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More "Pompous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not persuade himself to seek rest until he had got it down in black-and-white; for, though he wrote letters instead of sonnets, he was nevertheless a sort of a poet by temperament. You behold him calm now, master once more of his emotions, and not that agitated, pompous, and slightly ridiculous person who lately stamped over Oxford Street and stormed the Alhambra Theatre. And in order to help the excellent father of my hero back into your esteem, let me point out that the imminence and the actuality of fatherhood constitute a somewhat disturbing experience, ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... trees once grew beside a running brook: An Alder, one, of unassuming mien: His mate, a Poplar, who, with lofty look, Wore, with a rustling flirt, his robe of green. With pompous front the Poplar mounted high, And curried converse with each swelling breeze; While Alder seemed content to live and die A lowly shrub ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... amused Hadria to note the contrast between him and Mr. Gordon, who was a typical father of a family; limited in his interests to that circle; an amiable ruler of a tiny, somewhat absurd little world, pompous ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader! Many a bitter smile passed over Pen's face as he read his novel, and recalled the time and feelings which gave it birth. How pompous some of the grand passages appeared; and how weak others were in which he thought he had expressed his full heart! This page was imitated from a then favorite author, as he could now clearly see and confess, though he had believed himself to be writing originally then. As he mused over ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the Italy of the first years of the Fifteenth Century. Gentile was also pleased to add to the "superb chargers" mentioned by Lattuda, all kinds of animals, especially the apes that the Milanese loved to include in their pompous processions. Finally, in the background of this picture he has painted the embattled walls of a Guelph city with two massive gates; the one through which the Magi have entered, the other through which they will take their departure. Is there anything here, either in the foreground or the background ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... kilometres, which I had overheard from Bhme's lips at Memmert, and which Davies had attributed to the outside channels—did they refer to a canal? I remembered seeing barges in Bensersiel harbour. I remembered conversations with the natives in the inn, scraps of the post-master's pompous loquacity, talks of growing trade, of bricks and grain passing from the interior to the islands: from another source—was it the grocer of Wangeroog?—of expansion of business in the islands themselves as bathing resorts; from another source again—von Brning himself, surely—of Dollmann's personal ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... spiritual and temporal. Miss Jacky stood unrivalled as the sensible woman of Glenfern. She had attained this eminence partly from having a little more understanding than her sisters, but principally from her dictatorial manner, and the pompous, decisive tone in which she delivered the most commonplace truths. At home her supremacy in all matters of sense was perfectly established; and thence the infection, like other superstitions, had spread ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... center of all eyes, made pompous preparation; he pulled down his vest, arranged his sleeves and, in sonorous, cadenced voice began to recite his ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... Had not the magistrate seen him give the wretched man money to run away with? His first care was to disengage Margari's hands from his coat tail and next to hold him at arm's length so that he should not clutch his collar. Then with pompous impertinence he pretended ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... so pompous and costly—but it is the shop of a poor man. The whole Lake-frontage, as I have told you, cost no more than a city lot; and with sand on the beach, and stone on the shore and nearby fields, it all came to be as cheaply as a wooden cabin—indeed, it had to. That winter ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... was susceptible to what Elise chose to call wasted emotion, and she found herself again on the verge of tears when they entered the Chapel. Though she did not know enough of architecture to survey intelligently the somewhat pompous apartment, she was delightfully impressed by the rich adornments and the ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... conduct pours the utmost contempt upon all the will-worship, and doctrines, and superstition of carnal men-(Mason). With such, traditions, human inventions, forms, and externals, appear venerable and sacred; and they are mistaken with pertinaceous ignorance for the substance of religion. What is pompous and burdensome appears to such men meritorious; and the excitement of mere natural passions, as at a tragedy, is falsely deemed a needful help to true devotion. Their zeal hardens their hearts, and causes bitter rage, enmity, and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... out without making excuses. When he returned, Dr. Lindsay had dried his face and was calmer. But his aspect was sufficiently ominous; he was both pompous and severe. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... made A grand parade, With marching train-band, guild, and trade: The burgomaster in robes arrayed, Gold chain, and mace, and gay cockade, Great keys carried, and flags displayed, Pompous marshal and spruce young aide, Carriage and foot and cavalcade; While big drums thundered and trumpets brayed, And all the bands of the canton played; The fountain spouted lemonade, Children drank of the bright cascade; Spectators of every rank and grade, The young and merry, the grave ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... with faded frescoes on their plastered walls and with dim, echoing arcades. And so into the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele—there is no more charming little square in Italy—with its fountain and its two stone giants and the pompous statue of an incredibly ugly King astride a prancing horse and a monument to Peace set up by Napoleon to commemorate a treaty which was the cause of many wars. At the back of the piazza, like the back-drop on a stage, rises a towering sugar-loaf mound, thrown up, ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... a very pompous and stately man. He had not been honoured with his true title since he left school, and was therefore a good deal taken aback by the plain-speaking of his friend. He attributed the words, however, to the weak condition of Mr Stuart's mind, ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... course towards the tops of the Rocky Mountains. At the bottom of the valley flows an immense river, into which the various streams issuing from the mountains fall from all parts. In memory of their native land, the French formerly called this river the St. Louis. The Indians, in their pompous language, have named it the Father ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... had no charms for them; and, while her cousins had lovers, or danglers, by the dozen, Isabella found herself, to her infinite satisfaction, completely deserted and neglected, by all the starched and pompous fools that visited her uncle, during a stay of some months in ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... silence his subordinate by the tacit might of his superior dignity. He says: "I do not think there is much in all that. Many errors were committed at the time you refer to which we need not now discuss." A pompous man easily sweeps away the suggestions of those beneath him. But though a minister may so deal with his subordinate, he cannot so deal with his king. The social force of admitted superiority by which he overturned his under-secretary is ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... manfully as he blew his great horn; and in that pompous engine of sound, the boy beheld a spectacle of huge forces under human control. To Penrod, the horn meant power, and the musician meant mastery over power, though, of course, Penrod did not know that this was how he really felt about ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... the beloved of all in the town, never knew, never to her dying day, that on a certain memorable occasion, good-humored, fat, pompous Mrs. Bell would have given half a sovereign to box her ears. The astute captain, however, guessed her feelings, and chuckled inwardly. He had also found out during his brief morning's conversation that Mrs. Meadowsweet was going to ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... not to go there unless one is French or in some way connected with or interested in French life and character, yet the cuisine is excellent and the rooms clean and neat. The occasional presence of pompous Senators from the provinces on their way to the legislative halls of the capital ensures a certain average of cooking and attendance; at other times prevail the naturally comfortable instincts of ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... nearly all of Corneille's that now appears on the stage. His later works are, without exception, merely treatises or reasons of state in certain difficult conjunctures, dressed out in a pompous dialogical form. We might as well make a tragedy out ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... lady, was twice enlightened, and saw poor Anais de Negrepelisse as she really was, as Parisians saw her—a tall, lean, withered woman, with a pimpled face and faded complexion; angular, stiff, affected in her manner; pompous and provincial in her speech; and, and above all these things, dowdily dressed. As a matter of fact, the creases in an old dress from Paris still bear witness to good taste, you can tell what the gown was meant for; but an ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... kinds, to become a country gentleman, patriot, reformer, financier, and what not, always good-looking (he had been very handsome), pleasing, intelligent, cultivated, agreeable as a man can be who is not witty and who is rather pompous and slow, after many years of retirement, in the course of which he gave to the world his lucubrations on corn and currency. Time and the hour made him master of a large but encumbered estate and member for his county. Armed with the importance of representing ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... about eight-and-forty years of age; Son about eight-and-forty minutes. Dombey was rather bald, rather red, and though a handsome, well-made man, too stern and pompous in appearance to be prepossessing. Son was very bald, and very red, and somewhat crushed and spotted in his general effect, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... her by surprise, that she had been weeping. Some secret sorrow evidently oppressed her mind, and, at times, I have seen her beautiful face suffused with scarlet and her eyes become wet with tears, when my pompous landlady spoke of the ladies of Europe and "the true white-blooded females of America." I dreamed not at this time of the cause; but the truth dawned upon ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... of Richardson's writing. But to paint perfection, rather than to study nature, was his object in "Sir Charles Grandison," and therefore that novel was less powerful in the author's day, and is less interesting in ours than "Pamela" and "Clarissa." We no longer need the example of the pompous Sir Charles to dissuade us from indecent language and drunkenness in a lady's drawing-room, and we can only laugh at the studied propriety of his faultless ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... well that the prize should go to different localities, for in that way its sphere of usefulness is extended," remarked pompous Mr. Gloag, who could be impartial, as there was no candidate from Noran Side. He was a minister much in request for church soirees, where he amused the congregations so greatly with personal anecdote about himself that they never thought much ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... Taney lingered, while the horn and hounds were loud, To behold the pompous Pinkney scattering learning to the crowd; And old men great Wirt remembered, while their minds he strove to win, As a little German urchin drumming at ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... blasphemous and sometimes erotic. A devoted country clergyman doing his simple duty—trying to lift his congregation to better views of life, partaking their joys and alleviating their sorrows, often a martyr to meddlesome deacons or to pompous trustees, and his wife a prey to the whimsical wives of opinionated pew-owners—such a man I deeply revere; but the longer I live the more I am convinced that the professional revivalist and the sensation preacher are necessarily and ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... each side by numerous sarcophagi; as along the Roman Appian Way; passed the well of Shaikh el Bakkar, and a sarcophagus with a long inscription in Greek, which I regretted not having discovered yesterday, so as to allow of copying it. From an eminence we took the last view of the pompous colonnades ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... then the Honourable Sidney Lorraine, prospered in his political career. He was servile, and pompous, and indefatigable, and loquacious, so whispered the world: his friends hailed him as, at once, a courtier and a sage, a man of business and an orator. After revelling in his fair proportion of commissionerships, and under-secretaryships, and the rest of the milk and honey ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... treasures of earth, jewels and gold and dignities, and scenes of sensuous delights, and everything that holds to the visible and the temporal, and piles them into one scale, and then He puts into the other the one name, God; and the pompous nothings fly up and are nought, and have no weight at all. Is that not true? Does it need any demonstration, any ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... haughty gesture marks his gait, No pompous tone his word; No studied attitude is seen, No palling nonsense heard; He'll suit his bearing to the hour, Laugh, listen, learn, or teach. With joyous freedom in his mirth, And ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... out into the great living room, where a large, pompous, vividly colored gentleman was laying down the law to the triplets—three very attractive young girls, dressed precisely alike, who said, "Yes, pa-pah!" and "No pa-pah!" in a grave and silvery-voiced chorus whenever filial ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... eyes again to his wife's face. He saw it calm, her attitude reposeful. Till then his tone had been resentful, dull, without sarcasm. But now he became slightly pompous. ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... weaklings. She drew a lesson from the recent victory. Her white hands pointed him to glory that lay beyond a prolonged martyrdom; she spoke of stakes and flaming pyres; she spread the adjectives thickly on her finest tartines, and decorated them with a variety of her most pompous epithets. It was an infringement of the copyright of the passages of declamation that disfigure Corinne; but Louise grew so much the greater in her own eyes as she talked, that she loved the Benjamin who inspired her eloquence the more for it. She counseled him ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... ridicules those who reject without examination still more than those who believe with docile credulity. Jean Baptiste Rousseau (1670- 1741), the lyric poet of this age, displayed in his odes considerable energy, and a kind of pompous harmony, which no other had imparted to the language, yet he fails to excite the sympathy. In his writings we find that free commingling of licentious morals with a taste for religious sublimities which characterized the last years of Louis XIV. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... he seemed to feel for my situation. I did not know M. Barthes; however I perceived in what he said the warmth and zeal of friendship, and that he had it at heart to persuade me to fix my residence at Bienne. He made the most pompous eulogium of the city and its inhabitants, with whom he showed himself so intimately connected as to call them several times in my ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... arraying himself in a damask-satin or velvet, and wearing on his neck a chain of gold. Of a far other kind were the tastes of Wolsey's successor, who, in the warmest sunshine of his power, preferred a quiet dinner with Erasmus to the pompous display of state banquets, and who wore a gleeful light in his countenance when, after his fall, he called his children and grandchildren about him, and said: "I have been brought up at Oxford, at an Inn of Chancery, at Lincoln's Inn, and in the King's Court—from ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... an ass merely, he is a pompous and a stupid ass. (Laughs again to himself.) Now there is something very important that he ought to know, and he wouldn't let me tell him. ...
— The Great Adventure • Arnold Bennett
... alone, in wistful idleness, there came a knock at the door—a pompous rat-tat-tat, with a stout tap-tap or two added, once and for all to put the quality of the visitor beyond doubt. The door was then cautiously pushed ajar to admit the head of the personage thus impressively heralded. And a most extraordinary ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... of the Robins, too, is a continuous delight; and from its pompous and high-sounding dialogue a skilful adapter may glean not only one story, but one story with two versions; for the infant of eighteen months can follow the narrative of the joys and troubles, errors ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... six, the first man made his appearance. He was a thick-set, pompous individual, with a gold-headed cane and gold spectacles, and climbed up the stairs with dignity and difficulty. He was followed by a pale little woman, four small children, and a stout, red-haired nurse, bearing in her arms a baby, which was laboring under an attack of the intermittent ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... with the alien and warring races were conjured up, the splendid viceregal circle, the pompous headquarter military, the fast set, staid luxury-loving civilians, and all the fierce eddies and undercurrents of the graded social life, in which the cold English heart learns to burn as madly under "dew of the lawn" muslin as ever Lesbian ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... the Pacific coast between Mount St Elias and the Columbia river are worked out by Boas; the transformation from the hunting to the agricultural mode of life was accompanied by changes in belief and worship quite as radical. These have been carefully studied by Cushing, Stevenson and Fewkes. The pompous ceremonials of the civilized tribes of Mexico and the Cordilleras in South America, when analysed, reveal only a higher grade of the prevailing idea. Im Thurn says of the Carib: "All objects, animate and inanimate, seem exactly of the same ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... night, And chased the Stygian shades with rosy smile That spread from Error's home, the land of Nile. No more with harp and sistrum Music calls To wanton rites within Astarte's halls, The priests forget to mourn their Apis slain, And bear Osiris' ark with pompous train; Gone is Serapis, and Anubis fled, And Neitha's unraised vail shrouds Isis' prostrate head. Where Jove shook heaven when the red bolt was hurled, Neptune the sea—and Phoebus lit the world; Where fair-haired naiads held each silver ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... the last time I was in Paris, his head—a declaration of righteousness, a cross between a Caesar by Gerome, and an archbishop of a provincial town, set all my natural antipathy instantly on edge. Hugo is often pompous, shallow, empty, unreal, but he is at least an artist, and when he thinks of the artist and forgets the prophet, as in "Les Chansons des Rues et des Bois," his juggling with the ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... thoughts, or words in quiet. I despise the world yet, I assure you, more than either Gay or you, and the court more than all the rest of the world. As for those scribblers for whom you apprehend I would suppress my Dulness (which, by the way, for the future you are to call by a more pompous name, the Dunciad), how much that nest of hornets are my regard will easily appear to you when you read the ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... external trappings of his rank,—those gorgeous adjuncts and pompous circumstances which excite the wonder and envy of mankind,—no man could have shown himself more indifferent to them. He recognized indeed the necessity of maintaining the dignity of his high position. "Every moment," ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... command were mine, And every boast Ambition could desire, The pompous Gifts, sweet Bard, I would resign For the aft ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... dignities should regard Rome and Italy not as an inn to put up at in travelling, but as their home." And Pliny the Elder, going as a philosophical observer to the very root of the evil, says, in his pompous manner, "In former times our generals tilled their fields with their own hands; the earth, we may suppose, opened graciously beneath a plough crowned with laurels and held by triumphal hands, maybe because those great men gave to tillage ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... an 'igh 'ole time in 'ere, young gentlemen," and Mr. McGuffie's English groom looked down on the boys; "but you're missin' the Derby, that's what you are. Hold Pompous has come 'isself, and if he ain't been hexplainin' to the master 'ow he 'appened to knock Speug down. He's out o' breath now, and the master he's took up the runnin', and—my eye and Betty Martin—ain't he talkin'! Not cussin'—no, ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... actors in the day's doings the affair was an unmitigated annoyance, and even their own great and true happiness could not lighten the excessive fatigue of the pompous ceremony and of the still more pompous reception which followed it. To describe that day would be to make out a catalogue of gorgeous equipages, gorgeous costumes, gorgeous decorations. Many pages would not suffice to enumerate the cardinals, the dignitaries, the ambassadors, ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... with a tall, haggard man who had the eyes of a chained and starving dog. They joined a conspicuous party whose principal members were a fat woman massaged to the teeth, a dark girl who had evidently a sharp eye to the main chance as well as to the picturesque, and a hook-nosed, appallingly pompous man who would strut on the ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... and practice, reason and action from each other. It was by the instructions of my friend, that I learned to rise superior to the power of prejudice, to reject no truth because it was novel, to refuse my ear to no arguments because they were not backed by pompous and venerable names. In pursuance of this system, I have ventured in my last to suggest some reasons in favour of a moderate indulgence of youthful pleasures. Perhaps however my dear count will think, that I am going beyond what even these reasons would authorize ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... in society; it was more than I could bear for a length of time. On one occasion I met a party of my critics—seven of them; some of them had been very bitter foes in print, but they were prodigiously civil face to face. These gentlemen seemed infinitely grander, more pompous, dashing, showy, than the few authors I saw. Mr. Thackeray, for instance, is a man of quiet, simple demeanour; he is however looked upon with some awe and even distrust. His conversation is very peculiar, too perverse to be pleasant. It was proposed to me to see Charles Dickens, Lady Morgan, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... A pompous mulatto man in white cotton gloves and with a cluster of tuberoses in his buttonhole ushered the party down the aisle to the seats of honor reserved for the white folks. There were seventeen in the ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... side with the village idiot there was the pompous person who could not only read a book, but could put whole sentences together and even make rhymes, and who on these grounds took an important part in the life of the community. He was not only adviser and letter-writer to his ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... awning. One could see indistinctly through the mist half a score of carriages in a line, and the silhouettes of English grooms leading the duke's saddle-horse up and down an avenue of acacias, all leafless at that season and standing naked in their bark. Everything revealed well-ordered, pompous, ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... Her nose was relatively small, but too thick and broad at the nostrils, although it departed but little from the straight line of the classic model. Altogether the Signora Pandolfi, christened Maria Luisa, and wife to Marzio the silver-chiseller, was a portly and pompous-looking person, who wore an air of knowing her position, and of being sure to maintain it. Nevertheless, there was a kindly expression in her fat face, and if her eyes looked sleepy they did ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... care of them, generous diet, but principally to the fact of the elimination of all the roosters among the flock during the season between the "first of May and December first," with one exception. "Brigham," an immensely large, old, red Shanghai rooster, a most pompous and dignified old chap. A special pet of Aunt Sarah's, she having raised him from a valuable "setting" of eggs given her, and as the egg from which "Brigham," as he was called, emerged, was the only one of the lot which proved fertile, he was valued accordingly and given a longer lease of life ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... Humphry Ward's statement, he took very great pains with it; indeed, internal evidence would be sufficient to establish this if we had no positive external testimony whatsoever. He came at a fortunate time, when the stately yet not pompous or over-elaborated model of the latest Georgian prose, raised from early Georgian "drabness" by the efforts of Johnson, Gibbon, and Burke, but not proceeding to the extremes of any of the three, was still the academic standard; but when a certain ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... sense to see that the real Michael was speaking. When people were being unreal, when they were pompous or adopting attitudes, she could attend to nothing but their absurdity, which engrossed her altogether. But she never laughed at real things; real things were ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... French stage," said she, "always look over their right shoulders, to express magnanimous disdain; and a lover, whether he be Grecian or Roman, Turk, Israelite, or American, must regularly show his passion by the pompous emphasis with which he pronounces the word MADAME!—a word which must certainly have, for a French audience, some magical charm, incomprehensible ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... I forget the suddenly changing seasons of the northern clime. There is no long and lingering spring, unfolding leaf and blossom one by one; no long and lingering autumn, pompous with many-colored leaves and the glow of Indian summer. But winter and summer are wonderful, and pass into each other. The quail has hardly ceased piping in the corn when winter, from the folds of trailing clouds, sows broadcast over ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... who was born in 1757, was a son of Thomas Douce, one of the Six Clerks of the Court of Chancery. He was first sent to a school at Richmond, conducted by a Mr. Lawton, author of a work on Egypt, and afterwards to 'a French academy, kept by a pompous and ignorant Life-Guardsman, with a view to his learning merchants' accounts, which were his aversion.' On leaving school he studied for the bar, and for some time held an appointment, under his father, in the Six Clerks' Office, but the post was not very congenial to ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... hardly have recognised him had she met him in the street. He was thin, and pale, and haggard, and mean. And as he stalked up and down the room, it seemed to her that the very character of the man was changed. She had not previously known him to be pompous, unreasonable, and absurd. She did not answer him at once, as she perceived that he had not finished his address;—and, after a moment's pause, he continued. "Lady Rowley, there is nothing I would not have done for ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... &c.] The Indian women, richly attired, are carried in a splendid and pompous machine to the funeral pile where the bodies of their deceased husbands are to be consumed, and there voluntarily throw themselves into it, and expire; and such as refuse, their virtue is ever after suspected, and they live in ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... follow, the Little Big Horn is a combination of letters, the marking sunflowers exist no more. We destroyed, we preempted; we are destroyed and we have been thrust out. Illinois admitted to the Union on suchandsuch a date, the Little Giant rubbed stubby fingers through pompous hair heavy with beargrease, the Honorable Abe in Springfield's most expensive broadcloth, necktie in the latest mode but pulled aside to free an eager adamsapple; the drunken tanner, punctual with the small man's virtues, betrayed and dying painfully with so much blood upon his hands; and the ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... to partake of a lukewarm dinner in an overheated room is as imperative as it is detestable. For the rest, at Tours there is a certain Rue Royale which has pretensions to the monumental; it was constructed a hundred years ago, and the houses, all alike, have on a moderate scale a pompous eighteenth-century look. It connects the Palais de Justice, the most important secular building in the town, with the long bridge which spans the Loire—the spacious, solid bridge pronounced by Balzac, in "Le Cure de Tours," "one of the finest ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... to have a perfect costume, and another to understand the role. Master Crewe not only looks his part, but he acts it as well. He has not failed to take in all the points of the portrait, and imitates the pompous attitude to perfection. He stands with feet wide apart, grasping his gloves in the right hand and supporting the ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... Ireland, in the year 1731, it appeared that a great number of ecclesiastics had, in defiance of the laws, flocked into that kingdom: that several convents had been opened by jesuits, monks, and friars; that many new and pompous mass-houses had been erected in some of the most conspicuous parts of their great cities, where there had not been any before; and that such swarms of vagrant, immoral Romish priests had appeared, that the very papists themselves ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... time. It is a scene which might be put upon the stage, quite conceivably, without any loss of the main impression it is made to convey in the book—an impression of ironic contrast, of the bustle and jostle round the oration of the pompous dignitary, of the commonplace little romance that is being broached unobserved. To receive the force of the contrast the reader has only to see and hear, to be present while the hour passes; and the author places him there accordingly, in front of the visible and audible facts ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... it is true, that M. Taine is not professing to write a history in the ordinary sense. His book lies, if we may use two very pompous but indispensable words, partly in the region of historiography, but much more in the region of sociology. The study of the French Revolution cannot yet be a history of the past, for the French still walk per ignes suppositos, and the Revolution is still ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley
... port were either burnt or disabled. And the rain which immediately fell, served not so much to extinguish the flames, as the violent wind which then arose contributed to kindle them. Those of Achen, proud of that action, appeared next morning on their decks, letting fly their pompous streamers, and shouting, as if already they were victorious. But their insolence was soon checked; the cannon from the fortress forced them to retire as far off as the isle of Upe. In the mean time, seven poor ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... Pastorals, corrupt himself with foreign manners; for if he hath once vitiated the healthful habit, as I may say, of Expression, which Bucolicks necessarily require, 'tis impossible he should be fit for that task. Yet let him not affect pompous or dazling Expressions, for such belong to Epicks, or Tragedians. Let his words sometimes tast of the Country, not that I mean, of which Volusius's Annals, upon which Catullus hath made that biting Epigram, are full; for though the Thought ought ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... vexed that de Batz was sitting there. He felt he could have told this dainty little lady quite a good deal about England if only his pompous, fat friend would have had the ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... night and day, buried in a hopeless mass of diplomatic papers. But he soon became weary of this, and leaving all the ordinary affairs of the State in the hands of agents, amused himself with his violin and in chasing rabbits. As more serious employment, he gave pompous receptions, and enveloped himself in imperial ceremony and the most approved courtly etiquette. He still, however, insisted upon giving his approval to all measures adopted by his ministers, before ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... and resigned himself to his fate. At that instant the sound of hammering ceased, and the door opened. It was six o'clock, and Pine had come to have a last look at his patients before dinner. It seemed that there was somebody with him, for a kind, though somewhat pompous, voice remarked upon the scantiness of accommodation, and the "necessity—the absolute necessity" of complying ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... from that awful board, and Honeyman likewise interceded for him, and Mr. Bagshot promised that, as soon as his party came in, he would ask the Minister for a tide-waitership for him; for everybody liked the solemn, soft-hearted, willing little lad, and no one knew him less than his pompous and stupid and ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hollowed by ambition, he was the very type of a second-rate personage on the lookout for something to turn up, and ready to do anything if so he might get on in the world, while keeping within the limitations of the possible and the forms of law. His pompous expression was an admirable indication of the time-serving eloquence to be expected of him. Chesnel's successor had discovered the young Count's hiding place to him, and he took great credit to himself ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... of William's birth. The window is shown from which Duke Robert first beheld the tanner's daughter, and the room in which William first saw what, if it really be the spot, must certainly have been light of an artificial kind. A pompous inscription in the modern French style calls on us to reverence the spot where the "legislator of ancient England" "fut engendre et naquit." The odd notion of William being the legislator of England calls forth a passing smile, and another somewhat longer ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... spite of his affectations, Don Pedro was a man of culture, fond of literature, and endowed with a taste for poetry. He had been known occasionally to celebrate events pertaining to the kingdom, or the royal family in several stanzas of a classic, somewhat pompous, style. But although people had tried to persuade him to publish them, he never ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... one of these toboggan slides down the hill of fortune which sometimes happen to the most deserving. His father, old General Orlando Swain, had, all his life, put up a pompous front and was supposed to have inherited a fortune from somewhere; but, when he died, this edifice was found to be all facade and no foundation, and Freddie inherited nothing but debts. He had been expensively educated for a career as an Ornament of ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... had always been the seat of government, though it consisted of but a few buildings. But, since the revolution of 1836, it has expanded into a population of about seven hundred souls. The town occupies a plain, bounded by a lofty ridge. The dwellings are the reverse of pompous, being all built of mud bricks. The houses are remarkable for a paucity of windows, glass being inordinately dear; even parchment almost unattainable, and the artists in window-making charging three ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... This was an age of remarkable literary and artistic activity, pompous and pedantic in many of its manifestations, but distinguished also by productions of a very high order. Although contemporary with the Italian Baroque—Bernini having been the guest of Louis XIV.—the architecture of ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... you are a reformer, I beg your pardon. I never quarrel about what I have heard certain pompous gentlemen ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... have been here I have seen a great deal of Sir Mathew Tierney, who accompanied the King to Ireland, and who is of course pompous of his station, and glad to communicate all he knows. I am quite astonished to hear the language he holds, so highly favourable to the Catholics, and he does not scruple to say that their demands must be granted; that it is injustice to ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... I am safe till next summer; but last evening I met a lady who had been taken in to dinner by the American a few days ago. "A little bit pompous, perhaps," she said, "but he told me such a delightful story about MARK TWAIN that I should like to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various
... prisoners, nominally to Mexico. Whether any of these stories had a basis of fact, we cannot say, but from remarks the prisoners themselves made to us, we feel sure that the centre of their trouble was Merida, and that, in some way, they had offended the pompous governor. At all events, it is likely that, long before these words are written, both have met their death upon the road. It is a common thing for prisoners, passing along the Cordillera, to be shot "while attempting to ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... eighteenth century. She was standing beside a table, near a vase of flowers, holding in her bloodless right hand a rose as large as a tomato, looking straight before her with the little porcelain-like eyes of a doll. This woman had been styled "La Latina." In the pompous style of the epoch the lettering on the canvas told of her knowledge and wisdom, and lamented her death at the tender age of eleven years. The women were as dry shoots upon the vigorous trunk of the soldierly and exuberant Febrer stock. Scholarship quickly withered ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... strutted in a pompous and stately manner before them; then she turned and courtesied before ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... you speak, remember every cause Stands not on eloquence, but stands on laws— Pregnant in matter, in expression brief, Let every sentence stand in bold relief; On trifling points nor time nor talents waste, A sad offence to learning and to taste; Nor deal with pompous phrase; nor e'er suppose Poetic flights belong to reasoning prose, Loose declamation may deceive the crowd, And seem more striking as it grows more loud; But sober sense rejects it with disdain, As nought but empty noise, and weak as vain. The froth of words, the school-boy's vain ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... ruddy firelight throwing up her face like a painting. Miss Recompense went out to see about the supper. There was a good-natured black woman in the kitchen to do the cooking, and Cato, who did the outside work and waited on Dinah and Miss Recompense—a tall, sedate, rather pompous colored man. ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... on through the sand-wastes of Fact, Long level of gritty aridity; With pompous conceit make a pact, Be bondsman to bald insipidity; Be slab as a black Irish bog, Slow, somnolent, stupid, and stodgy; Plunge into sophistical fog, And the realms of the dumpishly dodgy. With trump elephantine and slow, Tread on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... is an inventor already. I shall have one of those cards attached to the door of my private office at once. I tell you, Belinda, our son will be a great man one of these days," said Mr. Joslyn, walking up and down with pompous strides and almost bursting with the pride he took in his ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... catching a glimpse of the front walk, hastened out into the hallway. Then she came in, smiling eagerly, a well-dressed, pompous-looking young man ...
— Dick Prescott's Third Year at West Point - Standing Firm for Flag and Honor • H. Irving Hancock
... think that the truth was best. She wanted to know why you did not go to the Duke. I told her that the Duke was not my father; but that as far as I was concerned the Duke might speak to you or not as he pleased. I had nothing to conceal. I am very glad he did not, because he is pompous, and you would have been bored. If there is one thing I desire more than another it is that nothing belonging to me shall ever be a bore to you. I hope I may never stand in the way of anything that will gratify you,—as I said when you lit that cigar. ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... words, than for their structures or formations; and the words that most want explanation are generally terms of art; which, therefore, experience has taught my predecessors to spread with a kind of pompous luxuriance over their productions. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... righteousness design'd His florid genius, and capacious mind: Oft have I heard, amidst th' adoring throng, Celestial truths devolving from his tongue; High o'er the list'ning audience seen him stand, Divinely speak, and graceful stretch his hand: With such becoming grace and pompous sound, With long-rob'd senators encircled round, Before the Roman bar, while Rome was free, Nor bow'd to Caesar's throne the servile knee; Immortal Tully pleads the patriot cause, While ev'ry tongue resounded his applause. Next round my board should candid ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... waiting for the safest opportunity, and when you hear not so often as you wish, remember our silence means our safety. Acquainted as we are, with the situation and condition of the enemy, we well know, that the pompous paragraphs in the London papers are not the news, which the Ministry hear from their army; but the ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... had assembled in the amphitheater enclosing the lists. All the gentry and populace of the surrounding country were gathered there in eager expectancy. The central box contained the lean but pompous Sheriff, his bejeweled wife, and their daughter, a supercilious young woman enough, who, it was openly hinted, was hoping to receive the golden arrow from the victor and thus be crowned queen ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... unmolested amongst the beeches till the ruddy gold of the setting sun ceased to glow on their foliage; then taking the nearest path, I suffered myself, though not without regret, to be conducted out of this fresh sylvan scene to the dusty, pompous parterres of the Greffier Fagel. Every flower that wealth can purchase diffuses its perfume on one side; whilst every stench a canal can exhale, poisons the air on the other. These sluggish puddles defy all the power of the United Provinces, ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... condemn his race to Hell, Unless they bend in pompous form? Tell us that all, for one who fell, Must perish in the ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... on in "calm peace and quiet," but now and again it was stirred into special activity, when Haydn had to put forth his efforts in various new directions. Such an occasion came very early in his service of Prince Nicolaus, when that pompous person made triumphant entry into Eisenstadt. The festivities were on a regal scale and continued for a whole month. A company of foreign players had been engaged to perform on a stage erected in the large conservatory, ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... his retinue and table, or by the magnificence of his guests; though the military commander-in-chief and the temporary admiral on the station did their utmost to entertain her, and some of the local big-wigs were pompous. Lord Mallow had ability and knew how to use it; and he was never so brilliant as on this afternoon, for they dined while it was still daylight and hardly evening. He told her of the customs of the country, of the people; and slyly and effectively he satirized ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... "Of all the pompous, stuck-up letters, it's the worst I ever imagined! And you say you're going? Oh, but look here! ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... his fortunes of yesterday, and looked at them from a distance he began to see something fine there. He had license to be pompous and veteranlike. ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... butler opened the door—a pompous, tall and awful butler in serious black and with side-whiskers. He approached; came down the walk swinging a bunch of keys, looking me over as he came, to see what sort of wares ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... am sorry for these noblemen Whose gallant zeal hath brought them over sea To visit these our shores, that they, with us, Must miss the splendor of St. Germain's court. Such pompous festivals of godlike state I cannot furnish as the royal court Of France. A sober and contented people, Which crowd around me with a thousand blessings Whene'er in public I present myself: This is the spectacle which I can show, And not without some pride, to foreign eyes. The splendor ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... boastful, so overbearing, so childishly important, it seemed to her that it would be easy to make them look ridiculous, and she often found herself framing replies for the Opposition. But of course there was a wide gulf between the pompous gentlemen who lolled and smoked their black cigars in the mahogany chairs on the redcarpeted floor of the House, and the bright-eyed little girl who sat on the edge of her seat in the gallery and looked ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... door, Austin flew to open it, and admitted Mr. Pitt, the governor, a tall pompous personage, who, in his turn, ushered in four other individuals. The first of these, whom he addressed as Mr. Gay, was a stout, good-looking, good-humoured man, about thirty-six, with a dark complexion, an oval face, fine black eyes, full of fire and sensibility, and twinkling with roguish humour—an ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the imperial court had undergone a great change since the death of Charles VI. It had been pre-eminent for pompous ceremony, which was thought to become the dignity of the sovereign who boasted of being the representative of the Roman Caesars. But the Lorraine princes had been bred up in a simpler fashion; and Francis had an innate dislike ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... so much affect the moderately comic, or half serious, as they did the great, the pompous, or heroic stile of dance. They spared for no pains nor cost, towards the perfection of their dances. The figures were exquisite. The least number of the figurers were forty or fifty. Their dresses were ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... informed the Bishop that the hoped-for relapse had taken place. He set out himself accordingly, accompanied by the Vicar-Inquisitor and attended by eight of the familiar names so often quoted, triumphant, important, no doubt with much show of pompous solemnity, to find out for himself. The Castle was all in excitement, report and gossip already busy with the new event so trifling, so all-important. There was no idea now of turning back the visitors. The prison doors were eagerly thrown open, and there indeed ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... justice had entered the room with a look of pompous importance, which was diminished, but not entirely done away, by evident surprise at the appearance of Laura and Wilton. The young gentleman, however, was not particularly well pleased with the interruption, ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... of the English monument to Shakspere, every people has its own mode of commemoration, and I think there is a great deal to be said for ours. There is the French monumental style, which consists in erecting very pompous statues, very well done. There is the German monumental style, which consists in erecting very pompous statues, badly done. And there is the English monumental method, the great English way with statues, which consists in not erecting them at all. A statue ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... shop in Lichfield is associated an amusing story, in which the chief figure was Farquhar, a dramatist, who attained a measure of success in the eighteenth century. His manner was somewhat pompous, and he resented with a great show of indignation the dalliance of the master of the shop. Whilst he was fuming, a little deformed man came up to him and performed the operation satisfactorily. The same day Farquhar was dining at the table of Sir Theophilus ...
— At the Sign of the Barber's Pole - Studies In Hirsute History • William Andrews
... obtain the credit which they must have done by the seizure of the Countess of Derby's despatches. It was, besides, essential to Buckingham's schemes that these should not pass into the hands of a public officer like Topham, who, however pompous and stupid, was upright and well-intentioned, until they had undergone the revisal of a private committee, where something might have probably been suppressed, even supposing that nothing had been added. In short, Christian, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... daughter with a broad smile. He had delivered his speech in pompous pride, his voice rising higher and louder with ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... deposited at their front door by the colonel's automobile. The robbers, under heavy guard, remained in the camp, pending action on the part of the civic authorities. They were very much alive and kicking when Anderson left them, after a pompous harangue on the futility of crime in that neck ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... the watch, moved forward at this point, and Lord Parham, with marked and pompous suavity, ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... their father. I recognised the princess Pride, not only by her being before the others, but also by her habit of stumbling every moment, for want of looking beneath her feet. She had with her a vast many kings, potentates, courtiers, gentlemen, and pompous people, many quakers, innumerable females of ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... most splendid, most magnificent royal palace of any to be found in England or any other kingdom, and the details which he gives seems to bear this out. More especially was he struck by what a later verse writer described as "that most pompous room called Paradise", a room which, according to the ducal description, "captivates the eyes of all who enter by the dazzling of pearls of all kinds", and "in particular there is one apartment belonging to the Queen, in which she ...
— Hampton Court • Walter Jerrold
... them from long staring into the sea distances. Altogether a handsome and distinguished-looking young man, noticeable anywhere, and especially among a crowd of swarthy Portuguese. He was not a lively young man; on the contrary, his manner was rather heavy, and even at times inclined to be pompous; he had a very good opinion of himself, had the clear calculating head and tidy intellectual methods of the able mariner; was shrewd and cautious—in a word, took himself and the world very seriously. A strictly conventional man, as the conventions ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... upon him that even he, Sir John Ferringhall, carpet-merchant, hide-bound Englishman, slow-witted, pompous, deliberate, felt his heart beat to music. Perhaps the Parisian atmosphere had affected him. He leaned towards her, laid ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the ordeal of an introduction; the affair seemed to exasperate him. Denslow alone, of the men, was in his element. Pompous and soft, he "cottoned" to the grandeur with the instinct of a born satellite, and his eyes grew brighter, his body more shining and rotund, his back more concave. His bon-vivant tones, jolly and conventional, sounded a pure barytone to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... oleaginous sympathy. Lamb, in fact, was always able to view his friend with clear eyes. In a letter to Manning, enclosing "all Coleridge's letters" to himself, he says that in them Manning will find "a good deal of amusement, to see genuine talent struggling against a pompous display of it." No criticism could be sounder. But Coleridge never wavered from the belief that he was in no phase of his being an ordinary man. If his thoughts were not ordinary thoughts, his imaginings not ordinary imaginings, then his stomach-aches were not ordinary stomach-aches, ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... came—a luminous April day of showers and warm wind—he was as good as his word. Molly, shining with pride in him (herself wearing the day's "uncertain glory"), saw him fold his arms in face of the pompous line of men his seniors, compress his mouth, shake his cropped head. The deputation was much taken aback, the crowd drove hither and thither; she saw head turned to head, guessed at wounds which certainly any one there was incapable of feeling. ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... to tumble everything out on the floor, and put you to every possible inconvenience, by way of exhibiting his importance; satisfied on that point himself, he impressed you with it by simple courtesy, thus gaining respect where the pompous inquisitive type of the animal would have excited ill-will and contempt. Thank heaven, the increased inter-communication, consequent upon steam-power, has very much civilized that, until lately, barbarian portion of the European family; nor do I attempt to deny that the contiguity ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... eyes of a chained and starving dog. They joined a conspicuous party whose principal members were a fat woman massaged to the teeth, a dark girl who had evidently a sharp eye to the main chance as well as to the picturesque, and a hook-nosed, appallingly pompous man who would strut on the ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... boats running on the river were in the government service, and ours at this time was loaded fore and aft with a company of dragoons, bound to Black Creek. As we left the dock, another large boat came out in a pompous manner, and gave us chase; and as the day had been intensely hot, a large line of clouds rolled over the bluff at the same time, probably from the gulf en route to the Atlantic, and moving slowly ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... upon his feeble frame, already exhausted by disease, caused him rapidly to decline. He was now confined to his chamber and his bed, and his death was hourly expected. He hated the French, and all his sympathies were with Austria. Some priests entered his chamber, professedly to perform the pompous and sepulchral service of the church of Rome for the dying. In this hour of languor, and in the prospect of immediate death, they assailed the imbecile monarch with all the terrors of superstition. They depicted ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... 14. If you be reproached for y^e name of Christ, hapy are ye, for y^e spirite of glory and of God resteth upon you. What though he wanted y^e riches and pleasurs of y^e world in this life, and pompous monuments at his funurall? yet y^e memoriall of y^e just shall be blessed, when y^e name of y^e wicked shall rott (with their marble ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford
... him to measure ten paces, which, after first giving notice that he "didn't ripre-sent nobody," he proceeded to do, taking a dozen or more gigantic strides, and hastily retired again behind the safe bulwark of Jeff's back. As he stood there in his shrunken condition, he about as much resembled the pompous and arrogant duellist of a half-hour previous as a wet and bedraggled turkey does the strutting, gobbling cock of the flock. The Major, with an objurgation at him for stepping "as if he had on seven league boots," stepped off the distance ...
— "George Washington's" Last Duel - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... responded the elder, shaking his head in a pompous way. "I went to administer consolation. I'm just coming from there now. It is an awful judgment on that man: no chance for repentance, overtook by hell, as I told Mrs. Davis, in a moment! But the Lord must be praised for his justice: that ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... cook — ah, he could cook! I believe that he would have made a palatable dish of those gaiters of his heroic grandfather which he was so fond of talking about. Then he was a good-tempered little man, and merry as a monkey, whilst his pompous, vainglorious talk was a source of infinite amusement to us; and what is more, he never bore malice. Of course, his being so pronounced a coward was a great drawback to him, but now that we knew his weakness we could more or less guard against it. ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... one can take liberties with it—the more imagination you have the better it will go. I might call it a stylish piece; take the Prelude as capriciously as you like; put all the effect you can into it. The Valse proper begins in a very pompous style, with right hand very staccato; all is exceedingly coquettish. On the fifth page you see it is marked amoroso, but after eight measures the young man gives the whole thing away to his father! The beginning of the sixth page is very piano and light—it ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... same day to the capital of Persia, where he alighted in the square of the palace, before the emperor his father's apartment, who deferred the solemnization of the marriage no longer than till he could make the preparations necessary to render the ceremony pompous and magnificent, and evince the interest he took ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... ditty. Beneath the awning sat a cavalier, in a rich though old-fashioned doublet, with an enormous sombrero and feather. When the barge reached the caravel, the cavalier stepped on board. He was tall and gaunt, with a long, Spanish visage, and lack-lustre eyes, and an air of lofty and somewhat pompous gravity. His mustaches were curled up to his ears, his beard was forked and precise; he wore gauntlets that reached to his elbows, and a Toledo blade that strutted out behind, while, in front, its huge basket-hilt might have served for ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... Borthrop Trumbull walked away from the fireplace towards the window, patrolling with his fore-finger round the inside of his stock, then along his whiskers and the curves of his hair. He now walked to Miss Garth's work-table, opened a book which lay there and read the title aloud with pompous emphasis as if he ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... lordships, or the so-much-admired patrimonies of those who are styled wealthy? When I measure them with my own little pittance, they swell into proud and bloated dimensions; but when I take the universe for my standard, how scanty is their size, how contemptible their figure; they shrink into pompous nothings! ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... the debauching of our prime gentry both male and female,—nor at his own cost, but on the public revenue,—and all this to do nothing but bestow the eating and drinking of excessive dainties, to set a pompous face upon the superficial actings of State, to pageant himself up and down in progress among the perpetual bowings and cringings of an ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... treated in this manner. What is the use of you, sir, if you cannot ensure my safe passage to England? If I am killed the world shall ring with it. I shall myself make a formal complaint to Lord Granville," said this incoherent and pompous donkey. Exit man of position fuming; enter unprotected female. Of course she was a widow, of course she had lost half-a-dozen sons, of course she kept lodgings, and of course she wanted her "hambassader" generally to take her under his wing. I left Wodehouse ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... it is strange; 'Tis very strange to mark men's fallacies. Behold him proudly view some pompous pile, Whose high dome swells to emulate the skies, And smile, and say, my name shall live with this, Till time shall be no more; while at his feet, Yea, at his very feet, the crumbling dust Of the fallen fabric of the other day, Preaches the solemn lesson.—He should know That time ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French
... the managing editor's door with more assurance than he had ever displayed before. The managing editor, a pompous, tall, thin man with a drooping frosty mustache, and cold gray eyes in a cold gray face that somehow reminded one of the visage of a walrus, was preparing to ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... hands will perhaps one day employ in constructing an edifice, in which our youth may find a safe refuge from the storms of doubt, unbelief, and irreligion. I have purposed to avoid all exuberant ornaments of style, all pompous parade of erudition, and contented myself with a plain diction, and a strict laconism. I have not quoted authors who preceded me in the same field; I have not called up for investigation what of valuable ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... penetrated his sacred ear; the imperial residence was profoundly secluded, and, naturally, unlike the outer world. Not more than a few court nobles were allowed to approach the throne, a practice most opposed to the principles of Heaven. This vicious practice has been common in all ages. But now, let pompous etiquette be done away with, and simplicity become our first object. Kioto is in an-out-of-the way position, and is unfit to be the seat of government! Let His Majesty take up his abode temporarily at Ozaka, removing his capital hither, ...
— A Comparative Study of the Negro Problem - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 4 • Charles C. Cook
... contre les vagabonds et faineants...." Not long ago I happened to see that this egregious person described himself as "Hon. Minister Plenipotentiary for Montenegro," but another gentleman, Sir Roper Parkington, a pompous wine-merchant, announced in the Press that he had become "Minister (Hon.) of Montenegro." Perhaps one of them has resigned, and our poor overworked Foreign Office will not be invited to decide between a Minister ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... character. In the one that followed, and in which Trotty conveyed a letter to Sir Joseph Rowley, the impersonation of the obese hall-porter, later on identified as Tugby, was in every way far beyond that of the pompous humanitarian member of parliament. A hall-porter this proved to be whose voice, when he had found it—"which it took him some time to do, for it was a long way off, and hidden under a load of meat"—was, in truth, as the Author's lips expressed it, and as his pen had ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... had turned his thumb down to a lot of barbarian captives because he had a fit of indigestion, and the next day, when his digestion was better, he had scattered coins among barbarian children; that Napoleon, who had also gone over the pass road, was a pompous, fat little man, who did not always wipe his upper lip clean of snuff when he was on a campaign; that the baron's youngest daughter had lost her eyesight from a bodkin thrust for telling her sister, who had her father's temper, that she ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... Grindley, a short, stout, and pompous gentleman, sat under a palm in the gorgeously furnished drawing-room of his big house at Notting Hill. Mrs. Grindley, a thin, faded woman, the despair of her dressmaker, sat as near to the fire as its massive and imposing copper outworks would permit, and shivered. Grindley junior, a fair-haired, ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... showing that popular idea of Russian policy. Foremost among these stand those two bronze masses of statuary in front of the Royal Palace at Berlin,—representing fiery horses restrained by strong men. Pompous inscriptions proclaim these presents from Nicholas; but the people, knowing the man and his measures, have fastened forever upon one of these curbed steeds the name of "Progress Checked," and on the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... remarkable one. But I reserve it until the others have spoken, and then I shall introduce it to wind up. I shall have them reprinted, of course, and inserted in future copies. This from the 'Candelabrum' is only eight lines in length, but full of venom. It calls my style dull and pompous. I think that will tell its own tale, placed after the ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... that he considered this attitude quite appropriate— historically speaking, of course. Furthermore, they have carted hither, from the Chamber of Deputies in Rome, the chair once occupied by Ruggiero Bonghi. Dear Bonghi! From a sense of duty he used to visit a certain dull and pompous house in the capital and forthwith fall asleep on the nearest sofa; he slept sometimes for two hours at a stretch, while all the other visitors were solemnly marched to the spot to observe him—behold ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... though pompous, were a kindly pair: and Mrs. Grantham, entering the library where Mr. Wesley and his daughter awaited her, and observing that the girl seemed frightened or depressed (she could not determine which), rang the bell at once and sent ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... he could cure it the smoke nuisance had to be cured, or his conscience would know the reason why! So he sat on the borough bench and fined himself for his own smoke, and then he installed gas ovens. The town laughed, of course, and spoke of him alternately as a rash fool, a hypocrite, and a mere pompous ass. In a few months smoke had practically ceased to ascend from the mayoral manufactory. The financial result to the mayor was such as to encourage the tenderness of consciences. But that is not the point. The point is that ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... who could deliver his judgment in this stilted style of pompous word-building, in such circumstances as were then existing, would have required a powdered footman in spotless plush to precede him out of a house on fire. I must confess to a little misgiving as to the authenticity of this speech. It looks much more likely to ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... by the old sea-rovers among the Western Isles. Manxmen alone have held on to it. Shall we also let it go? Shall we laugh at it as a bit of mummery that is useless in an age of books and newspapers, and foolish and pompous in days of frock-coats and chimney-pot hats? I think not. We cannot afford to lose it. Remember, it is the last visible sign of our independence as a nation. It is our hand-grasp with the past. Our little nation is the only Norse nation now on earth that can shake hands with the days of the Sagas, ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... The pompous teachings ye proclaim, Lights of the world and demi-gods of fame, The laurel wreaths that murderers rear, Blood-nursed and watered by the widow's tears, Seems not so foul, so tainted, and so dread, As the daily ...
— The Christian Foundation, May, 1880
... seriously of him. It would be impossible to think of him in any other way, he is so dull and pompous." ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... another poem, this time on the Ruin of the Church. In his boyhood he had witnessed the pompous shows which greeted AEneas Sylvius, more like a Roman general than a new-made Pope, on his entrance into Ferrara. Since then he had seen the monster Sixtus mount the Papal throne. No wonder if he, who had fled from the world to the Church for purity and peace, should need to vent ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... excuses. When he returned, Dr. Lindsay had dried his face and was calmer. But his aspect was sufficiently ominous; he was both pompous and severe. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... renounced the sweetest of private pleasures, that of serving my friends or winning the gratitude of those who are about me. If anybody owes to my mere favor a place, a post, let us have the name." He enumerated all the services he had rendered to the king, to the state, to the nation, with that somewhat pompous satisfaction which was afterwards discernible in his Memoires. There it was that he wrote: "Perhaps he who contributed, by his energies, to keep off new imposts during five such expensive years; he who was able to devote to all useful works the funds ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Major Cowper, going home with his wife and child—had walked away proudly, without deigning as much as to look at me twice, as if to see a man clamber on board a ship ten miles from the land was the most usual occurrence. He was, I found afterwards, an absurd, pompous person, as stiff as a ramrod, and so full of his own importance that he imagined he had almost demeaned himself by his condescension in throwing down the rope in answer to my despairing cries. On ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... Creates a whirlwind from the earth to draw A goose's feather or exalt a straw; Sets wheels on wheels in motion—such a clatter! To force up one poor nipperkin of water; Bids ocean labour with tremendous roar, To heave a cockle-shell upon the shore. Alike in every theme his pompous art, Heaven's awful thunder, or ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 394, October 17, 1829 • Various
... with which Ferdinand treated their Protestant brethren in his hereditary dominions; and as it was natural to consider his actions as the surest indication of his intentions, this diminished their confidence in those pompous professions of moderation, and of zeal for the reestablishment of concord, to which his practice seemed to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... Innocent Smith, but with Michael Moon. He was in a strange glow and pressure of spirits, and talked incessantly; yet he had never been more sarcastic, and even inhuman. He used his old useless knowledge as a barrister to talk entertainingly of a tribunal that was a parody on the pompous anomalies of English law. The High Court of Beacon, he declared, was a splendid example of our free and sensible constitution. It had been founded by King John in defiance of the Magna Carta, and now held absolute power over windmills, wine and spirit licences, ladies ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... to the rebuilt fire. The little man reposed by it calmly smoking. They sprang at him and overwhelmed him with interrogations. He contemplated darkness and took a long, pompous puff. "There's only one of me—and the devil made a twin," ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... his pedantry was disguised, therefore mitigated by his having associated with men of the world instead of with the pale and pompous capons of the student's closet. His favorite topic was beauty and ugliness—and his abhorrence for anyone who was not good to look at. As he talked this subject, his hearers were nervous and embarrassed. He was a drastic ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... the qualities of a great statesman. He regulated the Roman liturgy, the calendar of festivals, the order of processions, the fashions of sacerdotal garments; he himself officiated in the canon of the mass, devised many solemn and pompous rites, and invented the chant known by his name. He established schools of music, administered the Church revenues with precision and justice, and set an example of almsgiving and charity; for such was the misery ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... and the gaoler of Alice Benden. He obeyed the summons of the pompous voice with obsequious celerity, for it belonged to no less a person than the Lord Bishop of Dover. His Lordship, having caught sight of the bell-ringer as he crossed the precincts, had called him, and Perkins came up, his hat ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... the older man. "High Anglican, ascetic, out-of-doors," was Malcolm Sage's mental classification of the one, thus unconsciously reversing the William Johnson's verdict. The other he dismissed as a pompous ass. ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... of life, which have been invented or improved by the progress of industry; and the plenty of glass and linen has diffused more real comforts among the modern nations of Europe, than the senators of Rome could derive from all the refinements of pompous or sensual luxury. [33] Their luxury, and their manners, have been the subject of minute and laborious disposition: but as such inquiries would divert me too long from the design of the present work, I shall produce an authentic ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... feeble step. When he noticed me sitting on the broad piazza, he came, and taking a chair beside me, began to joke in his old way, telling comical happenings, and inquired if I knew where Noah kept his bees. His answer: "In the Ark-hives, of course." Once when I asked his opinion of a pompous, loud-voiced minister, he only ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... provide most of the opportunities which Puccini has embraced for writing in what may be called a sustained effort outside of the scenes between Tosca and her lover in the first act. Thus the first finale has a pompous church office as its background, with tolling of bells, the booming of cannon, the pealing of a great organ, through all of which surges a stream of orchestral melody bearing the declamatory shrieks ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... from exalting human leaders and their opinions. Ambitious ecclesiastics have exalted themselves with the help of misguided people; and, usurping authority, have lorded it over God's heritage. How wide the difference between the simplicity of the primitive gospel and the pompous ecclesiastical organizations and titles of modern times! It is self-evident that Christian union cannot be restored until this ecclesiastical machinery be put aside and the administration of Christ's kingdom be again entrusted to the local ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... within him when he heard these words, and but for the pompous man at Mr. Drury's side, he would have run up and pressed the good bookseller to his heart. 'Yes, you shall have all my papers,' he eagerly exclaimed; 'shall have them as soon as I get them back from Market-Deeping. ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... duty to inform you, Count Nobili"—Guglielmi is speaking with pompous earnestness—he anxiously notes the effect his words produce upon Count Nobili—"that, unless you remain under the same roof with your wife to-night, the marriage will not be completed; therefore no separation between you will ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... me and Andy Tucker, my partner, went to New York to lay in our annual assortment of clothes and gents' furnishings. We was always pompous and regardless dressers, finding that looks went further than anything else in our business, except maybe our knowledge of railroad schedules and an autograph photo of the President that Loeb sent us, probably by mistake. Andy wrote a nature letter once and sent it in about animals that he ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... contrasted, never fail to hit; One half in light, and one in darkness drest, (For contraries oppos'd still shine the best.) When a cold Page half breaks the Writer's heart, By this it warms, and brightens into Art. When Rhet'ric glitters with too pompous pride, By this, like Circe, 'tis un-deify'd. So Berecynthia, while her off-spring vye In homage to the Mother of the sky, (Deck'd in rich robes, of trees, and plants, and flow'rs, And crown'd illustrious with ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... left hand against these enemies with a divine armor: with a firm faith, with the comfort of the divine Word, with hope, so that he may endure and exercise patience. Thereby he proves himself to be a true servant of God, inasmuch as false teachers and hypocrites, with all their pompous worship, are incapable of ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... admired him for his youthful vigour and commanding stature,[281] and liked him too without exactly knowing why. So there was rivalry between the generals. Caecina mocked at Valens for his dirty and dishonest ways:[282] Valens at Caecina's pompous vanity. But they smothered their dislike and worked together for a common end, writing frequent letters in which they sacrificed all hope of pardon and heaped abuse on Otho. Otho's generals refrained from retaliating upon ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... swing-shelves, "leaning shelves," upon which a church attendant could rest his paper and his arm when taking notes from the sermon, as was at one time the universal custom, and in which even school-boys of a century ago had to take part. Funny stories are told of the ostentatious notes taken by pompous parishioners who could neither write nor read, but who could scribble, and thus cut a ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... ate and drank, and then climbed a hill of gorse, and sat alone, looking at the sea. His mind was full of confused images, and the sense of strain. In answer to the word 'Germany,' a train of vague thoughts dragged across his brain. The pompous middle-class vulgarity of the building of Berlin; the wide and restful beauty of Munich; the taste of beer; innumerable quiet, glittering cafes; the Ring; the swish of evening air in the face, ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... significations, and when the whole arrangement was alphabetically formed, he gave the definitions of their meanings, and collected their etymologies from Skinner, and other writers on the subject." To these accounts, Hawkins adds his usual carping, pompous testimony. "Dr. Johnson," he says, "who, before this time, together with his wife, had lived in obscurity, lodging at different houses in the courts and alleys in and about the Strand and Fleet Street, had, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... country. He made a weak speech, because to get votes he abstained from stating the cause of distress, which in his opinion is currency, or any remedy. Goderich and Lansdowne made good speeches. Rosebery not a bad one, though as usual pompous. All suggesting some remedies—all for reducing taxation, but against a Committee of the House. Lord Radnor made a good vulgar speech. King spoke better than usual. He proposed, but afterwards withdrew, an amendment for a Committee upstairs. The Duke, who alone spoke on our side, did ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)
... when the people realized what had happened, everybody roared. No one who glanced at the overturned music instrument and at the musicians, with their punch-dropping heads could restrain their laughter. Even the pompous bride found it so funny that she ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... the mere dust of history, rather than history itself: here an isolated individual makes his appearance in the record of his name, to vanish when we attempt to lay hold of him; there, the stem of a dynasty which breaks abruptly off, pompous preambles, devout formulas, dedications of objects or buildings, here and there the account of some battle, or the indication of some foreign country with which relations of friendship or commerce were maintained—these are ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... are indeed pompous, self-sufficient, affectedly solemn, venal and unfeeling with a vengeance. ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... and shaking, she was gone, and Abner Sawyer went with stumbling feet to the privacy of his work-shop, his face death-white. The pompous illusions of his little world were tumbling to ...
— Jimsy - The Christmas Kid • Leona Dalrymple
... this incapacity of his in its strongest light, when we recur to the fact of his astonishment at a religious princess refusing to confer a bishoprick upon one that had treated the Trinity, and all the profoundest mysteries of Christianity, not with mere scepticism, or casual sneer, but with set pompous merriment and farcical buffoonery. This dignitary of the church, Dean of the most conspicuous cathedral in Ireland, had, in full canonicals, made himself into a regular mountebank, for the sake of giving fuller ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... her prayers had gone up to the Throne of Grace. Sometimes she was tempted to go to the minister of the church where she sat Sunday after Sunday, and beg him to explain the mysteries to her. But the pompous austerity of his manners repelled her whenever she thought of broaching the subject, and gradually she saw that she must work out her own problems. Thus, from week to week and month to month, she toiled on, with a slowly dying faith, constantly ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... remains deaf. He wills, before aught else, that you should fulfil your duties to your own. Every prayer which causes another to suffer is an impiety." Such was pretty near the essence of his sermons: they were short and simple. No great sonorous words, no pompous digressions, no Latin quotations which no one would have understood, no declamations on Our Lady of Lourdes or of La Salotte, on the miracle of ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... calculated for the safety of the bearer, in case he had been placed sentinel at his Majesty's door, and kept his horses ready caparisoned, with a view of attending his sovereign to the field. Notwithstanding all these pompous preparations, had he been put to the proof, he would have infallibly crept out of his engagements, through some sneaking evasion, his imagination being very fertile in such saving pretences. Yet he will talk sometimes ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... waltzing." Mme. Lefebvre was aware of how costly were such drawing-room triumphs as she imaged in her ambitious soul, and where the supplies of booty could be found; Davout and Lannes and Ney were still faithful and efficient; Augereau in action was utterly uncertain, in morals pompous and wrong-headed; Murat knew where and how the great prizes were to be found, and was as dashing and venturesome as he was selfish and worldly-wise. The Russian generals were plodding disciples of routine. Bennigsen was ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... which we lived, poorly enough, in Richmond Terrace, Clapham, close to her father and mother—to Harrow, then, she betook herself, into lodgings over a grocer's shop, and set herself to look for a house. This grocer was a very pompous man, fond of long words, and patronised the young widow exceedingly, and one day my mother related with much amusement how he had told her that she was sure to get on if she worked hard. "Look at me!" he said, swelling visibly with importance; "I was once a poor ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... had, with a good deal of pompous benevolence, driven up on his outside-car to fetch Miss Rorke from the tumbled-down cabin which had been hitherto the only home she had known, that young lady, instead of being properly grateful, and impressed by her relative's condescension, had displayed a spirit ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... of the Raja Suddhodana; Indian pompous style; columns and beyond an outlook into a tropical palm-garden. Seats scattered through the room. On the left a compartment, open toward the audience, is separated from the main room ...
— The Buddha - A Drama in Five Acts and Four Interludes • Paul Carus
... who, seven years before, had gained the first prize for painting. He had now just come back from Rome. His soul, full-fed with poetry; his eyes, satiated with Raphael and Michael Angelo, thirsted for real nature after long dwelling in the pompous land where art has everywhere left something grandiose. Right or wrong, this was his personal feeling. His heart, which had long been a prey to the fire of Italian passion, craved one of those modest and meditative maidens ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... magnificence and the absence of any gaucherie in her movements when off the stage, all natural grace disappeared the moment she attempted to be somebody else. Her delivery was unnatural and pompous; her motions were stiff, strained, ridiculous. The whole of the first act was unsatisfying to the intelligence, but instead of dominating it by the force of her personality, Cleo, by the incompetence of her acting, set ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... a man of letters. His poems are what we should expect a clever lad to write. Had they been written at the end of the nineteenth century doubtless they would have been as fashionably decadent as, written at the beginning, they are fashionably pompous. It was clear from the first that Peacock would not be a poet; he lacked the essential quality—the power of feeling deeply. Before he was twenty it must have been clear that he possessed a remarkable head and an ordinary heart. He had wits enough for ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... letters, and Memory, effective mother-nurse of all arts. I also first bound with yokes beasts submissive to the collars; and in order that with their bodies they might become to mortals substitutes for their severest toils, I brought steeds under cars obedient to the rein,[38] a glory to pompous luxury. And none other than I invented the canvas-winged chariots of mariners that roam over the ocean. After discovering for mortals such inventions, wretch that I am, I myself have no device whereby I may escape ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... It was pompous July and the Van Kuyps were still in Paris. They lived near Passy—from her windows high in the air Alixe caught the green at dawn as the sun lifted level rays. Richard was writing his new tone-poem, which the Societe Harmonique accepted provisionally for the season following. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... played on that brutal, jangling instrument of wood, wire and iron, the pianoforte! I shudder at the profanation. I feel an oriental jealousy concerning all those beautiful thoughts nestling in the scores of Chopin and Schubert which are laid bare and dissected by the pompous pen of the music-critic. The man who knows it all. The man who seeks to transmute the unutterable and ineffable delicacies of tone into terms of commercial prose. And newspaper prose. Hideous jargon, I ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... organized from the congregation societies of various sorts to relieve the poor; Bible classes and evening reunions which the members of the parish were urged to attend in order to become acquainted. Mr. Glynn's manner was both hearty and pompous. To him there was no Church in the world but the Church of England, and it was obvious that as one of the clergy of that Church he considered himself to be no mean man; but apart from this serious ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... skins or wholesome food. Moreover, here the wolf awakes the reverberating echoes of the forest with its dismal howl; the raccoon, opossum, and squirrel pass their lives in sportive gambols; the wild and the ocellated turkeys strut about, pompous in manner, as if conscious of their handsome plumage, while the timid deer and shaggy-coated bison roam over prairies or through woodland glades, as yet unacquainted with the report of ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... enthusiasts, whose curious imagination pleases itself with making fruitless endeavours to spring beyond the visible world; who occupy themselves with chimeras of their own creation: in short, that these words are useful only to those whose sole profession it is to feed the ears of the uninformed with pompous sounds, that are not comprehended by themselves—upon the sense of which they are in a state of perpetual hostility with each other—upon the true meaning of which they have never yet been able to come to a common agreement; which each sees after his own peculiar ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... the true intentions of the English were known to General Jackson, who had made up his mind to take possession of Pensacola, he wrote to the Spanish governor,—a pompous, inefficient old grandee,—and demanded the surrender of certain hostile Creek chieftains, who had taken refuge in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... me, grandmother—but the word suits and may stand. Mr. Nicholas is pompous, and walks as slowly as if he had to carry the weight of his great fortune; but his manners are all right, and his wife and son are delightful. She is handsome, well dressed, and so good-hearted that her pretty county idioms ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... at Hondaye, at Irun, at Renteria, and finally at San Sebastian. At all of these wayside towns the houses show marks of Alphonsist bullets (the region was strongly Carlist); but to be riddled and battered seems to carry out the meaning of the pompous old escutcheons carven above the doorways, some of them covering almost half the house. It seemed to me, in fact, that the narrower and shabbier was the poor little dusky dwelling, the grander and more elaborate was this noble advertisement. But it stood for knightly prowess, and pitiless ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... Miss Cavendish is anxious for the society of Laura. Laura wishes the escort of her brother, who has also been invited to Blue Cliffs. We must not oppose the will of the ladies," concluded John, bowing to his niece with pompous deference. ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... deal, and it was evident that this foster-young, though' with the pigeons, was not nor ever would be of them, for it could not take kiudly to their flippant flirty ways. Whenever a male approached it, and with guttural noises and strange gestures made a pompous declaration of amorous feelings, the dove would strike vigorously at its undesirable lover, and drive him off, big as he was; and, as a rule, it would sit apart, afoot or so, from the others. The dove ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... jargon formation that occur in hackish, most of what he chronicles is actually suit-speak — the obfuscatory language of press releases, marketroids, and Silicon Valley CEOs rather than the playful jargon of hackers (most of whom wouldn't be caught dead uttering the kind of pompous, ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... run full tilt at phantoms that have no existence save in their own imaginations. Like a good many critics now-a-days, they forget that screams are not criticism, and that it is only vulgar tastes that are influenced by strings of superlatives, three-piled hyperboles, and pompous epithets. But what strikes one as particularly strange is that while they deal in extravagant eulogies, and ascribe all manner of imaginary ideas and qualities to Cervantes, they show no perception of the quality that ninety-nine out of a hundred ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... fingers at him, and bursting his ears with their shrill abuse. He was a bold man, but he began to dream at night of De Witt and his fate—of which he knew, with many gruesome particulars; and, from a stout and pompous burgher, he dwindled in six weeks to a lean and morose old tyrant. Withal he had no choice, for at his shoulder lurked the French Commandant, a resolute man with a wit of his own and a pet curtain—between the Stadthaus bastion and the bastion ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... Chelan who grounds him in theology,—for Julien had proclaimed his intention of studying for the priesthood. By unexpected good luck, his Latin earned him an appointment as tutor to the children of M. de Renal, the pompous and purse-proud Mayor of Verrieres. Julien is haunted by his peculiar notions of duties which he owes it to himself to perform as steps towards his worldly advancement; for circumstances have made him a consummate hypocrite. One of these duties is to make love to Mme. de Renal: "Why should he ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... especially the fortunate and the successful, are manifestations of this type of superiority seeking. Half the humor of the world is the pleasure, produced by a technique, of feeling superior to the boor, the pedant, the fool, the new rich, the pompous, the over-dignified, etc. Half, more than half, of the conversation that goes on in boudoir, dining room, over the drinks and in the smoking room, is criticism, playful and otherwise, of others. There are people in whom the adversely critical spirit ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... eyes were full of weeping, He falter'd in his walk; Tom never shed a tear, But onwards he did stalk, As pompous, black, ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Just then the bell sounds for departure, when a big officer comes up, puffing with surplus fat and official importance. Seeing three men stretched out, and learning that the odd-looking fellow then hurrying on board is the cause, he brandishes his club, striking Oswald on the shoulder, in pompous tones announcing his arrest. Oswald remonstrates, and attempts to explain that he is not the aggressor, but to all such, this swelling representative of the Crown's outraged dignity turns a ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... In the time of Socrates, among men only of worn-out instincts, old conservative Athenians who let themselves go—"for the sake of happiness," as they said, for the sake of pleasure, as their conduct indicated—and who had continually on their lips the old pompous words to which they had long forfeited the right by the life they led, IRONY was perhaps necessary for greatness of soul, the wicked Socratic assurance of the old physician and plebeian, who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as into the flesh and heart of the "noble," with a look that ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... looked up to begin, was Gino convulsed with silent laughter? It vanished immediately; but he became nervous, and was even more pompous ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... than as a solemn certificate of general merit. The shops on which Abbey Hill conferred its custom were certainly not the cheapest, possibly not the best; but they were undeniably the most imposing. The proprietors were decorously pompous, the shopmen superciliously polite. They could not be more so if they had belonged to the State, and been paid by a public which they benefited and despised. The ladies of Low Town (as the city subjacent to the ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... brown shroud of shriveled leaves; while here and there meek-eyed sheep lay sunning themselves upon the trampled graves, and the slow- measured sound of a bell dinged now and then as cattle browsed on the scanty herbage in this most neglected of God's Acres. Could Charles Lamb have turned from the pompous epitaphs and high-flown panegyrics of that English cemetery, to the rudely-lettered boards which here briefly told the names and ages of the sleepers in these narrow beds, he had never asked the question which now stands as a melancholy epigram on family ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... might have suspended judgment about them; but the mere fact that he had travelled filled him with a deep conviction that he knew all about the places he had visited, and this conviction, enunciated with pompous emphasis, supplanted the real knowledge and understanding derived from honest observation. Like so many people who do not possess the faculty of experiencing, he continually appealed to his own experience ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... gone. I know that this is not the opinion of most of Wagner's admirers; but, with the exception of a few pages of sublime beauty, I have never altogether liked the love scenes at the end of Siegfried and at the beginning of Goetterdaemmerung. I find their style rather pompous and declamatory; and their almost excessive refinement makes them border upon dulness. The form of the duet, too, seems cut and dried, and there are signs of weariness in it. The heaviness of the last pages of Siegfried recalls Die Meistersinger, which is also of that ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... back like one who hesitates to confront the unknown. The stairs were there before him; he began to descend, his right hand held forth, his eyes fastened in horror upon it. Then, as he heard the distant hum of voices below, once more pompous and erect he swung down the last broad treads between the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... forever, and we shall work steadily on in our appointed course, leaving it to others to recognize and proclaim our worth, to sound the trumpet which we have so long been industriously blowing for ourselves, content to let our reputation bide its time and rest upon sterling deeds rather than upon pompous declamations and empty oratorical phrases. The deeds of our ancestors were great indeed, and their patriotism and self-sacrificing devotion to a noble cause beyond a parallel: but even those will pale beside the present struggle of a full-grown nation at the very ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... smiled agreeably. She wanted to stay a day or two at Font Abbey. The senior flourished out his arm. "Let me show you what we call the garden here." She took his arm graciously. "I shall be delighted, sir [pompous old fool!]." ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... food, the monastic privileges of the brethren been held secure, and were unchanged by all the altering mariners of the age. The old fellow, somehow or other, seemed to have struck upon an everlasting rock, and founded his pompous charity there. ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... at the door, much less pompous than usual and displaying an interesting paleness of complexion. Jubber spat into the palm of each of his ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... One need only to take a ride in a bus or street car to find the certain symptoms of self-display. These may consist in nothing more serious than a peculiarly conspicuous collar or hatband, or particularly high heels. It may consist in a loud voice full of pompous references to great banquets recently attended or great sums recently spent. It may be in a raised eyebrow or a disdainful smile. There are people among every one's acquaintance whose conversation is largely ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... colours spread to the breeze. The captain of this vessel, Don Joseph Martinez, took a look at the English fortifications and another at the Americans. The Americans were enemies of England. Therefore the pompous don treated them royally, presented them with spices and wines, and allowed them to depart unmolested. When the Americans returned from the run up coast, they found the English fort dismantled, a Spanish fort erected on Hog Island at the entrance ...
— Pioneers of the Pacific Coast - A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters • Agnes C. Laut
... now lords of the Albans, returned to Rome in triumph, their advent to the city being marked by the first of those pompous processions which in after-years became known as Roman Triumphs, and were celebrated with the utmost ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... of the bearers and of the escort were struck down, and the king himself killed on the spot. A ball had entered his brain. Soojah-ool-dowlah then rode up; and as he contemplated his bloody work, the body of the unhappy king, vain and pompous as he was to the very last, was stripped of all the jewels about it—the jewelled dagger, the jewelled girdle, the jewelled head-dress—and it was ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... earnest letter dissuaded his pupil from making any experiments that might hurt his originality of style. Chopin actually attended the class of Kalkbrenner but soon quit, for he had nothing to learn of the pompous, penurious pianist. The Hiller story of how Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt and Heller teased this grouty old gentleman on the Boulevard des Italiens is capital reading, if not absolutely true. Yet Chopin admired ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... a rule, expressed himself badly, but he had been at pains to prepare a little set speech with which to impress his secretary, who now sat looking at him, silently meditating over the pompous utterance, and wondering what ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... the helpless, gentle, pompous Louis whom my father had once taken me to visit, and I understood that France, after her convulsions and her sufferings, did indeed require another ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... begged and gave church suppers to get the long, lazy youth through the seminary. He could still speak enough Swedish to exhort and to bury the members of his country church out at Copper Hole, and he wielded in his Moonstone pulpit a somewhat pompous English vocabulary he had learned out of books at college. He always spoke of "the infant Saviour," "our Heavenly Father," etc. The poor man had no natural, spontaneous human speech. If he had his sincere moments, they were perforce inarticulate. Probably a good deal of his pretentiousness was ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... pompous negro had undergone a great change. His black face was wreathed in smiles; his eyes glistened with delight; his large white teeth shone in the morning light like so ...
— Chasing an Iron Horse - Or, A Boy's Adventures in the Civil War • Edward Robins
... letters, the marking sunflowers exist no more. We destroyed, we preempted; we are destroyed and we have been thrust out. Illinois admitted to the Union on suchandsuch a date, the Little Giant rubbed stubby fingers through pompous hair heavy with beargrease, the Honorable Abe in Springfield's most expensive broadcloth, necktie in the latest mode but pulled aside to free an eager adamsapple; the drunken tanner, punctual with the small man's virtues, ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... to celebrate the feast, and to put up many prayers for the recovery of his brother, when some wicked persons, who had a great mind to raise a difference between the brethren, made use of this opportunity of the pompous appearance of Antigonus, and of the great actions which he had done, and went to the king, and spitefully aggravated the pompous show of his at the feast, and pretended that all these circumstances were not like those of a private ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... fain to take advantage of the still waters or back-current near the banks. The river being low at this season, we ran aground, in spite of all the care of our Scindian pilot and the Seedic leadsman, often enough to have wrecked a moderately-sized navy. The leadsman was a rather pompous individual, duly impressed with the importance of his position, in having charge of the deep-sea line, which was something short of two fathoms in length. He was stationed at the bows, and ever and anon proclaimed aloud the depth of water in language that he fondly believed to be English. As ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... burghers. It is a picture, not a dramatic scene, and to judge only from the text might suggest the Rienzi way of planning things. It is not, however, a spectacle in the sense in which we apply that word to some of the Rienzi scenes; there is nothing pompous about it, no recourse is made to gorgeous costumes. The artisans march past in their holiday clothes, each guild bearing its banner; the banners wave in the bright sunlight, and there is plenty of colour as well as of bustle and gaiety; but all is homely ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
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