unskilfully

• “The lines are, sometimes, such as elegy requires, smooth and easy; but to this praise his claim is not constant; his diction is often harsh, improper, and affected: his words ill-coined, or ill-chosen; and his phrase unskilfully inverted.”

  The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II

• “The lines are sometimes, such as Elegy requires, smooth and easy; but to this praise his claim is not constant; his diction is often harsh, improper, and affected, his words ill-coined or ill - chosen, and his phrase unskilfully inverted.”

  Johnson's Lives of the Poets — Volume 2

• ““Ay,” replied Morton, “even thus fly all your shafts — smartly enough loosened from the bow, and not unskilfully aimed — but a breath of foolish affection ever crosses in the mid volley, and sways the arrow from the mark.””

  The Abbot

• “By no means binding myself to this opinion — though admitting that the man who is afraid of a newspaper will generally be found to be rather something like it, I must still freely own that I should approach my Parliamentary debate with infinite fear and trembling if it were so unskilfully served up for my breakfast.”

  Speeches: Literary and Social

• “This mental exercise lasted until Biddy made a rush at them and distributed three defaced Bibles (shaped as if they had been unskilfully cut off the chump end of something), more illegibly printed at the best than any curiosities of literature I have since met with, speckled all over with ironmould, and having various specimens of the insect world smashed between their leaves.”

  Great Expectations

• “She stood at the door looking after him, with her hands loosely clasped in each other, as he made his way over the frowzy and uneven patch of ground which lay before their house, which had once (and not long ago) been a pleasant meadow, and was now a very waste, with a disorderly crop of beginnings of mean houses, rising out of the rubbish, as if they had been unskilfully sown there.”

  Dombey and Son

• “The portrait was a water-colour, painted rather unskilfully by a lady who had been a neighbour of hers; but the likeness, as every one declared, was a striking one.”

  Dream tales and prose poems

• “Grace assented to the proposal, and the woman told her tale unskilfully, for want of practice, as she declared.”

  The Woodlanders

• “He began to talk — at first reluctantly, unskilfully — but afterwards he talked more freely, chattered away in fact.”

  The Torrents of Spring

• “His wounds proved not mortal; but he never will be the man he was: partly from his having been unskilfully treated by this his first surgeon”

  Sir Charles Grandison

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