Use vanity in a sentence

In stripping love, as I have, of everything liable to seduce you, in making it out to be the effect of temperament, caprice, and vanity; in a word, in undeceiving you concerning the metaphysics that lend it grandeur and nobility, is it not evident that I have rendered it less dangerous?

To renounce for her sake, a woman whose exterior proclaimed her readiness to accord you whatever favor you might be willing to ask; to renounce her publicly, in the presence of her rival, and with so little regard for her vanity, is an effort which naturally will not pass without a proportionate recompense.

They always think of their own case as soon as ever any remark is made, and their whole attention is engrossed and absorbed by the merest chance reference to anything which affects them personally, be it never so remote: with the result that they have no power left for forming an objective view of things, should the conversation take that turn; neither can they admit any validity in arguments which tell against their interest or their vanity.

The satisfaction he felt in this wore off very soon when he appreciated that, while he had economized in his breakfast, his vanity had been very extravagantly pampered, and he felt how absurd it was when he remembered he would not have spent more if he had gone to Delmonico's in the first place.

Her vanity was also as deeply involved as her ambition, for she had hitherto believed her power over the affections of the King to be so entire that he could not liberate himself from her thrall; yet now, in the zenith of her beauty, in the pride of her intellect, and in the very climax of her favor, she found herself suddenly abandoned, as if the effort had not cost a single struggle to her royal lover.

It can scarcely be doubted that this ready assent must have been no slight mortification to the vanity of Madame de Moret, while it is equally certain that it was perfectly sincere on the part of the King, although from a cause altogether independent of the Countess herself.

As is so often the case with women whose charms move men to extravagance of speech and emotion, it was a great satisfaction to her, to her vanity, to feel that she had inspired this wonderful immortal flame; obviously, to feed such a flame by giving love for love would reduce it to the commonplace.

Tragedy professes to be a representation of all the high passions that influence the mind, such as jealousy, hatred, or revenge; it can have nothing to do with vanity or any other of the petty passions, for a course of action dependent on them would appear as insignificant in Tragedy as the passions themselves.

We see also in Comedy, as well as in the world itself, the despicable character of the rake, and the disgusting vanity of the coquette; we learn to distinguish between the different traits of character, and we soon find that those whose language is that of men of honor, often act like knaves.

Whether this opinion, so long transmitted, and so widely propagated, had its beginning from truth and nature, or from accident and prejudice; whether it be decreed by the authority of reason or the tyranny of ignorance, that, of all the candidates for literary praise, the unhappy lexicographer holds the lowest place, neither vanity nor interest incited me to inquire.

I have now none left to favor my studies; and, therefore, naturally turn my thoughts on those by whom I was favored in better days: and I hope the vanity of age may be forgiven, when I declare that I can boast among my friends, almost every name of my time that is now remembered: and that, in that great period of mathematical competition, scarce any man failed to appear as my defender, who did not appear as my antagonist.

I observe, that the most prevailing ornaments here are family portraits: almost every dwelling, even among the lower kind of tradesmen, is peopled with these ensigns of vanity; and the painters employed on these occasions, however deficient in other requisites of their art, seem to have an unfortunate knack at preserving likenesses.

Among those who gave their opinion at large, you will observe Paine: and, as I intimated in a former letter, it seems he was at that time rather allured by the vanity of making a speech that should be applauded, than by any real desire of injuring the King.

When I saw people expatiate with calmness, and heard them speak of it as a means of distinguishing themselves, I did not sufficiently allow for the tendency of the French to make the best of every thing, or the influence of vanity on men who allow it to make part of the national characteristic: and surely, if ever vanity were laudable, that of marking a detestation for revolutionary principles, and an attachment to loyalty and religion, may justly be considered so.

You are to understand, that the Representatives on mission, who describe the inhabitants of all the towns they visit as glowing with republicanism, have, besides the service of the common cause, views of their own, and are often enabled by these fictions to administer both to their interest and their vanity.

The building and upkeep of these fortifications proved a great drain upon the resources of the Order, and served but little purpose, except that of ministering to the vanity of successive Grand Masters, who desired to leave behind them memorials of themselves by bestowing their name upon a new fort or outwork.

The bracelet was known in the earliest ages; but it was formerly only a hoop of gold, or a cluster of jewels, and showed nothing but the wealth or vanity of the wearer, till our ladies, by carrying pictures on their wrists, made their ornaments works of fancy and exercises of judgment.

Swift was a wild beast, who baited and worried all mankind almost, because his intolerable arrogance, vanity, pride, and ambition were disappointed; he abused Lady Suffolk, who tried and wished to raise him, only because she had not power to do so: and one is sure that a man who could deify that silly woman Queen Anne, would have been more profuse of incense to Queen Caroline, who had sense, if the Court he paid to her had been crowned with success.

He usually, by a few questions, ascertained precisely how much the inquirer knew upon the subject, or the exact point at which his ignorance commenced, a process not very agreeable to the vanity of mankind; taking up the subject at this point, he would then very clearly and shortly explain it.

If this were teaching us all, in humility, to be much in the study of such fundamental necessary truths as this is; and to guard against a piece of vanity in affecting knowledge, the effect of which is nothing but a puffing of us up with pride and conceit!

Associating with country squires, he had taken part in their lavish suppers where, at dessert, tipsy women would unfasten their clothing and strike their heads against the tables; he had haunted the green rooms, loved actresses and singers, endured, in addition to the natural stupidity he had come to expect of women, the maddening vanity of female strolling players.

There, with a soul filled with musing, do I number the surrounding monuments of mortality, and contemplate the present stillness of so many once busy vanities, crowded all into one poor vaulted nook, as if the living grudged room for the corpse of those for which, when animated, the earth, the air, and the waters, could hardly find room.

I have always been so thoroughly persuaded of this truth, that, notwithstanding the flattering views I had for you (as I never intended you a sacrifice to my vanity), I thought I owed you the justice to lay before you all the hazards attending matrimony: you may recollect I did so in the strongest manner.

I am not partial to myself I know, and am contented that the pleasure I have received with this, shall serve to sweeten many sad thoughts that have interposed since your last, and more that I may reasonably expect before I have another; and I think I may (without vanity) say, that nobody is more sensible of the least good fortune nor murmurs less at an ill than I do, since I owe it merely to custom and not to any constancy in my humor, or something that is better.

It does not appear, however, that he returned from his expedition considerably improved in his fortune by the discovery of this mine, nor does he give any notice of the real position of it, by which we are led to conjecture, that the discovery of the mine was one of those fabrications, which the travelers of those times were apt to indulge in, for the purpose of gratifying their own vanity, and exciting the envy of their fellow countrymen.

Again visions of bliss hovered around her, and "Peers and Dukes and all their sweeping train" swam before her eyes, as she anticipated the brilliant results to herself from so noble an alliance; for self was still, as it had ever been, her ruling star, and her affection for her daughter was the mere result of vanity and ambition.

If the cashier is possessed of an imagination or of a fervid temperament; if, as will sometimes happen to the most complete cashier, he loves his wife, and that wife grows tired of her lot, has ambitions, or merely some vanity in her composition, the cashier is undone.

Rousseau was copying music in a garret in the street which is now called after his name, but he had long ago cut himself off from society; and Burke was not likely to take much trouble to find out a man whom he had known in England seven years before, and against whom he had conceived a strong and lasting antipathy, as entertaining no principle either to influence his heart or to guide his understanding save a deranged and eccentric vanity.

What has produced all this misery and the dreadful consequences which might have ensued, but my folly in trifling with the feelings of an innocent girl, and winning her affections merely to gratify my own vanity; at the same time that I have formed a connection with this unhappy creature, the breaking of which will never cause me one hour's regret, while it will leave her in misery, and will, in all probability, embitter all her future existence?

For the public admires the handle, the delicate work of the brain, while the cruelty is not apparent; how should the public know that the steel of the epigram, tempered in the fire of revenge, has been plunged deftly, to rankle in the very quick of a victim's vanity, and is reeking from wounds innumerable which it has inflicted?

At eight o'clock, when the lights of the candles in the chandeliers shone over the furniture, the hangings, and the flowers, the rooms wore the festal air that gives to Parisian luxury the appearance of a dream; and Lucien felt indefinable stirrings of hope and gratified vanity and pleasure at the thought that he was the master of the house.

The action of a little child is altogether nothing and vanity compared with the energy of the earthquake or the lightning, so far as the exhibition of force and the mere power to act is concerned; but, on the other hand, it is more solemn than centuries of merely natural processes, and more momentous than all the material phenomena that have ever filled the celestial spaces, when we remember that it is the act of a thinking agent, and a self-conscious creature.

The blind, of all their sufferings, often feel most keenly the impossibility of knowing whether the truth is told them about their own looks; and he who will try and realize what it is to have been always sightless will understand that this is not vanity, but rather a sort of diffidence towards which all people should be very kind.

Yet this is not the coward's or the suicide's or the weakling's morbid love of Death, but it is the cry of the philosopher who has sounded everything to its depths and knows intensely the vanity of the desire for happiness on the relative plane of limitations.

When they have been at home two or three years, which they spend in the vanities which they brought over with them, fresh travelers arrive with newer fashions, and the same confidence, and are looked upon as finer gentlemen, and wear their ribbons more gracefully; at which the others are angry, quit the stage, and would fain get into wiser company, where they every day find defects in themselves, which they owe to the ill spending that time when they thought only of being fine gentlemen

An author's vanity is vindictive, implacable, incapable of forgiveness, and his sister was the first and only person who had laid bare and disturbed that uneasy feeling, which is like a big box of crockery, easy to unpack but impossible to pack up again as it was before.

The efforts of the critic may be necessary to clip the wings of a presuming author, lest his rising vanity becomes insupportable: but I pity the man, who writes a book which none will peruse a second time; critical exertions are not necessary to pull him down, he will fall of himself.

In order that the unborn might still be added to the born, nature had inspired men with the wild delusion that the bodily companionship of the lover and the beloved was desirable above all things, and so, by the false show of pleasure, the human race was chained to vanity, and doomed to an eternal thirst for the non-existent.

Such were the obstacles arising from the vanity of philosophers and the imperfection of their science, which suspended the strength of their appeal to reason and common sense against the condemning of wretches to a cruel death on account of crimes which the nature of things rendered in modern times totally impossible.

On the contrary, having the amiable vanity which knits us to those who are fond of us, and disinclines us to those who are indifferent, and also a good grateful nature, the mere idea that a woman had a kindness towards him spun little threads of tenderness from out his heart towards hers.

I was glad of this, for I knew very well, in doing any little piece of duty, how apt our dirty vanity is to puff us up, and to make us assume so much more than we have any title to; and it is nothing short of relief to be able to extinguish this said vanity in the broad light of other men's benevolence.

He saw the vanity of political science as it then existed, the incapacity of popular leaders, and the sadness of a people drifting into anarchy and confusion; and, strong in his own will and his sense of right, he rose superior to himself, and directed the stormy elements of passion and fear.

We have a tendency to show off which is not apparently genetically connected with exploit or organization, and we recognize that this form of vanity is not consistent with the ordinary run of our activities when we argue with ourselves that the opinion of this or that person is of no consequence and attempt to think ourselves into a state of indifference.

I beseech your Majesty to have me advised of your will in all respects, and to be pleased to have much consideration given to the fact that the altar and its ministers are in much confusion, and that things should not be introduced which are vanity, but only such as are fitting to the grandeur due to the office of ministers of your Majesty.

It was the fashion for patrons of the stage at this time to treat its professors with great scorn, and often to view them with a kind of vindictive jealousy, "I see the gallants do begin to be tired with the vanity and pride of the theater actors, who are indeed grown very proud and rich," noted Pepys, in 1661.

If I were ready, on any call of my own vanity or interest, or to answer any election purpose, to forsake principles (whatever they are) which I had formed at a mature age, on full reflection, and which had been confirmed by long experience, I should forfeit the only thing which makes you pardon so many errors and imperfections in me.

He attacked the corruption of the politician and the minister, the vanity and vice of the courtier, the folly and extravagance of the fashionable world, and gathering venom in his course, made his satire universal and painted the pettiness and deformity of the human race.

I believe it is difficult for those who publish their own memoirs to escape the imputation of vanity; nor is this the only disadvantage under which they labor: it is also their misfortune, that what is uncommon is rarely, if ever, believed, and what is obvious we are apt to turn from with disgust, and to charge the writer with impertinence.

There he wooed the rustic muse in elegy, ode, and pastoral ballad, sounding upon the vocal reed the beauties of simplicity and the vanity of ambition, and mingling with these strains complaints of Delia's cruelty and of the shortness of his own purse, which hampered him seriously in his gardening designs.

Here was the present against the absent: here was the power of the eyes pitted against that of the memory: here were all the senses up in arms to subdue the influence of the thoughts: here was vanity, here was passion, here was the spot of all spots in the world, and here were also the life, and the manners and the habits and the pursuits that I delighted in: here was every thing that imagination can conceive, united in a conspiracy against the poor little brunette in England!

It was occasioned by his relations with the wife of an officer of rank, which had become really more intimate than her pride could stand, although she knew very well that on her husband's side it was only a sort of mixture of vanity and policy that prompted his affectation of devotion.

The mother or the teacher who bases her instruction in this matter on the assumption that pretty clothes of necessity breed vanity and all its attendant evils is merely sowing the seed of her influence upon stony ground when once the girl discovers her belief.

That superiority over his fellows, which he maintained with so much dignity in his march through life, was not assumed from vanity and ostentation, but was the natural and constant effect of those extraordinary powers of mind, of which he could not but be conscious by comparison; the intellectual difference, which in other cases of comparison of characters, is often a matter of undecided contest, being as clear in his case as the superiority of stature in some men above others.

Their old vanity was led by art to take another turn: it was dazzled and seduced by military liveries, cockades, and epaulets, until the French populace was led to become the willing, but still the proud and thoughtless, instrument and victim of another domination.

She sized him up at once, played on his vanity, extolled his fine tastes and never exposed a single crudity of her own, until she brought him to the point where his passion for her, his conviction that he had found "the perfect woman," led him to propose marriage.

Whilst he flattered her vanity, and turned her foibles to his own advantage, under the guise of a very dutiful affection, his deportment towards her was marked by an ironical respect, which was the more indefensible and unmanly because she could not see through it.

And in the instant of his indecision, while he waited for the surrender his vanity expected before exerting the force that would conquer brutally, she broke unexpectedly from his clasp and darted a few steps away from him, whirling about to face him with her head flung back, her eyes on fire, her lips parted in a breathless excitement.

There was, I confess, a time when, with youthful vanity, I did esteem myself possessed of some skill, and could step along the gamut with any Don or Signor of them all; but that is long since, and I fear me that the gutturals of Northern Germany have quite driven out of my throat the liquids and vowels of Italy.

The men who are founding an empire, whose future extent and power human sagacity cannot limit, and who, for the sake of present liberty of thought and action, and of prospective blessings for their descendants, have renounced and count as naught the vanities of this world, fear no arm of flesh.

All that was needed was a few years' tutelage and a few daring and unscrupulous leaders to prey upon their ignorance and magnify their vanity in order to bring them to a realization of the fact that their former political masters were now completely at their mercy, and subject to their will.

I may say however, in a poor justice to myself, that I wrote what I wrote so unfortunately, through reverence for you, and not at all from vanity in my own account ... although I do feel palpably while I write these words here and now, that I might as well leave them unwritten; for that no man of the world who ever lived in the world (not even you) could be expected to believe them, though said, sung, and sworn.

Every real master of speaking or writing uses his personality as he would any other serviceable material; the very moment a speaker or writer begins to use it, not for his main purpose, but for vanity's sake, as all weak people are sure to do, hearers and readers feel the difference in a moment.

This artifice, his vanity grumbles, is now common; but he would have all the world understand that it was his own invention, and he murmurs with the pedantry of the convicted criminal that it is now set forth for the better protection of honest citizens.

I looked again for the chapel, where the model of a ship, elegantly constructed, hung from the top, and found it in good preservation: some scrupulous man had made the ship, it seems, and thought, perhaps justly too, that he had spent a greater portion of time and care on the workmanship than he ought to have done; so resolving no longer to indulge his vanity or fondness, fairly hung it up in the convent chapel, and made a solemn vow to look on it no more.

She is a splendid creature, nobly endowed every way; too nobly to become through mere frivolity and foolish vanity the mark of the malice and envy of such things as she is surrounded by, and who will all eagerly embrace the opportunity of slandering one so immeasurably their superior in every respect.

Kate had but a small share of vanity, and only a very modest appreciation of her own attractions, and it seemed to her as though her cousin, moving as he did in the gay world of fashion, must surely see many other maidens tenfold more beautiful and graceful.

Let human vanity think what it will, many events and many names which seem imperishable will speedily die out of remembrance; many lights in the firmament, destined (as we deem) to shine 'like the stars for ever and ever,' will hereafter be missing from the catalog of the historic astronomer.

She wants your desire as a satisfaction for her vanity more than anything else, and her vanity is insatiable if her desire is weak, and so she continually tempts you to excess, and then blames you for the physical satiety and disgust which she herself has created.

There are few works, the authors of which can possibly be permitted to recommend them as worthy of universal regard, without the imputation of intolerable vanity; an imputation little likely to be diminished by the consideration, that other writers, over whom a decided preference is claimed, may have previously occupied the same subject.

She imagined that from her cell she still directed her confederates and agents, whom she considered one and all as servants, never suspecting that the permission to write letters, of which she made such bad use, was only a trap set for her ingenuous vanity.

The same vanity or daring which may have prompted the youthful skeptic's opinions, will lead him likewise, it is probable, rashly and irreverently to avow them, without regard either to the effect of his example on those around him, or to the odium which, by such an avowal, he entails irreparably on himself.

Pride of family, love of pomp, power, and luxury, and an inordinate personal vanity were the predominating characteristics of a man, who indulged his inclinations, no matter how devious the paths into which they strayed, nor how mercilessly obstacles must be tramped down, in order to facilitate the accomplishment of his purposes.

His vanity demanded an assurance that her heart was as entirely his as he hoped, yet he knew that he loved her all the more tenderly, and reverently, because of the true womanly delicacy that prompted her to shroud her real feelings, with such desperate tenacity.

Happiness is the goal for which mankind is ever seeking, but of the many roads which the imagination traces as the surest and nearest to that desideratum, few, perhaps none, ever chance upon the right; too many pursue a shadow instead of a substance, influenced by a phantom of their own creation, engendered in most instances by pride, vanity, or ambition.

None surpass him in the power with which he defended the mind of woman from the impoverishing and distorting systems prevalent in his day, and by his example and pen taught parents to educate their daughters in a manner that should rebuke vanity and deceit, and blend grace with utility.

She might think herself very old and pretend to take peculiar delight in many of the more decadent forms of Greek thought, but in reality her leaders instinctively turned to Stoicism, as affording a compromise between the mere thoughtless activity of youth, which acts for the love of acting, and the jaded philosophy of the vanity of all effort.

Though a rhymer from his earliest years, at least from the earliest impulse of the softer passions, it was not till very lately that the applause, perhaps the partiality, of friendship awakened his vanity so for as to make him think anything of his worth showing: and none of the following works were composed with a view to the press.

The very confession, and the manner of it, belittled the confessor, and Leigh took his characterization of his admirer as rich and fashionable with a grain of salt, making some allowance for the point of view, some for natural vanity and a desire to impress him.

Seeing at last that all my attempts to evade the man only fed his vanity, and encouraged him to further excesses, and that the motley crowd, who filled the room and already formed a circle round us, had made up their minds to see sport, I would no longer balk them; I could no longer do it, indeed, with honor.

We shall not say how far vanity and charlatanism may have had a share in this, but in general we fail to discover any honest intention and earnest endeavor to instruct and convince, and we can therefore only look upon such quotations and references as embellishments to fill up gaps and hide defects.

The picture, therefore, instead of gratifying our vanity, as we hoped, leaned, in a most mortifying manner, against the kitchen wall, where the canvas was stretched and painted, much too large to be got through any of the doors, and the jest of all our neighbors.

That Julian should be such a woman's favorite will surprise none: she had, she could have, no sympathies with mild and thoughtful Charles; but rather dreaded to set her flaunting folly in the light of his wise glance, and sought to hide her humbled vanity from his pure and keen perceptions.

I went to bed on my second night at Low Heath with as little vanity in me as I could decently do with; and even that, as I lay awake for an hour or two, oozed away, and did not return till in a happy moment I fell asleep, and once more, and for a few unconscious hours, became a hero to myself.

The railway rug was again produced and laid over his knees, and his feet were gently lifted on the hassock, and a pillow was neatly inserted at the back of the chair; and all looked so snug, and the hospitable juniors were so pleased with the result, that they had the vanity to let the door stand open, so that all who passed by might see how comfortable they could make a guest when they liked.

And I think we had very good reason for our admiration, for the craft was more than sightly, she was decidedly handsome, and we who had put her together were, after all, it must be remembered, only unskilled amateurs; and though I think I may, without undue vanity, say that we were all prime seamen, and knew perfectly well what constituted a handsome and wholesome craft, it is one thing to know this, and quite another to make your work correspond accurately with your ideas.

Woman's vanity sells many a remedy advertised to counteract the "vandal hand of disease, which robs her of her beauty, yellows and muddies her complexion, lines her face, pales cheek and lip, dulls the brilliancy of her eye, which it disfigures with dark circles, aging her before her time."

I flatter myself I shall make a very tolerable one; and what is more, I have an idea that you will make a very good lieutenant, as soon as the vanity, with which you have been puffed up since your receiving your promotion, will have settled down a little, and that you will find it much pleasanter to be on good terms with your captain than to be eternally in hot water, especially with one who, you know, is not a person to be played with.

Indeed, it looks like extreme vanity in me to affect being a man of such consequence as to have so great an interest in an alderman; but others have thought so too, as manifestly appeared by the rector whose curate I formerly was sending for me on the approach of an election, and telling me if I expected to continue in his cure that I must bring my nephew to vote for one Colonel Courtly, a gentleman whom I had never heard tidings of till that instant.

Indeed, had Gideon been accessible to vanity, the spontaneous homage he met with everywhere would have touched him more sympathetically and kindly than it did; but in the utter unconsciousness of his own power and the quality they worshiped in him, he felt alarmed and impatient of what he believed to be their weak sympathy with his own human weakness.

While as for ourselves, we find insects and grubs and worms all delicious eating, and that without stint or trouble; and as regards the covering of our bodies, I think without vanity these lovely feathers are not only as warm as the fur of animals, but much prettier and more becoming.

I had on a Lowland costume with a velvet coat and buckled shoes, and one or two vanities a young fellow would naturally be set up about, and the consciousness of my trim clothing put me in a very complacent mood as I stopped and spoke with the damsels.

And say, the young person who wrote the book did not adopt a masculine pseudonym in vanity or conceit, but because she was afraid it would be thought presumptuous to publish her name, and that she did not mean the story for such as he, but as a sweetener of history for young people, who might thereby acquire a taste for what went on in their own country hundreds of years ago, and be tempted to dive deeper into the subject.

"Ernest Thornton, I am informed that you have been engaged in a fight," he continued, in a tone a little less sharp than that with which he had pronounced my name; and I had the vanity to believe that the square tone in which I had uttered the single word I had been called upon to speak had produced a salutary impression upon him.

This is a nondescript piece of fiction, the design of which is, by means of a narrative of travel and adventure, constructed without much regard to the probability of particular incidents, to set forth, in the characteristic mocking vein of Voltaire, the vanity and misery of mankind.

All the strength of the world and all its beauty, all true joy, everything that consoles, that feeds hope, or throws a ray of light along our dark paths, everything that makes us see across our poor lives a splendid goal and a boundless future, comes to us from people of simplicity, those who have made another object of their desires than the passing satisfaction of selfishness and vanity, and have understood that the art of living is to know how to give one's life.

It would have been hard to conceive that one so ignorant and so simple, had as a boy, all untaught, seen as clearly the vanity of idols as well-instructed men could do, and had in his own simple way taken practical and striking steps to convince others of the justice of his views.

We all took a turn at opening the parcel, and it turned out to be a vanity bag, fitted with a mirror and other frivolities, so of course it was presented to me, and I arranged my hair in the mirror, and powdered my nose with the puff, just to shock them, which, by the way, it fully succeeded in doing.

Under his airy accusation she mistook this for vanity and accepted the blame with a faint sense of error, though, as a matter of fact, it was nothing more than the first subtle outcroppings of an artistic nature, endeavoring to re-create the perfect likeness of some phase of beauty which appealed to her.

From an excess of zeal which betrayed the cause of it, the Duke of Hamilton demeaned himself to act the part of a clerk; reading, at the ordinary place of proclamation, the act of convention aloud to the mean multitude, who found even their own vanity hurt in the sacrifice which was made to it by the first man in the nation.

It tickles their silly vanity to fancy that their interests are capitalistic interests, and their mental horizon is too hopelessly limited for them to perceive that the proletariat whom it pleases them to despise as the great army of the "unwashed" are in truth fighting their battles for them, and receiving instead of gratitude, contempt, gibes and sneers.