"Provincial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... actually seemed more in harmony with it than the modern dresses of the guests. It was the Excelsior party who looked strange and bizarre in these surroundings; to the sensitive fancy of Miss Keene, Mrs. Brimmer's Parisian toilet had an air of provincial assumption; her own pretty Zouave jacket and black silk skirt horrified her with its apparent ostentatious eccentricity; and Mrs. Markham and Miss Chubb seemed dowdy and overdressed beside the satin mantillas and black lace of the Senoritas. Nor were the gentlemen less outres: the stiff correctness ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... time, and Being to hide in clockwork. Keep him on the hop with ironical comments upon how it may be that environment can act upon Will, while Will can do nothing with environment—whose proper name is mud. Pester the provincial. Run him off ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... ordered household. He gave all for Sweden, and all he had was at her call. It was share and share alike, in his view. Despotic he could be, too. L'etat c'est moi might have been said by him. But he did not exploit the state; he built it. He fashioned Sweden out of a bunch of quarrelsome provincial governments into a hereditary monarchy, as the best way—indeed, the only way then—of giving it strength and stability. He was suspicious because everybody had betrayed him, or had tried to. With all that, his steady purpose was to raise and enlighten his people and ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... last day of the year, the second year of her shame and of her heart's widowhood, Mr. Scales had reappeared. She had gone casually into the shop and found him talking to her mother and Mr. Povey. He had come back to the provincial round and to her. She shook his hand and fled, because she could not have stayed. None had noticed her agitation, for she had held her body as in a vice. She knew the reason neither of his absence nor of his return. She knew nothing. And not a word had been said at meals. And the day ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... public mind. To counteract the half-truths of the opposite school, he wrote a tale of singular power and promise, The House with the Green Shutters. Like all reactions, it erred in the violence of its colouring. If intended as a true picture of the normal state of a small Scottish provincial town and its society, it may have been as false in its own direction as the kail-yarders had been in theirs. But for Mr. Douglas's untimely death—a real loss to literature—he would doubtless have shown ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... treats of the Royal Governors; French and Indian Wars; Witches and Pirates; The Religion, Literature, Customs, and Chief Families of the Provincial Period. ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New-England Sunday - Gleanings Chiefly From Old Newspapers Of Boston And Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... late W.T. Arnold, who died in 1904, leaving a record as journalist and scholar which has been admirably told by his intimate friend and colleague, Mr. (now Captain) C.E. Montague. He and I had shared many intellectual interests connected with the history of the Empire. His monograph on Roman Provincial Administration, first written as an Arnold Essay, still holds the field; and in the realm of pure literature his one-volume edition of Keats is there to show his eagerness for beauty and his love of English verse. I sent him ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Mrs. Sheridan,—he was unfortunately drowned at the Duke of Ancaster's. In a few days after, Mr. Sheridan again made me a visit, with a proposal for an engagement to play during the summer at Mr. Colman's theatre in the Haymarket.[29] I had refused several offers from provincial managers, and felt an almost insurmountable aversion to the idea of strolling. Mr. Sheridan nevertheless strongly recommended me to the acceptance of Mr. Colman's offer; and I at last agreed to it, upon condition that the characters I should be expected ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... English types and attitudes, costumes and accessories, in what may be called the great-coat-and-gaiters period—the period when people were stiff with riding and wicked conspiracies went forward in sanded provincial inn-parlors. Mr. Alfred Parsons, who is still conveniently young, waked to his first vision of pleasant material in the comprehensive county of Somerset—a capital centre of impression for a painter of the bucolic. ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... of men in industry have grown our national and international business corporations and our national and international labor unions. These corporations and unions are transforming local and provincial relations into cosmopolitan acquaintanceship. The recognized value of the acquaintance is in the extension of knowledge of people through their use and wont of material things, of the ways and means of life outside limited and personal areas. The acquaintanceship ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... the faith by American provincial Protestantism was very properly echoed from Spanish provincial Catholicism. In the year 1878 a Spanish colonial man of science, Dr. Chil y Marango, published a work on the Canary Islands. But Dr. Chil had the imprudence to sketch, in his introduction, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... souls of birds,—as well as lettering of their classes in books,—you, with all care, should cherish the old Saxon-English and Norman-French names of birds, and ascertain them with the most affectionate research—never despising even the rudest or most provincial forms: all of them will, some day or other, give you clue to historical points of interest. Take, for example, the common English name of this low-flying falcon, the most tamable and affectionate of his tribe, and therefore, I suppose, fastest vanishing from field ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... calm superiority] Hector in your own country: that's what comes o livin in provincial places like Ireland and America. Over here you're Ector: if you avn't noticed it ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... being given to the most incorrigible members of the book clubs of New York. These had been laboriously employed in puffing each other into celebrity for many weary years, but still remained just as vapid, as conceited, as ignorant, as imitative, as dependent, and as provincial as ever. ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... treaty with him for the valuable seignory of Ingrande; but the heirs of Gilles implored the interference of Charles VII. to stay the sale. Charles immediately issued an edict, which was confirmed by the Provincial Parliament of Brittany, forbidding him to alienate his paternal estates. Gilles had no alternative but to submit. He had nothing to support his extravagance but his allowance as a Marshal of France, which did not cover the one-tenth of his expenses. A man of his habits ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... Approaching nearer you find it to be a Travellers' window, and those odd lines of white the long walking-staves in the hands of Abraham, Raphael, the Magi, and the other saintly patrons of journeys. The appropriate provincial character of the bourgeoisie of Champagne is still to be seen, it would appear, among the citizens of Troyes. Its streets, for the most part in timber and pargeting, present more than one unaltered specimen of the ancient ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... Nevil, made her a deep courtesy, but she did not utter a single word. It was easy to see that she was very much frightened at finding herself, perhaps for the first time in her life, in the company of strangers belonging to the great world. Yet there was nothing provincial in her manners. The novelty of her position excused her awkwardness. Miss Nevil took a liking to her at once, and, as there was no room disengaged in the hotel, the whole of which was occupied by the colonel and his attendants, she offered, either out ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... the alcalde-major, and his brother, who was alcalde of the citadel, named Salazar de la Pedrada, who soon afterwards died of a pleurisy; Marcos de Aguilar, a licentiate or bachelor; a soldier named Bocanegra de Cordova, and certain friars of the Dominican order, of whom Fra Thomas Ortiz was provincial. This man had been a prior somewhere, and was said to be much better fitted for worldly affairs, than for the concerns of his holy office. By these men De Leon was advised to proceed to Mexico without delay, and accordingly the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... sorry about, Madame Nan," she cried, gaily; "these provincial young people don't appreciate the advantages of travel. They'd rather stay here in one place than jog about the country, seeing all sorts of grand scenery and sights! Once I'm away from this place I shall forget all about its petty frolics and its ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... if every housekeeper does not, that shavings make a most valuable fuel; for lighting fires they are preferable to those faggots, small bundles of which fetch in London, and large provincial towns, what may be considered a high price, as they commonly swell the weekly expenditure of every family. In Edinburgh, at the period to which we allude, a great deal of building was going on, and it was impossible to walk the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 533, Saturday, February 11, 1832. • Various
... thinking that his master's name had not altogether produced the magic effect which he had expected; remembering, also, how submissive Greyson had always been, who, being a London doctor, must be supposed to be a bigger man than this provincial fellow. "Do you know as how my master is dying, very like, while ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... a procession which told plainly enough what had happened; a procession of boats filled with dark-coated provincial soldiers, a few white-coats, many women and children. No flags flew astern; the very lift of the oars told of disgrace and humiliation. Thus came Payan de Noyan with his garrison, prisoners on parole, ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... that time lacking in the costumes of the new passengers,—I do not mean of the women alone, but of both sexes. It may be that CARRIAGE is at the bottom of this thing; and I think it is; for there are plenty of ladies and gentlemen in the provincial cities whose garments are all made by the best tailors and dressmakers of New York; yet this has no perceptible effect upon the grand fact: the educated eye never mistakes those people for New-Yorkers. No, there is a godless grace, and snap, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Lower House, it was again presented for the acceptance of the peers. Again they struck at its vitality, but the Commons said, Nulla vestigia retrorsum. A thousand popular platforms and almost the whole provincial press called upon the government to be firm; mass meetings in London and other large cities and towns clamored for the abolition of the House of Lords and the extinction of hereditary rule. Eventually the courage of the peers gave way, and the Land ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... from all parts waiting in the room. These included geographical explorers, botanists, geologists, antiquaries, archeologists, collectors of prehistoric flints, in short, the usual representatives of provincial ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... man of traffic, on Saco's banks today! O mill-girl watching late and long the shuttle's restless play! Let, for the once, a listening ear the working hand beguile, And lend my old Provincial tale, as suits, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Father Goriot The Atheist's Mass Cesar Birotteau The Commission in Lunacy Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a Princess The Government Clerks A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine The Seamy Side of History The Magic Skin A Second Home A Prince of Bohemia Letters of Two Brides The Muse of the ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... somewhere in the North, doing provincial journalism. Daniel—I believe he is in London, but I'm not very likely to ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... Whittier has been called provincial because he takes only the point of view of New England. The province of Holmes is still narrower, being mainly confined to Boston. He expresses in a humorous way his own feelings, as well as those ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... the Bay of Fundy. He loved and he sang of her streams and her valleys, her woods and her wild-flowers, most of all of the 'Mayflower,' the trailing arbutus of early spring, with its fresh pink petals and its wonderful fragrance, long since adopted as the provincial emblem. After more than one political fight he retired to the country for a month or for a year, and there let nature breathe into his soul her beauty and her calm. Of one such occasion he wrote: 'For a month I did nothing but play with the children and read old books to my ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... augmenting procession of fifty curious Sunday promenaders was not on my card. In fact, I had some difficulty in tearing myself from the inquisitive, questioning, well-dressed people. The gypsies bore the pressure with the serene equanimity of cosmopolite superiority, smiling at provincial rawness. Even so in China and Africa the traveler is mobbed by the many, who, there as here, think that "I want to know" is full excuse for all intrusiveness. Q'est tout comme chez nous. I confess that I was vexed, and, considering ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... which we stayed—the Charleston—is like no other hotel in the United States, though it has about it something which caused me to think of the old Southern, in St. Louis. Still, it is not like the Southern. It is more like some old hotel in a provincial city of France—large and white, with a pleasing unevenness of floor, and, best of all, a great inner court which, in provincial France, might be a remise, but is here a garden. If I mistake not, carriages and coaches did in earlier ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... "guess" in that very provincial fashion! I shall not ask Mr. Dallas to play at buying and selling in such a way. It would be trifling with him. I should be ashamed to do it. Besides, I have no intention of going back to Sea forth till your education is ended; and by that time—if I live to see that time—I shall have so ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... earlier comers should retire. During extremely hot weather, or to an author reading his production, you may offer a glass of sirup, or eau sucree, or if a lady becomes faint, some fleur d'orange and water; but it is provincial to propose anything else; and, indeed, the French never eat between meals, or in any rank above the very lowest will one be seen to partake of anything in the street, fruit or cake, or even give them to their children, it being considered ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various
... filling the highest offices from generation to generation. Their members bore the title of hiko (son of the Sun) and hime (daughter of the Sun), and those that governed towns and villages were called tomo no miyatsuko, while those that held provincial domains were ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... tour card which he had sent her as usual, giving dates and theatres. And the tour was over. On the chance that Jane, not hearing from him, should address a letter to the last theatre on the list, he communicated at once with the local management. But as local managements of provincial theatres shape their existences so as to avoid responsibilities of any kind save the maintenance of their bars and the deduction of their percentages from the box-office receipts, Paul knew that it was ludicrous to expect it to interest ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... however, that she ever entered a church, when she was little more than nine years old, was an experience in her life, and this was the occasion of it. It was in a French provincial town, where M. Linders had stopped for a day on business—only for one day, but that Madelon was to spend for the most part alone; for her father, occupied with his affairs, was obliged to go out very early, and leave her to her own devices; ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... spent his 30,000 francs in three months, and then docilely returned to Lavardens, where he was "out at grass." He spent his time hunting, fishing, and riding with the officers of the artillery regiment quartered at Souvigny. The little provincial milliners and grisettes replaced, without rendering him obvious of, the little singers and actresses of Paris. By searching for them, one may still find grisettes in country towns, and ...
— L'Abbe Constantin, Complete • Ludovic Halevy
... But who were the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above antiquarism; not to be resolved by man, nor easily perhaps by spirits, except we consult the provincial guardians, or tutelary observators. Had they made as good provision for their names, as they have done for their relicks, they had not so grossly erred in the art of perpetuation. But to subsist in bones, ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... a vigorous clean-up had made it more habitable. Manning, the mess servant, had unearthed from a disused dug-out a heavy handsome table with a lacquered top, and a truly regal chair for the colonel—green plush seating and a back of plush and scrolled oak—the kind of chair that provincial photographers bring out for their most dignified sitters. By the light of our acetylene lamp we had dined, and there had been two rubbers of bridge, the colonel and the little American doctor bringing about the downfall of Wilde, the signalling officer, and myself, in spite of the doctor's ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... exhibiting his equipages, entertaining the most distinguished young men of the place, and giving various hunting parties on the estate at Lanstrac, Paul saw very plainly that provincial life would never do without marriage. Too young to employ his time in miserly occupations, or in trying to interest himself in the speculative improvements in which provincials sooner or later engage (compelled ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... surely is a moment when Tantalus rebels, crosses his arms, and defies hell, throwing up his part of the eternal dupe. That is what I shall come to if anything should thwart my plan; if, after stooping to the dust of provincial life, prowling like a starving tiger round these tradesmen, these electors, to secure their votes; if, after wrangling in these squalid cases, and giving them my time—the time I might have spent on Lago Maggiore, seeing the ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... aught is known, their Wars are much such as were between Jacob's Sons and their Brother Joseph. If they be between Town and Town; Provincial or National: Every War is upon one side Unjust. An Unlawful War can't make lawful Captives. And by receiving, we are in danger to promote, and partake in their Barbarous Cruelties. I am sure, if some Gentlemen should go down to the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... men. Although bred in a remote provincial town, and without the benefit of a liberal education, they were possessed in a high degree of ingenuity and the spirit of observation. They educated themselves, and acquired an unusually large stock of information, which their inventive and original minds led them to apply in ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... alas! though the heart be warm and generous, the eye is a merciless critic. And the man who had moved on the wide arena of the world, whose mind had housed the large thoughts of this century, and expanded with its invigorating breath—was he to blame because he had unconsciously outgrown his old provincial self, and could no more judge by ...
— A Good-For-Nothing - 1876 • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... now; his voice trembles. If his skin were not so yellow, he would be white all over, for the marchesa's looks are not encouraging. The sindaco dreads a summons to the High Court of Barga, where the provincial prisons are—with which he may be soon better acquainted, ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... this pleasing error by the form of their provincial legislative assemblies. Their governments are popular in an high degree; some are merely popular; in all, the popular representative is the most weighty; and this share of the people in their ordinary government never fails to inspire them with lofty sentiments, and with ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... the subject who could now look back without despair, might labor with hope and gratitude for himself and for his country. II. In the assessment and collection of taxes, Majorian restored the ordinary jurisdiction of the provincial magistrates; and suppressed the extraordinary commissions which had been introduced, in the name of the emperor himself, or of the Praetorian praefects. The favorite servants, who obtained such irregular powers, were insolent in their behavior, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... began to express the human figure. Sometimes their mere name remains, more often it is doubtful, sometimes it is entirely lost. More curious still, you often have for this period a mixture of names. You come across some astonishing series of reliefs in a forgotten church of a small provincial town. You know at once that it is work of the moment when the flood of the Renaissance had at last reached the old country of the Gothic. You can swear that if it were not made in the time of Francis I or Henry ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... isolated Judean plateau was to hold aloof the chaste religion of the desert-bred Jews from the sensuous agricultural gods of the Canaanites; to conserve and fix it; if need be, to narrow it to a provincial tribal faith, to stamp it with exclusiveness, conservatism, and formalism, as its adherents with bigotry,[1406] for this is always the effect of geographical seclusion. But when all these limitations of ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... and remaining as short a time as possible in this unedifying city, which is a bad and overheated imitation of a French provincial town, we concede only so much to its modern character as to hire a fine open carriage in which to proceed inland toward Constantina. This city is reached after a calm, meditative ride through sunny hills and groves. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... month or two, in York it had already created a furore in more senses than one. For, in fact, and no wonder, it had in many quarters given the deepest offence. Its Rabelaisian license of incident and allusion was calculated to offend the proprieties—the provincial proprieties especially—even in that free-spoken age; and there was that in the book, moreover, which a provincial society may be counted on to abominate, with a keener if less disinterested abhorrence than any sins against decency. It contained, or was supposed to contain, a broadly ludicrous ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... how, when my term of study came to an end, I should ever again endure the old home-life at Saxonholme? How settle down for life as my father's partner, conforming myself to his prejudices, obeying all the demands of his imperious temper, and accepting for evermore the monotonous routine of a provincial practice! It was an intolerable prospect, but no less inevitable than intolerable. Pondering thus, I sighed heavily, and the sigh ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... heaven to David to be at home again. He cried like a child when he took little Lucien in his arms and looked round his room after three weeks of imprisonment, and the disgrace, according to provincial notions, of the last few hours. Kolb and Marion had come back. Marion had heard in L'Houmeau that Lucien had been seen walking along on the Paris road, somewhere beyond Marsac. Some country folk, coming ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... mentioned two New Zealanders, who are at present in this country, and have recently been exhibiting the dances and other customs of their native land, in several of our provincial towns. Among other things which they show is this method of kindling fire, and we extract from the letter of a correspondent who saw them at Birmingham, the following account of this part of their ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... them as far as possible to local usage, and to centralise the general administration of the whole of the "pays de par deca" (as the Burgundian dukes were accustomed to name their Netherland dominions) by the summoning of representatives of the Provincial States to an assembly styled the States-General, and by the creation of a common Court ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... for the transfer of the management of the Inland Posts to the Provincial Government, and for the ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... to time in every parish not provided with an ordained and preaching minister, seeing to the administration of the sacraments and of church discipline in such parishes, and presiding at the meetings of the provincial synod, and at the examination and admission of ministers and readers appointed to serve ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... women, very largely signed by Federal voters throughout the Dominion, was presented to the House of Commons and the Senate in 1896. This was the last effort in the Parliament, and as a change has since been made in the Electoral Act, making the voters' list for the Dominion coincide with the Provincial lists, the battle will therefore have to be fought out in each ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... the task facing them. Work in the provincial capital had been of so totally different an order, and life in a large community of foreigners had limited their sphere to the oversight of a small school for girls, and the ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... Rafael, San Gallo, Peruzzi, a concentration of artistic genius such as had never been, not produced by Rome itself, but attracted from every quarter by the master of Rome. What had been, one hundred years before, a neglected provincial town, became the centre of European civilisation by the action of the Popes, and principally of one ambitious Pope. The Vatican paintings were largely political, commemorating the sovereign more than the ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... Liberty; a Sermon on American affairs, preached at the opening of the Provincial Congress of Georgia. With an appendix giving a concise account of the struggles of Swisserland, to recover their Liberty. By John J. Zubly, D.D. (Select passages ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... be nothing for me in the schools as I had once dared to hope; there seemed, indeed, scarcely anything in the world except an illpaid assistantship in some provincial organized Science School or grammar school. I knew that for that sort of work, without a degree or any qualification, one earned hardly a bare living and had little leisure to struggle up to anything better. If only I had even as little as fifty pounds ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... looking, as usual, as though she had just quitted the hands of an expert French maid. It was in a great measure to the ultra-perfection of her toilette that she owed the critical attitude accorded her by the feminine half of Monkshaven. To the provincial mind, the fact that she dyed her hair, ordered her frocks from Paris, and kept a French chef to cook her food, were all so many indications of an altogether worldly and abandoned character—and of a wealth that was secretly to be envied—and the more venomous among Audrey's detractors lived ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... which his nickname of CHICK-PEA (Cicero) is said by some to be derived. As a lecturer is public property, we may remark, that his outer garment (toga) was of cheap stuff and somewhat worn, and that his general style and appearance of dress and manner (habitus, vestitusque) were somewhat provincial. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... augmented his practice in Westminster Hall, as it brought him in personal contact with attorneys in every part of the country, and heightened his popularity amongst all classes of his fellow-countrymen. In 1786 he entirely withdrew from ordinary circuit practice, and confined his exertions in provincial courts to the causes for which he was specially retained. No advocate since his time has received an equal number of special retainers; and if he did not originate the custom of special retainers,[12] he was the first English barrister who ventured ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... positions that were offered to him, in order to retain his modest but useful functions in the public prosecutor's offices at Paris. To explain his repeated refusals, he said that life in the capital had more charms for him than the most enviable advancement in provincial centres. But it was hard to understand this declaration, for in spite of his brilliant connections and large fortune, he had, ever since the death of his eldest brother, led a most retired life, his existence merely being revealed ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... the month of April, 1775, with the provincial troops hurrying to the defense of Lexington and Concord. Mr. Hotchkiss has etched in burning words a story of Yankee bravery and true love that thrills from beginning to end with the spirit of the ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... the hindquarters of his horse, his saddle having slipped back for want of a breastplate,—"I wish the hills had been piled on your back, and the flints thrust down your confounded throat, before I came into such a cursed provincial." "Haw, haw, haw!" roars a Croydon butcher. "What don't 'e like it, sir, eh? too sharp to be pleasant, eh?—Your nag should have put on his boots ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... the party, Miss Alethea Heredith, sister of the present baronet, Sir Philip Heredith, and mistress of the moat-house since the death of Lady Heredith, belonged to a bygone and almost extinct type of Englishwoman, the provincial great lady, local society leader, village patroness, sportswoman, and church-woman in one, a type exclusively English, taking several centuries to produce in its finished form. Miss Heredith was an excellent, if somewhat terrific, specimen of the class. She was ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... the visible. And to speak of Laws as Natural is to define them in their application to a part of the universe, the sense-part, whereas a wider survey would lead us to regard all Law as essentially Spiritual. To magnify the Laws of Nature, as Laws of this small world of ours, is to take a provincial view of the universe. Law is great not because the phenomenal world is great, but because these vanishing lines are the avenues into the eternal Order. "It is less reverent to regard the universe as an illimitable avenue which leads ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... and convinced myself that it was substantially true—for I was always too cautious to accept the loose and unsifted gossip of a provincial town—I think that for the first time in my life I experienced the passion of hate towards a human being. Why should this man who was so rich and powerful thus devote his energies to the destruction of a brother practitioner who was struggling ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... solid works, * * *—for a long series of years it was neglected, so much as to be suffered to go to decay, and ceasing to be the residence of the Commander-in-Chief, was used only for the offices of Government until the year 1808, when a resolution passed the Provincial Parliament for repairing and beautifying it; the sum of L1,000 was at the same time voted, and the work ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... performing their other functions, training up novices and preserving the conventual buildings, holding it sinful to lay aside, or even hide, their religious habit, though for an hour, through any human fear. And, every three years, they held their regular provincial chapters in the woods of the neighborhood, and observed the rule as it is kept in provinces that are ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... ring. He was now on his old footing at the Great Houses. The nobler felt many a pang of conscience that they had permitted a stranger at Bath House to accomplish a work so manifestly their own, while others dared not be stigmatised as provincial, prejudiced, middle-class. If London could afford a superb indifference to the mere social offences of a great poet, well, so could Nevis. They forgot that London had arisen as one man and flung him out, neck and crop. Lady Hunsdon had eclipsed London; ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... allowed to spend the winter with her, and thus cheer her loneliness, that it was decided that I must accept the invitation. It was the custom then for many of the local country gentry to visit the great provincial towns for their 'seasons' instead of undertaking the long journey to the metropolis. York, and many another country town, is still full of the fine old 'town houses' of the local gentry, who now go to London to 'bring out' their young daughters; ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... revolutionary doctrines, held back until the paper had to be wrung from him. The phases of Napoleon's life are scarcely more startling than those of this rather commonplace actor on a stage which was provincial when compared with the cosmopolitan scene of the ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Commonplace types regarded in the past as insufficiently drab, on the one hand, and insufficiently picturesque on the other are reflected in this new romantic treatment. Sarah Addington's "Another Cactus Blooms" prophesies colour in that hard and prickly plant the provincial teacher at Columbia for a term of graduate work. Humorously and sardonically the college professor is served up in "The Better Recipe," by George Boas (Atlantic Monthly, March); the doctorate degree method is satirized ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... bear on the minds of the young, and so far as, in rural districts, the first elements of scholarly education can be made pure, the foundation of a new dynasty of thought may be slowly laid. I was strangely impressed by the effect produced in a provincial seaport school for children, chiefly of fishermen's families, by the gift of a little colored drawing of a single figure from the Paradise of Angelico in the Accademia of Florence. The drawing was wretched enough, seen beside the original; I had only bought it from the ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... suburban edge of a very old, very ignorant, very sooty, hardhearted, stony-streeted, meanly grim, little provincial town there stands a gasometer. On one side of this gasometer begins a region of disappointed fields, which, however, has hardly begun before a railway embankment cuts across, at an angle convenient for its entirely obscuring the few ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... establishment here consists of twelve regiments of regular troops, six of which are Portuguese, and six Creoles; and twelve other regiments of provincial militia. To the regulars the inhabitants behave with the utmost humility and submission; and I was told, that if any of them should neglect to take off his hat upon meeting an officer, he would immediately be knocked down. These haughty severities render the people extremely ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... elected constable in October, 1678. He was the chief man of the place, had been deputy fiscael of New Netherland in the time of Governor Stuyvesant, and held many provincial and local offices. In 1659 he and Augustine Herrman went to Maryland on an embassy for Stuyvesant; see its journal in Narratives of Early Maryland, in this series, pp. 309-333. Thus it may have been he who told Danckaerts ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... it. But if he did it one time by mistake what would he do to go to confession? Perhaps he would go to confession to the minister. And if the minister did it he would go to the rector: and the rector to the provincial: and the provincial to the general of the jesuits. That was called the order: and he had heard his father say that they were all clever men. They could all have become high-up people in the world if they had not become ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... Massachusetts on January 21, 1745, by first inducing the members to swear secrecy and then asking them to consider a plan for a colonial expedition against Louisbourg. He and they were on very good terms. But they were provincial, cautious, and naturally slow when it came to planning campaigns and pledging their credit for what was then an enormous sum of money. Nor could they be blamed. None of them knew much about armies and navies; most thought Louisbourg was a real transatlantic Dunkirk; and all knew ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... which the general chapter was held, which was the first of the Order, he had as much leisure as he could desire for conversing with God, for giving instruction to his brethren at St. Mary of the Angels, and to the Town of Assisi and its environs. In the assembly, provincial ministers were appointed, to whom power was given for admitting postulants into the Order; which the Founder had previously reserved to himself. One whose name does not appear, was sent into Apulia, and John de Strachia was sent into Lombardy; Benedict of Arezzo, into the Marches ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... its sediment, mud, dirt, weeds, and rottenness; straining through the various strata, its grosser particles are arrested in their course, and nothing that is not pure, transparent, and limpid is transmitted. In the great filter of London life, conceit, pretension, small provincial abilities, pseudo-talent, soi-disant intellect, are tried, rejected, and flung out again. True genius is tested by judgment, fastidiousness, emulation, difficulty, privation; and, passing through many ordeals, persevering, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... of 1828, Bewick visited London about his works. "He was," says Mr. Dovaston, "very honourably received by many learned societies and individuals, of whom, and of whose collections, he wrote in raptures. On his return, the London and provincial papers had many paragraphs respecting this visit, his reception, and his life; to amend the errors of which statements, I must have been writing one at the very hour of his death; for I had not time to stop its insertion ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... girls—pretty, middling, and ugly, astonishingly virtuous, not virtuous at all, and couci-couci (one of them, by the way, is nicknamed "Bouci-Boula," because she is plump and plain), but all good-natured, and on occasion almost noble-sentimented; a guileless provincial; his friend, who has a mania for testing his wife's fidelity, and who accomplishes one of Paul's favourite fairy-tale or rather pantomime endings by coming down with fifteen thousand francs for an ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... small crops of common vegetables could be grown in many places, and outside supplies are becoming more available. So the toll of birds and mammals taken by the present genuine residents for necessary food is not a menace, if taken in reason. In isolated places in the Gulf, like Harrington, the Provincial law might safely be relaxed, so as to allow the eggs of ducks and gulls to be taken up to the 5th of June and those of murres, auks and puffins up to the 15th. Flight birds might also be shot at ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... action of a purely humane disposition. The Greeks and Romans being sharply marked nationalities, how could one cherish such expectations? It was possible only relatively in contradiction, partly to a provincial population from whom all genuine political sense had departed, partly to a church limited by a confessional, to which the idea of humanity as such had become almost lost in dogmatic fault-findings. The spirit was refreshed in the first by the contemplation of the pure patriotism of the ancients, ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... power to the Equites, and carried the Sempronian Law, 'one of the cornerstones of individual liberty.' 5. per socios ... Latinum, by working on Roman jealousy against the Italians, for whom equality was claimed. 6. spes societatis, i.e. the hope of sharing with the nobility in office, and in provincial appointments. 10. triumvirum c. d., one of the three Commissioners for establishing Colonies of Roman citizens on the ager publicus. 11. Fulvio Flacco, slain with C. Gracchus, 121 B.C. 17. pessum dedit has destroyed. pessum (prob.) pedis versum towards the feet, to ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... time like a babe at blind play with a set of chess men, not knowing king from pawn nor one rule of the game. Senator Floud—who was but a member of their provincial assembly, I discovered—sought an early opportunity to felicitate me on my changed estate, though he seemed not a ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... as an agent for a country paper. It was supposed to be his business to collect and transmit news to his principals at a large seaport town on the East Coast. These were days before the present development of newspaper enterprise, when leading provincial journals have their own London offices and a private wire. Mr. Hobson's principles were very liberal according to the idea of that time; they seemed to grudge no expense with regard to ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... or Olm (to use the provincial word), lay at the distance of about six hours, and the Hofbauer went up to examine the state of the pasturage before his son and the cattle finally started. In two days he returned. "The going up of the cattle must be postponed at least a week," he ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... the face of feelings such as these that, in the spring of 1559, the Queen Regent entered on her new line of policy toward her refractory subjects. Her first steps were taken with her usual prudence. A provincial council of the clergy was summoned to meet on March 1st for the express purpose of dealing with the religious difficulty. It was the last provincial council of the ancient Church that was to meet in Scotland; and, if the expression of its good intentions could ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... which the Tracer of Lost Persons exercises over this entire continent. The urban police, the State constabulary of Pennsylvania, the rural systems of surveillance, the Secret Service, all municipal, provincial, State, and national organizations form but a few strands in the universal web he has woven. Custom officials, revenue officers, the militia of the States, the army, the navy, the personnel of every city, State, and national legislative bodies ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... reproach to Spain that she has erected no monument to the man she is proudest of; no monument, that is to say, of him; for the bronze statue in the little garden of the Plaza de las Cortes, a fair work of art no doubt, and unexceptionable had it been set up to the local poet in the market-place of some provincial town, is not worthy of Cervantes or of Madrid. But what need has Cervantes of "such weak witness of his name;" or what could a monument do in his case except testify to the self-glorification of those who had put it up? Si monumentum quoeris, circumspice. The nearest bookseller's shop will ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... miles beyond where Moscow now stands, to the head waters of the Volga. They were bounded on the south-west by the Dwina. On the north they reached to the wild wastes of arctic snows. Over these distant provinces, Rurik established governors selected from his own nation, the Normans. These provincial governors became feudal lords; and thus, with the monarchy, the feudal ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... faculties, an awakened imagination and a world to conquer. This is no exaggeration. It is not always obvious, because we do not touch the secret spring nor wander near the magic. But the truth is there to find for him who cares to search. You discover behind the dullness of a provincial town a bright centre of interest, and when you study the circle you know that here is some wonderful thing: priests, doctors, lawyers, teachers, tradesmen, clerks—all drawn together, young and old, both sexes, all enthusiasts. Sometimes a priest ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... lectures (apparently the Introductio and Theolo giam that has come down to us), than his adversaries fell foul of his rationalistic interpretation of the Trinitarian dogma. Charging him with the heresy of Sabellius in a provincial synod held at Soissons in 1121, they procured by irregular practices a condemnation of his teaching, whereby he was made to throw his book into the flames and then was shut up in the convent of St Medard at Soissons. After the other, it was the bitterest possible experience that could befall him, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... there was a pretty scene. JOHN DILLON complained of allegation in provincial newspaper that he had applauded a statement that in a riot at Belfast several children and a young lady school-teacher, the daughter of Lord SLIGO'S Agent, were seriously hurt. Hadn't proceeded far with explanation ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 93, August 13, 1887 • Various
... while eating, and while not eating, his way of crumbling bread between fat fingers made me extremely nervous: he wore a waistcoat cafe au lait, and black boots with brown tops. He was oppressively gross and vulgar; he belonged to a type, he could easily be classified in any town of provincial Spain. Yet under the circumstances—when we had been discussing marriage, and he suddenly leaned forward and exclaimed: 'I was married once myself'—we were able to detach him from his classification and regard him for a moment as an unique being, a soul, however insignificant, with a history of ...
— Eeldrop and Appleplex • T.S. Eliot
... and most pressing task to which Gordon had to address himself was the supersession of the Turkish and Arab irregulars, who, under the name of "Bashi-Bazouks," constituted a large part of the provincial garrison. Not merely were they inefficient from a military point of view, but their practice, confirmed by long immunity, had been to prey on the unoffending population. They thus brought the Government into disrepute, at the same time that they were an element of weakness in its position. ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... was not altogether a stranger to me. For the last week or so I had been rather on the look-out for him in all the public places where in a provincial town men may expect to meet each other. I saw him for the first time (wearing that same grey ready-made suit) in a legitimist drawing-room where, clearly, he was an object of interest, especially to the women. I had caught his name as Monsieur Mills. ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... population of England. By a statute of Edward III., in 1362, it was displaced from the law courts. By 1386 English had taken its place in the schools. The {29} Anglo-Norman dialect had grown corrupt, and Chaucer contrasts the French of Paris with the provincial French spoken by his prioress, "after the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe." The native English genius was also beginning to assert itself, roused in part, perhaps, by the English victories in the wars ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... was a major from an Island district and a lieutenant from North Vancouver. They were exponents of a new deal, enemies of the profiteer and the professional politician, and they were thorns in the side of a provincial government which yearned over vested rights as a mother over her ailing babe. In the Dominion capital it was much the same as elsewhere,—a government which had grasped office on a win-the-war platform found its grasp wavering over the ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... murmured the Provincial Mayor; and, knitting his brows, he lapsed into an introspective state, his lips moving as one who repeats mystic words. 'Yes, I think I see it now,' he said after some time, brightening in a quite ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... and our stroll through the bright-colored, busy streets of the old French seaport was sufficiently entertaining. We walked along the sunny, noisy quays, and then turned into a wide, pleasant street, which lay half in sun and half in shade—a French provincial street, that looked like an old water-color drawing: tall, gray, steep-roofed, red-gabled, many-storied houses; green shutters on windows and old scroll-work above them; flower-pots in balconies, and white-capped women in doorways. We walked in the shade; all this ...
— Four Meetings • Henry James
... no opportunity was omitted, either in Parliament or by the press, to demonstrate the importance to the Atlantic and Lake Provinces of extending settlements into the prairies of Assinniboin and Saskatchewan,—thereby affording advantages to Provincial commerce and manufactures like those which the communities of the Mississippi valley have conferred upon the older American States. Nevertheless, the Canadian government declined to institute proceedings before the English Court of Chancery or Queen's Bench, to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... futile people Russia is over-full. Many such I myself have known, and always they have attracted me as strongly and mysteriously as a magnet. Always they have struck me more favourably than the provincial-minded majority who live for food and work alone, and put away from them all that could conceivably render their bread-winning difficult, or prevent them from snatching bread out of the hands of their weaker ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... "wider Schein," against the appearance of the sun, "counter-clockwise" as the mathematicians say— i.e., W., S., E., N., instead of with the sun and the hands of a clock; why it should have an unspelling influence is hard to say. "Bogle" is a provincial word for "spectre," and is analogous to the Welsh bwg, "goblin," and to the English insect of similar name, and still more curiously to the Russian "Bog," God, after which so many Russian rivers are named. I may add that "Burd" is etymologically the same as "bride" and is frequently ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... of schisms that occurred in their communion is of amazing length. The letters of Severus of Antioch make sad reading. They show us that the patriarch had constantly to interfere in cases of disputed succession to bishoprics. At almost every vacancy in the provincial dioceses there were parties formed each with their own nominee, ready to schismatise if they could not secure recognition and consecration for him. It is evident that monophysitism does not foster the generous, tolerant, humane virtues of Christianity. ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... his studies he received a government appointment in the provincial capital of Westphalia, Muenster. Here, in this conservative old town, began one of the most extraordinary relations between man and woman in modern German literary history. Immermann fell in love with Countess Elisa von Luetzow-Ahlefeldt, wife of the famous old commander of volunteers, Brigadier-General ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... place with the Auckland Provincial Council, which had in 1853 formed its own library. It was decided that it would be to the advantage of both legislatures to possess a joint library, and on the motion of the chairman the Council was approached ...
— Report of the Chief Librarian - for the Year Ended 31 March 1958: Special Centennial Issue • J. O. Wilson and General Assembly Library (New Zealand)
... grave provincial magnates long had held serene debate On the Treaty of Alliance and the high affairs ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis
... plot by which to trick the Parisians, to decoy and dupe and snare them, to drive them into a trap, and make them go and come and sweat and hope and turn pale,—a plot by which to amuse himself, the old provincial cooper, sitting there beneath his gloomy rafters, or passing up and down the rotten staircase of his house in Saumur. His nephew filled his mind. He wished to save the honor of his dead brother without the cost of a penny to the son or to himself. His own funds he was about ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... character, and the amount of the bloodshed, in itself great, was much exaggerated in the reports which flew, like wildfire, throughout the Peninsula—for the French were as eager to overawe the provincial Spaniards, by conveying an overcharged impression of the consequences of resistance, as their enemies in Madrid were to rouse the general indignation, by heightened details of the ferocity of the invaders ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... in the language of Lower Saxony, a heap of sheaves. Hocken was the act of piling up these sheaves; and in that valuable repertory of old and provincial German words, the Woerterbuch of J.L. Frisch, it is shown to belong to the family of words which signify ...
— Notes & Queries,No. 31., Saturday, June 1, 1850 • Various |
