"Servile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... expressions of them appear in the records of thought extant for the first century and more of English colonial experience. And when apprehensions did arise they were concerned with the dangers of servile revolt, not with any deleterious effects to arise from the economic nature of slavery ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... preached the gospel of humanity with impassioned zeal. America fully appreciates Goethe and Kant, looks upon them as cornerstones of elevated culture. Do you really believe that we have changed our natures, that our souls can be satisfied with military drill and servile obedience? We are soldiers because we have to be soldiers, because otherwise Germany and German civilization would be swept away from the face of the earth. It has cost us long and weary struggles to attain our independence, and we know full ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... thought, a social stratum, which, instead of leading, is getting more and more opposed to the great bulk of the most vigorous elements of the society. The stage is ceasing to be a truly national organ, and begins to suit itself to the tastes of the unprincipled and servile courtiers, who, if they are not more immoral than their predecessors, are without the old heroic touch which ennobled even the audacious and unscrupulous adventurers of the Armada period. That is to say, the change is beginning ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... susceptible. Women depend too much on their intuitions; they know so little about human nature, and less about man-nature. An intuition is oftentimes a safeguard to woman but more frequently a danger, because it creates within her too much of a servile dependence upon mere impulses and first impressions. My own intuitions are strong, but I want my knowledge to be stronger. I want to know all there is to know about men, women, and things. Women are usually like open books to me, easily read while ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... minions in disgrace, Stripped of their treasure, stripped of place; What now is all their pride and boast,— The servile slave, the flattering host, The tongues that fed him with applause, The noisy champions of their cause? They press the foremost to accuse His selfish jobs and paltry views. Ah, me! short-sighted were the fools, And false, aye false, the hireling tools. ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... it, was so delighted that he ran from place to place celebrating its excellence. Thomson obtained likewise the notice of Aaron Hill, whom, being friendless and indigent, and glad of kindness, he courted with every expression of servile adulation. ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... be written by the wife of Count Skariatine's steward, and it set forth in rather servile and illiterate language that the said Count Skariatine and his eldest son were both dead, having been seized on the same day with the smallpox, of which there had been an epidemic in the neighbourhood, but which was supposed to have quite disappeared when they fell ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... couldn't miss him. How I used to hate him when I was a boy! I haven't quite got over it yet. I used to outdo myself to make things uncomfortable for him when he came up here—I think it was because he always seemed to be truckling. He was ridiculously servile and polite in those days. He's changed since," added Hugh, dryly. "He must quite have forgotten by this time that ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... moreover, known that slavery is a state little favorable to population. (See Hume's Essay, and Malthus on population, i. 334.—G.) The testimony of Appian (B.C. l. i. c. 7) is decisive in favor of the rapid multiplication of the agricultural slaves; it is confirmed by the numbers engaged in the servile wars. Compare also Blair, p. 119; ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... of initiatory rites, and the ceremonies ordained by the Vedas. [14] Again it is ordained that silence is to be observed by parties of the three sacrificial classes when a Sudra enters to remove their natural defilements, and thus the servile position of the Sudra is recognised. [15] Here it appears that the Sudra is identified with the sweeper or scavenger, the most debased and impure of modern Hindu castes. [16] In the Dharmashastras or law-books it is laid down that a person taking a Sudra's ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... and such institutions which really have a motive in view—steadfastly adhered to—I saw, then as now, that every provincial museum was nothing if left to its own devices, and, if "inspired," was, at the best, but a sorry and servile imitator of the worst points ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... of the whole situation. Almost since the very day when the Pioneer began to blaze the trail of luxury over the railroads of the land, and the autocrat of the Pullman car created his servile but entirely honorable calling, it has been a mooted point. Recently a great Federal commission has blazed the strong light of publicity on it. Robert T. Lincoln, son of the Emancipator, and, as we have already said, the head and front of the Pullman Company, sat ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... progress, hatred of the levelling influence of Paris, love of the Provencal speech, belief in the Latin race, in the Roman Catholic Church, unshaken faith in the future, love of the ideal and hatred of what is servile and sordid, an ardent love of Nature, an intense love of life and movement. These things are reflected in every variety of word and figure. He is not the poet of the romantic type, self-centred, filling his verse with the echoes ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... Life of Christ, though yet unpublished, is said by one who has seen it to be a representation of the Messiah as a divine man, in whom all is pure and sublime, and who made himself remarkable chiefly by his triumphs over vice, falsehood, hatred and the servile spirit of his age. He endeavored to explain the reason for Christianity in the world. He longed for a positive religion. His philosophy is reducible to a philosophy of nature, which has quite a different meaning from that of Schelling, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... it, in the scholastic theology and mystic visions of the Paradiso. Petrarch he greatly admired, though with less idolatry than Dante; and the sonnets here printed will show to all competent judges how fully he had imbibed the spirit, without servile centonism, of the best writers in that style of composition who flourished in ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... amazed all my life in our great people by their dignity, their true and seemly dignity. I have seen it myself, I can testify to it; I have seen it and marvelled at it; I have seen it in spite of the degraded sins and poverty-stricken appearance of our peasantry. They are not servile; and, even after two centuries of serfdom, they are free in manner and bearing,—yet without insolence, and not revengeful and not envious. 'You are rich and noble, you are clever and talented, well be so, God bless you. I respect ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... to the scholastic views current in Paris at his time, and attacked great thinkers like THOMAS AQUINAS (c. 1225-1274) and ALBERTUS MAGNUS (1193-1280), as well as obscurantists, such as ALEXANDER of HALES (ob. 1245). But he himself was a scholastic philosopher, though of no servile type, taking part in scholastic arguments. If he declared that he would have all the works of ARISTOTLE burned, it was not because he hated the Peripatetic's philosophy—though he could criticise as well as appreciate at times,—but because of the ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... is symbolic; a thought, an idea, must always constitute the significance, the soul of its outward form. The mere delusive imitations, the servile copyings of the actual shapes of reality, are not the proper objects of art. To form a master work of art, the idea symbolized must be pure and noble; the technical execution, faultless. No heavier censure can, however, be passed upon an artist, than that he possesses only the technic or rhetoric ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... covenant with death and an agreement with hell!—of that party which tolled the bells, and fired the minute guns, and draped its churches with black, and all-hailed as saint and martyr the instigator of a bloody and servile insurrection in a sister State, the felon and murderer, John Brown! The Radical, the Black Republican, faction, sectional rule, fanaticism, violation of the Constitution, aggression, tyranny, and wrong—all ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... of national decadence. Philip III. gave up the government entirely to the Duke of Lerma, who formed an alliance with the Church, and they led together a joyous life. In the succeeding reign the Church had become such a gnawing cancer upon the state that the servile Cortes had the pluck to protest against its inroads. There were in 1626 nine thousand monasteries for men, besides nunneries. There were thirty-two thousand Dominican and Franciscan friars. In the diocese of ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... in the choice of our objects. We look abroad for a happiness which is to be found only in the qualities of the heart: we think ourselves dependent on accidents; and are therefore kept in suspense and solicitude. We think ourselves dependent on the will of other men; and are therefore servile and timid: we think our felicity is placed in subjects for which our fellow creatures are rivals and competitors; and in pursuit of happiness, we engage in those scenes of emulation, envy, hatred, ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... then, are two definite ethical characters in all engraved work. It is Athletic; and it is Resolute. Add one more; that it is Obedient;—in their infancy the nurse, but in their youth the slave, of the higher arts; servile, both in the mechanism and labor of it, and in its function of interpreting the schools of ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... cultivated and improved; would not such advantages place them more on a level with hired servants, who pay a ready and cheerful obedience to their masters? Were they favoured with the privileges of Christianity, would they not be more faithful and diligent, and better reconciled to their servile condition? Besides, Christianity has a tendency to tame fierce and wild tempers. It is not an easy thing to display the great and extensive influence which the fear of God, and the expectation of a future account, ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... ample supply for their needs and comfort from the surplus product of their labor and apart from the eye of their masters. Still the Helot had in him the common sentiments of our nature. His state was servile and mean. It was not to be expected he would always remain content in his subjection to his superiors in social and civil life. More and more his discontent would menace the stability of the community. Especially ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... Brumha's arm proceeded the military caste. The business of this class is to defend their country when attacked by enemies. From his breast proceeded the third caste, consisting of farmers and merchants. From his feet, the member of inferiority, proceeded the Sudras, or servile caste. Carpenters, braziers, weavers, dyers, and the manual cultivators of the soil, ...
— Dr. Scudder's Tales for Little Readers, About the Heathen. • Dr. John Scudder
... of the other or acknowledging it themselves. The women do not often recur to this equal privilege, for they either retaliate on their husbands by following their own devices or sink into the merest domestic drudges, worn down by tyranny to servile submission. Do not term me severe if I add, that after youth is flown the husband becomes a sot, and the wife amuses herself by scolding her servants. In fact, what is to be expected in any country where ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... the failure of the French to understand the natural drift of events on this side of the Atlantic, and account for the extraordinary, though shortlived, success of Napoleon's wild Mexican scheme. In this article, written with a servile pen, the poet-statesman attacked the character of the people of the United States, and brought out Napoleon's motives in his attempt to obtain, not for France alone, but for Europe at large, a foothold ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... received, now that they had returned home, served only to exasperate them against the pretensions of the superior class, without availing to eradicate their inbred instincts of servility in the presence of the very men they hated. Precisely this self-contemptuous recognition of his own servile feeling, operating on a morose temper, was the key to Hubbard's special bitterness toward the silk stockings. That Perez had none of this peasant's instinct, must, after all, be partly ascribed to the fact that his descent, by his mother's ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... then must the ideal flame that has fed on our noblest desires be content to throw faithful light on the less fragile, less tender beauty of the mighty mass that crushes these desires. Nor does this seem to me to imply a mere drowsy fatalism, or servile acquiescence, or optimism shrinking from action. The sage no doubt must many a time forfeit some measure of the blind, the head-strong, fanatical zeal that has enabled some men, whose reason was fettered and bound, to achieve results that are nigh superhuman; but therefore none the ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... death, so judge whether I have the right to travel first-class and even less to reckon myself of the educated class? But you won't catch them with logic.... One has to resort to deception. I put on a workman's coat and high boots, I assumed a drunken, servile mug and went to the agents: 'Give us a little ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... number actually bear arms in the ranks; thus giving the double advantage of taking so much labor from the insurgent cause, and supplying the places which must otherwise be filled with so many white men. So far as tested, it is difficult to say they are not as good soldiers as any. No servile insurrection, or tendency to violence or cruelty, has marked the measure of emancipation and arming the blacks. Those measures have been discussed in foreign countries, and contemporary with such discussion ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... that foulness keep from sight— Fine manners in the most misfeatured wight; Fine shapes of art by servile fingers moulded; Fine wisdom from a ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... superiority. In their turn, they were eager to proclaim her merits; and, as Sister Frances and Madame de Fleury administered justice with invariable impartiality, the hateful passions of envy and jealousy were never excited in this little society. No servile sycophant, no malicious detractor, could rob or defraud their little virtues of their ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... Carlyle, was expending a type of praise upon the British Army which would have been even more appropriate to the Prussian Army. The Prussian Army ruled Prussia; Prussia ruled Germany; Germany ruled the Concert of Europe. She was planting everywhere the appliances of that new servile machinery which was her secret; the absolute identification of national subordination with business employment; so that Krupp could count on Kaiser and Kaiser on Krupp. Every other commercial traveller ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... hard luck followed him. In all that city of Christian churches he could not obtain the use of a single meeting-house, "in which to vindicate the rights of TWO MILLIONS of American citizens, who are now groaning in servile chains in this boasted land of liberty; and also to propose just, benevolent, and constitutional measures for their relief." So ran an advertisement in the Boston Courier of the sorely tried soul. For two weeks he had gone up and down the town in search ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... republics of Greece, was the permission to take an active interest in public affairs; and Aesop, like the philosophers Phaedo, Menippus, and Epictetus, in later times, raised himself from the indignity of a servile condition to a position of high renown. In his desire alike to instruct and to be instructed, he travelled through many countries, and among others came to Sardis, the capital of the famous king of Lydia, the great patron, in that day, of learning and of learned men. He met at ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... clever, resourceful woman, driven perhaps by necessity, should have made unscrupulous use of their dominant superstitions, and, by naming herself "Daughter of the Sun," have obtained supreme power. The perfect acting of such an assumed character would not prove difficult to her, while their servile worship of the protesting Puritan, whose red hair alone had elevated him to sainthood, proved how easily these savages might be deceived, and led slaves by subtle magic. Yet who was the woman? Whence came she? Why should she ever have ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... life of the Greek. Ancient Egypt had, at least for the initiate, a noble teaching of retribution hereafter to crown the mortal career with fit consummation of joy or woe. Ancient Persia had in its own form a like doctrine. The Hebrews in their servile period caught not a scintilla of the Egyptian faith. In their exile it is probable that they did get some unrecorded influence from their Persian neighbors. Unmistakably, their emigrants to Alexandria, meeting there ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... circumstances of the Doms are much improved, and there is every prospect of their rising into a higher position. They bear, and for many a year they may be expected to bear, indubitable marks of having been for ages a servile, despised, downtrodden class, having no respect from others, and entertaining little respect for themselves. Their improved circumstances will do something towards raising them in the social scale, but we cannot look for high moral excellence ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... alchymist, with a command from the king that he should forthwith present himself at Versailles, and make public trial of his oil and powder. But this did not suit the plans of Delisle. In the provinces he was regarded as a man of no small importance; the servile flattery that awaited him wherever he went was so grateful to his mind that he could not willingly relinquish it, and run upon certain detection at the court of the monarch. Upon one pretext or another he delayed his journey, notwithstanding the earnest solicitations of his good ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... arrival of my fair friend—and once after. On the second occasion (my apartment being next door to the Englishman's) I was obliged to hide my charming guest in the harness room. She consented, with angelic resignation, to immolate her dignity to the servile necessities of my position. A more amiable woman (so far) I never ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... the vain triumph of the imperial lord, Whom servile Rome obeyed, and yet abhorred, Gave to the vulgar gaze each glorious bust, That left a likeness of the brave, or just; What most admired each scrutinising eye Of all that decked that passing pageantry? What ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... Majesty not to show a proper respect for them. I know that this jars upon the ears of many present; they do not consider that a man who holds a public office should be shown any more respect than any one else. The majority rules, and the majority only thinks of its own interests and those of its servile supporters. But even in this community of ours there is a minority that bears the burden of its affairs and represents its honour; and we will never consent to be dragged down into the mire of this "equality" ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... the village Gounde, where I procured relay horses. In some villages they refused to hire horses to me; I then threatened them with my whip, which at once inspired respect and obedience; my money accomplished the same end; it inspired a servile obedience—not ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... he saw nothing extravagant in the Hindoo chronology, nor aught that was monstrous in Hindoo mythology, Karlee yet served to illustrate the arguments of those who contend that Hindoos need not necessarily be all boasters, servile liars, and flatterers. He was not forever saying, "Master very wise man; master all time do good; master all time ispeak right." He never told me that my words were pearls and diamonds that I dropped munificently from my mouth. He never called me "your highness," ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... anguished but stifled moan of the childless father, who had apparently expended his hard-got earnings for the interment of his child—I not only repassed the gates considerably affected, but overpowered with an indescribable dread of impending death. I was now possessed with a servile love of God, arising from fear; an anxiety to please and obey him, to an infinite degree. Alas! even at this early age, how worldly-minded, how pitiful, can be ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... him "as musicians are affected by a false note." It was the combination of this intellectual integrity with extraordinary warmth and simplicity in the affections that made the point of his personality. The snobs and servile apologists of the regime he resisted seem to think they can atone for being hard-hearted by being soft-headed. He reversed, if ever a man did, that relation in the organs. The opposite condition really covers ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... shifting to the ground of the benefactor, even of the servile sort, was not entirely placating, as Ivory Buck's corrugated brow still hinted, but the constant iteration of admiration for his marvelous shrewdness and good fortune was having its effect. The old grudge and sorrow that had gnawed at his heart during so many ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... no worse can come, to fight: And fight and die, is death destroying death; Where fearing dying, pays death servile breath. ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... to all; frank and unreserved to those that loved him, discreet and complaisant to those who hated him; generous and compassionate to the distresses of his fellow-creatures in general; humble, but not servile, to his patron and superiors. Once, when he with a manly spirit justified himself against a malicious imputation, his young Lord, Robert, taxed him with pride and arrogance to his kinsmen. Edmund denied the charge against ...
— The Old English Baron • Clara Reeve
... philosophic method to consist in putting forth strings of brilliant apophthegms, careless about either their consistency or coherence: but of the method of Plato or Aristotle, any more than of that of Kant or Mill, you will find nothing in him. He seems to my simplicity to be at once the most timid and servile of commentators, and the most cloudy of declaimers. He can rave symbolism like Jacob Bohmen, but without an atom of his originality and earnestness. He can develop an inverted pyramid of daemonology, like Father Newman himself, but without ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... manor have, from the earliest times to which we have the means of resorting for information, enjoyed many unusual rights and immunities, and that their services were, in many respects, far from being so base and servile as those ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... is sufficiently suggestive; for he brings out from it at the next step, in the way of formula, the new principle, the new Shaksperian principle of rhetoric: In these things the sense is better judge than the art. And of the servile expressing antiquity in an unlike and an unfit subject, it is well said:—'Quod tempore antiquum videtur, id incongruitate ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... on his ear alike, Now dull in death. Yes, Byron, thou art gone, Gone like a star that through the firmament Shot and was lost, in its eccentric course Dazzling, perplexing. Yet thy heart, methinks, Was generous, noble—noble in its scorn Of all things low or little; nothing there Sordid or servile. If imagined wrongs Pursued thee, urging thee sometimes to do Things long regretted, oft, as many know, None more than I, thy gratitude would build On slight foundations; and, if in thy life Not ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... those with whom they are the most closely connected; and that if they are of humble parentage, and have kindred of slender ability or fortune, they may increase their means of well-being, and reflect honor and worth upon them,—as in fable those who were long in servile condition through ignorance of their parentage and race, when they were recognized and found to be sons either of gods or of kings, retained their love for the shepherds whom for many years they supposed to be their fathers. Much ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... labourer was regarded as in a servile condition, he might be supported from the motives which lead an owner to support his slaves, or by the charitable energies organised by ecclesiastical institutions. He had now ceased to be a serf, and the institutions ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... not to let all this interfere with her work, but it did, and at the sketch-class where she might have shown some rebound from the servile work of the Preparatory, and some originality, she disappointed those whom Charmian had taught to expect anything of her. They took her rustic hauteur and her professed indifference to the distinction of Ludlow's invitation, as her pose. ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... time he was made historiographer to the king, and witnessed many important battles. His life at court was very pleasant to him, and though he was a little too much inclined to be servile, yet he was generally an upright man. The story is told of him, that once when in the bosom of his little family, an attendant of the great duke came to invite him to dinner at the Hotel ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... has noted the poet's perception of historical truth in a matter where it might well have been overlooked; and future critics may perhaps spend their time more profitably in discovering other indications of a like vigilant industry than in laboring to prove that the absence of so servile a virtue has been conducive to his preeminence as a ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... point seems ever from a fact. The past appears to have been always spread out before him when he wrote, like a beautiful landscape, on which his eye rested with complacency, and from which his mind transferred and idealized some objects, without a servile imitation of any. When at Berlin, he had had it in his power to marry Virginia Tabenheim; and in Russia, Mlle. de la Tour, the niece of General Dubosquet, would have accepted his hand. He was too poor to marry either. A grateful recollection caused him to ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... delineating surfaces, such as bark and skins. The examples here shown have already experienced decided changes through the constraints of the ceramic art, but are the most graphic delineations preserved to us. They are free hand products, executed by mere decorators, perhaps by women, who were servile copyists of the forms employed by ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... impossible, can have but inferior value. And there is some radical wrong where the noblest manhood and womanhood are not appreciated and reverenced. Not to recognize genuine worth is the mark of a superficial and vulgar character. The servile spirit has no conception of the heroic nature; and they who measure life by material standards, do not perceive the infinite which is in man and which makes him godlike. A few only in any age or nation love the best, follow ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... Drayton's over-faithful adherence, not so much to the actual story, as to the method of the chronicler from whom his materials are principally drawn. It does not seem to have occurred to him to regard his theme in the light of potter's clay. Following his authority with servile deference, he makes at the beginning a slip which lowers the dignity of his hero, and consequently of his epic. He represents Henry the Fifth's expedition against France as originally prompted, not ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... she must either remain in a Union, where our institutions were to be dragged down; where the laws were to be obeyed in one section, but not in another; where existed open resistance to laws in one State and quiet obedience in another; where servile insurrections were being threatened continuously; where the slaves were aided and abetted by whites at the North in the butcheries of their families; or secede and fight. These were the alternatives on the one part, or a severance from the Union and its consequences ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... race, laid visible hold on the hopeful young man, that he must now take purely satiric estimate of so great an opportunity, with a programme which looked like formal irony on the kingly position, a premeditated mockery of those who yielded him, on demand, a servile reverence never before paid to any French monarch? Well! the amusement, or business, of Parisians, at all events, would still be that of spectators, assisting at the last act of the Valois tragedy, in the course of which fantastic traits and incidents would naturally be ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... occupations—carpenters, smiths, leather-dressers, leeches, prophets, bards, and fishermen, although the main business was agriculture. Cattle were the great staple of wealth, and the largest part of the land was devoted to pasture. The land was tilled chiefly by slaves, and women of the servile class were doomed to severe labor and privations. They brought the water, and they turned the mills. Spinning and weaving were, however, the occupations of all, and garments for men and women were alike ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... irreparable insult; but I care not a farthing if clerks who have never entered upon or trod the paths of chivalry should think me foolish. Knight I am, and knight I will die, if such be the pleasure of the Most High. Some take the broad road of overweening ambition; others that of mean and servile flattery; others that of deceitful hypocrisy, and some that of true religion; but I, led by my star, follow the narrow path of knight-errantry, and in pursuit of that calling I despise wealth, but not honour. I have redressed injuries, righted wrongs, punished insolences, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... and a bed for them, who had got milk for their sustenance, had been almost the last person her conscious eyes had seen in that half-hour of terror on the hillside. Her next memory, after an untold interval, was the rocking of the ship, an old woman who treated her obsequiously, a man who was her servile attendant and yet her jailer—but then, suddenly, as she knelt there, mind and body refused their service. She crumpled down on the soft sand, burying her head ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... dazed, and trembling. His eyes dwelt on Stampa with a new timidity. He found difficulty in straightening his limbs. He was quite insensible of his ridiculous aspect. His clothing, even his hair, was matted with soft snow. In a curiously servile way, he stooped to pick up ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... religion of this normal and spiritual type must be sharply differentiated both from superstition and from legalistic religion. The mark of superstition in his mind is the apprehension of God as capricious, a hard Master, and of such a character that his {309} favour can be gained only by servile flattery or bribery or by spells of magic. Superstition is "a brat of darkness" born in a heart of fear and consternation. It produces invariably "a forced and jejune devotion"; it makes "forms of worship which are grievous and burdensome" to the life; it chills or destroys all free ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... indefinable something in his manner which hinted his hope that you would remember the porter; but he was so civil that he did not snub the meekest and most vexatious of the passengers, and Basil mutely blessed his servile soul. Few white Americans, he said to himself, would behave so decently in his place; and he could not conceive of the American steamboat clerk who would use the politeness towards a waiting crowd that the Canadian purser showed when they all wedged themselves ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of the city was performed by slaves, who ousted the freeman from his chance of a living. There was indeed a certain number of public slaves who did public work for the State; but on the whole the great mass of the servile population worked entirely within the households and on the estates of the rich, and did not interfere to any sensible degree with the labour of the small freeman. As has been justly observed by Salvioli,[78] never at any period ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... we must suppose that it was rather worse than the first. Next came his two "Epistles to Pope, concerning the Authors of the Age," remarkable for nothing but the audacity of affectation with which the most servile of ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... grasp 'the reins of the flying dragon,' see how he walks in daylight on the dusty road! holding his alms-dish, going to beg! Gifted enough to tread down every enemy, lovely enough to gladden woman's heart, with glittering vesture and with godlike crown reverenced he might have been by servile crowds! But now, his manly beauty hidden, with heart restrained, and outward form subdued, rejecting the much-coveted and glorious apparel, his shining body clad with garments gray, what aim, what object, now! Hating the five delights that ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... apostrophized as a "dying" Poet,—the mob, always fickle and always dazzled by outward show, suddenly set up a deafening roar of cheering. The pallid hue of terror vanished from faces that had but lately looked spectrally thin with speechless dread, and crowds of servile petitioners and place-hunters began to press eagerly round their monarch's chariot, ... when all at once a woman in the throng gave a wild scream and rushed away shrieking "THE ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... deities were half-forgotten, and forgotten deities were resuscitated. Sages shook off superstitious bonds, priests forged new fetters on ancient patterns for themselves and their flocks. Philosophy explained away the more degrading myths; myths as degrading were suggested to dark and servile hearts by unscientific etymologies. Over the whole mass of ancient mythology the new mythology of a debased Brahmanic ritualism grew like some luxurious and baneful parasite. It is enough for our purpose if we can show that even in the ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... our words intimate well enough the popular feeling, that the appearance supposes a substance. The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner dependent and servile either on persons, or opinions, or possessions. Beyond this fact of truth and real force, the word denotes good-nature and benevolence: manhood first, and then gentleness. The popular notion certainly adds a condition of ease and fortune; ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... and the freshness and sanity of early morning came into the room when he did. I hung on his arm, and looked up into his dear shrewd eyes, so clear and kind, so full of wisdom. The boarders were with one accord servile to him; even Doctor Krummlaut, a clever man with far better brains probably than Bernd. Bernd, from habit, stiffened and became unapproachable the instant the middle class public in the shape of the congratulatory boarders appeared. He doesn't even ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... regal spoils of the chase; of childlike vanity with barbaric pride. Yet before these the glittering orders and ribbons of the diplomats became dull and meaningless, the uniforms of the officers mere servile livery. Their painted, immobile faces and plumed heads towered with grave dignity above the meaner crowd; their inscrutable eyes returned no response to the timid glances directed towards them. They stood by themselves, ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... constituting it a duchy, and, owing to the two children of his duchy, Mademoiselle de la Valliere assumed the title of Duchess. What a fuss she made at this time! All that was styled disinterestedness, modesty. Not a bit of it. It was pusillanimity and a sense of servile fear. La Valliere would have liked to enjoy her handsome lover in the shade and security of mystery, without exposing herself to the satire of courtiers and of the public, and, above all, to the reproaches of her family and relatives, who nearly all ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... treatise which every statesman should wear as a sign upon his hand and as frontlets between his eyes. His attacks were, in general, directed less against particular abuses than against those deeply-seated errors on which almost all abuses are founded, the servile worship of eminent men and the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... dimpled elbow on the velvet cushioned rail, watched the dancers for a while, then her unamused and almost expressionless gaze swept the tables below with a leisurely absence of interest which might have been mistaken for insolence—and envied as such by a servile world ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... nobility. In the wicked old empires, as in some of their modern survivals to-day, viziers and prime ministers were mostly drawn from the servile classes. It is so in God's kingdom. They who make themselves God's slaves are by Him made kings and priests, and shall reign with Him on earth. If we are slaves, then are we sons and heirs of God ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... the individual soul to God. These are periods when the opportunities for social service are much restricted by a faulty structure of the body politic; periods when secular civilisation is so brutal, or so servile, that the religious life can only be led in seclusion from it. At another time the typical Christian seems to be the active and valiant soldier of a militant corporation. At another, again, he is a philanthropist, who devotes his life to the redress of some ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... thousands, and their number is augmenting—foremost in intelligence, in weight of character, in strength of understanding, in manly and womanly development, and in all that goes to make up enlightened citizenship. Then, with rare exceptions, women were everywhere remanded to poverty and servile dependence, being precluded from following those avocations and engaging in those pursuits which make competency and independence not a difficult achievement. Now, there is scarcely any situation ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... Independence is in the mind of a man, or it is no where. On this ground were I to decline the contest, should scorn the imputation that should bring the purity of my purpose into doubt. No Minister can expect to find in me a servile vassal. No Minister can expect from me the abandonment of any principle I have avowed, or any pledge I have given. I know not that I have hitherto shrunk in place from opinions I have maintained while in opposition. Did there ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... people,—the Galatians,—and the country they occupied was called Galatia. They lived there some fifty years, aloof from the indigenous population of Greeks and Phrygians, whom they kept in an almost servile condition, preserving their warlike and barbarous habits, resuming sometimes their mercenary service, and becoming once more the bulwark or the terror of neighboring states. But at the beginning of the second century before our era, the Romans had entered Asia, in pursuit of their ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... it,' said Cuchulainn; 'the Ulstermen will take their slave-women to their beds, and there will be born to them a servile offspring, and they will use their milch-cows for meat in ...
— The Cattle-Raid of Cualnge (Tain Bo Cualnge) • Unknown
... villages laced with avenues of cedar, villages of garden, of roses and wonderful flowers and the perpetual humming of bees. And through all the world go our children, our sons the old world would have made into servile clerks and shopmen, plough drudges and servants; our daughters who were erst anaemic drudges, prostitutes, sluts, anxiety-racked mothers or sere, repining failures; they go about this world glad and brave, learning, living, ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... in this memorable struggle. In its course he compared the opinion of those who had opposed the resolution to the saying of an English bishop, that the people had nothing to do with the law but to obey it, and likened their conduct to the servile obedience of a Parliament of Paris under the old order of things. He concluded with the hope that the dangerous doctrine, that the representatives of the people have not the right to consult their discretion when about exercising powers delegated by ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... sex; and therefore neither despise their counsels, [57] nor disregard their responses. [58] We have beheld, in the reign of Vespasian, Veleda, [59] long reverenced by many as a deity. Aurima, moreover, and several others, [60] were formerly held in equal veneration, but not with a servile flattery, nor as though they made ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... the Law was read and expounded; and in the solemnity whereof they were put in mind, that their King was God; that having created the world in six days, he rested the seventh day; and by their resting on it from their labour, that that God was their King, which redeemed them from their servile, and painfull labour in Egypt, and gave them a time, after they had rejoyced in God, to take joy also in themselves, by lawfull recreation. So that the first Table of the Commandements, is spent all, in setting down the summe of Gods absolute Power; ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... paganism long since dead, but revived by a miracle for a brief Botticellian hour. Madonna and Venus! The Christ Child and Bacchus! Under which king? The artist never frankly tells us. The legends of fauns turned monks, of the gods at servile labour in a world that had forgotten them, are revived, but with more sublimated ecstasy than by Heine, when we stand before Botticelli and listen to his ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... hesitate! those who govern see not, that in doing our own business, we do theirs also;—that in abandoning education to us (which is what we wish for above all things) we mold the people into that mute and quiet obedience, that servile and brutal submission, which assures the repose of states by the immobility of the mind. They don't reflect that most of the upper and middle classes fear and hate us; don't understand that (when we have persuaded ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... In all these respects the inhabitants of Chiloe resemble their neighbours on the continent, excepting that their caciques are stript in a great measure of their power and influence, by the tyranny of the Spaniards, who keep them under the most servile slavery, while the missionaries blind them by a superstitious and imperfect conversion to Christianity, of which not one of these natives know any thing more than merely that they were baptized; all their devotion consisting ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... up; and it was only through a cloud that one could see the fearful harpy fixed and dumb on her red sofa, her yellow eyes betraying the servile sentiments, inspired by misfortune, or caused by some vice beneath whose servitude one has fallen as beneath a tyrant who brutalizes one with the flagellations of his despotism. Her eyes had the cold glitter of a caged tiger, knowing his ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... difficult. He has few of the qualities, either personal or literary, that attract sympathy and many of the defects that repel. He is at once vain and obsequious, servile and spiteful, professing candor and practising adulation, prolix and prosaic. As a general he proved himself a traitor; as apologist of the Jews, a function which he asserted for himself, he marred by a lack of independence ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... the movements of clodhoppers and ragamuffins, the realist of the fifteenth century would wander hopelessly were it not for the antique. Genius and science are of no avail; the position of Christ in baptism in the paintings of Verrocchio and Ghirlandajo is mean and servile; the movements of the "Thunderstricken" in Signorelli's lunettes is an inconceivable mixture of the brutish, the melodramatic, and the comic; the magnificently drawn youth at the door of the prison in Filippino's "Liberation of St. Peter" is gradually going to sleep and ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... become a censor of morals and arbiter of elegance, like the benevolent employers of the day who take an impertinent interest in the private lives of their workers. Without any doubt socialism has within it the germs of that great bureaucratic tyranny which Chesterton and Belloc have named the Servile State. ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... St. Benet's. But, on the other hand, if she comes to me for advice, it will be impossible for me not to say to her: 'My dear, character ranks higher than intellect. You may win the greatest prizes and yet keep a poor and servile soul. You may never get this great earthly distinction, and yet you may be crowned with honor— the honor which comes of uprightness, of independence, of integrity.' Prissie may never consult me, of course, Maggie; but, if she does, I must say words ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... brings to mind the tradition, stoutly upheld by Hamptonians, that it was at "Canute's Point" at the mouth of the Itchen, and not at Bosham or Lymington, that the king gave his servile courtiers the historic rebuke chronicled by Camden. By him, quoting Huntingdon, we are told that "causing his chair to be placed on the shore as the tide was coming in, the king said to the latter, 'Thou ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... pleased to countenance the restoration of liberty to these unhappy men, who alone in this land of freedom are degraded into perpetual bondage, and who, amidst the general joy of surrounding freemen, are groaning in servile subjection; that you will devise means for removing this inconsistency from the character of the American people; that you will promote mercy and justice towards this distressed race; and that you will step to the very verge of the power vested in you for discouraging every ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... especially to such movements for the reform or rehabilitation of the religious life as are of an austere, pietistic, ascetic cast—where the human subject is conceived to hold his life by a direct servile tenure from his spiritual sovereign. That is to say, where the institution of the priesthood lapses, or where there is an exceptionally lively sense of the immediate and masterful presence of the divinity in the affairs of life, there the layman is conceived to stand in an immediate servile ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... also paid military service to their superiors. The remotest kinsmen of each lord of land, poor as they might be, were valued for their swords, and were billeted on the unfree or servile tenants, ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... of his slave, the Giant Orcus, he found that this was indeed too true, and that the Knights were kept in servile bonds in the magic pavilion. Addressing his warriors, he told them of the discovery he had made, when, with loud shouts, they vowed to follow wherever ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... had been Bishop of Llandaff and of St. David's, died a year after his translation, and thereby saved the diocese the ill effects of a longer term of servile and corrupt management. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... undisputed sovereignty. He has demonstrated that in such circumstances, it is not the weakness but the strength of the ruling power in the state which is the great danger, and that the many-headed despot, acting by means of a subservient press and servile juries, speedily becomes as formidable to real freedom as ever Eastern sultaun with his despotic power ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... which it has accepted ready-made from doctor and theologian. Again, why? Because, my friends, the human mind is inert, despite its seemingly tremendous material activity. And its inertia is the result of its own self-mesmerism, its own servile submission to beliefs which, as Balfour has shown, have grown up under every kind of influence except that of genuine evidence. Chief of these are the prevalent religious beliefs, which we are asked to receive ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... miserable—very nearly desperate. What remains for me—what remains? Fortune has done her worst—thrown in the dust, her wheels rolled over me; and the servile world, who follow her chariot like a mob, stamp upon the mangled wretch. All this had passed over me, and left me scarred and bloodless in this solitude. It was not my fault, Maud—I say it was no ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... they were vainly intended to commemorate. So thought Palmyra; where is she? So thought the countries of Demosthenes and the Spartan; yet Leonidas is trampled by the timid slave, and Athens insulted by the servile, mindless, and enervate Ottoman. In his hurried march, Time has but looked at their imagined immortality, and all its vanities, from the palace to the tomb, have, with their ruins, erased the very impression of ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... place was a tumult of swarming savages and white men; already the Seneca women, crowding among the men, were raising the death wail. The dancing girls huddled together in a frightened and half-naked group; the Andastes cowered apart; the servile Eries were staggering out of the corn fields laden with ripe ears; and the famished soldiers were shouting and cursing at them and tearing the corn from their arms to gnaw the raw and ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... the contagion. Nor can this be wondered at. To establish a strict and regular discipline, and to succeed by giving proofs of their genius, is not the plan of our modern rhetoricians. They pay their court to the great, and, by servile adulation, increase the number of their pupils. Need I mention the manner of conveying the first elements of school learning? No care is taken to give the student a taste for the best authors [d]; ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... were already, more than 20 years ago, wild and irreconcilable spirits bent on fomenting disaffection, there were amongst the Deccanee Brahmans themselves a small intellectual elite who, though by no means servile apologists of British rule, fully realized that their primary duty was not to stir up popular passion against alien rulers, but to bring Hindu society into closer communion with the higher civilization which those rulers, whatever their ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... severity with which the laws on this subject were enforced, it may not be inappropriate to insert the annexed account from the Sketches of Yale College:—"The servile requisition of making obeisance to the officers of College within a prescribed distance was common, not only to Yale, but to all kindred institutions throughout the United States. Some young men were found whose high spirit would not brook the degrading ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... rank among works of the kind belonging to the sixteenth century. They contrast its sprightliness, its terse, telling phrases with the heavy, dragging constructions that disfigure the prose of contemporary works. Without copying in a servile fashion the Catilinarian speeches of Cicero, the "Tigre" breathes their spirit and lacks none of their force. Take, for example, the introductory sentences: "Tigre enrage! Vipere venimeuse! Sepulcre d'abomination! Spectacle de malheur! Jusques a quand sera-ce que tu abuseras de la jeunesse de nostre ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... them this would. Mary and her children were the only slaves owned by this Ennis, consequently her duties were that of "Jack of all trades;" sometimes in the field and sometimes in the barn, as well as in the kitchen, by which, it is needless to say, that her life was rendered servile to ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... throw poison into the draught. But, gentlemen, if you wish for a nearer and a more interesting example, you have it in the history of your own Revolution; you have it at that memorable period, when the monarch found a servile acquiescence in the ministers of his folly—when the liberty of the press was trodden under foot—when venal sheriff's returned packed juries to carry into effect those fatal conspiracies of the few against the many—when the devoted ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... of improvement in manners is observation. In company, where you are in doubt in reference to any rule or form, be quiet and observe what others do, and govern your conduct by theirs; but except in mere external forms, beware of a servile imitation. Seek to understand the principles which underlie the observances you witness, and to become imbued with the spirit of the society (if good) in which you move, rather than to copy particulars in the ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... Casimir Perier dead in the exhaustion of his power; political and social malady breaking out simultaneously in the two capitals of the kingdom, the one in the city of thought, the other in the city of toil; at Paris civil war, at Lyons servile war; in the two cities, the same glare of the furnace; a crater-like crimson on the brow of the people; the South rendered fanatic, the West troubled, the Duchesse de Berry in la Vendee, plots, conspiracies, risings, cholera, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... own, But catch the spreading notion of the town, They reason and conclude by precedent, And own stale nonsense which they ne'er invent. Some judge of authors names not works, and then Nor praise nor blame the writing, but the men. Of all this servile herd the worst is he That in proud dullness joins with quality A constant critic at the great man's board, To fetch and carry nonsense for my lord What woful stuff this madrigal would be, In some starved hackney sonnetteer, or me! But let a ...
— An Essay on Criticism • Alexander Pope
... tent-peg to proprietor. Perhaps you who read this have felt your own insignificance while gazing at an imperial tent-peg that happened to lie in your path as you wandered about the grounds; or you have certainly felt mean and lowly in the presence of a program-peddler, and positively servile in contact with a boss canvasman. It is in the air; and the very air is the ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... contrived to extend the velum at such a height over so great a surface, and to manage it at pleasure. Sailors were employed in the service, for the Emperor Commodus, who piqued himself on his gladiatorial skill, and used to fight in the arena, believing himself mocked by the servile crowd of spectators, when once they hailed him with divine honors, gave order for their slaughter by the sailors who ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... and broke into hectic gaiety, dear things, under the impression that they were brightening me up. I am being deluged with letters. I had no idea I was such a popular person. They come from high placed and lowly, from constituents whom my base and servile flattery have turned into friends, from Members of Parliament, from warm-hearted dowagers and from little girls who have inveigled me out to lunch for the purpose of confiding to me their love affairs. ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... Men, said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him the things he had demanded, my men, the thunder turned old Ahab's needles; but out of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own, that will point as true as any. Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as this was said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic might follow. But Starbuck looked away. With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of the lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining, bade ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... more powerfully to corrupt his integrity, or debase his fortitude. In either case, feebleness and irresolution must be the characteristics of the station. There are some who would be inclined to regard the servile pliancy of the Executive to a prevailing current, either in the community or in the legislature, as its best recommendation. But such men entertain very crude notions, as well of the purposes for which ...
— The Federalist Papers
... some rock blasted, that light and air might have free course through her soul's house, without which that soul could never grow stately like the house it inhabited. Whatever might be destined to effect this, for the chance of rendering poorest and most servile aid, he would watch and did watch, in silence and self-restraint, lest he should be betrayed into any presumptuous word that might breathe frost instead of balm upon the buds of her delaying Spring. If he might but be allowed to minister when at length the sleeping soul should stir! If its waking ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... Furthermore, the servile, abject, needy circumstances wherein the Devil keeps the Slaves, that are under his more sensible Vassalage, do suggest unto us, how woful the Devil would render all our Lives. We that live in a Province, which ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... now? No! Let everything go, strip us to the bone, but leave us our liberty! It is not for ourselves that we battle and suffer, but for posterity. It is for the birthright of our children—freedom. We are no servile Hindoos to meekly bow beneath the foreign yoke! They have put their hands to the plough, but they will find it stubborn land, land that they will grow weary of manuring with the bodies of their sons! And all for what? To raise a crop of thistles and thorns, ...
— With Steyn and De Wet • Philip Pienaar
... I am not so saucy as many of my countrymen, I have enough innate pride to prevent me from doing a mean action because a servile prudence may dictate it ... I will never meanly sue a thief to give me my own again unless ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... Plato, nor even St. Paul and St. John. They may have been honest men as men go, or they may not: but why is there to be a feeling against them rather than for them? Why is Henry always called a tyrant, and his Parliament servile? The epithets have become so common and unquestioned that our interrogation may seem startling. Still we make it. Why was Henry a tyrant? That may be true, but must be proved by facts. Where are they? Is the mere fact of a monarch's asking ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley
... throughout the North for the last quarter of a century has at length produced its malign influence on the slaves and inspired them with vague notions of freedom. Hence a sense of security no longer exists around the family altar. This feeling of peace at home has given place to apprehensions of servile insurrections. Many a matron throughout the South retires at night in dread of what may befall herself and children before the morning. Should this apprehension of domestic danger, whether real or imaginary, extend and intensify itself until it shall pervade the masses of the Southern people, then ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Buchanan • James Buchanan
... undisturbed, the proud camps of Whig and Tory. If Mr. Hyndman were a man of keen humour, which is far from my conception of his character, he might rest from his troubling and look on: the walls of Jericho begin already to crumble and dissolve. That great servile war, the Armageddon of money and numbers, to which we looked forward when young, becomes more and more unlikely; and we may rather look to see a peaceable and blindfold evolution, the work of dull men immersed in political tactics and ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... these educated men displayed in striving to conquer their rivals was more than disgusting. The serpents that lie in wait for their prey are endurable; for we know that it is their nature to be cunning and relentless: but to see men of intellect and education sly and snaky, ferocious, yet servile to the utmost, makes one almost believe in total depravity. The most of these men got what they deserved; namely, nothing: the places were filled temporarily with others, and every thing went on apparently as before. ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... prefer The lustre of a little trash, Arsinoe, And the poor glow-worm light of some faint jewels Before the light of love, and soul of beauty— O how it vexes me! He is no soldier: All honorable soldiers are Love's servants. He is a merchant, a mere wandering merchant, Servile to gain; he trades for poor commodities, And makes his conquests thefts! Some fortunate captains That quarter with him, and are truly valiant. Have flung the name of "Happy Caesar" on him; Himself ne'er won it. He's so base ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... lesser—all equals in her arms. Let us see him in that company where he looks noble amongst the noble; let us not look upon him in the company of the ignoble, where he looks ignobler still, being servile to them; let us look upon him with the lyrical Shakespeare, with Vaughan, Blake, Wordsworth, Patmore, Meredith; not with Baudelaire and Gautier; with the poets of the forest and the sun, and not with those of the ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... looked, he was ware of two coming towards him with pick and mattock on their shoulders. Swiftly they came, and soon they were at his side, fawning on him, and speaking in soft, wheedling voices. Their faces were eager and servile, their eyes ...
— The Silver Crown - Another Book of Fables • Laura E. Richards
... apprehended in a sense so absolutely opposed to the truth. How could your contemporaries look about them without seeing that it is always inequality which prompts the suppression of individuality by putting a premium on servile imitation of superiors, and, on the other hand, that it is always among equals that one finds independence? Suppose, Julian, you had a squad of recruits and wanted to ascertain at a glance their difference in height, what sort of ground would ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... namely, a universal maximum of individual freedom. Whatever far-reaching movements the State or great rich men or private corporations may make, the starvation by any complication of employment, the unwilling deportation, the destruction of alternatives to servile submissions, must not ensue. Beyond such qualifications, the object of Modern Utopian statesmanship will be to secure to a man the freedom given by all his legitimate property, that is to say, by all the values his toil or skill or foresight and courage ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... "liberal knowledge," of the "liberal arts and studies," and of a "liberal education," as the especial characteristic or property of a University and of a gentleman; what is really meant by the word? Now, first, in its grammatical sense it is opposed to servile; and by "servile work" is understood, as our catechisms inform us, bodily labour, mechanical employment, and the like, in which the mind has little or no part. Parallel to such servile works are those arts, if they deserve the ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... become so anxious to please that he was almost servile, and his manner toward the wife of the rising young attorney particularly was that of a humble retainer fawning at the feet of royalty. During breakfast he stood at a respectful distance, speaking only when spoken to, ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... insist here upon the character of the thrice renowned Ker. It is evident to all, he was a man of a great mind, far above a servile and mercenary disposition.—He was, for a number of years, hurried from place to place, and guarded from prison to prison. He endured all this with undaunted courage.—He lost a good estate then for the cause of Christ: and, though he got not the martyrs crown, yet he beyond all doubt obtained ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... "Every student of English history knows that, if a very bad king had not fallen in love with a very pretty woman, and desired to get divorced from his plain and elderly wife, and if he had not compelled a servile Parliament to carry out his wishes, there would, in all human probability, never have been an Established Church ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan |
