, and avoid lying in bed half awake. Take plenty of fresh air and exercise every day. And finally, and at all costs, keep absolutely sober. Probably the last of these pieces of advice is by far the most important. It is the unvarnished truth that the vast majority of men who have gone wrong did so for the first time, not when they were drunk, but when liquor had made them reckless and forgetful. The plain truth about alcohol is that it has a twofold effect upon the human constitution. ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... had of distinguishing myself in the active service of my country in this way as a soldier, and as a volunteer yeomanry cavalry man too, I must entreat the indulgence and particular attention of the gentle reader, while I give a faithful narrative, an unvarnished tale, of the whole affair. This being the solitary instance in which I was called into the field of battle while I was in the service, I must entreat those who do me the honour to read my Memoirs, to extend their forgiveness ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... competent and truthful reporters are employed by you to write an exact and unvarnished report of some single transaction which has occurred, and which each of them has witnessed. Each is required to do his work without any conference with the others. When these reports are brought to you, if they are very faithful and accurate ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... the men crowded round, listening greedily, just as everybody devours certain public prints without ceasing to impeach their veracity. Lacking newspapers at which to pish! and pshaw! they listened to Windy Jim, disbelieving the only unvarnished tale that gentleman had ever told. For Windy, with the story-teller's instinct, knew marvellous enough would sound the bare recital of those awful Dawson days when the unprecedented early winter stopped the provision boats ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... knowledge that is in you, then he who builds his house and lays up his treasure on the edge of a crater of molten lava is a sane, sensible person in comparison with yourselves. I say this as no figure of speech or bugbear with which to frighten you, but as an unvarnished unexaggerated statement which will be no more disputed by yourselves than ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... realism, it cannot be called crude as a work of poetic art. In rhyme and rhythm it is quite regular, and the impression which it leaves upon the mind is that it was the work of an educated man, keenly interested in the unvarnished life of a Yorkshire farm, keenly interested in the vocabulary and idioms of his district, and determined to produce a poem which should bid defiance to all the proprieties of ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... the oil-shops for keeping back-kitchen sinks clean), using with them a composition mainly consisting of exactly the same materials with which a housemaid polishes the fender and fire-irons. That is a plain, simple, unvarnished statement of facts. You may find it difficult of belief, but this is what actually happens. This is what you are having done everywhere, guardians of our ancient buildings. You'll soon have all your old windows ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... praise she received, since she really earned it. She sowed the seeds, and it was only right that she should reap the fruit. And of all the praises that were heaped upon her none equalled the simple unvarnished story of her own deed. To describe her exploit, with no word of comment, was to load her with commendation of the highest kind. And it is well indeed when that can be said of any woman—which is always the case when her life is right. On the whole, even now people get pretty much what they deserve. ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... to remember, Garth, that every word I write, is the simple unvarnished truth. If you look back over your remembrance of me, you will admit that I am not naturally an untruthful person, nor did I ever take easily to prevarication. But, Garth, I told you one lie; and that fatal exception proves the rule of perfect truthfulness, ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... he said, without lookup, "your epigrams are lost on me. I know most of them. I have heard them before. If you have anything to tell me about Mrs. Sydney Bamborough, for Heaven's sake tell it to me quite plainly. I like plain dishes and unvarnished stories. I am a German, you know; that is to say, a person with a dull palate ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... suffice to paper every scrap of bedroom wall in all the Astor houses in the world, and invested in Amalgamated Copper they would turn the system green with envy—and yet I am not happy. My well-beloved Henriette's last adventure has turned my fortune into bitterest gall, and plain unvarnished wormwood forms the finish of my interior, for she is gone! I, amid the splendor of my new-found possessions, able to keep not one but a hundred motor-cars, and to pay the chauffeur's fines, to endow ...
— Mrs. Raffles - Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman • John Kendrick Bangs
... mountaineer's face was contorted into a spasm of pain and his labored breathing demanded a respite of silence. Then slowly he declared with the unvarnished candor of the backwoods: "Joe's ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... their confident bawlings. For all that I could see, they were no better than humbugs, and I was none too pleased at their copying my beard. If there were any use in their noise, if the talking did any good to the public, I should not have a word to say against them: but, to tell you the plain unvarnished truth, I have more than once looked out from my peep-hole yonder and ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... The two unvarnished braggarts followed the valorous Dona Gorja with their eyes; and then with a despicable gesture drew their knives across their sleeve as though wiping off the blood there might have been, sheathed them at one and the same time, ...
