"Equivocal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you were consul, and you had yourself a full view of them in our conversations and discussions. Yet from the very first my feelings were hurt by many circumstances, when, on your mooting the question of the full restoration of my position, I detected the covert hatred of some and the equivocal attachment of others. For you received no support from them either in regard to my monuments, or the illegal violence by which, in common with my brother, I had been driven from my house; nor, by heaven, did they shew the goodwill ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... ask old ladies to tea, Or invite male supporters to crumpets or cricket; Should a snug Party Club prove a trifle too free, Or give an equivocal "treat," or hat-ticket; A seven years' nursing of Slopville-on-Slime, A well-fought Election and Glorious Victory (Crowed o'er by proud Party prints at the time) May—lose you your Seat. It ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 24, 1892 • Various
... divinity. The severe schools shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein, as in a portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some real ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... fence with Indiana Frusk. It gave her, therefore, no satisfaction to find herself included among Madame Adelschein's intimates. It embarrassed her to feel that she was expected to be "queer" and "different," to respond to pass-words and talk in innuendo, to associate with the equivocal and the subterranean and affect to despise the ingenuous daylight joys which really satisfied her soul. But the business shrewdness which was never quite dormant in her suggested that this was not the moment for such scruples. She must make the best of what she could get and wait her ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... Tilden was not an orator, and did not follow the example of Mr. Seymour or Mr. Greeley in going before the people, but skillfully and quietly directed all the movements of the canvass. In spite of his personal fidelity to hard money, the equivocal position of his party was used against him with great effect. The fact that the Republicans had passed the Resumption measure, and that the Democrats had demanded the repeal of its most important feature, made a clear and sharp issue, and the pronounced record of Mr. ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... sitting in church courts with these brethren, [47:1] and desirous to be known not as apostles, but as elders. [47:2] We possess little information respecting either their official or their personal history. A very equivocal, and sometimes contradictory, tradition [47:3] is the only guide which even professes to point out to us where the greater number of them laboured; and the same witness is the only voucher for the ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... be summer; but, above all, the very name of Palm Sunday (a festival in the English church) troubled me like an anthem. "Sunday!" what was that? That was the day of peace which masked another peace deeper than the heart of man can comprehend. "Palms!" what were they? That was an equivocal word; palms, in the sense of trophies, expressed the pomps of life; palms, as a product of nature, expressed the pomps of summer. Yet still even this explanation does not suffice; it was not merely by the peace and by the summer, by the ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... difficulty I was permitted to reach my much admired steed, and with a cheer, which was sustained and caught up by every denizen of the village as I passed through, I rode on my way, not a little amused at my equivocal popularity. ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... his young friend to one of the most amiable and frivolous duchesses of the day, a lady whose adventures caused an explosion five years later. Just then, however, she was in the full blaze of her glory; she had been suspected, it is true, of equivocal conduct; but suspicion, while it is still suspicion and not proof, marks a woman out with the kind of distinction which slander gives to a man. Nonentities are never slandered; they chafe because they are ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... thereupon said about the power of the imagination and the effect it was likely to have upon one who had placed himself in such an equivocal situation, and the terrors which, under its influence, might naturally revert to him, who in an excited state of his own nerves had endeavored to inflict such terrors upon another. Hereupon there was a general call upon Aunt Judith, from the youngsters present, to tell us something about ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... only, to the Indian right of occupancy, and that the exclusive power to extinguish that right was vested in that government which might constitutionally exercise it." These facts should be kept in mind when one comes to consider the equivocal course ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... still, at the same time that 'cornet of sugar-plums' may serve to warn young girls of the perils of lingering where fancies, more charming than chastened, come thickly from the first; on the rosy flowery unguarded slopes, where trespasses ripen into errors full of equivocal effervescence, into too palpitating issues. The anecdote puts La Palferine's genius before you in all its vivacity and completeness. He realizes Pascal's entre-deux, he comprehends the whole scale ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... is the basal element in the laughable? What common ground can we find between the grimace of a merry-andrew, a play upon words, an equivocal situation in a burlesque and a scene of high comedy? What method of distillation will yield us invariably the same essence from which so many different products borrow either their obtrusive odour or their delicate perfume? The greatest of thinkers, from Aristotle downwards, ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... define the flavour of that speech, but Renouard received it with an austerely equivocal smile. The professor stepping into the boat opened his parasol and sat down in the stern-sheets waiting for the ladies. No sound of human voice broke the fresh silence of the morning while they walked the broad path, Miss Moorsom a little in ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... a prophet when I warned you to expect new extravagances from the Duc de Chaulnes's son. Some weeks ago he lost five hundred pounds to one Virette, an equivocal being, that you remember here. Paolucci, the Modenese minister, who is not in the odour of honesty, was of the party. The Duc de Pecquigny said to the latter, "Monsieur, ne jouez plus avec lui, si vous n'etes pas de moitie." So far was very well. On Saturday, at the Maccaroni Club ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... of his fancy to lead him into the wild and labyrinthian paths of boyish romance; but certain it is, the floating illusions, conjured up by his imagination, exercised a mysterious influence over his heart, that hourly acquired a deeper and less equivocal character. It might have been curiosity in the first instance, or that mere repose of the fancy upon an object of its own creation, which was natural to a young man placed like himself for the moment out of the pale of all female society. It has been remarked, and justly, ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... above all, his readiness of pen, were deemed of no small utility, in promoting the union of the two kingdoms; of which he wrote an able history, in 1709, with two dedications, one to the Queen, and another to the Duke of Queensbury. Soon afterwards he unhappily, by some equivocal writings, rendered himself suspected by both parties, so that he once more retired to Newington in hopes of spending the remainder of his days in peace. His pension being withdrawn, and wearied with politics, he began to compose works of a different kind.—The year 1715 may therefore be regarded ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... avail nothing. I cannot be a hypocrite: I cannot dissemble that I have once been criminal, and that I am, at present, conscious of a thousand weaknesses and self-distrusts. There is but one meagre and equivocal merit that belongs to me. I stick to the truth; yet this is a virtue of late growth. It has not yet acquired firmness to resist the undermining waves of habit, or to be motionless ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... that," remarked the poet Treherne, "you might as well say Squire Vane doesn't exist, and that he's only an allegory for a weathercock." Something a shade too cool about this sally drew the lawyer's red brows together. He looked across the table and met the poet's somewhat equivocal smile. ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... Ministers. He has assumed the equivocal and suspicious title of "head president of the executive power." The Assembly is to adjourn. We are to be notified at our residences when it is to ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... which the door stood open in the repeal of the Orders in Council. Rufus King insisted that the name all had in mind be given in the resolution; although, he admitted, no one knew whether Clinton would pursue a policy different from Madison's. No man in the country, he said, was more equivocal in his character. He had disapproved the embargo and then receded from his opinion; and, to restore himself to the confidence of his party, he had published a tirade against the Federalists. "If we succeed in promoting his election," thundered the orator, "I fear we may place ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... herself, either by going on, or by turning back, or by standing still, would have signified nothing towards proving that she had intended to put an end to her own life and to that of her child. One shudders to think that innocent women may have suffered an ignominous death, from such equivocal ...
— On the uncertainty of the signs of murder in the case of bastard children • William Hunter
... influenced the alchemists, and which, I believe, they borrowed for their attempted explanations of chemical and physical phenomena. This system of doctrine I have termed "mysticism"—a word which is unfortunately equivocal, and has been used to denote various systems of religious and philosophical thought, from the noblest to the most degraded. I have, therefore, further to define my usage ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... papers for another voyage, then ships will cease to trade; or, if he undertakes to blockade her, and thus collect it, she has not gained her independence by secession. What must she do? If she is contented to live in this equivocal state, all would be well perhaps; but she could not live there. No people in the world could live in that condition. What will they do? They must take the initiative and declare war upon the United States; and the ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... former of these; the way in which that lady reconciles herself to the death of her father; the inflexible Colonel Bath; the insipid Mrs. James, the complaisant Colonel Trent, the demure, sly, intriguing, equivocal Mrs. Bennet, the lord who is her seducer, and who attempts afterwards to seduce Amelia by the same mechanical process of a concert-ticket, a book, and the disguise of a great-coat; his little, fat, short-nosed, red-faced, good-humoured ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the French translator is here rather equivocal, but distinctly bears the construction here given of the marquis being at supper in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... She has not, like the great lady of the past, the demeanor of lofty antagonism; she can crush nothing under foot, it is she who would be crushed. Thus she is apt at Jesuitical mezzo termine, she is a creature of equivocal compromises, of guarded proprieties, of anonymous passions steered between two reef-bound shores. She is as much afraid of her servants as an Englishwoman who lives in dread of a trial in the divorce-court. This woman—so free at a ball, so attractive out walking—is a slave at home; ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... destination. The breeze was steady, but light, and the passage was a delightful one through the narrow channels among the islands. The skipper got up a nice dinner of beefsteak, green corn, and tomatoes, which Mr. Hines declared was equal to the table at the Bay View; and this was no equivocal compliment. ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... in crowds. There are withered, chilly-looking old women in tumbled caps, and young ones in loose jackets and carelessly fastened skirts, with bare heads and tired, faded faces, eloquent of the wretchedness of their lives. There are some men also: tidy old buffers, porters in greasy jackets, and equivocal-looking individuals in black silk hats, while the foot-path is overrun by a swarm of youngsters dragging toy carts without wheels about, filling pails with sand, and screaming and fighting; a dreadful crew, with ragged clothes ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... sadly convulsed. This was in the hall out of Fred's hearing, but Rosamond had opened the drawing-room door, and now came forward anxiously. Lydgate apologized for Mr. Wrench, said that the symptoms yesterday might have been disguising, and that this form of fever was very equivocal in its beginnings: he would go immediately to the druggist's and have a prescription made up in order to lose no time, but he would write to Mr. Wrench and tell ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... Caqueta coming from the south-east, and that the Rio Negro issued immediately from it. (* See the classical memoir of this great geographer in the Journal des Savans, March 1750 page 184. "One fact," says D'Anville, "which cannot be considered as equivocal, after the proofs with which we have been recently furnished, is the communication of the Rio Negro with the Orinoco; but we must not hesitate to admit, that we are not yet sufficiently informed of the manner ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... and opulence is paid, one ought to be pretty sure it is real liberty which is purchased, and that she is to be purchased at no other price. I shall always, however, consider that liberty as very equivocal in her appearance, which has not wisdom and justice for her companions, and does not lead prosperity and plenty ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... demonstrate that political economy, with all its contradictory hypotheses and equivocal conclusions, is nothing but an organization of privilege and misery, I shall have proved thereby that it contains by implication the promise of an organization of labor and equality, since, as has been said, every systematic contradiction is the announcement ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... see the wisdom of my concern for your hasty departure when I add that I know all about the little house in Versailles, that my knowledge is shared by the chief of the Parisian police and the minister of war. If you annoy Miss Harrigan with your equivocal attentions...." ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... problems—its exceeding circumspection; while its great promise is due to its comprehensiveness—its generous provision for all interests and points of view. But its very breadth and complexity render this philosophy peculiarly liable to the equivocal use of conceptions. This may be readily understood from the nature of the central doctrine of absolute idealism. According to this doctrine it is proposed to define the universe as an absolute spirit; or a being infinite, ultimate, ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... members of the family, as he did not know their addresses. However, he retreated into the background on the arrival of two relatives, whom three lines in the newspapers had roused from the forgetfulness in which Claude himself, no doubt, had left them. There was an old female cousin,* with the equivocal air of a dealer in second-hand goods, and a male cousin, of the second degree, a wealthy man, decorated with the Legion of Honour, and owning one of the large Paris drapery shops. He showed himself good-naturedly condescending in his elegance, and desirous of displaying ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... Rowland, and then went to kiss her grandmother, who began to cry when she saw her. Mr Prothero suppressed a very equivocal question concerning the reason of her again ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... Jane," said another, with an equivocal expression, with which Jane was made content; and, after a full half-hour's confabulation, in the primitive style, the parties separated—each, in her way, to give as much circulation to Betty's inuendoes as the importance of the ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... to account for the war with Masinissa, and not contented with the humiliation of their old rival, aimed at her absolute ruin, though she had broken no treaties. The Carthaginians, broken-hearted, sent embassy after embassy, imploring the Senate to preserve peace, to whom the senators gave equivocal answers. The situation of Carthage was hopeless and miserable—stripped by Masinissa of the rich towns of Emporia, and on the eve of another conflict with the ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... with his eyes turned towards the door, remained silent, again sad, reflecting no doubt on all the difficult, equivocal present, so different from the glorious past. But all at once he turned to Pierre, who was still waiting. "And so, my friend," said he, "you are staying at the Palazzo Boccanera? Ah! what a grievous misfortune there has ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... end of my lecture, Mr. Dammit indulged himself in some very equivocal behavior. For some moments he remained silent, merely looking me inquisitively in the face. But presently he threw his head to one side, and elevated his eyebrows to a great extent. Then he spread out the palms of his hands and shrugged up his shoulders. Then he winked with ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... do not well know what to say. The subject of them seems to be somewhat equivocal; but many of them are highly beautiful in themselves, and interesting as they relate to the state of the personal feelings of the author. The following are some ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... guerrilla."—"I like your spirits," I said. "They are worthy of a better cause."—"Take another swallow of 'em," he replied, handing me the canteen. I toasted him: "Here's hoping you gorillas will outlive the Southern Confederacy!"—"A d—d equivocal sentiment," observed my fire-eating, fire-drinking Masonic brother; "but here we are at Meacham's ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague
... Paullus in one day gave up seventy townships in Epirus to plunder, and sold the inhabitants, 150,000 in number, into slavery. The Aetolians lost Amphipolis, and the Acarnanians Leucas, on account of their equivocal behaviour; whereas the Athenians, who continued to play the part of the begging poet in their own Aristophanes, not only obtained a gift of Delos and Lemnos, but were not ashamed even to petition for the deserted site of Haliartus, which was ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the quaint arrangements of the rambling building, and their yet quainter fittings. Here, a cabinet, painted and carved in a sentimental but vicious style; there, an equivocal-looking chapel, studded with enamels and mother-of-pearl, with miniatures on ivory wrought out in relief, like those on old-fashioned snuff-boxes; there, one of those pretty Florentine retreats, adapted to the hypochondriasis of women, and even then called boudoirs. Everywhere—on the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... malevolence and opposition. It will not be doing him injustice to say, that, besides the little underhand intrigues which he is frequently practising, there has hardly been any great military question, in which his advice has been asked, that it has not been given in an equivocal and designing manner, apparently calculated to afford him an opportunity of censuring me, on the failure of ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... it saw fit, provided only that the evidence was relevant to the issue raised by the indictment, and that if an overt act was proved "in the course of the whole evidence," that would be sufficient. The day following the Court read an opinion which is a model of ambiguous and equivocal statement, but the purport was fairly clear: for the moment the Court would not interfere, and the prosecution was free to proceed as it thought best, with the warning that the Damocles sword of "irrelevancy" was suspended ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... this somewhat equivocal form of expression, that flagellation was threatened, Taddy obeyed, still feeling his smarting ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... factory, will be quite likely, when B., C., and D. erect factories in his immediate neighborhood, to hold his peace when sundry varieties of swill milk are offered at his door, instead of speaking out an equivocal protest against the insult thus offered to his professional ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... compelled to will as it does will, is determined to determine as it does determine, and hence that its apparent freedom is illusory. Hobbes' definition, it may be urged, when applied to the case of the Will, is equivocal. No doubt a man is free as to his action, if there be an 'absence of all impediments' to his action—or, in other words, if he is able to act as he wills to act. But it does not follow that he is free as to his will, even though there be an absence of all ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... our feelings being hurt by having to give an answer on the basis proposed to us by the British then it would not have been necessary for the people to come together at Vereeniging. But in matter of fact we have come here with a proposal, which, rightly understood, is nearly equivocal to the Middelburg proposal, and which meets the wishes of the English Government ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... emblem—to the accompaniment of a significant clash of arms and roll of drums from the mustered garrison outside—in the normal manner; and after a solemn warning from the commandant that vengeance would follow any act of aggression, the council broke up. To the forest leader's equivocal announcement that he would bring all of his wives and children in a few days to shake hands with their English fathers, Gladwyn ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... exposition—strange as the proceeding appears to us—as short and as clear as the most admirable literary skill could contrive. That eccentric ambition dominates the writings of the times. In a purely literary direction it is illustrated by the famous but curiously rambling and equivocal controversy about the Ancients and Moderns begun in France by Perrault and Boileau. In England the most familiar outcome was Swift's Battle of the Books, in which he struck out the famous phrase about sweetness and light, 'the two noblest ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... this theory. He now, however, retracts it, and finds by more decisive experiments, that the electrical fluid can neither forward nor retard vegetation. Uncorrected still of the rage of drawing general conclusions from partial and equivocal observations, he hazards the opinion that light promotes vegetation. I have heretofore supposed from observation, that light affects the color of living bodies, whether vegetable or animal; but that either the one or the other receives nutriment from that fluid, must be permitted to be doubted ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... to present my billet on a respectable looking house, the door was opened by the lady of it, wearing a most gingerly aspect. She told me, with an equivocal sort of look, that she had two spare beds in the house, and that either of them were at my service; and, by way of illustration, shewed me into a sort of servant's room, off the kitchen, half full of apples, onions, potatoes, ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... me off my feet!" cried the Philosopher. I groped hurriedly for a compliment which would match the equivocal fervour of this, but I could not ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... his aspirations becoming deeper and wider, his mind ceased always to follow his heart. But the latter following rather the former, though with sadness and fatigue, and all the problems of life becoming more and more enveloped in darkness, it is possible that he passed through gloomy hours, wherein equivocal expressions escaped his pen. In a word, if he avoided dizziness, he was not equally fortunate ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... modifications of our own being, which alone—according to this system—we actually behold, is as thorough idealism as Berkeley's, inasmuch as it equally removes all reality and immediateness of perception, and places us in a dream-world of phantoms and spectres, the inexplicable swarm and equivocal generation of motion in our own brains. (3) That this hypothesis neither involves the explanation nor precludes the necessity of a mechanism and co-adequate forces in the percipient, which, at the more than magic touch of the impulse from without, creates anew for himself ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... difficulty, and with many forebodings and anxious fears, made his first attempt, brings it to his teacher. The teacher, if he is a kind-hearted and considerate man, perhaps briefly commends the effort with some such dubious and equivocal praise as it is "Very well for a beginner," or "As good a composition as could be expected at the first attempt," and then proceeds to go over the exercise in a cool and deliberate manner, with a view of discovering and bringing out clearly and conspicuously to the view, ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... faith both the question was put and the answer treasured up—what serious influence it often exercised both upon public and private proceeding. The hexameter verses in which the Pythian priestess delivered herself were indeed often so equivocal or unintelligible, that the most serious believer, with all anxiety to interpret and obey them, often found himself ruined by the result. Yet the general faith in the oracle was no way shaken by such painful experience. For as the unfortunate issue always ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... and vials on the table glittered with an equivocal friendliness, as though something of the demeanour of him who had prescribed their contents adhered ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... any appearance of God, this eternal deprivation would have been equivocal, and might have as well corresponded with the absence of all divinity, as with the unworthiness of men to know Him; but His occasional, though not continual, appearances remove the ambiguity, If He appeared ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... cream complexion under a plenteous harvest of flaxen hair would not be associated in America with anyone very serious. There she would have been thought arrayed by Nature as a tearing blonde, suitable for the equivocal light stage, or as a frivolous artist's model, or as promenade girl in a suit and cloak house. But in Fraeulein the extraordinary combination of volatile comeliness and unimpeachable earnestness daily worked growing ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... politic, is a very equivocal term: true union is such a harmony as makes all the particular parts, as opposite as they may seem to us, concur to the general welfare of the society, in the same manner as discords in music contribute to the general melody of sound. Union may prevail in a state ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... well, that nothing bears But the free comfort which from thence he hears; But he bears both the sentence and the sorrow That, to pay grief, must of poor patience borrow. These sentences, to sugar or to gall, Being strong on both sides, are equivocal: But words are words; I never yet did hear That the bruis'd heart was pierced through the ear.— I humbly beseech you, proceed to the affairs ...
— Othello, the Moor of Venice • William Shakespeare
... is frequently said, we are aware, that if God had pardoned the sinner without enforcing the demands of the law, he would have displayed his mercy alone, and not his justice; but in fact this would have been a very equivocal display of mercy. It would have shown only one of two things: either that God regarded the sinner with an eye of compassion, or that he did not regard his sin: either that he was merciful, or that he had no great abhorrence of sin: either that he loved the transgressor, or that he did ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... days it was not infrequently said, "If a surgeon is called in he is sure to operate.'' Not only have the public said this, but even physicians have been known to suggest it, and have indeed used the equivocal expression, the "apotheosis of surgery,'' in connexion with the operative treatment of a serious abdominal lesion. But fortunately the public have found out that the surgeon, being an honest man, does not advise operation ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... preeminently the land of material progress. Here the prize was within every man's reach: patient industry need never doubt its reward; nay, in defiance of the four Gospels, assiduity in pursuit of gain was promoted to the rank of a duty, and thrift and godliness were linked in equivocal wedlock. Politically she was free; socially she suffered from that subtle and searching oppression which the dominant opinion of a free community may exercise over the members who compose it. As a whole, ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... esteemed worship does not see his way to himself suggest opposition to this course in our Town Council, or in our Provincial Council, and the Most Worshipful the Assessors do not either see theirs; it being, as you know, an equivocal and onerous thing for either council to express or suggest in their assembly views antagonistic to those of the Prefecture, so that I fear, most honoured and reverend friend, it will not be in my power farther to press this matter, and I fear also that your ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... somewhat equivocal. "She never said she was unhappy," she replied. Her husband sniffed and resumed his pacing ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... pursue a course so equivocal without arousing suspicion. In after years many who had been committed to it became ashamed of their actions, and loudly proclaimed that they had really been devoted to the Union; to which it was sufficient to answer that if this had been the case, and if ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... commonwealth. I knew your father and your grandfather. They were men of the highest courage and of unimpeachable honor. Their devotion to the South cannot be questioned. I grieve more than I can say to find you in so equivocal a position. I am convinced that there is some explanation for it, and I ask you, not as your general, but as your friend, ...
— A Little Traitor to the South - A War Time Comedy With a Tragic Interlude • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... avowed, the world never excuses, but which it is more apt to overlook, when the appearances are saved, and the transgression is secret and concealed. Even those, who know with equal certainty, that the fault is committed, pardon it more easily, when the proofs seem in some measure oblique and equivocal, than when they are direct and undeniable. The same idea is presented in both cases, and, properly speaking, is equally assented to by the judgment; and yet its influence is different, because of the different manner, in which it ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... be standing in view of my house to-day for two or three hours in the course of your business, so do please call and see me. I am sadly disappointed that you have not come before, for can I help anxiety about my own equivocal relation to you?—especially now my aunt's fortune has brought me more prominently before society? Your daughter's presence here may be the cause of your neglect; and I have therefore sent her away for the morning. Say you come on business—I ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... said she, 'for a woman to quarrel with curiosity; so far from complaining of yours, I am come merely with a design to gratify it, and only expect you will judge of my desire to oblige you by my readiness in obeying your commands; were I myself the subject, the motive for my obedience might be equivocal.' ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... the habit of wearing a costume much resembling that of the military dandies of the period. Choiseul meeting him in this equivocal garb, proceeded to be funny at his expense by putting to him all sorts of ironical and embarrassing questions. But Pecour felt all the vanity of a successful rival and was good natured. Then the Duke began to make sneering remarks ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... all this disguise and mystery, and a doubt again arose in his mind as to the propriety of taking passengers who came on board under such equivocal circumstances. A feeling of compassion, however, added to the graceful manners and sweet voice of the lady, decided him to persevere in his original intention; and politely requesting her to make herself at home in the cabin, he returned on deck. Ten minutes later the anchor ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... mixture has resulted a character equivocal and ambiguous, but peculiarly Porto Rican. The heat of the climate has made them lazy, to which end also the fertility of the soil has conduced; the solitary life of the country residents has rendered them morose ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... of an armory! What a distinct and memorable revelation of ancient Greece is the Venus or Apollo, a Parthenon frieze or a fateful drama! The best political essays on the French Revolution are based on the economical and social facts recorded in the Travels of Arthur Young. The equivocal action of Massena, when he commanded Paris against the Allies, is explained in the recently published letter of Joseph Bonaparte, wherein we learn his deficiency of muskets. Humboldt accounted for the defects of Prescott's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... happy. He descended to the street and turned his steps homeward. At last something was accomplished. The serpent's fangs were drawn. He experienced a cynical amusement in the thought that the path of true love had been smoothed by such equivocal means. Neither of the children would ever know of the shadows that had gathered so closely ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... Macbeth. "If thou speakest false, thou shalt hang alive upon the next tree, till famine end thee. If thy tale be true, I care not if thou dost as much by me"; for Macbeth now began to faint in resolution, and to doubt the equivocal speeches of the spirits. He was not to fear till Birnam wood should come to Dunsinane; and now a wood did move! "However," said he, "if this which he avouches be true, let us arm and out. There is no flying hence, nor staying here. I begin to be weary of the sun, and ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... of Hans increased, and he looked towards the door with the most cowardly intention; and, lo! two laughing, dimpled faces, were peeping in at them. "Ha! how are you?" said the stranger; "come in! come in!" and to Hans' horror, two very equivocal damsels entered the shop. Hans felt scandalised, and was about to make a most powerful remonstrance, when he encountered the eye of his impertinent customer; and, from its sinister expression, he thought it wise to be silent. One of the damsels seated ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 16, 1841 • Various
... repeat—that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man—a man of restless and versatile intellect—who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... also sweet reasonableness and an entire accordance with the fitness of things is a question no doubt capable of being debated. Me the situation strikes, I must confess, as a little grotesque. The layman in the wide sense, the amateur, always occupies a rather equivocal position when he addresses experts and the profession; but his position is never so equivocal as when he doubles the part of non-expert with that of candid friend. How Mr Arnold succeeded in this exceedingly delicate attempt I do not propose to examine at any length. He thought ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... or verses, and these being thrown into an urn, the first that was taken out was delivered to the family.[11] Health, prosperity in worldly affairs, and all that was intermixed in the good or evil of this world were regulated by the responses or signs which these equivocal, not to say less than absurd, means afforded, of prying into the womb of ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... enter into is commonly known by the name of the Story of the Three Seals. It is to be found in the Appendix, No. 10, to the First Report of the state and condition of the East India Company, made in 1773. The word Report, my Lords, is sometimes a little equivocal, and may signify sometimes, not what is made known, but what remains in obscurity: the detail and evidence of many facts referred to in the Report being usually thrown into the Appendix. Many people, and I among the rest, (I take shame to myself for ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... five years to her age. If she had been put upon her trial for murder, the police reporters would have discovered traces of great beauty in her countenance. An ordinary spectator, having no occasion to spice a paragraph, would have made the equivocal remark that she had once ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... Mrs. Royston had built for her, and the abundance of warm furnishings and nutritious food, a degree of luxury indeed which was hardly known elsewhere in the Boundary. Her prosperity had evolved the equivocal advantage of restoring her prestige as a sibyl, and she had entered upon a new lease of the practice of the dark arts of fortune-telling and working charms and spells. He gave a humorous account of her ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... weak spot in Hooker's character than the odd pride he took in Mr. Lincoln's somewhat equivocal letter to him at the time of his ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... fault. I gave you the opportunity. You failed to profit by it. You got drunk the first night you arrived. Kenneth Traynor was a temperate man. Is it no wonder you excited wonder and talk? Then you were stupid under questioning and gave equivocal answers. Your explanation to Parker about the diamonds was more than unfortunate; it was idiotic. His suspicions were at once aroused. He may yet give us trouble before we have time to get rid of the stones. Finding the wife eluded ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... notice his proffered arm, Chloe walked beside him in a sudden pensive silence which Anstice found oddly appealing after her impetuous speech; and for a moment he forgot his own equivocal position in a desire to help her through what he guessed to ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... of fear had passed, and she seemed less concerned about the equivocal situation than a girl should be; at least, this is the way Tom's thought was shaping itself. He tried to imagine Ardea in Nan's place, but the thing was baldly unimaginable. A daughter of the Dabneys would never run and cower and beg to be hidden at the possible cost of her good name. And ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... presence which in itself he conceived to be a challenge was to demonstrate itself for this in no equivocal terms. ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... weather of "the mistress's" moods without complaint, and be willing to take buffets or caresses according to the temper of the hour. To Kirstie, thus situate and in the Indian summer of her heart, which was slow to submit to age, the gods sent this equivocal good thing of Archie's presence. She had known him in the cradle and paddled him when he misbehaved; and yet, as she had not so much as set eyes on him since he was eleven and had his last serious illness, the tall, slender, refined, and rather melancholy ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not entirely lose his presence of mind; for in that case he would have sunk on the earth or started backward; whereas he kept his ground and smiled at Jacob, who nodded his head up and down, and said, "Hoich, Zavy!" in a painfully equivocal manner. David's heart was beating audibly, and if he had had any lips they would have been pale; but his mental activity, instead of being paralysed, was stimulated. While he was inwardly praying (he ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... still early morning when he was roused from his slumbers by the entrance of the proprietor of the barn, a sturdy, good-humoured peasant, more surprised, than pleased, to find upon his premises a stranger of Paco's equivocal appearance. The muleteer's exterior was certainly not calculated to give a high opinion of his respectability. His uniform jacket of dark green cloth was soiled and torn; his boina, which had served him for a ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... love-letter was brought to him. It purported to come from the lady at whom he had flung the comfits;[27] offered him her heart, and begged an interview with him. The bearer was a masked woman, who owned to an equivocal position in Count Guido's household. Caponsacchi saw through the trick, declined the proposed interview on the ground of his priesthood, and completed his answer with an allusion to the husband, which would punish ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... by a beggar. Banes, Frasers weel-baned. Bannockburn, guide to, refusing an Englishman's five shillings. Bannockburn, Scottish remark upon. Baptism, minister and member of his flock. Barclay of Ury, M. P., walk to London Bathgate, mending the ways of Beadle, equivocal compliment to minister's sermons Beadle or Betheral, character of Beast, a stumbling, at least honest 'Becky and I had a rippit, for which I desire to be humble' Begg, Dr., on Scottish morality of the present day Beggar, expressing his thanks to a clerical patron Bellman of Craigie, ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... as it became evident that she did not mean to give any explanation. To have the Curate to stay with her was possible, without infringing upon her position; but matters became very different when she showed herself willing to take "any one," even when in equivocal ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... grand reception had a raised dais only a little lower than that provided for the duchess de Berri. At a dinner at Baron Rothschild's, Careme, the Delmonico of those times, surprised her with a column of ingenious confectionery architecture on which was inscribed her name spun in sugar. It was a more equivocal compliment when Walter Scott christened two pet donkeys ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... This said, without the movement on either side of a single muscle, the two gentlemen passed to other subjects; and I inferred, upon the whole, that, having detected my manoeuvre, they wished to put me on my guard in the only way open to them. At any rate, this was the sole personality, or equivocal allusion of any sort, which ever met my ear during the years that I asserted my right to be as poor as I chose. And, certainly, my censors were right, whatever were the temper in which they spoke, kind or unkind; for a little extra care in the use of clothes ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... should not leave one's courier there (in order to receive letters) and reside instead with one's maid at Monte Carlo; true, further, that it is unwise to gamble heavily, to lose largely, to confide the misfortune to a man of Paul's equivocal position and reputation, to borrow twenty thousand francs of him, to lose or spend all, save what served to return home with, and finally to acknowledge the transaction and the obligation both very cordially by word of mouth and (much worse) in letters which were—well, ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... it, she might at once throw aside her reticence and furnish him with the information he so greatly needed. But it would be a delicate matter to bring her to that point of view, unconscious as she must be of her equivocal position. He could not go to her and tell her that in order to announce their engagement he must be able to tell the world who and what she really was. The most he could do would be to tell her exactly what papers were ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... no doubt must hang over the negotiation. The money, with pledges, and thine own conscience for arbiter between us; but no equivocal dealings, to be followed by a disappointment, under the pretence that second parties ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... my room-fellow was told that he was to be sent South immediately: he received the news very stolidly, and betrayed no impatience during the interval that elapsed before the exchange-steamer could be got ready. Truth to say, it is rather an equivocal advantage—to be turned loose in a city where famine-prices prevail, utterly penniless. But, if my mate did not exult in his prospects, neither did he in any way despond. He "supposed he'd get along somehow;" indeed, he had plenty of a very ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... and who was both associated with him and opposed to him in party strife, repeatedly represents him as illegitimate; and states that he was 'a natural son of the house of Bolingbroke.' Lord Bacon's account of his origin is equivocal—calling him 'a gentleman as it seems of an ancient house and name.' By genealogists and heralds a legitimate pedigree is assigned to him, deducing his descent in the right male line from William St. John, who came in with the Conqueror; but ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... master. In case Isaaco wishes to go back, we beg you will not let him do so; but if he wishes to go on, on his mission to Sego, we also beg and hope you will give him all assistance, and some trusty persons to conduct him to Sego. [Footnote: This equivocal invitation was given to the King, who well knew that the King of Sego was more powerful than him; and if he should injure Isaaco in any manner, he would be driven from ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... physical exercise, has sometimes been advocated as a method of calming sexual excitement, but it seems to be equally equivocal in its action. If it is profoundly interesting and exciting it may stir up rather than lull the sexual emotions. If it arouses little interest it is unable to exert any kind of influence. This is true even of mathematical occupations which have been advocated by various ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the western States to the ocean. This navigation, although of general benefit, has been always valued and desired, as of peculiar advantage to the Western States, whose demands to obtain it were neither equivocal nor unreasonable. But with the river Mississippi, by a sort of coercion, we acquired, by good or ill fortune, as our future measures shall determine, the whole province of Louisiana. As this acquisition was made at the common expense, ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... construction of the last sentence, and the substitution of the name of the person mentioned, for the degree of affinity in which he was supposed to stand to Tom, might be merely a rigid observance of the best tone of society, or it might be equivocal. All these little distinctions gleamed across the mind of Tom Wychecombe; but that was not the moment to pursue the investigation. Courtesy required that he should make an immediate answer, which he succeeded in doing steadily ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... principle in them which overcame, were of the same nature. The pleasure of doing good to others and of bodily self-indulgence, the pleasures of intellect and the pleasures of sense, are so different:—Why then should they be called by a common name? Or, if the equivocal or metaphorical use of the word is justified by custom (like the use of other words which at first referred only to the body, and then by a figure have been transferred to the mind), still, why should we make an ambiguous word the corner-stone of moral philosophy? ...
— Philebus • Plato
... had been something equivocal in the expression of the Indian's face. Every word he uttered about the party, its numbers, and his own manner of falling in with it, was true, and his countenance indicated that he was dealing fairly. Still, the captain fancied that ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... his eyes. It was rather an equivocal compliment, considering the person to whom she spoke. But he was not one of the kind to take offence, as ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... no evil—is not suspicious—does not lay up slight expressions or equivocal conduct, and reason out evil from them, and suffer it to corrode and sour the mind against an individual; but puts the best construction upon the words and conduct of others that they will bear, ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... dramatic life of the diary of a man of genius, like Swift, who wrote one, or even of a lively observer, who lived amidst the scenes he describes, as Horace Walpole's letters to Sir Horace Mann, which form a regular diary, only show that they are better acquainted with the more ephemeral and equivocal labours. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... recalling thus to his memory all she had told him in her soft, sweet voice, he asked himself if she had not really been slandered; and, if there was actually something amiss in her past life, why should it not rather be laid at the door of those two equivocal personages who watched over her, ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... Notwithstanding our correspondent's equivocal title to this article, we beg to assure our readers, who may suspect us of diablerie, that we are not a party to the purchase or sale. Could an ejectment in this case be effected ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 279, October 20, 1827 • Various
... and she sank, as if lifeless, on a couch. She was soon restored, however, and surrounded by the seemingly affectionate caresses of her envious mother and jealous sisters. She had to hear all their arguments to persuade her to prefer her present splendid misery to the equivocal boon of having found out a poor, destitute brother, though it was not yet clear whether she could call him by that name. ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... observation may be set aside; first, because the so-called facts are in their own nature equivocal; secondly, because they stand on insufficient authority; thirdly, because they are not sufficiently numerous. But, in this case, the disease is one of striking and well-marked character; the witnesses are experts, interested ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the morrow full of secrecy and other things more equivocal still in appearance. Her burden proved, however, to be a bundle of rags which, she assured Ippolita, represented all that was necessary ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... something equivocal in all this; and I pointed this out when outlining and discussing the different theories of matter. It consists in taking from among the whole body of sensations certain of them which are considered to be special, and which ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... absurdity, that in freely exposing the servile practices of dedicators, the writer was himself indulging in that luxurious sin, which he so forcibly terms "Public Prostitution." This early management betrays no equivocal symptoms of that traffic in Dedications, of which he has been so severely accused,[152] and of that paradoxical turn and hardy effrontery which distinguished his after-life. These dedications led to preferment, and thus hardily was laid the foundation-stone ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... practice. July 1st I attended a lady in labor, who was afterwards quite ill and feverish; but at the time I did not consider her case a decided puerperal fever. On the 8th I attended one who did well. On the 12th, one who was seriously sick. This was also an equivocal case, apparently arising from constipation and irritation of the rectum. These women were ten miles apart and five from my residence. On 15th and 2Oth two who did well. On 25th I attended another. This was a severe labor, and followed by unequivocal puerperal fever, or peritonitis. She recovered. ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... own. His having taken the same great step in the same free way had not in the least involved the relegation of his daughter. That it was remarkable they should have been able at once so to separate and so to keep together had never for a moment, from however far back, been equivocal to her; that it was remarkable had in fact quite counted, at first and always, and for each of them equally, as part of their inspiration and their support. There were plenty of singular things they were NOT enamoured of—flights of brilliancy, of audacity, of originality, ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... sister would be found to have much in common. But he was more or less consciously building on the hope that Dalton's suit would prosper, and that Lettice would settle down quietly as the mistress of Angleford Manor, and so be weaned from the somewhat equivocal situation of a successful author. It did not so much as enter his mind, by the way, that there was anything equivocal in Mrs. Westray's authorship. Her book had failed, and her husband was very wealthy, so that she could not be suspected ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... was more equivocal. A blind reverence for authority, a habit of speculation, instead of experiment, so pernicious in physics, in short, an ignorance of the true principles of philosophy, often led the scholars of that day in a wrong direction. Even when they took ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... equivocal smile on the face of nearly every one present as they looked at the Member of Congress and awaited his reply. What that would have been they never knew, because just at that moment entered Mr. Sefton, breathing peace and good will. He had heard the last words, ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... these beasts have been able to disturb you; but fear not," he continued, as she was about to speak, "I also am here to protect you," and he accompanied the words, with a glance that left the nature of the protection offered more than equivocal. ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... but you used a phrase which has a very equivocal significance; you are unfortunate in ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... company of the sophisticated who have chafed under the omnipresent influence of a "good example" and stilled the painless pangs of an unruly conscience. With splendid satire for the base, with shrill condemnation for tyranny and oppression, with the scorpion-lash for the equivocal, the fraudulent, and the insincere, Mark Twain inspires the growing body of reformers in all countries who would remedy the ills of democratic government with the knife of publicity. The wisdom of human experience and of sagacious tolerance informing his books for the young, provokes the ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... wit of a girl who would hazard such a silly adventure, he found himself pitying her plight, guessing that she was really sorry. But as to what was going on in the master's cabin he had no way of ascertaining. He wondered whether Captain Downs would marry the couple in such equivocal fashion. ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... to meet her face to face, and to trust and try himself alone with her. The result of all which appears in a greater freshness and reality of delineation. Here the persons have nothing of a dim, equivocal hearsay air about them, such as marks in some measure his earlier efforts in comedy. The characters indeed are not pitched in so high a key, nor conceived in so much breadth and vigour, as in several of the plays written at earlier dates: the plan of the work did not require this, or even ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... 1832 abrogated the Parliamentary Opposition of England, which had practically existed for more than a century and a half. And what a series of equivocal transactions and mortifying adventures did the withdrawal of this salutary restraint entail on the party which then so loudly congratulated themselves and the country that they were at length relieved from its odious repression! In the hurry of existence one is apt too generally to pass ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... Hendrie's interesting note the explanation of the symbolical language of this recipe; though we cannot agree with him in supposing Theophilus to have so understood it. We have no doubt the monk wrote what he had heard in good faith, and with no equivocal meaning; and we are even ourselves much disposed to regret and resist the transformation of toads into nitrates of potash, and of basilisks ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Bishop of Hippo in Africa, belongs the equivocal distinction of having originated in the Christian Church a controversy respecting the Divine decrees, a controversy which dates its origin from the fifth century, and which, after the lapse of thirteen hundred years, ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... of August 10, which the British had not thought fit to add to their fleet, but used simply as carriers; mounting their guns on the fortifications of Kingston. Cooper justly remarks, "This sufficiently proves the equivocal advantage enjoyed by the possession of these craft." Chauncey himself, at the end of the campaign, recommended the building of "one vessel of the size of the 'Sylph,'"—three hundred and forty tons,—"in lieu of all the heavy schooners; ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... province of Asia. The fall of Gracchus made an independent judgment by the people impossible, and, even had it been practicable for the Comitia to decide, their judgment must have been so perplexed by rival interests and arguments that they would probably have acquiesced in the equivocal decision of the senate. This decision was that Phrygia should be free.[550] It was to be open to the Roman capitalist as a trader, but not as a collector; it was not to be the scene of official corruption or regal aggrandisement. It was ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... lived. But we should hardly call him indulgent to-day. Good as he was to his boy, it had always been with the goodness of a superior. It was the way of his time. A half-century ago the child's position was equivocal. He lived by the grace of God and his parents, and their duty to him was rather a duty to society, born of an abstract morality. Love was given him, not as a right, but as an indulgence. And young Jacob Dolph, in all his grief and anxiety, was guiltily conscious of a secret ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner |
