What is "urbanity"

Usage examples of "urbanity".

Old Rua Te Kahu came in wearing a feather cloak over his best suit and, with great urbanity, moved among his guests.

Meilin spoke with an urbanity that betrayed how Van Klomp must have been making the walls shake for the last while.

Minneapolis was an amazement of urbanity: its colossal buildings, its sumptuous stores, its swarming streets, the sheer noise, and then, beyond these ascertainable realities, the existence, surmised but wholly probable, of fairies swooping and darting through the glass-and-stone canyons, flitting above the trafficked streets, lighting in flocks on the carved facades of monolithic banks, then spiraling larklike into the azures of mid-afternoon, like a vastation of bright invisible locusts that fed not on the leaves of trees or on the potted flowers decorating the Mall but on the thoughts, the minds, the souls of all these calm pedestrians.

Jarndyce, that that gentleman may have done me the honour so far to misapprehend my character as to induce you to believe that you would not have been received by my local establishment in Lincolnshire with that urbanity, that courtesy, which its members are instructed to show to all ladies and gentlemen who present themselves at that house.

His grace himself, when Mark arrived there with Sowerby and Miss Dunstable--for in this instance Miss Dunstable did travel in the phaeton, while Mark occupied a seat in the dicky--his grace himself was at this moment in the drawing-room and nothing could exceed his urbanity.

He was formally introduced to Mrs Lopez, the use of the name for the occasion being absolutely necessary, and with all the smiling urbanity, which as a bishop he was bound to possess, he was hardly able not to be funereal as he looked at her and remembered her story.

Jarndyce, that the gentleman to whom, for the reasons I have mentioned, I refrain from making further allusion-- it is possible, Mr. Jarndyce, that that gentleman may have done me the honour so far to misapprehend my character as to induce you to believe that you would not have been received by my local establishment in Lincolnshire with that urbanity, that courtesy, which its members are instructed to show to all ladies and gentlemen who present themselves at that house.

He is perhaps fifty-eight, of strong build, rather bull-necked, with grey eyes, and a well-coloured face, whose choleric autocracy is veiled by a thin urbanity.

The habit of wealth and property which the Kolodrian merchants brought to Lurkna Downs, the urbanity and cosmopolitan conceits which two centuries of trade with Kolodria have since fostered there, have deprived the First Folk values—their ferocious passions and proud austerities—of the general reverence they once enjoyed.

It is evident, however, that he hunted out and pursued, with a wonderful pleasantness of style and argument, and with a most pointed and insinuating urbanity, the foolishness of ignorant men, who thought that they knew this or that,-sometimes confessing his own ignorance, and sometimes dissimulating his knowledge, even in those very moral questions to which he seems to have directed the whole force of his mind.

By sunset two hundred and fifty Spaniards were masters of Bridgetown, the islanders were disarmed, and at Government House, Governor Steed – his gout forgotten in his panic – supported by Colonel Bishop and some lesser officers, was being informed by Don Diego, with an urbanity that was itself a mockery, of the sum that would be required in ransom.

And because those who manned her were new to the seas of the Spanish Main, and because even the things that had happened in Bridgetown were not enough to teach them to regard every Spaniard as a treacherous, cruel dog to be slain at sight, they used him with the civility which his own suave urbanity invited.

Guests speculate that his pre-show ritual of socialisation - a bestowing upon them of his brilliance - is a ploy to point up the disparity between the urbanity of the man and the barbarity of his act, thereby commenting on the dichotomy inherent in the human condition.