"Frippery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... are men, bricks, warriors. Such female frippery as this shall never degrade them. Into the rag-bag with it, and sell it to the Jews for a pair of China sheep or a ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to be sure. But among the revolutions in France must be reckoned a considerable revolution in their ideas of politeness. In England we are said to learn manners at second-hand from your side of the water, and that we dress our behavior in the frippery of France. If so, we are still in the old cut, and have not so far conformed to the new Parisian mode of good breeding as to think it quite in the most refined strain of delicate compliment (whether in condolence or congratulation) to say, to the most humiliated creature ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... to Wit and Parts), than other grouling Mortals know, or battering half-a-dozen fair new Windows in a Morning after their debauch, whilst the dull unjantee Rascal they belong to is fast asleep. But I'll proceed no farther in their character, because that miracle of Wit (in spite of Academick frippery) the mighty Echard hath already done it to my satisfaction; and whoever undertakes a Supplement to anything he hath discourst, had better for their reputation be ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... wit, Next, o'er his books his eyes began to roll, In pleasing memory of all he stole, How here he sipped, how there he plundered snug, And sucked all o'er, like an industrious bug. Here lay poor Fletcher's half-eat scenes, and here The frippery of crucified Moliere; There hapless Shakespeare, yet of Tibbald sore, Wished he had blotted for himself before. The rest on outside merit but presume, Or serve (like other fools) to fill a room; Such with their shelves as due proportion hold, Or their fond parents dressed in red and ...
— English Satires • Various
... stairs, which, at first sight, I mistook for an Alguazil, in a plethora, but upon nearer approach found to be your worshipful self, posting to the opera, clad in a great-coat of the newest cut, all fringe and frippery, the offspring of a German tailor. You and your cloak were so enveloped in frogs and self-conceit, that I could compare you to nothing but king Pharaoh, inoculated with a plague greater than any in Egypt, an ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... We passed by the Concert of Musard, then held in the Rue St. Honore; and round this, in the wet, a number of coaches were collected. The ball was just up, and a crowd of people in hideous masquerade, drunk, tired, dirty, dressed in horrible old frippery, and daubed with filthy rouge, were trooping out of the place: tipsy women and men, shrieking, jabbering, gesticulating, as French will do; parties swaggering, staggering forwards, arm in arm, reeling to and fro across the street, and yelling songs in chorus: hundreds of these were bound ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... divides philosophy into the three stages of Theological, Metaphysical, and Positive. This general theorem he completes by particular applications,—to costume among others. In this he distinguishes the three stages of Tattooing (including paint), Frippery, and Clothes. Man has reached the third stage, he says; woman is in the second, and not entirely ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... coals, dreamed of the ball and beautiful prince as well as her sisters. "Bare and grim to tears," says Emerson, "is the lot of the children I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hung it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune, and would talk of 'the dear cottage where so many joyful hours had flown.' Well, this thatching of hovels is the custom of the country. Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion." Happy is it that ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... of living to which my profession leads; a fondness for the parade, the gayety, not to say the licentiousness, of a station calculated to gratify such a disposition; and a prepossession for Major Sanford, infused into your giddy mind by the frippery, flattery, and artifice of that worthless and abandoned man. Hence you preferred a connection with him, if it could be accomplished; but a doubt whether it could, together with the advice of your friends, who have kindly espoused my cause, ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... style stood on the velvet-covered mantelpiece. There was a nicely fitted cabinet, and the Chinese flower-stands were handsomely filled. The bed, the toilet-table, the wardrobe with its mirror, the little sofa, and all the lady's frippery bore the stamp of fashion or caprice. Though everything was quite third-rate as to elegance or quality, and nothing was absolutely newer than three years old, a dandy would have had no fault to find but ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... of the English officers in their very best Apparel. I was fit to die a-laughing, and whispered to our Doctor of Physic, that had I known I was fated to walk in such a Procession, I would never have sold my old Tower Warder's slashed doublet to the Frippery Man in Monmouth Street, but would have brought it round the World with me to wear at this Outlandish place. Each of us had, moreover, in Compliment to his Saintship, a long Candle, lighted, in his hand; the which gave us great Diversion, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... here the revolutionary side of Hegel's philosophy was again taken up, and at the same time freed from the idealistic frippery which had in Hegel's hands interfered with its necessary conclusions. The great fundamental thought, namely, that the world is not to be considered as a complexity of ready-made things, but as a complexity ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... "He that on frippery sets his heart May purchase titles such as Bart.; These garish gauds my spirit spurns, I'm greater as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various
