To collect the several essays of princes glancing on that project umbrages and state representations rather than realities, to ingratiate princes with their subjects, or with the oratory of so pious a project to woo money out of people’s purses.—Fuller, Holy War, b. v. c. 25.
You look for it [truth] in your books, and you tug hard for it in your disputations, and you derive it from the cisterns of the Fathers, and you inquire after the old ways; and sometimes are taken with new appearances, and you rejoice in false lights, or are delighted with little umbrages or peep of day.—Bishop Taylor, Sermon preached to the University of Dublin.
There being in the Old Testament thirteen types and umbrages of this Holy Sacrament, eleven of them are of meat and drink.—Id., The Worthy Communicant, c. ii. § 2.
At the beginning some men were a little umbrageous, and startling at the name of the Fathers; yet since the Fathers have been well studied, we have behaved ourselves with more reverence toward the Fathers than they of the Roman persuasion have done.—Donne, Sermons, 1640, p. 557.
That there was none other present but himself when his master De Merson was murdered, it is umbrageous, and leaves a spice of fear and sting of suspicion in their heads.—Reynolds, God’s Revenge against Murther, b. iii. hist. 13.
Uncouth. Now unformed in manner, ungraceful in behaviour; but once simply unknown. The change in signification is to be traced to the same causes which made ‘barbarous,’ meaning at first only foreign, to have afterwards the sense of savage and wild. Almost all nations regard with disfavour and dislike that which is outlandish, and generally that with which they are unacquainted; so that words which at first did but express this fact of strangeness, easily acquire a further unfavourable sense.
The vulgar instruction requires also vulgar and communicable terms, not clerkly or uncouth, as are all these of the Greek and Latin languages.—Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, b. iii. c. 10.
Wel-away the while I was so fonde,
To leave the good that I had in honde
In hope of better that was uncouth;