— First Love (Little Blue Book #1195) - And Other Fascinating Stories of Spanish Life • Various
... I say," concluded the lecturer, "just come out to New South Wales and see for yourselves if I have not told you the plain, unvarnished truth; and I repeat what I have said before, that although it is no place for the idle rich, for the man or the woman who wants to work it is not ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... that the chauffeur had not the slightest notion that he had conveyed a murderer to London when he began to tell his tale to his employer and the detectives. They wanted a plain, unvarnished story, and got it. On leaving the offices in Bishopsgate Street, Fenley asked to be driven to Gloucester Mansions, Shaftesbury Avenue. Tom had seen the last of him standing on the pavement, with a suitcase on the ground at his feet. He was ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... at the raw-boned lady, imagined himself telling the raw- boned lady the simple, unvarnished truth, and the raw-boned lady's utter disbelief of every word of it. An ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... crime, but I honestly believe that the extraordinary features of my own life-romance are as strange as, if not stranger than, any hitherto recorded. Even my worst enemy could not dub me egotistical, I think; and surely the facts I have set down here are plain and unvarnished, without any attempt at misleading the reader into believing that which is untrue. Mine is a plain chronicle of a chain of extraordinary circumstances which led to an ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... that took place and happened, I will proceed and relate the plain and unvarnished history of it. And what I set down in this epistol, you can depend upon. It is the plain truth, entirely unvarnished: not a mite of varnish will ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... oftentimes he would be carried away by the sentimental side of his past struggles. Then he would unburden himself of a great deal of unvarnished history. On such occasions I would obtain from him a veritable treasure of information ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... time that he gave any sign of wishing to draw nearer to her, she touched her horse's flank. Something in the nature of a revelation had come to her during that brief halt by the roadside. For the first time she had caught a glimpse, plain and unvarnished, of the actual man that inhabited the giant's frame, and it had given her an odd, disturbing suspicion that the strength upon which she leaned was in simple fact ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... rosier. He was not used among his docile Canadians to any such speech as this. The unvarnished fashions of New England honesty ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... may be those who will object that the plain, unvarnished tale of my friend "Hy" Smith, which follows, is lacking in the robust qualities that truth alone can bring; to them I recommend the attitude of the Injun. But I must add this: Heaven forbid that I should have to stand good for any of Hy's stories! Still, some ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... result but expense and the loss of precious time. I have nothing to explain to you which you are not already perfectly well acquainted with by my late letters. I was fully aware at the time I was writing them that I should afford you little satisfaction, for the plain unvarnished truth is seldom agreeable. But I now repeat, and these are perhaps among the last words which I shall ever be permitted to pen, that I cannot approve, and I am sure no Christian can, of the system which has lately been pursued in the large sea-port cities ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... employed him as their tool. And now he had mortally offended Hohenlo, and Buys, and Barneveld, while he hated Sir John Norris with a most passionate hatred. Wilkes, the English representative, was already a special object of his aversion. The unvarnished statements made by the stiff counsellor, of the expense of the past year's administration, and the various errors committed, had inspired Leicester with such ferocious resentment, that the friends of Wilkes trembled for ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... it would be to hear a wild Western unvarnished, unprejudiced judgment of myself! "What did you think of her singing?" I asked ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... detraction. Being disappointed in his hopes of profit, he shuffled out of the concern as meanly as any higgler could have done who had found himself in a profitless business with a disreputable partner. There is no disguising this unvarnished truth; and though his friends did well in getting the connection ended as quickly as possible, they could not eradicate the original sin of the transaction, nor extinguish the consequences which it of necessity entailed. Let me not, however, be misunderstood: ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... intention to anticipate the story, as he himself tells it, either of the "Hawarden Kite" or the Home Rule split, much less to disclose his opinions—they are emphatic and deliberate—of the men who made mischief at that crisis. I leave also untouched the plain, unvarnished account he gives, on unimpeachable authority, of a subsequent and not less discreditable phase in the annals of the Liberal party. There are reasons, obvious to everyone who gives the matter a moment's thought, that render it inadvisable ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... the fact that Fielding, following the doctrine laid down in his initial chapters, has depicted him under certain conditions (in which, it is material to note, he is always rather the tempted than the tempter), with an unvarnished truthfulness which to the pure-minded is repugnant, and to the prurient indecent. Remembering that he too had been young, and reproducing, it may be, his own experiences, he exhibits his youth as he had found ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... that such an effort would be futile, for she would detect his hollowness at once, and he feared a glance of scorn from her blue eyes more than the lightning of heaven. He resolved to leave the Lake House on Monday, and from New York write to Miss Burton the unvarnished truth, assuring her that he knew himself to be unworthy even to speak to her again. Then, as soon as he could complete his preparations, he would go abroad and give himself ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... house first. It meets my ideal, but it mayn't be yours. You must promise to give an unvarnished opinion." ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... mortal man did, or ever will; and oh! Charley, a great deal because he is Sir Victor Catheron of Catheron Royals, with a rent-roll of twenty thousand a year, and more, and a name that is older than Magna Charta. If there be any virtue in truth, there—you have it, plain, unvarnished. I like him—who could help it; but love him—no!" She clasped her hands above her head, and gazed dreamily out at the sparkling sunlit scene. "I shall be very fond of him, very proud of him, when I am his wife—that I know. He will enter Parliament, and make speeches, and write ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... brutes if you scratch them deep enough," drawled Dade. "The trouble with Calumet is that he's never had a chance to spread on the soft stuff. He's the plain, unvarnished, dyed-in-the-wool, original man. There's a word fits him, if I could think of it." ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... has sent His servants to rebuke sin, both in the world and in the church. But the people desire smooth things spoken to them, and the pure, unvarnished truth is not acceptable. Many reformers, in entering upon their work, determined to exercise great prudence in attacking the sins of the church and the nation. They hoped, by the example of a pure Christian life, ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... see? There are a number of prosperous foreign colonies living in London now, most of whose leading members maintain business or social relations, more or less active, with one or another section of the English population of the great British metropolis. Perhaps, if we could get a plain, unvarnished account from some member of one of these colonies, of England and English life as they appear to him and to his compatriots, Englishmen might be as much confounded as I have known very intelligent and well-informed Frenchmen to be, ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... did not, indeed, claim a seat at the table and in the parlor, but they repudiated many of those habits of respect and courtesy which belonged to their former condition, and asserted their own will and way in the round, unvarnished phrase which they supposed to be their right as republican citizens. Life became a sort of domestic wrangle and struggle between the employers, who secretly confessed their weakness, but endeavored openly to assume the air and bearing of ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... none too pleased at their copying my beard. If there were any use in their noise, if the talking did any good to the public, I should not have a word to say against them: but, to tell you the plain unvarnished truth, I have more than once looked out from my ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... like ours, is becoming sated with cleverness, it is a delight to read the unvarnished story of Champlain. In saying that the adjective is ever the enemy of the noun, Voltaire could not have levelled the shaft at him, for few writers have been more sparing in their use of adjectives or other glowing words. His love of ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... corroborative facts as have since come to light, preclude all argument on this point. But we'll listen to the young woman, notwithstanding; she has a right to speak, and she shall speak. Did not your mother die in the woods? No hocus-pocus, miss, but the plain unvarnished truth." ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... Its tales of massacre, captivity, and single-handed fighting linger in the American imagination still. Typical pamphlets are Mary Rowlandson's thrilling tale of the Lancaster massacre and her subsequent captivity, and the loud-voiced Captain Church's unvarnished description of King Philip's death. The King, shot down like a wearied bull-moose in the deep swamp, "fell upon his face in the mud and water, with his gun under him." They "drew him through the mud to the upland; and a doleful, great, ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... shielding him," with impatient disdain; "I suppose because he happens to be rather good to look at. But I call it rude; just plain, unvarnished rudeness to go off like that for some trumped-up reason and never say good-bye to you and me. I hope I shall meet more amiable Rhodesians elsewhere, and I should like to have a chance to tell him so." Then she rattled off into another subject, leaving ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... reeked of soldiers' boots and leggings, an unvarnished table, two sorry chairs, a window closed with a grating, a crazy stove which, while letting the smoke emerge through its cracks, gave out no heat—such was the den to which the man who had just ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... historian in search of unvarnished records of actual fact these documents are useless, without most drastic criticism. They were compiled long after the time of their subjects, from tales, doubtless at first, and probably for a ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... restless spirits; scaling mountain heights; Dwelling among the countless, rare delights Of lands historic; turning dusty pages, Stamped with the tragedies of mighty ages Gazing upon the scenes of bloody acts, Of kings long buried—bare, unvarnished facts, Surpassing wildest fictions of the brain; Rubbing against all people, high and low, And by this contact feeling Self to grow Smaller and less important, and the vein Of human kindness deeper, seeing ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... robbers, and I am their chief," was the remark made by the Dey of Algiers to the English Consul in 1641, and the man spoke the plain unvarnished truth. Yet at this time the Algerines had no more than sixty-five ships, and no organisation which could have held out for twenty-four hours against such attacks as had been successfully resisted on many occasions ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... probably much to be said on the other side. The unhappiest feature of drifting into a habit of positive and continuous talk is that one has few friends faithful enough to criticise such a habit and tell one the unvarnished truth; if the habit is once confirmed, it becomes almost impossible to break it off. I know of a family conclave that was once summoned, in order, if possible, to communicate the fact to one of the circle that he was in danger of becoming a bore; the head of the family was finally deputed ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... promise is the burden of my song. Perhaps you’ve heard him lecture, and blow about it strong; To hear him talk you’d think it was a heaven upon earth, But listen and I’ll tell you now the plain unvarnished truth. ...
— The Old Bush Songs • A. B. Paterson
... have wondered whether a Christmas dinner ever was so fearfully and wonderfully constructed, and under such novel circumstances, as the one to which I sat down on Christmas Day, 1879, I have decided to relate—in the truthful, unvarnished style that one always looks for in the old railway man—the incidents in which I was fortunate enough to participate on ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... channels virulent poison penetrated to the marrow of the social organism. Language itself, on which all human intercourse hinges, was twisted to suit unwholesome ambitions, further selfish interests, and obscure the vision of all those who wanted real reforms and unvarnished truth. During the war the armies were never told plainly what they were struggling for; officially they were said to be combating for justice, right, self-determination, the sacredness of treaties, and other abstract nouns to which the heroic soldiers ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... victorious alike over inward sinful affection and outward persecution. To every one who reads the gospel narratives in the exercise of his sober judgment, it is manifest that they are intended to be plain unvarnished statements of facts. The question is, Are these statements reliable? Here new arguments can hardly be expected; the old are abundantly sufficient. Reserving for another place those general arguments which apply to the gospel system as a whole, let us here briefly consider the ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... England long be proud, And ever foster, by good wholesome laws, Those trades which help so mightily her cause! O, may that day be distant that shall bring Neglect of thee, from whom such good doth spring! Hail, peaceful Commerce! still a hearty hail! As I proceed with my unvarnished tale. ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... two; but it must be remembered that he was writing long after the time he mentions, and that his recollections were no doubt somewhat mellowed by Jane Austen's subsequent fame; whereas Philadelphia Walter's is an unvarnished contemporary criticism—the impression made by Jane on a girl a ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... arts which spring from the composition of language. Here the art of logic, aiming solely at conviction, addresses the understanding with cool deductions of unvarnished truth; rhetoric, designing to move, in some particular direction, both the judgement and the sympathies of men, applies itself to the affections in order to persuade; and poetry, various in its character and ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... is so deep-rooted, his self-respect so great, that he respects all other dignitaries: the Senators are his "very noble and approved good masters." Every word weighed and effectual. Admirable, too, is the expression "round unvarnished tale." ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... among the varnishes of modern times. It is said that many instruments having the name of Pique in them are the work of Lupot, and this misnomer is accounted for by the story that Pique purchased them in an unvarnished state, and varnished them with his preparation. Be this as it may, it is certain that the varnish of Pique could not serve to benefit such instruments; on the contrary, it would reduce their value. The tone of Lupot's instruments improves yearly. The quality is round and telling, and free from ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... Philip's secret marriage with Guida, and of all that came after, up to the scene in the Cohue Royale when the marriage was proved and the child given back to Guida; when the Countess Chantavoine, turning from Philip, acknowledged to Guida the justice of her claim. He drove home the truth with bare unvarnished power—the wrong to Guida, the wrong to the Countess, the wrong to the Dukedom of Bercy, to that honour which should belong to those in high estate. Then at the last he told them who Guida was: no peasant girl, but the granddaughter of the Sieur Larchant ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... earliest account—bald, simple, unvarnished. Then came mysterious messages from the Central Press about the absence of any clue to identify the stranger. He hadn't entered the house by any regular way, it seemed; unless, indeed, Mr. Callingham had brought him home himself and let him in with the latchkey. ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... necessary, or they would not go to the limit in expense for printing and mailing, as they do. But from the point of view of the gardener, and especially of the beginner, it is to be regretted that we cannot have the plain unvarnished truth about varieties, for surely the good ones are good enough to use up all the legitimate adjectives upon which seedsmen would care to pay postage. But such is not the case. Every season sees the introduction of literally hundreds of new varieties—or, as is more often the case, ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... lying was all very well; he could manage that with passable craft, especially when, as in this instance, detection would be difficult; but prophecy was a little out of his line. Though with misgivings, he resorted to unvarnished truth: ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... of the crew, who had chosen to stay by the ship, remained on board for four days and nights, and, excepting nine, who perished from the severity of the weather, they all got safe on shore. The above is a plain, unvarnished account, taken from the narrative of Captain Bland: it is a true tale, and needs not the aid of romance to give it interest. For more than twenty-four hours the crew suffered the horrors of uncertainty; their vessel thrown ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... cannot be called crude as a work of poetic art. In rhyme and rhythm it is quite regular, and the impression which it leaves upon the mind is that it was the work of an educated man, keenly interested in the unvarnished life of a Yorkshire farm, keenly interested in the vocabulary and idioms of his district, and determined to produce a poem which should bid defiance to all the proprieties ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... was duty. He seemed to see the smoke- blackened cabin and the mother of the boy sitting, with drawn face, in dread of the hours. He felt the racking nerve-tension of a life in which the father went forth each day leaving his family in fear that he would not return. Then, under the spell of the unvarnished recital, he seemed to witness the crisis when the man, who had dared repudiate the lawless law of individual reprisal, paid the ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... projects of men, while some of your modern novelists are arranging their matter, sharpening their scissors, preparing pen, ink, and paper, and taking indigestible suppers to make way into the world for the offspring of their creative fancies. Ours being a tale of truth,—yes, of bare, unvarnished truth, yet of truth more interesting, if not "stranger, than fiction,"—it is not to be wondered that, when we acknowledge the homely dame, and her alone, as our guide, inspirer, and preceptor, we lack the advantage of romancers, and cannot command "a special sunset," ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... most people imagine, consists in telling one truth—unvarnished, unadorned truth—he is indeed a friend: yet, hang it, I must be candid, and say I have had many other, and more agreeable, proofs of Hobhouse's friendship than the truths he always told me; but the fact is, I wanted him to sugar them over a little with flattery, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... Indeed, that was the one notable event in its history which filled the proprietor with pride, and in his wisdom, in order to lure visitors into its comfortable interior, he could find no more magnetic announcement for the signboard on each side of the entrance than the plain unvarnished statement: "Good House. ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz
... I mean," said the Chief. "There is a type of man who is quite incapable of telling the plain, unvarnished truth. That type of fellow might have the most extraordinary adventure happen to him and yet be unable to let it stand on its merits. When he narrates it, he trims it up with all kinds of embroidery. ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... ever had of distinguishing myself in the active service of my country in this way as a soldier, and as a volunteer yeomanry cavalry man too, I must entreat the indulgence and particular attention of the gentle reader, while I give a faithful narrative, an unvarnished tale, of the whole affair. This being the solitary instance in which I was called into the field of battle while I was in the service, I must entreat those who do me the honour to read my Memoirs, to extend their forgiveness to me if I should prove somewhat tedious; but to my fair readers, my ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... Not from any cowardly motive, but—as he put it afterwards—"because one makes a point of retiring whenever a rank outsider appears. One ought to be particular about the company one keeps." It says something for the boy's character, that this statement was accepted by the house as unvarnished truth. Lovell glanced at the other Fifth Form boys, ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... is not meant to be sensational, but a plain, unvarnished tale of truth—some parts hard and very sad. It is a narrative of my personal experience, and being in no sense a literary man or making any pretense as a writer, I hope the errors may be overlooked, for it has been to me a difficult ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... calling as an electro-plater, and should be applied to by his companions in the shop in all emergencies under the name of the "Encyclopaedia." Suppose a long procession of such cases, and then consider that these are not suppositions at all, but are plain, unvarnished facts, culminating in the one special and significant fact that, with a single solitary exception, every one of the institution's industrial students who have taken its prizes within ten years, have since climbed to higher situations in their ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... of individuals have often been the means of destroying or reforming the most powerful tyrannies; reason has been convinced by argument, and passion appealed to by declamation in vain—when some unvarnished tale, or simple exposure of facts, has at once rouzed the feelings, and conquered the supineness of ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... disinterment of the cod-fish, when he felt himself gently pulled by the skirts of the coat. Looking round, he discovered that the individual who resorted to this mode of catching his attention was no other than Mr. Wardle's favourite page, better known to the readers of this unvarnished history, by the distinguishing ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... scarce any one, we apprehend, who is in any considerable degree conversant with the shifting scenes of human existence, who does not know that many of the plain narratives of common life possess an indescribable charm. These unvarnished details of human weal and human wo, coming right from the mint of nature, decline the superfluous embellishments of art, and, in the absence of all borrowed lustre, clearly demonstrate that they are "adorned the most when unadorned." They bear a most diametrical contrast to those figments ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... very highly while the Grand Master was making this direct and unvarnished attack upon his conduct, and the murmur of assent which followed it showed plainly that almost all who were present acquiesced in the justice of the accusation. Incensed, and at the same time mortified, he yet foresaw that to give way to his headlong resentment would be to give the cold and ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... a plain and unvarnished account of the Yakutsk prison revolt, and subsequent "massacre," which aroused such indignation in England a few years ago. It was then reported that the political exiles here were subjected to such cruelty while in prison that they unsuccessfully tried to starve ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... themselves as they do today. "Who could abide such a fanatical, fiery fool? such an uncompromising character? Nobody could work with him, or he with them!" (What a lie! Jesus did, and they got on well together.) A tactless enthusiast, who considered it his business to tell every man the unvarnished truth regardless of consequences. He won his degree hands down, and without a touch of the spur. A first-class one, too—that of the headman's axe—next best ...
— The Chocolate Soldier - Heroism—The Lost Chord of Christianity • C. T. Studd
... his friends to be a cynic; and a French cynic is not without cruelty. He once told Wanda that he had seen men and women do much worse than throw their lives away, which was probably the unvarnished truth. But there must have been a weak spot in his cynicism. There always is a weak spot in the vice of the most vicious. For he sat alone in his room at the Hotel de l'Europe, at Warsaw, long into the night, smoking cigarette after cigarette, and thinking thoughts which he ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... brethren ashore. He has already began to busy himself with the condition of 'our roadside arabs,' as he calls them. We fear Mr. Smith in prosecuting this good work of his is doomed to perform a serious act of disenchantment. The ideal Gipsy is destined to be scattered to the winds by the unvarnished picture which Mr. Smith will cause to be presented to our vision. He does not pretend to show us the romantic, fantastically-dressed creature whose prototypes have long been in the imaginations of many of us as types ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... shoulder—take these things too much to heart. The most bitter remedies—and unfortunately the truth was such—are generally the wholesomest, and for my sick, dreaming nature, he thought, after earnest, mature consideration, that the unvarnished truth was the only means of ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... listeners, and before the first sentence was ended they were under the spell of a mighty magician. They stood hushed, awed, and melted, as the speaker enforced the solemn lesson of the hour, and brought home to them, in plain unvarnished terms, the duty which remained for them to do—to finish the work which the dead around them had given their lives to carry on. It was one of the briefest of the many speeches with which Lincoln had swayed the impulses and opinions of crowds ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... down into the present fashion. Now-a-days the skill of the repairer is exercised in the various treatment of this part. Players vary in their tastes or whims, some liking a perfectly smooth or polished surface as more suitable to their handling than what they understand as an unvarnished neck, others like it the other way as not so likely to slip, there being a little more hold or resistance. Anyhow, the raw wood cannot be left simply glass-papered, this would be speedily followed in use by an accumulation of dirt and grease unpleasant ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... strenuous age, appears galvanised into some fleeting semblance of vitality by the extravaganza presented to it, for the language of hyperbole is the natural expression of Eastern thought, and penetrates into mental recesses unknown and unexplored by the relater of unvarnished facts. The quick response of the native mind to Nature's teaching, and the wealth of tradition woven round flower and tree, mountain and stream, foster the love of marvel and miracle in those whose daily wants are supplied by the prodigality of a tropical climate, for the ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... tea-tables and say the right things to tea-drinkers. Association with the crude, outspoken youth at the State University had been an education in human nature, especially masculine nature, for her acute mind. Her unvarnished association with the other sex in classroom and campus had taught her, by means of certain rough knocks which more sheltered boarding-school girls never get, an accuracy of estimate as to the actual feeling of men towards the women they profess to admire unreservedly which ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... we rarely obtain an unvarnished picture of character from the near relatives of distinguished men; and, interesting though all autobiography is, still less can we expect it from the men themselves. In writing his own memoirs, a man will not tell all that he knows about himself. Augustine ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... which exhibits exactly the same determination to exaggerate nothing and to reduce nothing, but to report exactly what the author saw with his own eyes, in that little corner of the prodigious battle-field in which his own regiment was fighting. Truth, the simple unvarnished truth, has been the object of these various writers in setting down their impressions, but the result exemplifies the difference between what is, and what is not, durable as literature. For this purpose, it is well to turn from Lintier's pages to those ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... no fairy tale, but the unvarnished truth. The page of the princess listened, and immediately repeated all that he heard ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... that have seen truly if kindly. If I have been tempted into praise where simple narrative might to the reader seem all that was required, if I have seemed to exaggerate in any of my history's details, I may say that I am not conscious of having set down more than "a plain, unvarnished tale." Embarrassed with riches of fact, I have had no thought of ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... seen Sarah in 'Cleopatra,' and we were relying on you for an unvarnished account. Ladies, too! See here, my boy, you won't get any good out of touring about the Continent with ladies. Hang it all! I believe ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... professional purposes, and merely to get the curtain down decently. It is a point, which it takes the key of the play—Lord Bacon's key, of 'Times,' to put in. It wants but a comma, but then it must be a comma in the right place, to make English of it. Plain English, unvarnished English, but poetic in its fact, as any prophecy that Merlin was ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... Plain unvarnished history takes the romance out of Captain Cook's assassination, and renders a deliberate verdict of justifiable homicide. Wherever he went among the islands, he was cordially received and welcomed by the inhabitants, and his ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a plain, unvarnished tale," said Tom, "but it's one that ought to be told, and in this very spot. Perhaps you don't any of you know, that in Dr. Marks' school it's ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney
... emblematic of the true man, is both unreasonable and uncharitable. Nor, I think, will that reader grasp the way to see the truth who cannot teach himself what has in Cicero's case, been the effect of daring to tell to his friend an unvarnished tale. When with us some poor thought does make its way across our minds, we do not sit down and write it to another, nor, if we did, would an immortality be awarded to the letter. If one of us were to lose his all—as Cicero lost his all when he was ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... Steinhauser said to themselves, As the public have never had more than one-third of the Nights, and that translated indifferently, we will see what we can do. "We agreed," says Burton, "to collaborate and produce a full, complete, unvarnished, uncastrated, copy of the great original, my friend taking the prose and I the metrical part; and we corresponded upon the subject for years." [149] They told each other that, having completed their task, they would look ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... had quite done with his unvarnished tale, and when Mr. Smoothbore had given him a parting nod in sign that he had done with him, Sergeant Balais rose, for the first time, with an uplifted finger, as though, but for that signal of delay, the honest landlord ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... effect-ing, at all hazard, his liberation from "durance vile," but his efforts had no other result than that of confirming his trammels, and he was presently bound over to keep the peace, under the guarantee of a straight-waistcoat! The unfortunate mercer now told a "plain unvarnished tale," which gained the attention of the humane physician, who was no other than the proprietor of the mansion, in which he managed its concerns as an Asylum for Lunatics. The lady who accompanied the mercer to the house, had been with the physician the preceding ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... the 'personality' he had striven so hard to build up, was solace and necessity now. He no longer called it 'la sorciere glauque.' He had shed away all his French phrases. He had become a plain, unvarnished, Preston man. ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... been stung by a wasp, and it is certainly true that at that moment there was a piece of elastic on the thumb and first finger of Speug's left hand, but his right hand was devoted to literature. The language which Cosh allowed himself to use in the heat of the moment was so unvarnished that it came under Bulldog's attention, who told him that if he wanted to say anything like that again he must say it in Latin, and that he ought to take notice of the excellent conduct of Peter ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... their short journey to the landlord's, commenced, in her own way, a lecture upon agricultural economy, which, though plain and unvarnished, contained excellent and practical sense. She also pointed out to him when to speak and when to be silent; told him what rent to offer, and in what manner he should offer it; but she did all this so dexterously and sweetly, that honest Peter thought the new and corrected views which she furnished ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... thought this was not so accurate.'' This famine of conscience, this indifference to truth, does far-reaching damage in our profession. I assert that it does immensely greater harm than obvious falsehood, because, indeed, the unvarnished lie is much more easily discoverable than the probable truth which is still untruth. Moreover, lies come generally from people with regard to whom one is, for one reason or another, already cautious, while these insinuating approximations ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... continued with: "I'd better teach you your new trade now. You've got to learn to cane chairs, so the warden says. If you want, we can begin right away." But without waiting for Cowperwood to acquiesce, he went off, returning after a time with three unvarnished frames of chairs and a bundle of cane strips or withes, which he deposited on the floor. Having so done—and with a flourish—he now continued: "Now I'll show you if you'll watch me," and he began showing Cowperwood how the strips were to be laced through the apertures on either ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... qualities of mind; with boys of generous impulses and large hearts; with boys who delight in playing pranks, and who are ever ready for any sort of mischief; and with boys in whom human nature is strongly engrafted. They are boys, as many of us have been; boys in the true, unvarnished sense of the word; boys with hopes, ideas, and inspirations, but lacking in judgment, self-control, and discipline. And the book contains an appropriate moral, teaches many a lesson, and presents many a precept worthy of being followed. ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... will and choice, this would not satisfy the wretched Turk. Blood, lawless blood—a horrid Moloch, surmounting a grim company of torturers and executioners, and on the other side revelling in a thousand unconsenting women—this hideous image of brutal power and unvarnished lust is clearly indispensable to the Turk as incarnating the representative grandeur of his nation. With this ideal ever present to the Asiatic and Mohammedan mind, no wonder that even their religion needs the aid of the sword and bloodshed ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... things in the world to see the quiet, gentlemanly way in which Ruskin gave vent to his extreme opinions. It seems to be no effort to him, but as if it were a matter of course that every one should give expression to the faith that is in him in the same unvarnished way as he does himself, not looking for agreement, but for conversation and discussion. 'It is strange,' Ruskin said, 'being considered so much out of harmony with America as I am, that the two Americans I have known and ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... I can pin my dragon-fly friend down to a plain, unvarnished autobiography, I may be able to trace some chronological sequence in the kaleidoscopic changes in his career. But hitherto, in his talks with me, he flits about from any one date to any other during a couple ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... stand up fur that girl yonder, if any consarned gossip takes t' handlin' her name lightly. That girl's put in my care by Billy, an' Billy an' me have stood by each other through many a gale. An' now, Mark Tapkins, I'd like t' hear what ye've got t' say out plain an' unvarnished. I don't want no gibin'. I only got one way o' hearin' an' talkin'." Mark drew back from the calm, lowering face ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... I have left the ranks, The plain unvarnished fact is That through those three rough years, and thanks To very frequent practice, I, who was once a nascent snob, Am ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... truth and nothing but the truth about it in the last century: Francis, the great Social Reformer—Francis Newman, who was no time-server, no prophesier of smooth things; but, as much as in him lay, desired more than anything else to lay the whole unvarnished truth before his fellow men, things that concerned the weaker members of the community. In lecture after lecture he turned things to the "rightabout-face" which had hitherto been done sub rosa in India. He did in effect pull down the very rose tree which had acted as such an efficient ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... prevaricators found the plain, unvarnished story of each day's work as much as they cared to send in at night, for the builders were now putting down four and five miles of road every working day. Such road building the world had never seen, and news of it now ran round the earth. At night these tireless ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... nothing in return for his instruction, but the participation of a good table, and 150l. by way of presents. Instead of his letters to Mrs. Piozzi in the 'European Magazine,' had he told this plain unvarnished tale, he would have convicted that lady of avarice and ingratitude, without incurring the danger of a reply, or exposing his memory to be insulted ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... been wont to think the only place unconscious beauties abounded was in high-flown, unreal novels; but here was one in real life, and that the exceedingly unvarnished existence of Noonoon. Not that I would have thought any the less of her had she been conscious of her physical loveliness, for beauty is such a glorious, powerful, intoxicating gift that had I been blessed with it I'm sure I would have admired myself all day, ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... a very gross view of the case, which could not but jar upon Gladys, though she was conscious that there was a good deal of truth in it. Somehow, in the light of Teen Balfour's unvarnished estimate of philanthropic endeavour, her dreams seemed to become all at once ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... one of these unhappy women ventured to write a plain, unvarnished, but poignant, description of her inner life, where would she find a publisher daring enough to let his name appear on the ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... as he had promised,—if she should still require it; but he would first try what a letter would do,—a plain unvarnished tale. Might it still be possible that a plain tale sent by post should have sufficient efficacy? This was his plain tale ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... discreditable, but at the same time historically instructive, since it shows to what a point the noblest of the Florentines had fallen. All Pitti's invectives against the Ottimati, bitter as they may be, are justified by the unvarnished narrative we read upon the pages of Varchi and Segni concerning this most vicious, selfish, vain, and brilliant hero of historical romance. Married to Clarice de' Medici, by whom he had a splendid family of handsome and vigorous sons, he was more than the rival of his wife's princely ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... well since her departure, and where she found Adam more tractable and reasonable than she had had reason to anticipate. He listened to all Joan's messages, agreed with her suspicions and seemed contented to abide by her decision. The plain, unvarnished statement which Mrs. Tucker gave of the misery and gloom spread over the place affected him visibly, and her account of the two girls, and the alteration she had seen in them, did not tend ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... place where we, in our ignorance, had placed fixed ice in our charts; and to them likewise the wisdom of an all-merciful Providence revealed the fact of a northern sea of open water, that they might be additional witnesses in the hour of need. We cannot do better than read the plain unvarnished tale of the gallant American—a tale of calm heroism under no ordinary trials, which stamps the document as the truthful narration of a gentleman and a sailor. He says, after describing the being beset by young ice in the mouth of Wellington ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... This journal was found among his papers by a personage of high standing in Greece, who was the first to inspect them, and who, seeing his own name and conduct mentioned in no flattering terms, destroyed them in order to hide from England the unvarnished truth told of himself. Count Gamba often speaks of this journal in the letters addressed at this ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... erred. Before she had made a concrete instance he knew how hopeless his wish had been: the silence, the loosening of hands had told him that. And when she spoke there was a brutality in what she said, and worse than the brutality there was a plain, unvarnished truth. ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... own bar, Memory having given her evidence of the hopes, wishes, sentiments I had been cherishing since last night—of the general state of mind in which I had indulged for nearly a fortnight past; Reason having come forward and told, in her own quiet way a plain, unvarnished tale, showing how I had rejected the real, and rabidly devoured the ideal;—I pronounced judgment to ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... assure you I neither magnify nor embellish. I am merely stating unvarnished facts, that you may thoroughly understand into what fertile soil your scattered grains of learning fall. I promise you, with moderate cultivation it will yield ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... appropriation for a separate prison for women. With the full sympathy of Governor Baker, who was not only a most honorable gentleman, but a sincere believer in the equal political rights of women, Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Coffin appeared before the legislature of 1869, and by an unvarnished account of what they had witnessed and learned in the Southern prison, they aroused the legislators to immediate action, and an act to establish a "Reformatory Institution for Women and Girls" was passed at that session (viz., that of 1869). ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... debased, no nature so utterly loathsome, no soul so hopelessly lost, as the handsome, smiling, accomplished, popular, viceless Greek, Tito Melema. Yet is he the very reverse of what is called a monster of iniquity. That which gives its deep and awful power to the picture is its simple, unstrained, unvarnished truthfulness. He knows little of himself who does not recognise as existent within himself, and as always battling for supremacy there, that principle of evil which, accepted by Tito as his life-law, and therefore consummating itself in him, "bringeth forth death;" death the ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... down upon my bleeding knuckles, "I am not Sir Maurice Vibart. It seems my fate to be mistaken for him wherever I go. My name is Peter, plain and unvarnished, and I am very humbly your servant." Now as I spoke, it seemed that the Daemon, no longer the jovial companion, was himself again, horns, hoof, and tail—nay, indeed, he seemed a thousand times more foul and hideous than before, as he mouthed and jibed at me in baffled ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... knowledge. {250} Sir Walter's first instance is from Causes Celebres, (vol. xii., La Haye, 1749, Amsterdam, 1775, p. 247). Unluckily the narrator, in this collection, is an esprit fort, and is assiduous in attempts to display his wit. We have not a plain unvarnished tale, but something more like a facetious leading ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... down to within two or three miles of the Gloria bridge. Goodloe, at Little Butte, reports that there was nothing moving on the main line after the passing of the midnight freight east; and Shaughnessy, the track-walker, is just a plain, unvarnished liar: he knows a lot more ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... qualities, frankly, and untinged by bitterness. But it must be remembered, that Gen. Hooker has left himself on record as the author of many harsh reflections upon his subordinates; and that to mete out even justice to all requires unvarnished truth. ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... to details, he saw that the nail was one of several which had fastened a narrow strip of molding around the cabinet. About two feet of this molding had been torn away, leaving the nails protruding from the cabinet and Tom noticed not only that the unvarnished strip which the molding had covered was clean and white, but that the exposed parts of the nails were ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... Clarges Street was reached Percy had told his friend an unvarnished story of the follies of the last few days, and enlisted his support in his determination ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... instantly. Some would gladly have escaped observation. Every man among the survivors acted as though it were first necessary to explain how he came to be in a life-boat. Some of the stories smacked of Munchausen. Others were as plain and unvarnished as a pike staff. Those that were most sincere and trustworthy had to be fairly pulled from those who gave ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... historical standpoint, however, and as a picture of the old barbaric Celtic culture, and as a pure expression of elemental passion, it is of more importance to have the genuine tradition as it developed amongst the people, unvarnished by poetic art and uninfluenced by the example of older and ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... it intensely if her interest and her blush had been noticed, and put down to personal attraction. It was not that at all. She rather disliked the man, with his keen, hawklike face, his piercing eyes, and his direct, unvarnished speech. He was the sort of man of whom a woman might have reason to be afraid if she were, by unaccountable mischance, attracted by him, and he by her. He would dominate her and she would be at least as much of a chattel as in the hands of a male Clinton. It was what ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... confectionery on to the middle of the ashes, and then raked it deep down into the mass. The suddenness, the velocity of this extraordinary act, made an impression on my memory which nothing will ever efface." Such is a plain unvarnished account of the kind of way in which numbers of people were brought up in the 'fifties and 'sixties of the last century. Can it be wondered that those who had such a childhood should grow up with an absolute horror of the ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... authority" that he held the mortgage which covered the two connecting houses; that, as the expression is, he "had more money than he knew what to do with." Others, who did not profess to be so scrupulously exact in their determination to tell only a plain, unvarnished tale, delighted in fabulous stories concerning his riches. They said that though the floor of his sitting-room was carpetless, and the bay-window curtainless but for the cobwebs, he could cover the one with gold pieces and the other with bank-notes, if he pleased. ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... leader, Lord Elcho was true to the cause which he had adopted. His account of the manner in which the council of the Regent, as he was styled, was conducted, is so characteristic, not only of those to whom he refers, but of his own mind, that I shall give it in the unvarnished phraseology in which ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... to the lower slopes, it might here near the head be deflected so that it sped at first through the canon of the upper Dry Creek, and following a natural course be brought with little expense to Dry Valley. Ettinger's proposition was no fanciful dream; it was hard, unvarnished fact. And, as so often happens when a man sees a radiant possibility, he wondered that he had not seen it for ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... publishing these melancholy facts to the world. As, through the boundless mercy of Providence, we have been restored, to the bosom of our families and homes, we deemed it a duty we owe to the world, to record our "unvarnished tale." ...
— A Narrative of the Mutiny, on Board the Ship Globe, of Nantucket, in the Pacific Ocean, Jan. 1824 • William Lay
... the ingenuousness and simplicity of the speaker's accents. A generation continually excited by narratives, as sterile as vehement, of storm and stress and spiritual shipwreck, might do well, if it knew the things that pertained to its peace, to ponder this unvarnished history—the history of a man who, though he was not one of the picturesque victims of the wasteful torments of an uneasy spiritual self-consciousness, yet laboured so patiently after the gifts ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... task to grapple with the details of her career, her own picturesque, high-coloured narrative being not invariably in accord with the prosaic records gathered from contemporary sources. For example, according to the plain, unvarnished statement of a Saxon chronicler, Lady Morgan's father was one Robert MacOwen, who was born in 1744, the son of poor parents in Connaught. He was educated at a hedge-school, and on coming to man's estate, obtained a situation as steward to ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
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