... raising her countenance, bathed in tears, and purple with shame; "is it not shameful of me to be dressed in all this frippery, and throwing away so much money in follies, while you are thus miserably clad, and in need of everything—perhaps dying of want, for I have never seen your poor face look so ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... whose extravagances in speech, manner and dress caused deep dismay among the more serious members of the community. In particular the learned Dr. SHADWELL denounced them with great severity in a leading review, but with little result. They bedizened themselves with frippery, shrieked like parrots on all occasions and interpreted the motto of the time, "Carry On," in a sense deplorably remote ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... Without a pair of shirts between us, Morn, noon, and night to smell tobacco; To live my days in Gallic hovels, Untouched by water since the flood; To wade through streets, where famine grovels In hunger, frippery, and mud. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 290 - Volume X. No. 290. Saturday, December 29, 1827. • Various
... separable charm. For it has everything—a sufficient scheme, a definite meaning and purpose, a sustained and adequate command of poetical presentation, and passages and phrases of the most exquisite beauty. Although it begins as a pastoral, the mere traditional and conventional frippery of that form is by no means so prominent in it as in the later (and, I think, less consummate) companion and sequel Thyrsis. With hardly an exception, the poet throughout escapes in his phraseology the two main dangers which so constantly beset him—too great stiffness and too ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... their place is taken by the professors of a flabby latitudinarianism, which ignores sin—the central fact of human life—and therefore can find no place for the Atonement. Heresy is preached more unblushingly than it was thirty years ago; and when it tries to disguise itself in the frippery of aesthetic Anglicanism, it leads captive not a few. In the churches commonly called Ritualistic, I note one great and significant improvement. English Churchmen have gradually discovered that they have an indigenous ritual of their own—dignified, expressive, ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... world, of which we English and Americans are perhaps the truest types, stands revealed, from beneath its froth, frippery, and vulgar excrescences, sound at core—a world whose implicit motto is: "The good of all humanity." But the herd-life, which is its characteristic, brings many evils, has many dangers; and to preserve a sane mind in a healthy body is the riddle before us. Somehow we must free ourselves ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... openings of those dark streets where Wisdom herself hath stretched forth her hands and no man regarded,—thirty minutes to raise the dead in,—let us but once understand and feel this, and we shall look with changed eyes upon that frippery of gay furniture about the place from which the message of judgment must be delivered, which either breathes upon the dry bones that they may live, or, if ineffectual, remains recorded in condemnation, perhaps against the utterer and listener alike, but assuredly against one of ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... Baron with a bored expression—he was acting his part of arbiter of taste who has seen everything. "We used to deal in Ossianic mists, Malvinas and Fingals and cloudy shapes, and warriors who got out of their tombs with stars above their heads. Nowadays this poetical frippery has been replaced by Jehovah, angels, seistrons, the plumes of seraphim, and all the paraphernalia of paradise freshened up with a few new words such as 'immense, infinite, solitude, intelligence'; you ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... market-place, occupying a considerable extent of frontage, and "conducted (as the advertisements have it) by Mr. Joseph Hanson, late of London," put forth by far the boldest pretensions of any magazine of finery and frippery in the town; and it is with that magnificent store, and with that only, that I intend to deal ...
— Mr. Joseph Hanson, The Haberdasher • Mary Russell Mitford
... shall be saying, "Who will deliver us from realism?" Nothing is so tiring as a constant close imitation of life. One comes back inevitably to imaginative work. Homer's fictions will always be preferred to historical truth, Rubens' fabulous magnificence to all the frippery copied exactly ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... popgun, paper pellet, gimcrack, gewgaw, bauble, trinket, bagatelle, Rickshaw, knickknack, whim-wham, trifle, trifles light as air; yankee notions [U.S.]. trumpery, trash, rubbish, stuff, fatras^, frippery; leather or prunello; chaff, drug, froth bubble smoke, cobweb; weed; refuse &c (inutility) 645; scum &c (dirt) 653. joke, jest, snap of the fingers; fudge &c (unmeaning) 517; fiddlestick^, fiddlestick end^; pack of nonsense, mere farce. straw, pin, fig, button, rush; bulrush, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... fellows," said Stevenson, "but none of us can write like Hazlitt." To write a style that is easy yet incisive, lively and at the same time substantial, buoyant without being frothy, glittering but with no tinsel frippery, a style combining the virtues of homeliness and picturesqueness, has been given to few mortals. Writing in a generation in which the standards of prose were conspicuously unsettled, when the most ambitious writers were seeking an escape from the frozen patterns ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... selected as the master of the world. He was young. He was small. He seemed almost frail. He was an unspeakable egotist. He was fastidious in his dress. I have read that he even used perfumes. And how could the common eye discern, through all of these externals of frippery, the lion heart, the eagle vision, and the mind ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... reached at nightfall, to meet the river flotilla to which we were to be transferred, I was shown, as the vessel which was to receive the coffin and the staff of the escort, a frightful-looking boat on which a sort of hideous dais had been built, with all the frippery and plumes of the Pompes Funebres, an official catafalque worthy of Carpentras or of Brives-la-Gaillarde. I immediately gave orders for this masterpiece of bad taste to be destroyed, a coat of black paint given to the boat, and everything cleared ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... This was in Rosemary Lane, Wellclose Square, Whitechapel—"a place near the Tower of London where old clothes and frippery ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... idol-beetle-fly: Next in an arch, akin to this, His idol-canker seated is: Then in a round is placed by these His golden god, Cantharides. So that, where'er ye look, ye see, No capital, no cornice free, Or frieze, from this fine frippery. Now this the fairies would have known, Theirs is a mixed religion: And some have heard the elves it call Part pagan, part papistical. If unto me all tongues were granted, I could not speak the saints here painted. Saint Tit, Saint ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... the great ones of the earth is so intimately known to us as the magnificent histrion, whose tinselled grandeur and pompous egoism have been laid bare by the Duke of St. Simon, prince of memoirists. Never has the frippery of a court been shrivelled by such fierce and consuming light, glaring like a fiery sun on its meretricious splendours. And what a court it is! What a gilded crowd of princes and paramours, harlots and bastards, ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... for Sunday, and the question of possibly squeezing out three or four shillings to buy an extra bit of frippery ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... me once more to dress with exceeding care, but I fretted much for my own easy garments which permitted a man to use his limbs with the freedom God had given them. Verily there would be no regret when all this frippery could be cast aside, and by my faith, it was much simpler to lay it off than to array one's self in. I never did learn all the eccentricities of that remarkable rig my fashionable friend ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... pantaloons, dancing ladies, walking dandies, kings with their crowns, and queens in their rabbit-skins, and the rest, are poor pinch-bellied devils, caricaturing humanity for some twelve or fourteen shillings a-week, finding their own paint and frippery. Now, whenever you wish to form a correct idea of the two great classes of fashionable life, call to your remembrance the gentlemen who, like the late lamented Mr Richardson, are proprietors of shows, and the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... looked highly offended; and nervously twitching his beard, uttered something invidious about frippery young poetasters being too full of silly imaginings ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... you know my boys? Well, they are really young men; and anyone can see how they have improved. Some of them have real good homes, to be sure; but the most of them are friendless sort of boys. Now, I want to get them acquainted; not with the frippery people who would have nothing to do with them, but with some of our real splendid boys and girls who will enjoy helping them. I'm going to have the nicest little party I ever had in my life; I mean to have some ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... the useful," said Flora. "The Cleveland set will be sure to deal in frippery, and I have been looking over Mrs. Hoxton's stores, where I see quite enough for mere decoration. There are two splendid vases in potichomanie, in an Etruscan pattern, which are coming for me ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... looking steadily at me. She rose now. She wore a blue morning dress, with lace ruffles and other little fooleries in which women delight, and I remember being shocked with the strange contrast between this frippery and the speechless dread and misery of her face. She gained control of her ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... to the purpose; this is not only deluding our selves, but putting a Slur upon the Devil himself; and, I say, I shall not dishonour Satan so much as to suppose any thing in it: However, as I must have a care too how I take away the proper Materials of Winter Evening Frippery, and leave the good Wives nothing of the Devil to fright the Children with, I shall carry the weighty Point no farther. No doubt the Devil and Dr. Faustus were very intimate; I should rob you of a very significant [6] Proverb, if I should so much as doubt ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... a mummer as I am within the walls, and thou knowest that well enough, dame," replied the apprentice. "I can touch the players themselves, at the Ball and at the Fortune, for presenting any thing except a gentleman. Take but this d—d skin of frippery off me, which I think the devil stuck me into, and you shall put me into nothing else that I will not become as if ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... civilly declines. "What! Says me nay?" "'Tis even so, sir. Why? Can't say. Dislikes you, or, more likely, shy." Next morning Philip searches Mena out, And finds him vending to a rabble rout Old crazy lumber, frippery of the worst, And with all courtesy salutes him first. Mena pleads occupation, ties of trade, His service else he would by dawn have paid, At Philip's house,—was grieved to think, that how He should have failed to notice him till now. "On one ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... Paris fashions of the Second Empire, and he might have found consolation for the tragedies of 1870, if he had known, as has been asserted, that they portended deliverance from the thraldom. France, so we are told, purged and purified by the baptism of fire, shook off its tasteless frippery, and sought a chaster and purer mode.... Thus elevated and touched to higher issues, the modistes of France, when once the Third Republic had settled down, made quite nice and simple dresses for a few years, and were imitated by the slavish islanders across the Channel, ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... "was more like to pick it up in a frippery warehouse, while the broker was looking another way; and, for the hawk's eye you talk of, his was always after my stray spoons. He was tapster's boy here in this blessed house for a quarter of a year; and between misreckonings, miscarriages, mistakes, and misdemeanours, ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... interval of a learned period, like that of Pope in England, are inevitably succeeded by a sham return to nature. What he had in mind was, of course, the movement represented by Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, the romantic poets of the Lake School, whom he describes as a "modern-antique compound of frippery and barbarism." He must have greatly enjoyed writing such a paragraph as this: "A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilised community. ... The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward. The brighter the light diffused around him by the progress of reason, the thicker ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... father has no right to pledge me, even though I told him I liked the girl, and would wish the match. 'Tis not enough that my father offers her my heart and hand; he has no right to do it; a delicate woman would not accept professions made by proxy. Lady Emily! Lady Emily! with all the tawdry frippery, and finery of dress and demeanour—compare HER with—— Pshaw! Ridiculous! How blind, how ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... knowledge, heroism of the truthful—there is something in them that makes one's heart swell with pride. But we anchorites and marmots have long ago persuaded ourselves in all the secrecy of an anchorite's conscience, that this worthy parade of verbiage also belongs to the old false adornment, frippery, and gold-dust of unconscious human vanity, and that even under such flattering colour and repainting, the terrible original text HOMO NATURA must again be recognized. In effect, to translate man back again into nature; to master the many vain and visionary interpretations ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... excellent good sense, and the descriptive poetry of Bryant shows how carefully he has observed the rules which Scott has laid down. He never has a conventional image, and never resorts to the second-hand frippery of a poetical commonplace-book to tag his verses with. Every season of our American year has been delineated by him, and the drawing and coloring of his pictures are always correct. Our American springs, for instance, are not at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... mother's she ought to dress like a workgirl. The dresses with trains caused quite a sensation in the house; the Lorilleuxs sneered; Lantier, whose mouth sneered, turned the girl round to sniff at her delicious aroma; the Boches had forbidden Pauline to associate with this baggage in her frippery. And Gervaise was also angered by Nana's exhausted slumber, when after one of her adventures, she slept till noon, with her chignon undone and still full of hair pins, looking so white and breathing so feebly ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... eye to the great job I had mentioned to them— they had secretly set their hearts on supplying the right essence for my pictorial vindication of our fine novelist. They knew that for this undertaking I should want no costume—effects, none of the frippery of past ages—that it was a case in which everything would be contemporary and satirical and presumably genteel. If I could work them into it their future would be assured, for the labour would of course be long and the ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... with great volubility, but little attention. Her task finished, she shut the books, and employed the remainder of the time in translating a number of little mottoes into German, which she had composed for boxes, baskets, and other frippery. ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... most grim functionary, lays claim to the clothes. There was more real justice, friend Will, in the little finger of the Law of Moses, than in the whole right arm and sword of our boasted English trull, and you may throw her scales and blind-man's-buff frippery into the bargain. ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... awver that," declared Uncle Thomas. "I'll send the trap home with 'e, an' you can look out the frippery; an' you might send a nice split bake back-along with it, if you've got the likes of sich a thing ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... dissipation, rudeness, and stupidity, often corroborates the Puritan's report about the bad manners of the undergraduates. Yet Oxford, then as now, did not lack her exquisites, and her admirers of the fair. Terrae Filius thus describes a "smart," as these dandies were called—Mr. Frippery: ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... and injure the harmony of proportion, the grace of form, and divinity of sentiment of his nymph or his goddess—so with Burns the fashion of a lady's boddice, the lustre of her satins, or the sparkle of her diamonds, or other finery with which wealth or taste has loaded her, are neglected us idle frippery; while her beauty, her form, or her mind, matters which are of nature and not of fashion, are remembered and praised. He is none of the millinery bards, who deal in scented silks, spider-net laces, rare gems, set in rarer workmanship, and who shower ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... strain—that joyous strain? "'Twas such as England loved to hear, "Ere thou and all thy frippery train, "Corrupted both her ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Shakespear's Points and Quibbles, (for which he must be allowed to have a superlative Genius) and now and then penning a Catch or a Ditty, instead of inditing Odes, and Sonnets, the Gentlemen of the Bon Goust in the Pit would never have been put to all that Grimace in damning the Frippery of State, the Poverty and Languor of Thought, the unnatural Wit, and inartificial Structure of his Dramas. I am, SIR, Your very ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... the room a good deal of second-hand frippery in the way of silk and lace, rather faded velvet, even, eight-button gloves that had been cleaned several times, and perfumes abstracted from madame's dressing-table, but the faces were happy, thoughts given wholly to gaiety, and I was able to make a little ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... her mouth too generous for that—but she seemed crisp, clean-cut, and wholesome What first struck O'Neil was her effect of boyishness. From the crown of her plain straw "sailor" to the soles of her sensible walking-boots there was no suggestion of feminine frippery. She wore a plain shirtwaist and a tailored skirt, and her hair was arranged simply. The wave in its pale gold was the only concession to mere prettiness. Yet she gave no impression of deliberate masculinity. She struck one as merely not interested ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... all as illiterate and impudent as a suburb whore. What are we to think of the fine-dressed sparks, proud of their own personal deformities, which appear the more hideous by the contrast of wearing scarlet and gold, with what they call toupees[1] on their heads, and all the frippery of a modern beau, to make a figure before women; some of them with hump-backs, others hardly five feet high, and every feature of their faces distorted: I have seen many of these insipid pretenders entering into conversation with persons of learning, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... into the place he has manoeuvred for at the expense of manliness, truth, consistency, and honesty, does he not conjugate the verb valoir negatively? When Madame Favorita has made her last curtsy for the night behind the foot-lights, has thrown off her tawdry frippery, and sits in her lonely chamber, glowering at the image of the young rival who has won all the applause,—when she bemoans her waning charms and the wearisome life which has lost its sparkle, and sees its emptiness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... war-horses ready for the charge. The life of the woods, which was their true life, again drew them. They could scarcely wait. Dancing and love-making suddenly cloyed; for a man was made to conquer the wilderness and take the spoils of the earth. "Woodsman's habits returned upon them. The frippery of the island was dropped like the withes which bound Samson. Their companions the Indians were also making ready the canoes. Blackbird stood erect behind the elbow of John McGillis as he took leave of his ...
— The Cobbler In The Devil's Kitchen - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... and sons in succession resigned their breath. It is not unusual to see one of these apartments now transformed into a modern drawing-room, where a thoughtful mind can scarcely forbear comparing the past and present,—the spindled frippery of modern furniture, the frail but elegant apparatus of a tea-table, the general decorum, the equal absence of everything to afflict or to transport, with what has been heard, or seen, or felt, within the same walls,—- the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... Peter." Here she nibbled her thread with white teeth, and held up what she had been sewing to view the effect of a bow of riband, with her head very much on one side. And I inwardly wondered that she should spend so much care upon such frippery—all senseless bows ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... office, to marvel why Miss Blake ever wore a collar, or a tucker, or a frill, or a pair of cuffs. So far as clean linen was concerned, she would have appeared infinitely brighter and fresher had she and female frippery at once parted company. Her laces were always in tatters, her collars soiled, her cuffs torn, and her frills limp. I wonder what the natives thought of her in France! In London, we decided—and accurately, I believe—that Miss Blake, in the solitude of her own chamber, washed ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... of Ciudad Rodrigo the swiftest and most brilliant. A great siege tests the fighting quality of any army as nothing else can test it. In the night watches in the trenches, in the dogged toil of the batteries, and the crowded perils of the breach, all the frippery and much of the real discipline of an army dissolves. The soldiers fall back upon what may be called the primitive fighting qualities—the hardihood of the individual soldier, the daring with which the officers will lead, the dogged loyalty with which the men will follow. As an illustration ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... and Master Hall, like an ass as he was, took up wi' him. There's no end to men's doltishness [foolishness]. I'm homely, [plain-spoken] you'll say, and that's true; I love so to be. I never did care for dressing my words with all manner o' frippery, as if they were going to Court. 'Tis a deal the best to speak plain, and then folks ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... in changing the aspect of the building, that it looked, within, more like a vast pagan toyshop than a Christian church. Here and there, it is true, a pillar or an altar rose unencumbered as of old, appearing as much at variance with the frippery that surrounded it as a text of Scripture quoted in a sermon of the time. But as regarded the general aspect of the basilica, the decent glories of its earlier days seemed irrevocably departed ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... that let us take breath." And having done so, they must have remembered that they were not in a serious world; that they were in the fairyland of fans, in the paradise of pipkins, in the limbo of blue china, screens, pots, plates, jars, joss-houses, and all the fortuitous frippery of Fusi-yama. ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... to the good sense of my fellow-citizens: let us have no more tags and lace, no more glitter, no more frippery which costs so little at the shops yet is so dear to ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... strikes us most is the abrupt transition everywhere discernible from monuments of vast antiquity to buildings of quite modern date. There seems to be no interval between the marbles and mosaics of Justinian or Theodoric and the insignificant frippery of the last century. The churches of Ravenna—S. Vitale, S. Apollinare, and the rest—are too well known, and have been too often described by enthusiastic antiquaries, to need a detailed notice in this place. Every one is aware that the ecclesiastical customs and architecture of the early Church ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... ever being bullied and overawed by a long veranda-load of gaping, patronizing tourists, and the idiotic flirting females of their species. Think of a lot of over-dressed creatures flouting those severe outlines and deep-toned distances with frippery and garishness. You know how you have been lulled to sleep by that delicious, indefinite, far-off murmur of the canyon at night—think of it being broken by a crazy waltz or a monotonous german—by the clatter of waiters and the pop of champagne corks. And yet, by thunder, ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... furnished by Miss Roberts was that "A lady on ship-board, spruced up for the Park or the Opera, would only be an object of ridicule to her experienced companions. Frippery which would be discarded in England is often useful in India. Members of my sex," she adds, "who have to study economy, can always secure bargains by acquiring at small cost items of fashion which, while outmoded in London, will be new enough by ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... it,—does it not, dear Matilda, throw a mysterious grandeur about its possessor? You will call this romantic: but consider I was born in the land of talisman and spell, and my childhood lulled by tales which you can only enjoy through the gauzy frippery of a French translation. O Matilda, I wish you could have seen the dusky visages of my Indian attendants, bending in earnest devotion round the magic narrative, that flowed, half poetry, half prose, ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... he said, bitterly, "that you understand the frippery taste of this trivial age better than I. A capability to appreciate solid reading, reading that cultivates the understanding while it amends the heart, seems to be with the forgotten learning before the flood. They who pander to this diseased ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... told the company he had been teased by a very importunate beggar. Addressing himself to our adventurer, "You took notice," says he, "of a fine lady flaunting about our walk in all the frippery of the fashion. She was lately a gay young widow that made a great figure at the court-end of the town; she distinguished herself by her splendid equipage, her rich liveries, her brilliant assemblies, her numerous ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... cloth. Am I not half naked? Is this the cloth I should respect—this gaudy frippery, which your citizens have made a target ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... answer. A man wrestling with a 935 by 135 cover isn't exactly in the mood to compliment a woman on her frippery or talk about the mountains. And I'm no more than human, all said and done, and the sight of the food she took out of the basket made me feel well-nigh desperate. So I turned my back upon her, and she went off to the copse to prepare breakfast as she had promised. Not five minutes afterwards ...
— The Man Who Drove the Car • Max Pemberton
... gentleman talks of giving you carriages and diamonds! He has money, let him spend it on you; so be it. It is no concern of mine. But as to what I can give you, I will not have the crown-pieces I have picked up with so much toil wasted in carriages and frippery. Those who spend too fast never grow rich. A hundred thousand crowns, which is your fortune, will not buy up Paris. It is all very well to look forward to a few hundred thousand francs to be yours some day; I shall keep you waiting for them as long ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... beast, bedizened in his general's frippery, in a reeking tavern-room, stand the noble lady of Savenaye and the ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... as neat as you please," interrupted I, "and I shall love you the better for it; but all this is not neatness, but frippery. These rufflings and pinkings and patchings will only make us hated by all the wives of our neighbors. No, my children," continued I, more gravely, "those gowns must be altered into something of a plainer cut, for finery is very unbecoming ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... description of it which he has heretofore inserted in another publication. "It then existed in its pristine state, and was a small square of tall and miserable houses, the very intestines of which seemed turned inside out, to judge from the old garments and frippery that fluttered from every window. It appeared to be a region of washerwomen, and lines were stretched about the little square, on which clothes were ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... her about many things, but she invariably gave me to understand that her experience and superior knowledge in such matters were not to be gainsaid. I was willing to leave to her all the fuss and frippery of preparing clothes for her daughter. It always seemed to me that she had clothes enough, and clothes that were good enough for married life. I couldn't understand why a young woman, on becoming a wife, should need a lot of new and elaborate dresses, such as she had never worn and ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... again! The money—root of all evil. What comes here? [A Page enters.] A long-winged grasshopper, all gold, green, and gauze? How these young pea-chicks must needs ape the grown peacock's frippery! Prithee, now, how many such butterflies as you suck here together on the ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... for a few minutes watching Aubrey. He perceived with satisfaction that his costume was simple and suitable, entirely devoid of frippery and foppery; that his mind seemed to be taken up with his employment; that he was looking well, and appeared to understand his business. At last the grave and reverend signors had made their choice; Bullinger's Decades, at nine shillings, was selected, and Beza's New Testament, at sixteen: ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... seriously, when he would again rely upon his independent exertions. Sometimes the actor was able to hire or purchase scenes and dresses, the latter being procured generally from certain shops in Monmouth Street dealing in cast clothes and tarnished frippery that did well enough for histrionic purposes; then, engaging a company, he would start from London as a manager, to visit certain districts where it was thought that a harvest might be reaped. The receipts were divided among the troop upon a prearranged method. The impresario took shares in ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... I saw that the room had been changed. There was too much middle-class frippery: white curtains at the windows, numerous pictures on the walls, a lamp pendent from the ceiling, underneath it in the center of the room a round table and chairs, knickknacks in a china cupboard, a pink-painted spinning ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... these occasions that she took off a little of the worldly frippery she had indulged in and put on her very plainest cap, but she could not disguise the arch, pretty face, and this evening it really seemed more beguiling than ever. Caresses of all kinds were frowned upon ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... fal-lal as we say, and for which she had an inborn turn, being of good draper family, and polished above the yeomanry. Nevertheless I could never bear it, partly because I felt it to be out of place in our good farm-house, partly because I hate frippery, partly because it seemed to me to have nothing to do with father, and partly because I never could tell the reason of my hating it. And yet the poor soul had put them on, not to show her hands off (which were above her station) but simply for her children's sake, because ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... their own clothes, necessary or ornamental, and are continually talking about them; and their thoughts follow their hands. It is not indeed the making of necessaries that weakens the mind; but the frippery of dress. For when a woman in the lower rank of life makes her husband's and children's clothes, she does her duty, this is part of her business; but when women work only to dress better than they could otherwise afford, it is worse than sheer loss of time. To render the poor virtuous, they must ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... were driven by them from room to room, until at length we were driven out of the house altogether; the building being, almost from basement to roof- tree, crowded with silks, muslins, ribbons, flowers, and every other imaginable species of frippery affected ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... the court frequently donated old ribbons, feathers, or flowers, from discarded millinery or other finery, and all these were utilized by the frippery loving courtiers. ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... always, that in this work it was not alone the well-born and the wealthy who made sacrifices, and gave grand gifts. Not from the sacrifice of gauds and frippery did the humble charities of these hired nurses come, but from the yielding up of a thousand needed comforts for themselves, and the forgetfulness of their own wants, in supplying the mightier wants of the suffering. It is impossible ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... it from ridicule. Nothing could be more evident than that this French patriotism was as theatrical, in the countless majority of instances, as the loves and sorrows of its stage. Yet, however the speeches might be got by heart, or the frippery and actors hired, the drame was powerfully performed; and all Europe sat by, giving it the tribute of its tears and its terrors. Even we of England, with all our more sober recollections that the heroes were ragamuffins, and the heroism imaginary, gave ourselves ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... a matter of fact many of our millionaires would be more at home in an atmosphere concocted from the ingredients of plain pine tables and blanket-covered mattresses than they are surrounded by the frippery of China and the frivolity of France. If these gentlemen were fortunate enough to enjoy sufficient confidence in their own taste to give it a thorough test it is not safe to think of the extreme burden that would be put on the working capacity of the factories of the Grand Rapids furniture ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... labour, each can strive, lovingly and earnestly, in her own sphere. "Life is real! Life is earnest!" Not less for her than for man. She has no right to bury her talent beneath silks or ribands, frippery or flowers; nor yet has she the right, because she fancies not her task, to grasp at another's, which is, or which she imagines is, easier. This is baby play. "Life is real! Life is earnest!" Let woman so read it—let woman so learn ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... velvet pall, have so much more than their first death-smell in them. But when the occasion came we found it the simplest and truest thing, after all, to content ourselves with the old fashion, taking away what we could, but interpolating no novelties, and particularly avoiding all frippery of flowers and cheerful emblems. The procession moved from the farmhouse. Nearest the dead walked an old man in deep mourning, his face mostly concealed in a white handkerchief, and with Priscilla leaning on his arm. Hollingsworth and ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Coudray has the character of the first engineer in the kingdom, and his manners and disposition will, I am confident, be highly pleasing to you, as he is a plain, modest, active, sensible man, perfectly averse to frippery and parade. My friends here rejoice at the acquisition, and considering the character of the man, and at whose hands I in effect received him, I must congratulate you on it. Several young gentlemen of fortune, whose families ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... then—at one o'clock—shining with a rich splendour. The roadway blazed. Under the shop-blinds, which drooped forward like heavy lids over the tired eyes of the windows, little crowds from Streatham and Kentish Town were shopping. They stared at us. Through the frippery of this market-place we reached the homelier atmosphere of Holborn. The rattle of our boxes' had grown apace, and we made small bets among ourselves as to what the total takings would be. I was thankful when the march or solemn walk was ended. For days ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... humble dependent; but Mr. Webb would occasionally come and dine with him—and often asked him in return. Mrs. Webb too was civil to his wife and the girls—always lent them the Dublin pattern for their frills, frocks, and other frippery—and seldom drove into Drumsna without calling. The consequence was, that the Counsellor was a man after Tony's own heart. Though they were of