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More "Urbane" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an air of mystery. He swelled his chest and strutted a step or two nearer. Urbane condescension oozed ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... life or to social intercourse, but fond of spending his leisure moments at his own temporary home, which a devoted wife made to him a paradise. His manners to strangers were very stiff; his friendship, once gained, was earnest and unchangeable. Dr. Gamble, surgeon of the post, was an urbane, kindly gentleman. Business claimed his entire time also, and he was seldom seen outside of his office. The ladies of our little circle have been already mentioned, as well as most of the surgeons. Dr. Bemiss, of all others, was a general favorite. ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... his watch—that he had not time to make her acquaintance. Oddly enough, I felt when he said it that this was no idle speech, but that only time prevented him from walking up the hill and paying his respects. I felt also, the longer we talked, I will not say a fear of him, for his manner was too urbane to permit it, but an increasing respect. Crazed he might be, as his questions were disconnected and now and again bewildering, as when he asked if my father had travelled much abroad, and again it I really preferred to remain idle at home instead of returning ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... were absorbed in conversation, Lily flushed and eager, and her husband smiling, urbane, ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the greatest respect and affection. To all he responded with benign but unapproachable dignity. From the vociferating group he called the trader, McClellan, to whom he introduced us, all three, with urbane formality. ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... said very little more; he took the keys of his house out of his bureau, gave them to me—and, thanking him cordially for his frankness, and his urbane concession to my wish, I ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... had been fixed keenly and unwaveringly on Mr. Jocelyn's urbane countenance, as if he would detect the cause of such unlooked-for words, but at the mention of Mildred's name his brow and even neck was suffused. "She must have spoken of me kindly," he thought, "or her father would not be so friendly." ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... 'and the world is round—the apple is a sour, disagreeable fruit; and who has tasted much of the world without having his teeth set on edge?' I, however, treated the publisher, upon the whole, in the most urbane and Oxford-like manner; complimenting him upon his style, acknowledging the general soundness of his views, and only differing with him in the affair ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... little flower. If it was a pretty baby you wouldn't want to pull its head off and stick it in a vawse o water to look at. [The grasshopper chirps: Keegan turns his head and addresses it in the vernacular]. Be aisy, me son: she won't spoil the swing-swong in your little three. [To Nora, resuming his urbane style] You see I'm quite cracked; but never mind: I'm harmless. Now what ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... your consciousness, some sense of belonging to the first city in the world? . . . Oh, yes, you use it, fast enough, whenever you go back to Cambridge and play the condescending metropolitan in Combination Room. There, seventy minutes from Liverpool Street, you pose—yes, pose, Jack—as the urbane man, Horatius Flaccus life-size; whereas your job as a citizen is confined to cursing the rates, swearing if a pit in the wood pavement jolts you on the way home from the theatre, supposing it's somebody's business, ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Invisible is the thing he does, and yet it is done. Let us hope that some sense of this tardy appreciation may soothe his spirit beyond the grave. On the present occasion there was nothing to soothe his spirit. The Speaker sat, urbane and courteous, with his eyes turned towards the unfortunate orator; but no other ears in the House seemed to listen to him. The corps of reporters had dwindled down to two, and they used their pens very listlessly, taking down here a sentence and there a sentence, ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... blue eyes, rather a fair complexion, prominent features, and a high, capacious forehead. His aspect was severe and forbidding; his voice clear and powerful; his action dignified, but neither graceful nor engaging; his tone and manners, although urbane and complacent in society, were lofty, and even arrogant, in the senate. On entering the house, it was his custom to stalk sternly to his place, without honouring even his most favoured adherents with a word, a nod, or even a glance ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 558, July 21, 1832 • Various
... been obeyed with urbane alacrity, Sam called out again, very much as if he were piping all hands to osculation: 'Rev. Mr. Rippledean, step ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... light pressure after the Washington copy was run off, and blink rapidly. At the same moment Mr. David Sterne gave utterance to an exclamation, partly of annoyance, partly of surprise. Mr. Harrington Surtaine, wearing an expression both businesslike and urbane stood ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... men to comprehend the position of women in the primitive Church, is strikingly shown in Chalmers' commentary on the fact that Paul used exactly the same title in addressing Priscilla that he uses in greeting Urbane, Although conceding that Priscilla had shared the work of an Apostle in teaching Apollos "the way of God more perfectly," and, although he knows nothing whatever of Urbane's work, yet Chalmers unhesitatingly concludes that Urbane's help to Paul must have been in things spiritual, but ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Mr Dorrit, 'I took the liberty' (he laid an emphasis on the phrase and repeated it, as though he stipulated, with urbane firmness, that he must not be contradicted again), 'I took the liberty of requesting this interview, in order that I might mention the topic to you, and inquire how ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... one who was a boy in the older era of the urbane Addison and the witty Pope, and a man in the newer period of the novelists, is well described in Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. "All the little money," wrote that book-lover, "that came into my hands was ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... the young jeweller made out the account and receipt, whilst M. Lambert, the secretary, counted out before him 105 crisp Bank of England notes of L100 each. Then, with a final bow to his exceedingly urbane and eminently satisfactory customer, Mr. Schwarz took his leave. In the hall he saw and spoke to Mr. Pettitt, and then he ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... more remarkable than the difference which exists between the Salvini of the stage and the Salvini of private life, the one so imposing, impetuous and fiery, the other so gentle, urbane, and even retiring. He is a gentleman possessing the manners of the good old school—courtly and somewhat ceremonious, reminding one of those Italian nobles of the sixteenth century of whom we lead in the novels of Giraldo Cinthio and Fiorentino—uomini illustri, e di ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... laboribus, URBANE, nullis victe calumniis[330], Cui fronte sertum in erudita Perpetuo ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... never, as it so often does in the case of Mr Arnold's dangerous master and model Renan, degenerates into unctuosity; they are nobly serious, but without being in the least dull; they contain some exceedingly just and at the same time perfectly urbane criticism of the ordinary reviewing kind, and though they are not without instances of the author's by-blows of slightly unproved opinion, yet these are by no means eminent in them, and are not of a provocative nature. And I do not think it fanciful to suppose that the ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... the chief with an admiring smile. He had never ceased to wonder at the multifarious qualities which enabled the man to remain indispensable to native and cottager alike. Courteous, handsome, urbane, diplomatic, debonair, when a matron of the very highest caste sent for him to enlist his efforts in the regaining of some jewel, tiara, or piece of vertu, missing after a weekend, he never for a moment forgot ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... civil and urbane in the entertainment of his guests, and requested them to consider themselves as his children. It was on this occasion he told Lord Byron, that he discovered his noble blood by the smallness of his hands and ears: a remark which has become ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... forbearingly, generous and urbane reader; follow us undaunted whither we go, nor charge us with tracing crime in a bad cause. We will leave the old prison, the dejected inebriate, the more curious group that surround him, and the tale of the destroyer it develops, and ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... no master, no pontiff in the arts. Palizzi bore rule at Gretz - urbane, superior rule - his memory rich in anecdotes of the great men of yore, his mind fertile in theories; sceptical, composed, and venerable to the eye; and yet beneath these outworks, all twittering with Italian superstition, ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Magazine at the time of its failure in 1857, and undertook to pay up every creditor, a task which consumed sixteen years. He wrote the Easy Chair papers in Harper's Monthly. A volume of these essays contains some of his easiest, most urbane, and humorous writings. They are light and in the vein of Addison's Spectator. In Orations and Addresses are to be found some of his strongest and most polished speeches on ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... curious blend of the fashionable and the devout, the anchorite and the man of the people; Lord and Lady Shervinton, elderly connections of the nondescript variety; Mr. Hannaway Wells, reserved yet, urbane, a wonderful type of the supreme success of mediocrity; a couple of young soldiers, light-hearted and out for a good time, of whom Julian took charge; an Oxford don, who had once been Lord Maltenby's tutor; ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... on the bear-skin in her canoe, with her hat over her face, declaring it too hot to eat, but consuming, under protest, a croquette occasionally tossed in for her sustenance. Miss Prosody, quite genial and urbane after luncheon, was deep in consultation with the boatman as to the locality of certain ferns she proposed spudding up for her pet rockery at "The Maples," where her lighter hours were diurnally spent in washing and ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... world, he held such strong opinions, and expressed them with such placid freedom, that he never failed to command attention, or to deserve it. Contemptuous enough, perhaps too contemptuous, of human frailties, he at least knew how to make them entertaining, and his urbane irony ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... as my companions on this journey, two Russian gentlemen, with whom afterwards, at several points of my tour, I came into contact. They were urbane and intelligent men, full of their own country and of the Czar, yet professing great respect for England, which they had just visited, and looking down with a contempt they were at little pains to conceal, upon the Frenchmen and Italians ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... meet VIDA. Hastily.] It seems to me that horses are like the fourth gospel. Any conversation about them becomes animated almost beyond the limits of the urbane! [VIDA, disgusted by such plainness of speech, rises and goes to PHILIP who waves her ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... "My dear lady," urbane William rose and bowed. "If Robert Burroughs is elected to the United States Senate, the judge shall be Minister to Berlin. It is practically arranged already. Bob's a big man in his party. What he asks for he'll get, never ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... coming as it did from a young woman whose countenance he had mentally pronounced interesting, and with regard to whom he was conscious of the germ of the inevitable desire to produce a responsive interest. And then he thought it would break the ice to say something playfully urbane. ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... embarrassment to meet the gentleman who entered, though I knew she could not help but feel keenly the niggardly appearance of the board she left with such grace. The stranger—he was certainly a stranger; this I could see by the formality of her manner—was a gentleman of urbane bearing and a general air ...
— The Gray Madam - 1899 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... dreary city for a lounger; even a resident finds that he must serve a seven years' apprenticeship before he gets any footing in its stiff ungenial society—for of all Italians, nothing socially is less graceful than a Piedmontese. They have none of the courteous civility, none of the urbane gentleness of the peninsular Italians. They are cold, reserved, proud, and eminently awkward; not the less so, perhaps, that their habitual tongue is the very vilest jargon that ever disfigured a human mouth. Of course this is an efficient barrier against intercourse with strangers; and though ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... disgruntled when he found himself, as it were, segregated, and he sulked openly; but Hicks, on the contrary, was so urbane and respectful that everyone remarked his changed manner, and Mrs. Stott triumphantly demanded to know if it were not proof of her contention that servants were the better for being occasionally ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... says a late historian, "stood in awe for many years of these suave, urbane, occasionally fire-eating and always well-dressed gentlemen from this most aristocratic section of the Union. The Southerners, born leaders of men, and with politics the paramount interest in their lives, controlled both San Francisco ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... asked how things were going in Paris. He was, says Barnet, a round-faced man, dressed very neatly in black—so neatly that it was amazing to discover he was living close at hand in a tent made of carpets—and he had 'an urbane but insistent manner,' a carefully trimmed moustache and beard, expressive eyebrows, and ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... him. Appointing a secretary is pure vanity and vexation of spirit; you must find the right man made ready to your hand; and when you have found him you will soon see that he slips into the onerous duties of the secretariat as if to the manner born, by pure instinct. The perfect secretary is an urbane old gentleman of mature years and portly bearing, a dignified representative of British archaeology, with plenty of money and plenty of leisure, possessing a heaven-born genius for organisation, and utterly unhampered by any foolish views of his own ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... excursion, which would cause a loss of considerable time and a deflection from the intended route, was declined in courteous terms by Marcoy through the interpretation of Pepe Garcia. Among civilized folk this urbane refusal would have sufficed, but the savages, taking such a reply as a challenge to verbal warfare, returned to the charge with increased tenacity. It were hard to say what natural logic they put in practice or what sylvan persuasions they wrought by, but their peculiar mode of stroking the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... "and I was proud to call him my client. Yes, I had the honor of advising him in several matters and of carrying through some rather delicate negotiations for him. A man of the strictest integrity, ever genial and urbane, of sound judgment and independent views, endowed with strong common sense and quick perceptions. You see, I had the highest opinion of Mr. Tarbell, and have often wished to tell his widow—alas that I should have to call her so!—how certain I am that she will succeed in the career ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But BEING PAID,—what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... fumbled with the spring-catch of the case, she was aware of having accomplished a great and noble act of surrender. She hoped the best from it. In particular, she hoped that she had saved the honour of her party and put it at last on a secure footing of urbane convivial success. For that a party of hers should fail in giving pleasure to every member of it was a menace to her legitimate pride. And so far fate had not been propitious. The money in the house ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... Minister, proved to be a rubicund, rather portly gentleman, with white side whiskers and an air of urbane courtesy that set her at her ease at once. She told him who she was, hopefully, and was delighted to find that ...
— The Ivory Snuff Box • Arnold Fredericks
... she is without an equal. The colonies are together larger in area than the mother-country, and include Algeria, Madagascar, and Cochin China. The French are a people of keen intelligence, of bright, impulsive, and vivacious nature; urbane, cultured, and pleasure-loving in the cities, thrifty and industrious in the country; few races have given so rich a bequest to the literature and art of the world. Roman Catholicism is the dominant form of religion, but Protestantism and the Jewish religion are also State supported, as also ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... sir," he begged, in an urbane voice in which I alone detected the anxiety—"am I not right in believing that one of the young ladies is ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... existence; the hostler adored them, especially Mr. Joseph; when the latter was there, which he was every Saturday till Monday, he would stroll over the stable with Squires—that was the hostler's name—joking incessantly, and treating the latter to an occasional cigar. Urbane Mr. Joseph would joke with anybody, Mr. George was more severe and had according to the landlady, the most ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... diminished;" which is by no means what he thought of the prerogative. Next to his bottle he was fond of his Horace; and, in the intervals of business at the police-office, would enjoy both in his arm-chair. Between the vulgar calls of this kind of magistracy, and the perusal of the urbane Horace, there must have been a gusto of contradiction, which the bottle, perhaps, was required to render quite palatable. Fielding did not love his bottle the less for being obliged to lecture the drunken. Nor did his son, who succeeded him in taste and office. I know not how a former poet-laureat, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... was only philosophising upon these scenes of inexpensive patriotism which fill even the most urbane and peaceful among us full of truculence. . . . I recently saw my tailor wearing a sword, attired in the made-to-measure ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... of the enthusiastic excitement which Thorpe perceived now that he had looked for. The equanimity of Marquises, who were also ex-Ambassadors, was evidently a deeper-rooted affair than he had supposed. This elderly and urbane diplomat took a gift of thirty thousand pounds as he might have ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... everything! He chattered to them, with astonishing knowledge and shrewdness, for half an hour. Complete composure, complete good-humour, complete good manners—he possessed them all. Easy to see that he was the son of an old race, moulded by long centuries of urbane and civilised living! ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the Sage of Lindenwald from Prince John. In one particular, however, they were alike. Each had that personal magnetism that binds followers to leaders with hooks of steel. The father was grave, urbane, wary, a safe counsellor, and accustomed to an argumentative and deliberate method of address that befitted the bar and the Senate. Few knew how able a lawyer the elder Van Buren was. The son was enthusiastic, frank, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... blue-grey frock, the white doeskin trousers which strapped under the patent-leather boots, the gold braid, the silver saber and the little rope of medals strung across his full, broad breast. It was thus he created awe; it was thus he became truly the sovereign, urbane ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... "Too urbane to advocate delusion, too hale for the bitterness of irony, this fable of Jurgen is, as the world itself, a book wherein each man will find what his nature enables him to see; which gives us back each his own ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... entered presently a small restaurant of foreign appearance. The outside, which had once been painted white, was now more than a little dingy. Greyish-colored muslin blinds were stretched across the front windows. Within, the smell of cooking was all-pervading. A short dark man, with black moustache and urbane smile, greeted us at the door, and led us to ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... back to Four Winds he found the Captain on the point of starting off for a cruise in his yacht. He was urbane and friendly, utterly ignoring the incident of Alan's last visit and regretting that business compelled him to go down the lake. Alan saw him off with small regret and turned joyfully to Lynde, who was walking under the pines with her dogs. She looked pale and tired ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the table, calling for his furred paletot, and gave orders that his sleigh and horses should be brought round. The well-bred waiters, whose duty it was to be surprised at nothing, were evidently astonished at these signs of agitation in the most urbane and reposeful visitor at the club-rooms. With a hurried step he descended to the street, stepped into his sleigh, buried himself to the chin in furs, and the driver dashed off with a ringing of bells and a flourish of the whip around his horses' ears, that made ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... was speaking the fitful energy died away. The old man ceased to talk; his eyelids fell. But the smile still lingered about his mouth, and as he settled himself on his pillows, like one who rests, the spectators were struck by the urbane and distinguished beauty of his aspect. The purple flush had died again into mortal pallor. Illness had masked or refined the weakness of mouth and chin; the beautiful head and countenance, with their characteristic notes of youth, impetuosity, a kind of gay detachment, had never ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Charles. For all his urbane, good-tempered, debonair ways, there was an ugly cynical streak in his nature, manifested now in the manner in which he dealt with this situation. Himself he led his boldly handsome favourite by the hand into his wife's presence, before the whole Court assembled, ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... at her right hand scowled angrily, but Paul turned to him with an urbane smile. "As you do not seem to be playing," he said, "perhaps you will allow me to have ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... the collections, is that addressed to the Countess of Cumberland. It is an amplification of Horace's Integer Vitae, and when we compare it with the original we miss the point, the compactness, and above all the urbane tone of the original. It is very fine English, but it is the English of diplomacy somehow, and is never downright this or that, but always has the honor to be so or so, with sentiments of the highest consideration. Yet the praise of well-languaged, since it implies that good writing then as now ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... whom we both have known so well, No other man in manners can excel; Facetious, courteous, affable, urbane. The world's approval he is sure to gain. But, would you think it? he has now essayed To be a bard, and countless verses made; Perhaps ten thousand, perhaps ten times more, For none but he could ever count them o'er; Not scribbled down on scraps, as one ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... it was of her own choice that Anne lived apart from Lichfieldian junketings, contented with her dreams and her pride therein, and her remorseful tender memories of the things she might have done for Jack and had not done—lived upon exalted levels nowadays, to which the colonel's more urbane bereavement ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... thought, had her husband been so silly as in his abandonment of Silverbridge. When she heard that the day was fixed for declaring the vacancy, she ventured to ask him a question. His manner to her lately had been more than urbane, more than affectionate;—it had almost been that of a lover. He had petted her and caressed her when they met, and once even said that nothing should really trouble him as long as he had her with him. Such ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... office of the Jack Creek Pizenweed, at 7 o'clock, and found the editor in. It was so unusual to find the editor in at that hour that the boy whistled in a low contralto voice, and passed on into the "news room," leaving the gentlemanly, genial and urbane editor of the Pizenweed as he had found him, sitting in his foundered chair, with his head immersed in a pile of exchanges on the table and his venerable Smith & Wesson near by, acting as a paper-weight. The gentlemanly, genial and urbane editor of ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... see, although we are forced, as it were, to throw ourselves on his hospitality, I don't quite like to descend on him all at once with the whole strength of our party. It will be better for one of us to break the ice, and as you are the best-looking and most hypocritically urbane, when you choose, I think we could not do better than ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... in the stern had picked up a magazine and was lolling back reading it. As the boat passed under him Cleggett saw on the cover page of the magazine a picture of the very man who was perusing it. It was a singularly urbane face; both the counterfeit presentment on the cover page and the real face were smiling and calm and benign. Cleggett could read the legend on the magazine cover accompanying the ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... is kneeling by Sir Victor Catheron's side. "Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?" say the urbane tones of the rector of Chesholm, and the Right Honorable the Earl of Wroatmore comes forward on two rickety old legs and gives her. "If any one here present knows any just cause or impediment why this man should not be married to ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... the present day. These votaries have their various kinds. There is the critic who simply uses his subject as a sort of springboard or platform, on and from which to display his natural grace and agility, his urbane learning, his faculty of pleasant wit. This is perhaps the most popular of all critics, and no age has ever had better examples of him than this age. There is a more serious kind who founds on his subject ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... trifle pallid, but bland and urbane, strolled out to the porch, saluting us gracefully. He paused beside Dorothy, who slipped her needle through her work and held out her hand for him ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... and fashion, the pride and flower of a great race and a great history, the city of kings and emperors, and of a people which, after all, loves kings and emperors, and will not long, I fear, be happy without them,—a gregarious, urbane people, a people of genius and destiny, whose God is Art and whose devil is Communism. London has long ago outgrown itself, has spread, and multiplied, and accumulated, without a corresponding inward expansion and unification; but in Paris they have pulled down and built larger, and ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... his lips, the warm, cheering light in his bright blue eyes, won the perfect trust, the profound respect, the lasting love and veneration of those who entered the charmed circle of his influence. Learned without pedantry, dignified but not pompous, genial and urbane; never forgetting the sanctity of his mission, though never thrusting its credentials into notice; judging the actions of all with a leniency which he denied to his own; zealous without bigotry, charitable yet rigidly ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... all familiar with the old fable of The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. We will vouch that the following read us as luminous a comment thereon as may be desired: 'Polite,' 'urbane,' 'civil,' 'rustic,' 'villain,' 'savage,' 'pagan,' 'heathen.' ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... ease under circumstances and conditions which he began to comprehend and have an amiable contempt for, he became urbane and conversational, and a little amused to find navigation so simple, even when ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... new developement of humour went a moderation won from humour, whether in matters of religion, of politics, or society, a literary courtesy and reserve, a well-bred temperance and modesty of tone and phrase. It was in the hands of the town-bred essayist that our literature first became urbane. ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... me. The mountains seemed to echo them always. "Wake up, Davy! Do something; be somebody; get out of the valley." Here was my shibboleth. I must do something; I must be somebody; I must get out of the valley! And then I should go to Penelope Blight, and a hundred urbane, unctuous uncles could not defraud me of my ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... a cold sweat over him. He knew all the time that that was all was left to him, but he snatched at everything. He could not obtain the floor-walker position of which he had spoken to Anderson. He thought that possibly his fine presence and urbane manner might recommend him for a place of that sort, but it was already filled. He went to several of the great department stores and inquired if there was a vacancy. He felt that the superintendents to whom he applied regarded his good points as he might have regarded ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... trips to England; but on this occasion Fields got no farther than the wharf, where the last object visible was his comely and smiling countenance as he waved his adieux. Conspicuous among the group on the after-deck, as we glided out of the smooth harbor of Boston, was an urbane and dignified gentleman of perhaps sixty years of age, with a clean-shaven mouth and chin, finely moulded, and with what Tennyson would call an educated whisker, short and gray, defining the region in front of and below his ears. He spoke deliberately, ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... of the wistful melancholy of his verse. It is almost always urbane, vivacious, light-hearted. The classical bent of his mind shows itself here, unmixed with the inheritance of romantic feeling which colors his poetry. Not only is his prose classical in quality, by virtue of its restraint, of its definite aim, and of the dry white light of intellect which suffuses ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... remarkable in one of her sex at that period.[309] Carefully avoiding all political intrigue, she made no distinction of persons beyond that due to their rank; and thus, while her intercourse with the Queen was marked by an affectionate respect peculiarly gratifying to its object, she was no less urbane and condescending to the Marquise de Verneuil; who had, as may have been anticipated, already regained all her former influence over the mind of the monarch, his passion even appearing to have derived new strength from ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... he, following my eye. "It is a handsome machine, a full dress concern with all its plating and brown leather, and in use it is as willing and quiet as any tricycle could be, a most urbane and gentlemanly affair—if you will pardon the adjective. I am glad these things have not come too late for me. Frankly, the bicycle is altogether too flippant for a man of my age, and the tricycle hitherto, with its ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... a tact and politeness which spoke of a time when he mixed freely with the world, and old Flood was so astonished by the ease and good-breeding of his visitor that his own manner became at once courteous and urbane. ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... uncomfortable, ugly, as hard to endure as a March wind, is but the extension of his father. When one knows the elder it is difficult to do otherwise than pity the younger. He is but living the tendencies which were born in him and which are an inseparable part of his nature. He cannot be genial and urbane. Are not some born moral cripples as others are born with physical deformities? Are not some spiritually deaf, dumb, and blind from birth? It cannot be doubted. We are all more or less what our fathers were, but our surroundings do much to ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... club is happy to add The American Hotel, Hoboken, to its private list of places where it has been serenely happy. Consider corned beef hash, with fried egg, excellent, for 25 cents. Consider rhubarb pie, quite adequate, for 10 cents. Consider the courteous and urbane waiter. In one corner of the dining room was the hotel office, with a large array of push buttons communicating with the bedrooms. The club, its imagination busy, conceived that these were for the purpose of awakening seafaring guests early in the morning, so as not to miss their ship. If we ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... must give way just so far as was necessary to keep mastery of her. A man to whom ideas were of no value, except when wedded to immediate action; essentially neat; demanding to be 'done well,' but capable of stoicism if necessary; urbane, yet always in readiness to thrust; able only to condone the failings and to compassionate the kinds of distress which his own experience had taught him to understand. Such was Miltoun's younger brother at the age ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... I will say as to the manners of a master of hounds, and then I will have done. He should be an urbane man, but not too urbane; and he should certainly be capable of great austerity. It used to be said that no captain of a man-of-war could hold his own without swearing. I will not quite say the same ...
— Hunting Sketches • Anthony Trollope
... bluster may please those who already agree with the speaker, but with these people he should be little concerned; a debater worthy of the name seeks to change the opinions of those who disagree with him. For this reason he is diplomatic, courteous, and urbane. ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... had before, if at all, scantily possessed. He studied the Koran, abandoned the use of strong liquors, became scrupulously abstemious, plain in his attire, assiduous in his attention to business, urbane and courteous to all.' In 1833, Shah Soojah, issuing from the British territory, made an abortive attempt to recover his kingdom; but Runjeet Singh, the ruler of the Sikhs, was more successful in wresting from him Peshawur, a province of Afghanistan, and Dost Mahomed, both in rage and terror, began ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... parish was depressing.' Among the neighbouring families, with whom he made acquaintance while at Wilmslow, were the Gregs of Quarry Bank, a refined and philanthropic household, including among the sons William R. Greg (born in the same year as Mr. Gladstone), that ingenious, urbane, interesting, and independent mind, whose speculations, dissolvent and other, were afterwards to take an effective place in the writings of the time. 'I fear he is a unitarian,' the young churchman mentions to his father, and gives sundry reasons ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... profession, said Chevenix, a prince. He had no territory, and was not apparently scheming to get any, either of his own or other people's. Nobody at the Foreign Office believed that he corresponded with any intransigent; he used to go there often and exchange urbane gossip with under-secretaries. He lodged in Duke Street, gave dinner-parties at the Bachelors, had a large visiting-list, and was, as they say, always "about." One saw him everywhere—in the city, in Mayfair drawing-rooms, at Kensington tea- parties, and at Lambeth Palace. Chevenix swore ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... by a sudden inspiration, Alexander arose and warmly pressed the hand of Napoleon, who was then half-dozing at his side.[199] On the surface, indeed, everything was friendship and harmony. With urbane facility, the Czar accompanied his ally to the battlefield of Jena, listened to the animated description of the victor, and then joined in the chase in ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... transitions, which induce fierce distraction, Job himself would become irritable, insanely furious, and choleric. A man in such a state regards himself as the focus of all miseries. When recovered, he feels chastened, becomes urbane and ludicrously amiable, he conjures up fictitious delights from all things which, but yesterday, possessed for him such awful portentous aspects. His men he regards with love and friendship; whatever is trite he views with ecstasy. Nature appears charming; in the ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... York politics is shown in Van Buren, the devotee of "regularity" in party and the adroit manager of its machinery. Shrewdness, tact, and self-reliant judgment, urbane good- humor, mingled with a suspicious and half-cynical expression, were written on his face. "Little Van" was an affable, firm, and crafty politician. Although he was not a creative statesman, neither was he a mere schemer. He had definite ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... a quiet toneless voice and urbane manners and on a finger of his plump clean hand he displayed at moments a ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... were, after all, in many cases more anxious to damage theology than to build up Philosophy. They read Hume without any delicate sense for his urbane ironies, and believed in good faith that he and John Stuart Mill between them had shown that by a mysterious process called 'induction' it is possible to prove rigorously universal conclusions in science ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... he had once been in a tikka-gharri with Auntie Jan to get some books for Mummy. Peter had recommended the shop, and the name instantly seized upon Tony's imagination and will remain with it evermore. He never for one moment connected it with the urbane gentleman in eyeglasses and a funny little round hat who owned the shop. For Tony "Taraporevala" will always suggest endless vistas of halls, fitted with books, shelves, and tall stacks of books, and counters laden with piles ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... Prince-royal of Spain. They were all of the same age, but the superiority of Don John was soon recognized. It was not difficult to surpass the limping, malicious, Carlos, either in physical graces or intellectual accomplishments; but the graceful; urbane, and chivalrous Alexander, destined afterwards to such wide celebrity, was a more formidable rival, yet even the professed panegyrist of the Farnese family, exalts the son of Barbara Blomberg over the grandson ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... verse in amplest store— Methinks he fathers thousands ten or more Indited not as wont on palimpsest, 5 But paper-royal, brand-new boards, and best Fresh bosses, crimson ribbands, sheets with lead Ruled, and with pumice-powder all well polished. These as thou readest, seem that fine, urbane Suffenus, goat-herd mere, or ditcher-swain 10 Once more, such horrid change is there, so vile. What must we wot thereof? a Droll erst while, Or (if aught) cleverer, he with converse meets, He now in dullness, dullest ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... carriage. It was clean and comfortable; but the Cantankerous Old Lady made the porter mop the floor, and fidgeted and worried till we slid out of the station. Fortunately, the only other occupant of the compartment was a most urbane and obliging Continental gentleman—I say Continental, because I couldn't quite make out whether he was French, German, or Austrian—who was anxious in every way to meet Lady Georgina's wishes. Did madame desire to have the window open? Oh, certainly, with pleasure; the day was so ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... State Convention was a new experience for him. He walked behind the Duke, who made his slow, urbane way here and there, drawling good-humored replies to salutations. He had quip ready for jest, handclasp for his intimates, tactful word for the newer men who were dragged forward to meet him. Even the Governor ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... guides, and to the Royal Courts of Justice, where Sir EDWARD MARSHALL HALL, K.C., "will describe the methods of conducting civil actions." What GILBERT WHITE would say to all this brick-and-mortar sophistication we do not dare to guess. All that we venture to do is to suggest one or two more urbane adventures. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 29, 1919 • Various
... pretend, my lad, as how We're glad to lose our REECE; Urbane, polite, he suited quite ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... we have been using a repressed and obsolete style which is painful to those who enter into the joyous spirit of such occasions, and last night's wedding in the family of the patrician Skinners we assigned to our gentlemanly and urbane Mr. J. Mortimer Montague, late of the publicity department of the world-famed Robinson Circus and Menagerie. The following graceful account from Mr. Montague's facile pen is the most accurate and satisfactory report of a nuptial event we have ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... Western art, philosophy, letters; and not only the rudiments but the continuing inspiration, so that—though entirely superseded in worship, as even in the Athens of Pericles they were worshipped only by an easy, urbane, more than half humorous tolerance—Apollo and the Muses, Zeus and the great ones of Olympus, Hermes and Hephaestus, Athene in her armour, with her vanquisher the foam-born irresistible Aphrodite, these remain the authentic gods of our literature, beside whom the gods of northern ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Sine pane, sine nummo, Sorte positus infeste, Scribo tibi dolens moeste. Fame, bile tumet jecur: Urbane, mitte opem, precor. Tibi enim cor humanum Non a malis alienum: Mihi mens nee male grato, Pro a te favore dato. Ex gehenna debitoria, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... of Pope Urbane, And Volmond, emperor of Allemaine, Apparelled in magnificent attire, With retinue of many a knight and squire, On St. John's eve at vespers proudly sat, And heard the priest ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... been in service in France. This delighted Mr Chase—the name by which I signify the tradesman—for he, too, had once so lived in France; and by the time he reached the tavern he had talked himself into a very good opinion of his new patron. The French gentleman was very urbane, gave Mr Chase his instructions, let him understand expense was not to be studied, and, as he was at lunch, would not be satisfied unless the tradesman sat down with him. This was a great honour for the latter, as he found his employer was a baron. Well, the foreigner was disposed to praise everything ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... other pleasant things is this world, it requires to be felt to be appreciated; and, for that reason, it is a subject on which the unworthy chronicler is altogether incompetent to speak. The first words of the ceremony dropped from the prelate's urbane lips, and Sir Norman's heart danced a tarantella within him. "Wilt thou?" inquired the bishop, blandly, and slipped a plain gold ring on one pretty finger of Leoline's hand and all heard the old, old formula: "What God hath joined together, ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... which, for depth, illumination, and beauty, have a power of life, and come under the term "literature." Their language lends itself to the expression of subjective ideas with lucidity, brilliance, charm. The French quality of mind allows that expression to be at once dignified and happily urbane. Sometimes these sayings take the form of the cynical epigrams of a La Rochefoucauld; are expanded into sententious aphorisms by a La Bruyere; or reveal more earnest and athletic souls, who pierce below ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the quiet haven of the Oratory at Birmingham, with his great Protagonist, who, throughout an equally long life spent in painful controversy, and wielding weapons as terrible as Carlyle's own, has rarely forgotten to be urbane, and whose every sentence is a 'thing of beauty.' It must, then, be owned that too many of Carlyle's literary achievements 'lack a gracious somewhat.' By force of his genius he 'smites the rock and spreads the water;' but ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... yonder that I bought for good, straight ten cent cigars, but they are only a chaos of hay and Flora, Fino and Damfino, all socked into a Wisconsin wrapper. Over in the other end of the case is a brand of cigars that were to knock the tar out of all other kinds of weeds, according to the urbane rustler who sold them to me, and then drew on me before I could light one of them. Well, instead of being a fine Colorado Claro with a high-priced wrapper, they are common Mexicano stinkaros in a Mother Hubbard wrapper. The commercial tourist who sold ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... hand and the key in the other, looked so prodigiously confounded, that his friend could not help laughing heartily. Tom himself was tickled; no less by the hilarity of his friend than by the recollection of the sudden manner in which he had been brought to a stop, in the very height of his urbane conference with Mr Fips; so by degrees Tom burst out laughing too; and each making the other laugh ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... cultivated as an art; a neat repartee was more highly valued than the crackling of thorns under a pot; and the epigram, not yet a mechanical appliance by which the dull may achieve a semblance of wit, gave sprightliness to the small talk of the urbane. It is sad that I can remember nothing of all this scintillation. But I think the conversation never settled down so comfortably as when it turned to the details of the trade which was the other side of the art we practised. When we had done discussing the merits of the latest ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... some of the American crew of treachery; the Americans, in turn, accuse the British of revolting brutality. Of course in such a fight things are not managed with urbane courtesy, and, moreover, writers are prejudiced. Those who would like to hear one side are referred to James; if they wish to hear the other, to the various letters from officers published in "Niles' Register," especially vol. ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... surmises, Edmonds's was the nearer the truth. Urbane as always, the proprietor of The Patriot waved his editor to a seat, remarking, "I hope you'll sit down this time," the slightly ironical tinge to the final words being, in the course of the interview, his only reference to their previous encounter. Wondering ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the sentences flowing from his mouth as smooth as butter and as neatly dovetailed as a parquet floor. He had a sort of man-of-the-world manner, treating his opponents with condescending geniality, deprecating all passion and exaggeration and making you feel that his urbane statement must be right, for if he had wanted he could have put the case so much higher. I watched him, fascinated, studying his face carefully; and the thing that struck me was that there was nothing in it—nothing, that is to say, to lay hold ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... had half-depopulated the car by leading the more jovial spirits back in search of liquid refreshments that an urbane clergyman, now of Boston but formerly of Pekin, Illinois, professedly much interested in the sheriff's touch-and-go manner as presumably quite characteristic of the West, dropped into the vacant seat beside ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... came in first; the directors rose as one man, urbane, sprightly, and gallant. She was exceedingly pretty; they recognised it. They ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... phrenologists and craniologists,—having already measured innumerable skulls amongst the omnigenous seafaring population of Liverpool, illustrating all the races of men,—and was in society a most urbane and pleasant companion. On my mother's suggestion, he had been summoned to Laxton, in the hope that he might mitigate the torments of Mrs. Schreiber's malady. If I am right in supposing that to have been cancer, I presume that he could not have added much to the prescriptions of the local doctor. ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... about pistol—shot asunder, both would begin to tug and rug at the right—hand glove, but it is frequently a mighty serious affair in that hissing hot climate to get the gauntlet off; they approach,—one, a smart urbane little man, who would not disgrace St James's Street, being more kiln—dried and less moist in his corporeals than his country friend, has contrived to extract his paw, and holds it out in ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... soft; and mettle and spirit, unquenched by age, flashed from the brilliant eyes. The Marquis had the Conde nose and the lovable Bourbon mouth, from which, as they used to say of the Comte d'Artois, only witty and urbane words proceed. His cheeks, sloping rather than foolishly rounded to the chin, were in keeping with his spare frame, thin legs, and plump hands. The strangulation cravat at his throat was of the ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... immediately announced. Lady Kelsey had heard that he was to be offered a vacant bishopric, and she mourned over his disappearance from London. He was a spiritual mentor who exactly suited her, handsome, urbane, attentive notwithstanding her mature age, and well-connected. He was just the man to be a bishop. Then Mrs. Crowley appeared. They waited a little, and presently Dick was announced. He sauntered in jauntily, unaware that he had ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... all men who knew him slightly, counted on by the few men who believed they knew him well, and hugely admired by that vast congregation of starers and gapers who passionately display their approval of an urbane, ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... upon Mrs. Cable's visit to his office in the afternoon, Bansemer presented himself at her home in the evening, urbane, courtly, but characteristically aggressive. Her action in bearding him in his den was not surprising, even though it might have been considered unusual. He had been well aware for some time that she was sorely uneasy and that it was only a question of time when she would make the expected advances. ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... sometimes tolerated by those who aspire to urbane and liberal judgments because they think it can be defended on humanistic grounds. But, as a matter of fact, it is as offensive to the thoroughgoing humanist as it is to the sincere religionist. They have a common quarrel with it. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... people galloping about them. Our next reception was at a Spanish Benedictine Monastery and Home for natives, called New Norcia. This Monastery was presided over by the Right Reverend Lord Bishop Salvado, the kindest and most urbane of holy fathers. We were saluted on our arrival, by a regular feu-de-joie, fired off by the natives and half-castes belonging to the mission. The land and property of this establishment is some ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... did according to Goldsmith's famous dictum—if your pistol misses fire, you must knock your adversary down with the butt end of it. This procedure, though inartistic to be sure, is in some contingencies the only kind that will serve. But you should cultivate procedure of a type more urbane. Let your very reasonableness be the most potent weapon you wield. To this end you should form the habit of looking for good points on both sides of a question. As a still further precaution against contentiousness you should uphold the ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... that unalterable law which he had disavowed and which had brought him low. Lastly, when his bodily evils had quite disabled him, he lay a great while dying, still without complaint, still finding interests; to his last step gentle, urbane and ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... know the truth, unless Grassette himself disclosed the situation. He looked at Grassette with a look of poignant pity and interest combined. In his own placid life he had never had any tragic happening, his blood had run coolly, his days had been blessed by an urbane fate; such scenes as this were but a spectacle to him; there was no answering chord of human suffering in his own breast, to make him realise what Grassette was undergoing now; but he had read widely, he had been an acute observer of the world and its happenings, and he had a natural human ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... white-vested, and generally "in full fig."—(Mem.—Write to Notes and Queries, Unde derivatur—"Full fig?") who advances briskly but quietly towards me. My visitor has evidently made some mistake in the number of his room. At least, I hope the mistake isn't on my part, or on the urbane Manager's part, in putting me up here. Smart visitor bows. I am about to explain that he is in error, and that this is my room, when he deprecates any remark by saying, "Delighted to meet you; my name is CAPES. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 8, 1891 • Various
... beyond the telegraph- poles, and includes the words for food in every dialect between Ostend and the Golden Horn) had just brought soup and a bottle of thin Hungarian claret, when the other three chairs at my table were taken by a Rumanian family returning from a holiday in Budapest—an urbane gentleman of middle age, a shy little daughter, and a dark-eyed wife, glittering with diamonds, who looked a ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... unusually urbane hotel clerk. "Why, usually they leave their keys and get their mail from the floor clerk. But Mr. Griebler seems to ...
— Personality Plus - Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock • Edna Ferber
... went up to the first lieutenant and preferred his request, fully anticipating a refusal, but to his surprise the officer in question was all that was urbane and pleasant. ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... seated Kate between Dr. von Shierbrand and Marna Cartan. Opposite to her sat Mrs. Goodrich with her quiet smile. Everyone had something pleasant to say; when Kate spoke, all were inclined to listen. The atmosphere was quiet, urbane, gracious. Even David Fulham's exotic personality seemed to soften under the regard of Mrs. Dennison's ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... and smiling an urbane mayoral "Good afternoon," that all in the main office could ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... eyebrows; but he was apparently determined to be even more urbane than usual. He rested his two hands upon the back of his mother's chair and bent forward, as if he were leaning over the edge of a pulpit or a lecture-desk. He did not smile, but he looked softly grave. "Excuse me, sir," he said, "I assured you that I would not influence my sister's decision. I ...
— The American • Henry James
... Calhoun was a highly-cultured gentleman, a Presbyterian clergyman, and one of those urbane men who add force and dignity to any opinion. His wife was Gen. Lowrie's only sister. He preached gratuitously in St. Cloud, and Border Ruffianism and Slavery gained respectability through their connection, when he and his wife made that fatal plunge off the bridge ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... Campbell, of the well-known Cherry Valley family, built for his residence in 1807 the house which still stands on Lake Street facing the length of Chestnut Street. He was a man of stout build, with a full face, slightly retiring forehead, a trifle bald, urbane and unassuming in deportment. As a pleader at the bar he was only moderately eloquent, but he was popularly designated far and near as "the honest lawyer," and his advice was not only much sought but implicitly relied upon. In a period not much devoted to the amenities of legal procedure one member ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... deal more of both than I possess, therefore I shall not attempt it. During the period of his embassy in England I lived a good deal with him, his house being always open to me, and I dined there en famille whenever I pleased. Nothing could be more hospitable, nothing more urbane and kind than he was; and it was fine to see, after his stormy youth and middle age, after a life spent in the very tempest and whirlwind of political agitation, how tranquilly and honourably his declining years ebbed away. Still ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... and urbane, she noted woman-fashion the superfine quality of his linen, the perfection of every detail of his appearance, the grace with which he wore his clothes. His manner was gracious, even courtly. Yet there was about him ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... Heroes of the Revolution says: "Barry was noble in spirit, humane in discipline, discreet and fearless in battle, urbane in his manners, a splendid officer, a good citizen, a devoted Christian ...
— The Story of Commodore John Barry • Martin Griffin
... McKenna is tall, with a slender figure, Irish blue eyes, fair hair, regular features and a Dante profile. He has an engaging and very courteous address, a sympathetic manner, a ready but always urbane wit and great conversational charm. He possesses the rare accomplishment of "talking like a book." His intimates are legion; and, apart from these, he knows everyone who "counts" in London society. He is known never to lose his temper; and it is doubtful whether ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... light-hearted as he generally was, was for one moment also absolutely paralysed with amazement and concern, then saying hurriedly, "Forgive me, Lady Chaloner, I must go and see what has happened," he quickly followed. Lord Stamfordham drew up his chair to the table and sat down. His urbane, genial manner had returned, and he spoke as though nothing had happened; the rest instantly took their cue ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... resident finds that he must serve a seven years' apprenticeship before he gets any footing in its stiff ungenial society—for of all Italians, nothing socially is less graceful than a Piedmontese. They have none of the courteous civility, none of the urbane gentleness of the peninsular Italians. They are cold, reserved, proud, and eminently awkward; not the less so, perhaps, that their habitual tongue is the very vilest jargon that ever disfigured a human mouth. Of course this is an efficient barrier against ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... his excuses with a tact and politeness which spoke of a time when he mixed freely with the world, and old Flood was so astonished by the ease and good-breeding of his visitor that his own manner became at once courteous and urbane. ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... pay you the compliment of saying, my dear Captain Okewood," Clubfoot remarked in that urbane voice of his which always made my blood run cold, "that never before in my career have I devoted so much thought to any single individual, in the different cases I have handled, as I have to you. As an individual, ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... is sometimes tolerated by those who aspire to urbane and liberal judgments because they think it can be defended on humanistic grounds. But, as a matter of fact, it is as offensive to the thoroughgoing humanist as it is to the sincere religionist. They have a common ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... his native city will cherish him, and gratefully recall the unbending Puritan soul that dwelt in a form so gracious and urbane. The plain house in which he lived—severely plain, because the welfare of the suffering and the slave were preferred to books and pictures and every fair device of art; the house to which the north star led the trembling fugitive, and which the unfortunate ...
— Phrases for Public Speakers and Paragraphs for Study • Compiled by Grenville Kleiser
... pull its head off and stick it in a vawse o water to look at. [The grasshopper chirps: Keegan turns his head and addresses it in the vernacular]. Be aisy, me son: she won't spoil the swing-swong in your little three. [To Nora, resuming his urbane style] You see I'm quite cracked; but never mind: I'm harmless. Now ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... "terms" they could be called—that he had ended by accepting from herself; they had burdened her memory as little as her conscience. "Oh yes, I see what you mean—you've been very nice about that; but why drag it in so often?" She had been perfectly urbane with him ever since the rough scene of explanation in his room the morning he made her accept his "terms"—the necessity of his making his case known to Morgan. She had felt no resentment after seeing there was no danger Morgan would take the matter up with her. Indeed, attributing this ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... consideration. About the middle of the seventeenth century women romancers, like women poets, were elegant triflers, content to add the lustre of wit to their other charms. While Mme de La Fayette was gaining the plaudits of the urbane world for the delicatesse of "La Princesse de Cleves" and the eccentric Duchess of Newcastle was employing her genius upon the fantastic, philosophical "Description of a New World, called the Blazing World" (1668), women of another stamp were beginning to write fiction. With the advent ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... book. They have an unction which never, as it so often does in the case of Mr Arnold's dangerous master and model Renan, degenerates into unctuosity; they are nobly serious, but without being in the least dull; they contain some exceedingly just and at the same time perfectly urbane criticism of the ordinary reviewing kind, and though they are not without instances of the author's by-blows of slightly unproved opinion, yet these are by no means eminent in them, and are not of a provocative ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... forced upon us by a new aspect of facts, so that we may find ourselves saying: "Such and such a person is very gentle and kind—he is quite rustic; and such and such another person is very rude and ill-taught—he is quite urbane." ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... Governor was disposed to permit him to live in the interior of the island, if he so desired. This change would give him a large measure of personal freedom, he would no longer be under close surveillance, and he would be able to enjoy social life. He had formed a friendship with an urbane and cultivated French gentleman, Thomas Pitot, whom he consulted, and who found for him a residence in the house of Madame D'Arifat at ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... the telegraph- poles, and includes the words for food in every dialect between Ostend and the Golden Horn) had just brought soup and a bottle of thin Hungarian claret, when the other three chairs at my table were taken by a Rumanian family returning from a holiday in Budapest—an urbane gentleman of middle age, a shy little daughter, and a dark-eyed wife, glittering with diamonds, who looked ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... those histrionic dances which, to the Western stranger, seem at first mysterious as a performance of witchcraft—but which really are charming translations of legend and story into the language of living grace and the poetry of woman's smile. And as the wine flows, the more urbane becomes the merriment—until there falls upon all that pleasant sleepiness which sake brings, and the guests, one by one, smilingly depart. Nothing could be happier or gentler than their evening's joviality—yet sailors are ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... habitually live hand-to-mouth to a greater extent than the latter. So it comes, for instance, that the American farmer and his wife and daughters are notoriously less modish in their dress, as well as less urbane in their manners, than the city artisan's family with an equal income. It is not that the city population is by nature much more eager for the peculiar complacency that comes of a conspicuous consumption, nor has the rural population less regard for pecuniary decency. But the provocation ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... town in Virginny, the Muther of Presidents & things, that I was shaimfully aboozed by a editor in human form. He set my Show up steep & kalled me the urbane & gentlemunly manajer, but when I, fur the purpuss of showin fair play all around, went to anuther offiss to git my hanbills printed, what duz this pussillanermus editer do but change his toon & abooze ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... companion which took in everything. The tall man in glasses looked too human for a lawyer, too intelligent for a schoolmaster, and too well-dressed for an ordinary medical man. Colwyn, versed in judging men swiftly from externals, noting the urbane, somewhat pompous face, the authoritative, professional pose, the well-shaped, plump white hands, and the general air of well-being and prosperity which exuded from the whole man, placed him as a successful practitioner in the more ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... that she would be met and accompanied by him in her evening walk with her sisters. She had another admirer, one of the head-waiters at the inn at Salt Hill. He also was not without pretensions to urbane superiority, such as he learnt from gentlemen's servants and waiting-maids, who initiating him in all the slang of high life below stairs, rendered his arrogant temper ten times more intrusive. Lucy did not disclaim him—she was incapable of that feeling; ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... Sala, and I know not how many others, from abroad. No catalogue of them, but only types can be given here. He was almost never without people who made no claim to distinction; and to them, too, he was the genial, urbane, and ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... fervent adhesion of the honest, the brave, and the good; while in other parts of his writings his infatuated admiration of force, however clothed with brutality, and of strength, however marred with mendacity, are calculated as deeply to alienate the urbane man of the ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... It is one of the primary social documents of America. It is as much Davy Crockett, whether going ahead after bears in a Tennessee canebrake or going ahead after General Andrew Jackson in Congress, as the equally plain but also urbane Autobiography of Franklin is Benjamin Franklin. It is undiluted regionalism. It is provincial not only in subject but in ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... chief with an admiring smile. He had never ceased to wonder at the multifarious qualities which enabled the man to remain indispensable to native and cottager alike. Courteous, handsome, urbane, diplomatic, debonair, when a matron of the very highest caste sent for him to enlist his efforts in the regaining of some jewel, tiara, or piece of vertu, missing after a weekend, he never for a moment forgot that it was all ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... first; the directors rose as one man, urbane, sprightly, and gallant. She was exceedingly pretty; they recognised it. They ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... caught a short glimpse of. Then, having been accommodated with paper and ink, the young jeweller made out the account and receipt, whilst M. Lambert, the secretary, counted out before him 105 crisp Bank of England notes of L100 each. Then, with a final bow to his exceedingly urbane and eminently satisfactory customer, Mr. Schwarz took his leave. In the hall he saw and spoke to Mr. Pettitt, and then he ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... Scripture, both as to shape and properties. "An apple is round," said I, "and the world is round; the apple is a sour, disagreeable fruit, and who has tasted much of the world without having his teeth set on edge?" I, however, treated the publisher, upon the whole, in the most urbane and Oxford-like manner; complimenting him upon his style, acknowledging the general soundness of his views, and only differing with him in the affair of ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... without apparent embarrassment to meet the gentleman who entered, though I knew she could not help but feel keenly the niggardly appearance of the board she left with such grace. The stranger—he was certainly a stranger; this I could see by the formality of her manner—was a gentleman of urbane bearing and a general ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... the stern had picked up a magazine and was lolling back reading it. As the boat passed under him Cleggett saw on the cover page of the magazine a picture of the very man who was perusing it. It was a singularly urbane face; both the counterfeit presentment on the cover page and the real face were smiling and calm and benign. Cleggett could read the legend on the magazine cover accompanying ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... generation run before the phrenologists and craniologists,—having already measured innumerable skulls amongst the omnigenous seafaring population of Liverpool, illustrating all the races of men,—and was in society a most urbane and pleasant companion. On my mother's suggestion, he had been summoned to Laxton, in the hope that he might mitigate the torments of Mrs. Schreiber's malady. If I am right in supposing that to have been cancer, I presume that he could not have added much to the prescriptions ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... the Revolution says: "Barry was noble in spirit, humane in discipline, discreet and fearless in battle, urbane in his manners, a splendid officer, a good citizen, a devoted Christian and ...
— The Story of Commodore John Barry • Martin Griffin
... public life has unbosomed himself so completely as this son of Massachusetts in the pages of his diary. There are no half tones in the pictures which he has drawn of himself, no winsome graces of mind or heart, only the rigid outlines of a soul buffeted by Destiny. Gallatin—the urbane, cosmopolitan Gallatin—must have derived much quiet amusement from his association with this robust New Englander who took himself so seriously. Two natures could not have been more unlike, yet the superior flexibility of Gallatin's temperament made their association not only possible but exceedingly ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... the most delicate mode of conferring a compliment," replied the urbane Italian, as he recovered from his first surprise at Randal's sudden address, and ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... heavily, cradling his glossy hat. But his urbane smile became brilliant again and he ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... of their hair before the image of St. Urbane, trusting that by so doing their hair would ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... among these South Sea giants. I noticed that he ate more than three pounds of pig and a quart of poi after all his previous devastation of shellfish, feis, chicken, and taro, besides two fish as big as both my hands. My right-hand neighbor was Mr. Davey, an urbane and unreserved American, who informed me in a breath that he was a dentist, a graduate of Harvard University, seventy-two years old, and had been in Tahiti forty-two years. He called his granddaughter of eighteen to meet me, and she brought ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... of warning that was sounded came from Mrs. Fallows, who sat on the porch of Your Hotel, and, like the Greek Chorus, foretold the disasters that would befall, and prophesied nothing but evil for the entire enterprise. Even the urbane Jimmy became ruffled by her insistent iteration, and declared that she "put him in mind of ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... first-class carriage. It was clean and comfortable; but the Cantankerous Old Lady made the porter mop the floor, and fidgeted and worried till we slid out of the station. Fortunately, the only other occupant of the compartment was a most urbane and obliging Continental gentleman—I say Continental, because I couldn't quite make out whether he was French, German, or Austrian—who was anxious in every way to meet Lady Georgina's wishes. Did madame desire to have the window open? Oh, ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... absolutely paralysed with amazement and concern, then saying hurriedly, "Forgive me, Lady Chaloner, I must go and see what has happened," he quickly followed. Lord Stamfordham drew up his chair to the table and sat down. His urbane, genial manner had returned, and he spoke as though nothing had happened; the rest instantly took ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... wise? And if the nobler passions wane, Distorted to base use, if the near goal Of insubstantial gain Tempt from the proper race-course of the soul That crowns their patient breath Whose feet, song-sandalled, are too fleet for Death, Yet may she claim one privilege urbane And haply first upon the civic roll, That none can breathe her air nor grow ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... them, especially Mr. Joseph; when the latter was there, which he was every Saturday till Monday, he would stroll over the stable with Squires—that was the hostler's name—joking incessantly, and treating the latter to an occasional cigar. Urbane Mr. Joseph would joke with anybody, Mr. George was more severe and had according to the landlady, the most perfect and ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... wages, yet in some coin are they paid. Invisible is the thing he does, and yet it is done. Let us hope that some sense of this tardy appreciation may soothe his spirit beyond the grave. On the present occasion there was nothing to soothe his spirit. The Speaker sat, urbane and courteous, with his eyes turned towards the unfortunate orator; but no other ears in the House seemed to listen to him. The corps of reporters had dwindled down to two, and they used their pens very listlessly, taking down here a sentence and there a sentence, knowing that their work ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... men upon whose care the comfort of the stranger depends in every land, and whose tact and temper are no bad index of the national character. In New York, then, you are met everywhere by a sort of urbane familiarity. The man who does you a service, for which you pay him, is neither civil nor uncivil. He contrives, in a way which is by no means unpleasant, to put himself on an equality with you. With a mild surprise you find yourself taking for granted ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... the French, urbane, amenable and suave. Negro emotions and French sensibilities mingled even without recourse to the vehicle of language. Imbued with all the finer Latin qualities and characteristics, the French ever invited the black man to a social world which the Anglo-Saxon denied ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... last week to note that Mr. James Hamilton, the gentlemanly and urbane proprietor of Wolfville's temple of terpsichoir (see ad, in another column) had changed whiskeys on us, and was dispensing what seemed to our throat a tincture of the common carpet tack of commerce. It is our hope that Mr. H., on seeing this, will at ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... contrast between two men than the space that divided the Sage of Lindenwald from Prince John. In one particular, however, they were alike. Each had that personal magnetism that binds followers to leaders with hooks of steel. The father was grave, urbane, wary, a safe counsellor, and accustomed to an argumentative and deliberate method of address that befitted the bar and the Senate. Few knew how able a lawyer the elder Van Buren was. The son was enthusiastic, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... gracious, but he displayed none of the enthusiastic excitement which Thorpe perceived now that he had looked for. The equanimity of Marquises, who were also ex-Ambassadors, was evidently a deeper-rooted affair than he had supposed. This elderly and urbane diplomat took a gift of thirty thousand pounds as he might ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... young woman whose countenance he had mentally pronounced interesting, and with regard to whom he was conscious of the germ of the inevitable desire to produce a responsive interest. And then he thought it would break the ice to say something playfully urbane. ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... find it harder to forgive them that they ruled out moreover a great part of the literature of the preceding century as offensive to urbane taste, or as they would say, 'disgusting.' They disliked it mainly, one suspects, as one age revolts from the fashion of another—as some of you, for example, revolt from the broad plenty of Dickens (Heaven forgive you) or the ornament of Tennyson. Some of the great ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... some hint of the limitations of his mind and character. With his almost acid sharpness of insight, with his almost animal dexterity in act, there went none of that large, unconscious geniality of the world's heroes. He was not easy, not ample, not urbane, not even kind; his enjoyment was hardly smiling, or the smile was not broad enough to be convincing; he had no waste lands nor kitchen-midden in his nature, but was all improved and sharpened to a point. "He was bred to no profession," says Emerson; "he never married; he lived alone; he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... quiet haven of the Oratory at Birmingham, with his great Protagonist, who, throughout an equally long life spent in painful controversy, and wielding weapons as terrible as Carlyle's own, has rarely forgotten to be urbane, and whose every sentence is a 'thing of beauty.' It must, then, be owned that too many of Carlyle's literary achievements 'lack a gracious somewhat.' By force of his genius he 'smites the rock and spreads the water;' but then, ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... uprightness and with exactitude, not esteeming one influence above another; he called to account many of the senators and many of the knights, as well as other individuals. Mummius, on the other hand, was more urbane and humane in his behavior; he imputed no dishonor to any one, and abolished many of the regulations framed by Africanus, so far as was possible. To such an extent of amiability did his nature lead him, that he lent some statues to Lucullus for ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... and brought his finger-tips together. His voice was as urbane as it lay within its ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... he wouldn't look at it. The first duty of a fencing-master, like the rest of us, is to make money. Roland quite evidently scorns it, and at the last instructs us for nothing. Fencing-masters don't promote freebooting expeditions, and, besides, a fencing-master is always urbane and polite, cringing to every one. I have watched Roland closely at times, trying to study him, and in doing so have caught momentary glimpses of such contempt for us, that, by the good Lord above us, it made me shrivel up. You know, Greusel, that youth has more of the qualities ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... the 'seventies were, after all, in many cases more anxious to damage theology than to build up Philosophy. They read Hume without any delicate sense for his urbane ironies, and believed in good faith that he and John Stuart Mill between them had shown that by a mysterious process called 'induction' it is possible to prove rigorously universal conclusions in science ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... lady," urbane William rose and bowed. "If Robert Burroughs is elected to the United States Senate, the judge shall be Minister to Berlin. It is practically arranged already. Bob's a big man in his party. What he asks for he'll get, never you ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... pepper, bread, butter, whatever it was that Mr. Crawford wanted, before him before the older man had realized that he wanted it. His attitude toward Argyl was at all times deferential, eloquent of respectful admiration. Hapgood was nothing if not urbane. Toward Conniston, however, he did not once glance. To his way of thinking, evidently, there were but three people in the room—the wonderfully masterful Mr. Crawford, the radiantly beautiful Argyl, the deeply appreciative ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... showed his sense of dignity and glamour. There seemed to be a great tradition which enriched and upheld him. Mr. Beagle senior used to stand on the little balcony at the rear of the main floor, transfixed with the pleasure of seeing Gissing move among the crowded passages. Alert, watchful, urbane, with just the ideal blend of courtesy and condescension, he raised floorwalking to a social art. Female customers asked him the way to departments they knew perfectly well, for the pleasure of hearing him direct them. Business began ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... does the author conceive of the world? What does he think of God? How does he regard human life? Is he hopeful or pessimistic? Is he a writer of prose, poetry, or both? To what school of writing does he belong? What is the mood or spirit,—humorous, buoyant, serious, sad, ironical, angry, genial, urbane? What is its purpose,—to ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... Honorable Franklin, "and I was proud to call him my client. Yes, I had the honor of advising him in several matters and of carrying through some rather delicate negotiations for him. A man of the strictest integrity, ever genial and urbane, of sound judgment and independent views, endowed with strong common sense and quick perceptions. You see, I had the highest opinion of Mr. Tarbell, and have often wished to tell his widow—alas that I should have to call her so!—how certain I am that she will succeed in the career she has ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... echo them always. "Wake up, Davy! Do something; be somebody; get out of the valley." Here was my shibboleth. I must do something; I must be somebody; I must get out of the valley! And then I should go to Penelope Blight, and a hundred urbane, unctuous uncles could not defraud me of my ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... has been before remarked, the bitter must go with the sweet. In the face of so exalted a moral passion it would be absurd to look for that urbane habit which seeks the well-being of one's self and the other fellow, not in exact obedience to harsh statutes, but in ease, dignity and the more delicate sort of self-respect. That is to say, it would ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... William, surnamed Rufus or William the Red, second sonne to William Conqueror, began his reigne ouer England the ninth of September, in the yeare 1087. about the 31. yeare of the emperour Henrie the fourth, and the 37. of Philip the first, king of France, Urbane the second then gouerning the see of Rome, and Malcolme Cammoir reigning in Scotland. [Sidenote: Polydor. Sim. Dunel. Matth. Paris.] Immediatlie after his fathers deceasse, and before the solemnitie of the funerals were executed, ...
— Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (2 of 6): England (2 of 12) - William Rufus • Raphael Holinshed
... a cause which he had near at heart, when he heard Katharine upon the stairs. A moment later it was plain that he had been mistaken, it was not Katharine; but he could not settle himself to his letter. His temper had changed from one of urbane contentment—indeed of delicious expansion—to one of uneasiness and expectation. The dinner was brought in, and had to be set by the fire to keep hot. It was now a quarter of an hour beyond the specified ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... but fair question, and Gervase found himself curiously perplexed by it. He offered no reply, neither did Denzil, and they all three slowly entered the Mena House Hotel, there to be met with deferential salutations by the urbane and affable landlord, and to be assured that they would find their rooms comfortable, and also that "Madame la Princesse Ziska" expected them to dine with her that evening. At this message, Denzil Murray made a sign to Gervase that he wished to speak to him ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... who addressed a brief remark to me at times, half apologetically, in the precisest of English. We sat next each other at the same table, came and went at much the same hour; and for a long while our intercourse was restricted to formal courtesies; mutual inquiries after each other's health, a few urbane strictures on the climate. The little old gentleman in spite of his aspect of shabby gentility,—for his coat was sadly inefficient, and the nap of his carefully brushed hat did not indicate prosperity—perhaps even because of this suggestion ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... some haughty astonishment in the mind of the Duke di Marina, who eyed him from time to time with ill-disguised impatience that bordered on contempt. I, on the contrary, listened to everything he said with urbane courtesy—I humored him and drew him out as much as possible—I smiled complacently at his poor jokes and vulgar witticisms—and when he said something that was more than usually outrageous, I contented myself with a benevolent shake of my ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... passing through Philadelphia. The part seemed to me not adapted to his nature. Macbeth was an ambitious man, and Booth was not. Macbeth had barbarous and ferocious instincts, and Booth was agreeable, urbane, and courteous. Macbeth destroyed his enemies traitorously—did this even to gain possession of their goods—while Booth was noble, lofty-minded, and generous of his wealth. It is thus plain that however much art ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... which had once been painted white, was now more than a little dingy. Greyish-colored muslin blinds were stretched across the front windows. Within, the smell of cooking was all-pervading. A short dark man, with black moustache and urbane smile, greeted us at the door, and ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... considerable time at his bothered seconds, shrugged his shoulders slightly. This affair had hopelessly and unreasonably complicated his existence for him. One absurdity more or less in the development did not matter. All absurdity was distasteful to him; but, urbane as ever, he produced a faintly ironic smile and said ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... middle, blowing water through, his conch. There are two statues, the one of a general who fought in the Indian Mutiny and afterwards lived and died in the Square, the other of a mid-Victorian philanthropist whose stout figure and urbane self-satisfaction (as portrayed by the sculptor) bear witness to an easy conscience and an unimaginative mind. There is, round and about the fountain, a lovely green lawn, and there are many overhanging trees and shady corners. An ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... has made smooth the relations between the English and French Armies. It was Chesterfield, wasn't it, who spoke of "Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re"? That is General Huguet. A tall man, dark, keen and of most soldierly bearing; beside the genial downrightness of the British officers he was urbane, suave, but full of decision. His post requires diplomacy ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... little skipper in the blandest and most urbane humour. He received me with a courtesy that almost made me feel affection for him. We found Mr Farmer, the first-lieutenant, with him, and had it not been for a sly twinkling of the eye of the captain, and very significant looks that ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... habit is to speak in a highly-pitched voice, so that my friends sometimes rebuke me thereanent; but, harsh and loud as is my voice, it cannot be heard at any great distance while I am lecturing. I am wont to talk too much, and in none too urbane a tone. The look of my eyes is fixed, like that of one in deep thought. My front teeth are large, and my complexion red and white: the form of my countenance being somewhat elongated, and my head is finished off in narrow wise at the back, like to a small sphere. Indeed, it ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... looking at him, puzzled. Years of association with Uncle Chris had enabled her to read his moods quickly, and she was sure that there was something on his mind. It was not likely that the others had noticed it, for his manner was as genial and urbane as ever. But something about him, a look in his eyes that came and went, an occasional quick twitching of his mouth, told her that all was not well. She was a little troubled, but not greatly. Uncle Chris was not the sort of man to whom ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... to forswear One pastoral joy, or rural frolic. I call you to a city where The most urbane are most bucolic. 'Twill charm your poet's eyes to find Good husbandmen in brokers burly;— Their stock is ever on their mind; To water it they ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... in 1857, and undertook to pay up every creditor, a task which consumed sixteen years. He wrote the Easy Chair papers in Harper's Monthly. A volume of these essays contains some of his easiest, most urbane, and humorous writings. They are light and in the vein of Addison's Spectator. In Orations and Addresses are to be found some of his strongest and most polished speeches on ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... lines about a mouth whose predominant expression was one of mingled cynicism and suspicion. There was suspicion, too, in his small black eyes, as well as a sort of lurking fierceness which not even his most urbane and elaborate smile could altogether eliminate. In person he was very thin and somewhat under the middle height, and had all the air of a confirmed valetudinarian. He was dressed as no English gentleman would care to be seen ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... headquarters. The major had been in garrison at Peking when the war began. If my shipmate on a long battleship cruise, Lt.-Col. Dion Williams, U.S.M.C, reads this out in Peking let it tell him that the major is just as urbane in the cellar of a second-rate farmhouse on the outskirts of Neuve Chapelle as he would be in a corner ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... had been all over the town appearing to 'em, and endearin' himself to 'em, cleer out beyond Jonesville as far as Spoon Settlement and Loontown), why, they jest thought their eyes of him, he wus so thoughtful and urbane and helpful. Why, there hain't no tellin' how much helpfuler he wuz than ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... Cleveland Wood, is a pleasant and urbane bit of light verse; while "Percival Lowell," by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, is an abominably dull elegiac piece of heavy verse. Edwin Gibson's "Sonnet to Acyion" deserves keen attention as the work of a capable and ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... a good fellow, but he seems to me a little—what shall I say?—too elaborate. Too urbane; too ornate. He expresses himself so dreadfully well! I don't believe he ever uses a shorter word ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... accuse some of the American crew of treachery; the Americans, in turn, accuse the British of revolting brutality. Of course in such a fight things are not managed with urbane courtesy, and, moreover, writers are prejudiced. Those who would like to hear one side are referred to James; if they wish to hear the other, to the various letters from officers published in "Niles' Register," especially vol. ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... Pieker's. She asked him to attend the opening session of the revival the following Sunday night. Arthur blushed and stammered a little, so that, since Arthur wasn't given to embarrassment, Missy at once surmised he had a "date." Trying for an impersonal yet urbane and hospitable manner, ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... ornaments. Colonel Barney of the Sixth was one of Vermont's best men. A kind yet faithful commander in camp, gallant and fearless on the field. He was the highest type of a man; a christian gentleman. Colonel Stone had been killed instantly on the 5th. His urbane manners were remembered by all who frequented our division head-quarters, and his bravery had endeared him to his men. Colonel Tyler, too, of the Second was among the mortally wounded, and ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... to this urbane wisdom that the history of the conversion of Ireland is without one story of martyrdom. The change was carried out in open-hearted frankness and good-will, the old order giving place to the new as gently as spring changes to summer. The most marvelous example of St. Patrick's ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... as the urbane Austrian military permitted themselves to do upon occasion when addressing ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... people," says a late historian, "stood in awe for many years of these suave, urbane, occasionally fire-eating and always well-dressed gentlemen from this most aristocratic section of the Union. The Southerners, born leaders of men, and with politics the paramount interest in their lives, controlled both San ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... the first time this subject had come up between them, but hitherto he had denied with urbane mendacity the ill results of his favourite indulgences. Now his control ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... gone. Michael did not depart with him, but took his leave a few moments later. Michael's departure from Rome the following day on urgent affairs was generally known. The duke had watched him bid Fay a mechanical farewell, and had then expressed an urbane regret at his departure. The thin, pinched face of the young man appealed to the elder one. The duke had liked ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... bone, may, nay! probably will, send us back to our gentle "lovers of humanity" who, "knowing everything pardon everything." But one sometimes wonders whether a life all "irony," all "pity," all urbane "interest," would not lose the savor of its taste! There is a danger, not only to our moral sense, but to our immoral sense, in that genial air of universal acceptance ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... sir," said the doctor, who had changed as in a moment from the sturdy naturalist into the urbane medical man. "I quite see your necessity for guarding against ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... pleasant smile on his lips, the warm, cheering light in his bright blue eyes, won the perfect trust, the profound respect, the lasting love and veneration of those who entered the charmed circle of his influence. Learned without pedantry, dignified but not pompous, genial and urbane; never forgetting the sanctity of his mission, though never thrusting its credentials into notice; judging the actions of all with a leniency which he denied to his own; zealous without bigotry, charitable yet rigidly just, as free from austerity as levity, his heart throbbed with warm, ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... noteworthy figure in any assemblage of men. He was tall, slender and erect. His manner was urbane and reserved. He served on many charitable and educational boards and was attentive to his trusts. He was an active member of the Episcopalian Church, being many years a warden in his parish, and frequently a delegate to the Diocesan Convention, ...
— A History of the McGuffey Readers • Henry H. Vail
... that the sound arose from Pat's affection of English softness of speech. The expression natural to the unadulterated Irishman would rather be "Ma-ajor." He discovers his own provincialism, and trying to be polite and urbane, he says "Meejor." In one of the lines I have quoted there occurs the word "troat." Such a sound never came naturally from the mouth of an Irishman. He puts in an h instead of omitting it, and says "dhrink." He comes to London, and ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... Spaniards pronounced this later Malate. There lived the chief Tagals after they were deprived of their houses in Manila, among whom were the families of Raja Matanda and Raja Soliman. San Augustin says that even in his day many of the ancient nobility dwelt there, and that they where very urbane and cultured. "The Men hold various positions in Manila, and certain occupations in some of the local public functions. The women make excellent lace, in which they are so skilfull that the Dutch women cannot surpass them." This is still true of ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... Christian ministers are never called on by God's word to insult the convictions, or even the prejudices, of their brethren; and that religion is at any rate not less susceptible to urbane and courteous conduct among men, than any other study which men take up. I am sorry to say that I cannot defend Mr Slope's sermon in the cathedral. But come, my dear, put on your bonnet, and let us walk round the dear ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... already agree with the speaker, but with these people he should be little concerned; a debater worthy of the name seeks to change the opinions of those who disagree with him. For this reason he is diplomatic, courteous, and urbane. ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... things he wished, and attempted to force his admiration for all she admired. She was desperately in earnest with her study of art, and when Philip, passing in the Long Gallery a window that looked out on the Tuileries, gay, sunny, and urbane, like ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... on palimpsest, 5 But paper-royal, brand-new boards, and best Fresh bosses, crimson ribbands, sheets with lead Ruled, and with pumice-powder all well polished. These as thou readest, seem that fine, urbane Suffenus, goat-herd mere, or ditcher-swain 10 Once more, such horrid change is there, so vile. What must we wot thereof? a Droll erst while, Or (if aught) cleverer, he with converse meets, He now in dullness, dullest villain beats Forthright on handling verse, nor is the wight 15 Ever so ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... Sarria arrived, his smooth, shiny face glistening with perspiration. He wore a new cassock and carried his broad-brimmed hat under his arm. His appearance made quite a stir. He passed from group to group, urbane, affable, shaking hands right and left; he assumed a set smile of amiability which never left his ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... distinction, Mr. Parker, nor can it be acquired by effort. Vigour we may cultivate, and clearness we must; it is essential. On a level with these I should place propriety. Propriety teaches us to regulate our speech by the occasion; to be incisive at times and at times urbane; to adapt the 'how' to the 'when,' as I might put it. I do not think—I really do not think—that Christmas Eve is a happily chosen moment for calling ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... falsehood, might have been added. "He was a great favourite with George the Third, and the Saint Fiorenzo had consequently been appointed to attend on His Majesty during his summer sojourn at Weymouth. The King won the affection of both officers and men by his urbane and kind manners whenever he came on board. He used to call us up, and talk to us, lieutenants, midshipmen, and seamen alike, in the most familiar manner, taking an interest in our private histories, and all ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... dismissed her two visitors. De Batz, well content with the result of this evening's entertainment, wore an urbane, bland smile on his rubicund face. Armand, somewhat serious and not a little in love, made the hand-kiss with which he took his leave last ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... to meet VIDA. Hastily.] It seems to me that horses are like the fourth gospel. Any conversation about them becomes animated almost beyond the limits of the urbane! [VIDA, disgusted by such plainness of speech, rises and goes to PHILIP who waves ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... Bishop, Julian's godfather, a curious blend of the fashionable and the devout, the anchorite and the man of the people; Lord and Lady Shervinton, elderly connections of the nondescript variety; Mr. Hannaway Wells, reserved yet, urbane, a wonderful type of the supreme success of mediocrity; a couple of young soldiers, light-hearted and out for a good time, of whom Julian took charge; an Oxford don, who had once been Lord Maltenby's tutor; and last of all the homely, very pleasant-looking, middle-aged lady, ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... snappy little fellow, Max, stared at one another, the former looking urbane and jovial and unconcerned, whilst Max was trembling with rage. He could have kicked this big German who ventured to obstruct him, and who seemed about to thwart his purpose. Yet Max was a careful individual, who had indeed worked his way upwards ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... cultivated women are earnest and playful; of a world in which people must pretend courageously that life is very important for fear of discovering that it hardly signifies. It is a strange world, faded, friendly, urbane, and, we are happy ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... would cause a loss of considerable time and a deflection from the intended route, was declined in courteous terms by Marcoy through the interpretation of Pepe Garcia. Among civilized folk this urbane refusal would have sufficed, but the savages, taking such a reply as a challenge to verbal warfare, returned to the charge with increased tenacity. It were hard to say what natural logic they put in practice or what sylvan persuasions they wrought by, but their peculiar mode of stroking the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... ended. It was only a relic of the years spent in Jamaica, only a sign of his well-being, though it gave no real picture of himself. He did not know how like a tyrant he had become in some small ways, while in the large things he remained generous, urbane, and resourceful. He was in appearance thin, dark-favoured, buoyant in manner, and stern of face, with splendid eyes. Had he dwelt on Olympus, he might have been summoned to judge and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... room, which he had for years known by heart, with a strange sense of metamorphosis in his own life. The familiar objects around him, from Lady Mallinger's gently smiling portrait to the also human and urbane faces of the lions on the pilasters of the chimney-piece, seemed almost to belong to a previous state of existence which he was revisiting in memory only, not in reality; so deep and transforming had been the impressions ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... himself on evenings of light pressure after the Washington copy was run off, and blink rapidly. At the same moment Mr. David Sterne gave utterance to an exclamation, partly of annoyance, partly of surprise. Mr. Harrington Surtaine, wearing an expression both businesslike and urbane stood in the doorway. ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... religious condition of the parish was depressing.' Among the neighbouring families, with whom he made acquaintance while at Wilmslow, were the Gregs of Quarry Bank, a refined and philanthropic household, including among the sons William R. Greg (born in the same year as Mr. Gladstone), that ingenious, urbane, interesting, and independent mind, whose speculations, dissolvent and other, were afterwards to take an effective place in the writings of the time. 'I fear he is a unitarian,' the young churchman mentions to his father, and ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... that he asked him the old man returned only his urbane, unmeaning replies, touched with their melancholy symbolism. When St. George left him it was in the hope that Olivia would consent to have him sent down the mountain, although St. George himself was half inclined to agree with Amory's "But, really, I would far rather talk with one madman ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... said his lordship, stepping forward in the most urbane manner, and stopping the doctor, with a high-bred resolution impossible to resist, "I greatly fear you find no ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... gratify, the deepest humility displeases. During these terrible transitions, which induce fierce distraction, Job himself would become irritable, insanely furious, and choleric. A man in such a state regards himself as the focus of all miseries. When recovered, he feels chastened, becomes urbane and ludicrously amiable, he conjures up fictitious delights from all things which, but yesterday, possessed for him such awful portentous aspects. His men he regards with love and friendship; whatever is trite he views with ecstasy. Nature appears charming; ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... brutish mind of the born and bred Parisian,—the goblin-creature with whom pure virtues, whether in man or woman, are no more sacred than nuts to a monkey. The suave charm of a polished civility sat on M le Due's smooth brow, and beamed in his urbane smile,—his manners were exquisite, his courtesy irreproachable, his whole demeanor that of a very precise and elegant master of deportment. Yet, notwithstanding his calm and perfectly self-possessed exterior, he ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... territory, and was not apparently scheming to get any, either of his own or other people's. Nobody at the Foreign Office believed that he corresponded with any intransigent; he used to go there often and exchange urbane gossip with under-secretaries. He lodged in Duke Street, gave dinner-parties at the Bachelors, had a large visiting-list, and was, as they say, always "about." One saw him everywhere—in the city, in Mayfair drawing-rooms, at Kensington tea- parties, ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... votaries, in most countries at the present day. These votaries have their various kinds. There is the critic who simply uses his subject as a sort of springboard or platform, on and from which to display his natural grace and agility, his urbane learning, his faculty of pleasant wit. This is perhaps the most popular of all critics, and no age has ever had better examples of him than this age. There is a more serious kind who founds on his subject ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... that made me feel more at home, knowing and loving Bath as I did. It did not matter that in trying for some mutual acquaintance there we failed; our good-will was everything; and the solicitor was intelligent and agreeable. The other gentleman, tall, dark, of urbane stateliness, was something more, in the touch of Oriental suavity which, more than his nose, betrayed him; and it appeared, in delightful suggestion of the old-time commercial intimacy of the Dutch and English coasts, that he was from Holland, and next morning at breakfast he developed a ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... company, pleasant companions, good-natured, easy-going, and urbane. Their self-conceit is inordinate, and remains undiminished in spite of repeated failures in the most important affairs of life. They see themselves fall immeasurably behind those who are admittedly their inferiors ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... was a highly-cultured gentleman, a Presbyterian clergyman, and one of those urbane men who add force and dignity to any opinion. His wife was Gen. Lowrie's only sister. He preached gratuitously in St. Cloud, and Border Ruffianism and Slavery gained respectability through their connection, when he and his wife made that fatal plunge ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... She looked up at him. Yes, he was changed. The old Karl would have taken her in his arms. This new Karl was urbane, ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the Federal Court on the ground that he had induced Dodge to attempt to jump his bond. In place of the blustering Kaffenburgh was sent another member of the famous law firm of Howe and Hummel, David May, an entirely different type of man. May was as mild as a day in June—as urbane as Kaffenburgh had been insolent. He fluttered into Houston like a white dove of peace with the proverbial olive branch in his mouth. From now on the tactics employed by the representatives of Hummel were conciliatory in the extreme. ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... their sense of responsibility greater; for one of woman's great functions, which is that of bestowing praise aright, is increased. There is also much evidence that certain boys' vices are mitigated; they are made more urbane and their thoughts of sex made more healthful. In some respects boys are stimulated to good scholarship by girls, who in many schools and topics excel them. We should ask, however, What is nature's way at this stage of life? Whether boys, in order to be well virified ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... tongue is to be found nowhere in common use, but everywhere in select usage. It is the common speech "freed from rude words, involved constructions, defective pronunciation, and rustic accent; excellent, clear, perfect, urbane, and elect, as it may be seen in the poems of 'Cino da Pistoia and his friend,'"—that friend being Dante himself. They have attained to the glory of the tongue, and "how glorious truly it renders its servants we ourselves know, who to the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... the first. To take two or three Latin examples: Cicero, in employing 'favor,' a word soon after used by everybody, does it with an apology, evidently feels that he is introducing a questionable novelty, being probably first applied to applause in the theatre; 'urbanus,' too, in our sense of urbane, had in his time only just come up; 'obsequium' he believes Terence to have been the first to employ. [Footnote: On the new words in classical Latin, see Quintilian, Inst. viii. 3. 30-37.] 'Soliloquium' seems ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... work she is without an equal. The colonies are together larger in area than the mother-country, and include Algeria, Madagascar, and Cochin China. The French are a people of keen intelligence, of bright, impulsive, and vivacious nature; urbane, cultured, and pleasure-loving in the cities, thrifty and industrious in the country; few races have given so rich a bequest to the literature and art of the world. Roman Catholicism is the dominant form of religion, but Protestantism and the Jewish religion are also State ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... He nodded urbane acquiescence, strolled away immediately, and minutely inspected the surface of the funnel, till some female passengers of Giant's Town tittered at what they must have thought a rebuff—for the approaching wedding was ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... who reverse this order, but he was not one of them. He had become a scholar in his youth, not from love of scholarship, but as a means to success. The Church had become his profession, and he had worked hard at his calling. He had taught himself to be courteous and urbane, because he had been clever enough to see that courtesy and urbanity are agreeable to men in high places. As a bishop he never spared himself the work which a bishop ought to do. He answered letters, he studied the characters of the clergymen under him, he was just with ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... only philosophising upon these scenes of inexpensive patriotism which fill even the most urbane and peaceful among us full of truculence. . . . I recently saw my tailor wearing a sword, attired in ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... every country under the sun. Tartars, Mongols, Little Russians, Chinamen, Japanese, French officers, British officers, peasants and fashionable women, schoolboys, officials, actors and artists and business men and priests and sailors and beggars and hawkers and, guarding them all, friendly, urbane, filled with a pleasant self-importance that seemed at that hour the simplest and easiest of attitudes, the Police. "Rum—rum—rum—whirr—whirr—whirr—whirr"—like the regular beat of a shuttle the hum rose and fell, as the sun faded into rosy mist ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... this maiden, turning over the pages with a thrill of sensuous curiosity. This charming Providence had fitted his mood to perfection with these little classics of the hour, by authors too graceful and urbane to bore a poor mortal with their immortality. Adorable Miss Tancred! He was in love with her before sight, ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... smiling and urbane, she noted woman-fashion the superfine quality of his linen, the perfection of every detail of his appearance, the grace with which he wore his clothes. His manner was gracious, even courtly. Yet there was about him something so relentless that for the ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... the first lieutenant and preferred his request, fully anticipating a refusal, but to his surprise the officer in question was all that was urbane and pleasant. ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... and idled about the waters inside the point, dozing under an awning, smoking, gaping, and wishing that headaches were out of fashion, while the taciturn and tarry skipper instructed the dignified and urbane Thomas in the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... cursing, was the first to be hanged. He got his finger under the rope around his neck and died hard, but died. Stinson, also cursing, went next. It was then time for Plummer, and those who had this work in hand felt compunction at hanging a man so able, so urbane and so commanding. None the less, he was told to prepare. He asked for time to pray, and was told to pray from the cross-beam. He said good-by to a friend or two, and asked his executioners to "give him a good drop." He seemed to fear suffering, he who had ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... intelligence might have upon the ladies of his household, who had been projecting another visit to the American ship, being the fourth that had already taken place; but he finally determined, as the only course left him, to ensconce himself behind the intrenchments of his dignity, and to merge the urbane feelings of the hospitable gentleman in the awful gravity of the dog in office. Besides, he hoped that his vigilance and severity on the present occasion would be a sweet savor in the nostrils of his august monarch, and that promotion would follow as an affair of ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... manhood, the child that once we all were. In him the powerful and spontaneous flow of emotion from out the depths of being has never been dammed. He can still speak from the fullness of his heart, cry his sorrows piercingly, produce himself completely. Gracious and urbane as his music is, proper to the world of modern things and modern adventures and modern people, there is still a gray, piercing lyrical note in it that is almost primitive, and reflects the childlike singleness and intensity of the animating spirit. The man who shaped not only the ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... of this excellent piece of fun was followed by another explosion of laughter. The Frenchman who sat opposite to me—a man, as I have said, of grave but urbane deportment, became curious to know what it was that our neighbours had been conversing about, and which had occasioned so much hilarity. He very politely expressed this wish to me. If it was not an indiscretion, he should like to partake, he said, in the wit that was flowing round him; adding, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... too familiar with the works of that Titan in wisdom and error, Descartes, not to recollect the interesting correspondence between the urbane philosopher and our combative countryman, Henry More,(3) on this very subject; in which certainly More has the best of it when Descartes insists on reducing what he calls the soul (l'ame) of brutes into ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... greetings (Brodrick was aware of a growing restraint in this particular) Eddy, at the first opening, made for his point—their point, rather. His uncle had inquired with urbane irony at what hour the family was to be bereaved of their society, and how long ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... exclusiveness!—lying there, with none so poor to do him reverence! He was a type—and, by reason of his happy temperament, an exceedingly favourable type—of the 'gentleman,' shifting for himself under normal conditions of back-country life. Urbane address, faultless syntax, even that good part which shall not be taken away, namely, the calm consciousness of inherent superiority, are of little use here. And yet your Australian novelist finds ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... astonishment. I did not see what became of Trevor, but Lawrence was dragged past me by several Affghans, whom I saw wrest his weapons from him. Up to this moment I was so engrossed in observing what was taking place, that I actually was not aware that my own right arm was mastered, that my urbane friend held a pistol to my temple, and that I was surrounded by a circle of Ghazees, with drawn swords and cocked juzails. Resistance was in vain, so, listening to the exhortations of Gholam Moyun-ood-deen, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... kneeling by Sir Victor Catheron's side. "Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?" say the urbane tones of the rector of Chesholm, and the Right Honorable the Earl of Wroatmore comes forward on two rickety old legs and gives her. "If any one here present knows any just cause or impediment why this man should ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... out of Epernay, and asked how things were going in Paris. He was, says Barnet, a round-faced man, dressed very neatly in black—so neatly that it was amazing to discover he was living close at hand in a tent made of carpets—and he had 'an urbane but insistent manner,' a carefully trimmed moustache and beard, expressive eyebrows, and ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... justice to the weddings that occur in this town; we have been using a repressed and obsolete style which is painful to those who enter into the joyous spirit of such occasions, and last night's wedding in the family of the patrician Skinners we assigned to our gentlemanly and urbane Mr. J. Mortimer Montague, late of the publicity department of the world-famed Robinson Circus and Menagerie. The following graceful account from Mr. Montague's facile pen is the most accurate and satisfactory report ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... ourselves on his hospitality, I don't quite like to descend on him all at once with the whole strength of our party. It will be better for one of us to break the ice, and as you are the best-looking and most hypocritically urbane, when you choose, I think we could not do better than devolve the duty ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... had embraced her. She had attended his funeral in Westminster Abbey. And she could suppress all that from her eyes! She could stand there calm and urbane in her acceptance of the terrific ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... a small, square bottle, ovally labeled with the engraving of a countenance full of soft pity as that of the Romish-painted Madonna, the herb-doctor passes slowly among them, benignly urbane, turning ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... the urbane and alert showman. He explained how the pressure was regulated. He pulled the capstan-like arms of the motive wheel and the blanketed steel bed slid smoothly under the glittering cylinder. Although George had often been in his stepfather's printing works he now felt for the first time the ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... came in a deep growl from Jim Kenerley's end of the table, and Patty was surprised at such a speech from her urbane host. Then she realised that that, too, was Mr. ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
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