There was, however, no perceptible change as yet in the utter worldliness of the times, or in the low standard of morals.

This unruffled serenity, this joyful acceptance of material existence and its pleasures are not in the Persian poet the result of the carelessness and shallowness of Horace, or the cold-blooded worldliness and sensuality of Martial.

And he, too, knew too much of the better side of English religious life to justify the fierce invective and sarcasm with which he assailed for a time the English Church as a mere system of comfortable and self-deceiving worldliness.

To-night Katie loved him anew for his delightful worldliness.

I think I never read of a request so preposterous or more disgraceful,the greatest flaw I know in her character,showing the extreme worldliness of women of fashion at that time, and the audacity which is created by universal flattery.

The furious reproaches which she heaped upon him when she saw in Acte a possible rival to her power drove him to take refuge in the facile and unphilosophic worldliness of Seneca's concessions, and goaded him almost immediately afterwards into an atrocious crime.

The "Mornings in Florence" and "Giotto and his Works in Padua" so insist upon the artist's holiness and conscious purpose in all he did that his genial worldliness, shrewdness, and humour, as brought out by Dante, Vasari, Sacchetti, and Boccaccio, are utterly excluded.

He was impatient of mere idle worldliness, of conceit and impertinence, of men who gave themselves airs; he was very impatient of pompous and solemn emptiness.

Here was the Ministry of the Interior appealing for a reduction in taxesa program of strict economywhile new bishoprics were being created and ecclesiastical appropriations swelled for the benefit of the upper clergy; and with no advantage at all, meanwhile, to the proletariat of the soutane, to the poor curates who, to make a bare living, had to practice the most impious worldliness and unscrupulously exploit the house of God!

He was impatient of mere idle worldliness, of conceit and impertinence, of men who gave themselves airs; he was very impatient of pompous and solemn emptiness.

A thousand inconceivably petty worldlinesses weighed with me in that crisis.

He pictured the third Mrs. Cartaret as a woman of affectionate gaiety and a pleasing worldliness, so well surrounded by adorers of his own sex that she could probably furnish forth her three stepdaughters from the numbers of those she had no use for.

The spirit of Cosimo de' Medici, almost cynical in its positivism, the spirit of Sixtus IV., almost godless in its egotism, were abroad in Italy at this period; indeed, the fifteenth century presents at large a spectacle of prosaic worldliness and unideal aims.

A man bent on the most useful ends might, with a fortune large enough, make morality magnificent, and recommend religious principle by showing it in combination with the best kind of house and the most liberal of tables; also with a wife whose graces, wit, and accomplishments gave a finish sometimes lacking even to establishments got up with that unhesitating worldliness to which high cost is a sufficient reason.

While I, in the uselessness of my round, white youth, sit benched among the old women, dropping spiritless, pointless "yeses" and "noes" among the veteran worldliness of their talk, how they crowd about her, like swarmed bees on some honeyed, spring day!

Hilda questioned, characteristically on her guard, with a nervous girlish movement of the leg that perhaps sinned against the code of authentic worldliness.

After Mrs. Labadie's homeliness, Pauline's exclusive narrowness, Jane's petty frivolity, Hester's vulgar worldliness, and the general want of cultivation in all who treated her on an equality, it was like returning to rational society; and she could not but observe that Mr. Archfield altogether held his own in conversation with the rest, whether in French or English.