different religions, they had, generally speaking, the same political feelings and opinions—the same philanthropical principles—and the ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... my complaisance ended. Again the matter of clothes was harped upon. The three gorgeously caparisoned chamberlains, who had inducted me to the shelter, laid before me changes of raiment bedecked with every imaginable kind of frippery, and would have me transform myself into a popinjay in fashion ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... on them, and growled out, 'Have done with that folly! What has a herd boy like thee to do with roses and frippery? Come away from the lady's rein. Thou art over-held to ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... than severe. Mr. Cleves has the wonderful art of preaching sermons which the wheelwright and the blacksmith can understand; not because he talks condescending twaddle, but because he can call a spade a spade, and knows how to disencumber ideas of their wordy frippery. Look at him more attentively, and you will see that his face is a very interesting one —that there is a great deal of humour and feeling playing in his grey eyes, and about the corners of his roughly-cut mouth: a man, you observe, who has most likely sprung ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... with no such frippery, however, that I connected the occasional presence among us of the young member of the cousinship (in this case of the maternal) who most moved me to wistfulness of wonder, though not at all, with his then marked difference of age, by inviting my free approach. Vernon King, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... less subdued. In 1824 there was a noisy dapper dandyism abroad. Vulgar, as we should now think, but yet genial—a matter of white greatcoats and loud voices—strangely different from the stately frippery that is rife at present. These men are out of their element in the quadrangle. Even the small remains of boisterous humour, which still clings to any collection of young men, jars painfully on their morbid sensibilities; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Italians of today but men tricked out in women's finery, when they should be waiting full-armed to rally at the first signal of revolt? Oh, for the day when a poet shall arise who dares tell them the truth, not disguised in sentimental frippery, not ending in a maudlin reconciliation of love and glory—but the whole truth, naked, cold and fatal as a patriot's blade; a poet who dares show these bedizened courtiers they are no freer than the peasants they oppress, and tell the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... not commanded and to leave undone what is commanded. We see that the world is full of shameful works of unchastity, indecent words, tales and ditties, temptation to which is daily increased through gluttony and drunkenness, idleness and frippery. Yet we go our way as if we were Christians; when we have been to church, have said our little prayer, have observed the fasts and feasts, then we think our ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther
... any amount of good, to be selfish like that now and then. It reconciles one so splendidly to existence. It's like a spring cleaning of the soul. And then, I think, when one opens one's eyes again one sees—one must see—everything more rightly, not dressed up in frippery, not horribly naked either, but truly, accurately, neither overlooking graces nor dwelling on distortions. D'you understand what I mean? Perhaps I don't ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... veterans." This I saw, years after Charles Lamb's death, in the possession of his sister, Mary. "All our furniture has faded," he writes, "under the auctioneer's hammer; going for nothing, like the tarnished frippery of the prodigal." Four years afterwards (in 1833) Lamb moves to his last home, in Church Street, Edmonton, where he is somewhat ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... her mighty extravagant; but beshrew me if she were half as vain or extravagant as our noble King Jamie! It is a marvel he cannot see how ten-fold uglier he makes his ugly person by trapping himself out in all such frippery ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... for my work. She takes no interest in anything but the frippery side of life. That's what appeals to me in you—you are so aspiring. I feel that you have such wonderful possibilities. You would spur ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... were times when, if you asked him to relate a thing afresh, he would interpolate new matter, or alter it so that it was impossible to recognise it. Once upon a time, one of those gentlemen who, like the usurers at our yearly fairs, clutch and beg and steal every sort of frippery, and issue mean little volumes, no thicker than an A B C book, every month, or even every week, wormed this same story out of Thoma Grigorovitch, and the latter completely forgot about it. But that same young gentleman, in the ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... saffron, and are with such fine pearls necklaced, these dames do exhale from their exuberant bodies the essence of a quite primitive and simple era; but for the ease of their deportment in their frippery, they might be Maenads in masquerade. They have nothing of the coyness that civilisation fosters in women, are as fearless and unsophisticated as men. A 'wooing' were wasted on them, for they have no sense of antagonism, and seek not ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... "Great Pan is dead!" And Jove's high palace closed its portal, The fallen gods, before they fled, Sold out their frippery to a mortal. ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... window also looks upon the park—I have wondered that these melodious street cries are not used generally for calling the wares of wider sale. If a radish can be so proclaimed, there might be a lilt devised in praise of other pleasing merceries—a tripping pizzicato for laces and frippery—a brave trumpeting for some newest cereal. And should not the latest book—if it be a tale of love, for these I am told are best offered to the public in the Spring (sad tales are best for winter)—should ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks |
