In this picture, which shows the crudeness of the zoological notions current in the 18th century as to both men and apes, there are set in a row four figures: (a) a recognizable orang-utan, sitting and holding a staff; (b) a chimpanzee, absurdly humanized as to head, hands, and feet; (c) a hairy woman, with a tail a foot long; (d) another woman, more completely coated with hair.
The price at which the corn was sold was always moderate; the corn law of Gracchus (123 B.C.) made it absurdly low, and Clodius (58 B.C.) bestowed it gratuitously.
Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans, it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet.
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The crusaders found them everywhere in Syria and Palestine, and corrupted their name to Publicani, under which name, often absurdly conjoined with Sadducaei, we find them during the ages following the crusades scattered all over Europe.
On these grounds the adversaries of Demosthenes, in after-days, used absurdly to taunt him with a traitorous or barbarian ancestry.
His uncle, who was old, indolent and absurdly proud, had lived in great seclusion; Retz, on the contrary, gradually acquired a very great influence with the populace of the city.
Jim was almost tempted to envy the wooden horse for being unable to feel pain; but the creature was so absurdly unnatural that he decided he would not change places with it under any circumstances.
But the reason for this was not, as Herr Max Hecker rather absurdly suggests, Wolfgang's jealousy of his grandfather's oppressive fame, but one far more simple and natural.
Failing in this attempt, he was induced to become tutor, or keeper, to the marquis of Annandale, a harmless literary lunatic. This position, financially advantageous, was absurdly false (see letters in Burton's Life, i.
The likeness he is recorded to have painted of Ginevra de' Bend used to be traditionally identified with the fine portrait of a matron at the Pitti absurdly known as La Monaca: more lately it has been recognized in a rather dull, expressionless Verrocchiesque portrait of a young woman with a fanciful background of pine-sprays in the Liechtenstein gallery at Vienna.