"Ostentatious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... old car he got the oars of the old flat bottom boat belonging to the troop. He also procured a black marking stick used for marking scout signs on rocks, and a pasteboard target on the back of which he printed in ostentatious lettering. ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... called out languidly. Then perceiving the matter she hastily followed. The Appleboys were standing on their lawn viewing the whole proceeding with ostentatious indifference. ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... in Lord Canning's sweeping condemnation, it should be considered that the object of the punishment was to produce a deterrent effect on those who were likely to follow the bad example that had been set them, and as the offence of the troopers had been public and ostentatious, General Hewitt no doubt thought it right to make the punishment as ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... navigation of Chinese waters.") that of developing in that country a demand for some of the economic and manufacturing products of England, so as to relieve that country of the necessity of sending out such a mass of specie—that interesting object which all the ostentatious display of the commercial wealth of Europe had not been able to attain, and all the astute diplomacy of Lord Macartney had failed to achieve—the English have recently accomplished. Masters of the trade in these kinds ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... Having a good title to military distinction himself, he could afford, as the unwarlike emperors could not, to be generous to his officers. The common soldiers, on the other hand, were fascinated by his personal prowess and his somewhat ostentatious camaraderie. His features were firm and clearly cut; his figure was tall and soldierly, and exhibited the sinewy hard health of a veteran campaigner. His hair was already gray before he came to the throne, though he ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... depend on you." I told him that such a remark might well be accepted in some quarters as a British surrender. Then he came up to the scratch: "Surrender? Never." But I fear we need—in some practical and non-ostentatious way—now and then to remind all these European folk that we get no particular encouragement ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... which were usually squandered in rivalry with the boyardesses, in jewellery, dress, and other luxuries.[160] It is said that one of the princesses, being offended with a lady of rank for excelling her in the ostentatious richness of her dress and personal adornments, caused her to be exiled; and that when she had secured a sufficiently large sum to purchase a more magnificent apparel than her rival, she allowed her to return to court, in order that she might enjoy her humiliation. The complaints ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... antipodes antojar vr. (with personal dative) to have a fancy or desire. anudar to knot. anunciar to announce. anadidura addition; por —— in addition. anadir to add. ano year. apagar to extinguish, dim. apalear to drub, beat with a stick. aparatoso ostentatious, magnificent. aparecer to appear. aparejar to prepare. aparente apparent. aparicion apparition, appearance. apariencia appearance. apear vr. to alight. apellido name, surname. apenas hardly. apero ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... Mr. Parnell on the one hand, and the Marquis of Salisbury and Sir Michael Hicks-Beach on the other, must have been equally unprepared for what has happened. The Queen, caring not to conceal her political predilections, hesitated not to give her ostentatious approval and powerful endorsement to Tory management by consenting to open Parliament, as she had previously done for Lord Beaconsfield after his return from Berlin. A phenomenally large and brilliant assemblage ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... or Ariosto." We much admire Pulci and Ariosto, especially Ariosto, but they and their dissimilar images have no business here; and were Dr Joseph alive any where in the neighbourhood, we should whistle in his ear not to be so ostentatious in displaying his Italian literature, which was too thin to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... Claparon's private office. Between the ostentatious reception-room of Francois Keller and the untidy abode of the counterfeit banker, there was all the difference that exists between Versailles and the wigwam of a Huron chief. Birotteau had witnessed the splendors of finance; he was now to see its fooleries. ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... angle below the rose are four openings, showing alternately the lilies of Louis and the castles of Blanche. We who are below, the common people, understand that France claims to protect and defend the Virgin of Chartres, as her chief vassal, and that this ostentatious profusion of lilies and castles is intended not in honour of France, but as a demonstration of loyalty to Notre Dame, and an assertion of her rights as Queen Regent of Heaven against all comers, but particularly against Pierre, the rebel, who has the audacity to assert ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... woman had appropriated certain rather large trust sums and had presented them to her servant. At first every suspicion of the influence of sex was set aside. Only the discovery of the fact that in her ostentatious piety she had set up an altar in her house, and compelled her servant to pray at it in her company, called attention to the deep interest of this very moral maiden ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... for the humility of the lady whom I was about to meet. If the parlor of Mrs. Clifford bore such sufficient tokens of her weakness of intellect, her own costume betrayed still more. She had made her person a sort of frame or rack upon which she hung every particle of that ostentatious drapery which she was in the habit of wearing at her fashionable evenings. A year's income was paraded upon her back, and the trumpery jewels of three generations found a place on every part of ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... Short rose as Miss Fairfax entered, and bowed to her with deference. Bessie, being forbidden by her mother to retreat, sat down with ostentatious resignation to bear what was to come. But her bravado was not well enough grounded to sustain her long. The preliminaries were already concluded when she arrived, and Mrs. Carnegie was giving utterance ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... The ostentatious licence and the unscrupulous conduct of the Alcibiades of the 17th century have been deservedly censured. But even his critics agree that he was good-humoured, good-natured, generous, an unsurpassed mimic and the leader of fashion; and with his good looks, in spite of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... on which these places are established, and the ostentatious manner in which the business of even the smallest among them is divided into branches, is amusing. A handsome plate of ground glass in one door directs you 'To the Counting-house;' another to the 'Bottle ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... stepdaughter. One of the underlings from the stable was ready to take her horse. She dismounted unaided, flung the reins to the groom, and walked up to the Captain with her firmest step. When she was in the hall he shut the door, and bolted and locked it with a somewhat ostentatious care. She seemed to breathe less freely when that great door had shut out the cool night. She felt as if ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... at their door every outrage perpetrated in the country around.—The party from Elvas would afford a rich booty in purses, watches, and jewelry; and he thought it quite possible that after some of their allies had entertained them in Badajoz, with ostentatious hospitality, others might waylay, rob and murder them before, or soon after they crossed the frontier. So, he hastily ordered Major Conway to send out a patrol of dragoons to meet them; and the Major sent off Lieut. Goring in a hurry ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... characteristic is the frequency of Lyly's classical allusions. If the only definition of pedantry be 'vain and ostentatious display of learning,' I question if we may dismiss Lyly's wealth of classical lore with the word 'pedantry.' He was fresh from his university life. If he studied at all when he was at Oxford, he must have studied Latin ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... conclusion of the entertainment threatened to be necessary. May, who had previously decided that Mr. Quisante would be much better in company, was travelling to the conclusion that he was not nearly so trying when alone; to be weaselly is not so bad as to be inconsiderate and ostentatious. ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... fanatics. But such conflicts take place most often not between widely different sects but between subdivisions of the same sect, e.g., Tengalais and Vadagalais. It would seem too that at present most Hindus of the higher castes avoid ostentatious membership of the modern sects, and though they may practise special devotion to either Vishnu or Siva, yet they visit the temples of both deities when they go on pilgrimages. Jogendra Nath Bhattacharya ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... me away. Only, they made such a fuss about the watching"—she caught her breath—"it might be ostentatious from that point of view, too. Oh, George"—she reached for his hand—"we're two little orphans moving in worlds not realized, and we shall make some bad breaks. But we're going to have ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... and communities that are seldom disturbed by grave offences against the criminal law, but none which can insure itself against the affronts, enmities, wounded sensibilities, rankling grievances, occasioned by incivility and rudeness. Moreover, there are persons entirely free from vice, perhaps ostentatious in the qualities which are the opposites of vices, and not deficient in charitable labors and gifts, who cultivate discourtesy, are acrid or bitter in their very deeds of charity, and carry into every society a certain porcupine selfhood, which makes their mere presence annoying ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... absence of original development. Where the Greek master lightly sketches, the Etruscan disciple lavishes a scholar's diligence; instead of the light material and moderate proportions of the Greek works, there appears in the Etruscan an ostentatious stress laid upon the size and costliness, or even the mere singularity, of the work. Etruscan art cannot imitate without exaggerating; the chaste in its hands becomes harsh, the graceful effeminate, the terrible hideous, and the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Poor Schadow died yesterday. He caught cold the other evening at the Duke of Bracciano's uncomfortable, ostentatious palace, where we heard him complaining of the cold of the Mosaic floors: three days afterwards he was no more. He is universally ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... abroad. His domination over the lives of the thousands who slave in his foundries is kept unshaken by reason of the fact that he coats the bitter acts of oppression of which he is constantly guilty, with ostentatious gifts in the name of benevolence. He presents the cities of ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... driver (who had been to town and read novels) as he sat sideways on the box, passing his hand from the top to the bottom of his long whip, and trying to show off his accomplishments—"that ostentatious German has procured three light bays, and when he drives out with his lady—-oh, my! At Christmas he had a Christmas-tree in the big house. I drove some of the visitors there. It had 'lectric lights; you could not see the like of it in the whole ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... him so near the back of the car that he had to turn out, a step or so, to avoid collision with it. He accompanied this turning-out maneuver by another which was less ostentatious, but more purposeful. Timing his steps, so as to pass by the rear of the car just as the Master was busy helping his wife to descend, the youth thrust an arm over the side of the tonneau, with the speed of a striking snake. His hand closed on the handle ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... mother had come to disturb her mind; but she had been anxious not to judge hastily and without sufficient cause, and had succeeded in putting it from her as an unworthy thought. Now it came back to her, and remained and rooted itself in her mind. Now she understood why her mother, with an ostentatious pretence of fairness, even of generosity, towards her daughter, had left it to Fan to decide whether she would walk in the woods or spend the morning receiving religious instruction at home. Now she ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... western end the occupants of the seats before the table filed in one by one. The first to come was the sheriff, Wilfrey Lawson. With papers in hand, he stationed himself immediately under the jurors' box and facing the bar. Then came the clerk of the court, who was making an ostentatious display of familiarity with counsel for the King, who walked ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... Norwich may be taken as typical of the last legitimate development of the stone roof; it was the precursor of the later fan vaulting, such as we find in Henry VII.'s chapel at Westminster, where legitimate construction was replaced by ostentatious ingenuity and the accumulation ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell
... went home, held a council, came the next day with their elephants and horses, overwhelmed the few giants watching me, and carried me off. Jubilant over their victory, the smaller boys were childishly boastful, the bigger boys less ostentatious, while the girls, although their eyes flashed more, were not so talkative as usual. The woman of ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... will bring under review the dexterous policy, by which the crown contrived to strip the aristocracy of its substantial privileges, and prepared the way for the period, when it should retain possession only of a few barren though ostentatious dignities. [67] ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... opulence and luxury, women of finer natures and moral tone. The court of France is a court of adventurers, of parvenus; and the palaces, the toilets, the equipage, the entertainments, of the mistresses outshine those of the lawful wives. Hence comes a style of dress which is in itself vulgar, ostentatious, pretentious, without simplicity, without unity, seeking to dazzle by strange combinations and ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... charming woman, whilst to subalterns and such like she remained haughty and inaccessible as a goddess. At seventeen Vaninka's education was finished, and her governess who had suffered in health through the severe climate of St. Petersburg, requested permission to leave. This desire was granted with the ostentatious recognition of which the Russian nobility are the last representatives in Europe. Thus Vaninka was left alone, with nothing but her father's blind adoration to direct her. She was his only daughter, as we have mentioned, and he thought her ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... even deluded enough to imagine that they could face the full Roman force in open field. Both sides, therefore, were eager to bring about the same result. Next morning the small British squads which were hovering around showed ostentatious reluctance to come to close quarters, so as to draw the Romans out of their lines. Caesar gladly met their views, and sent forward all his cavalry and three legions, who, on their part, ostentatiously broke rank and began to forage. This ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... here apparently detached herself from a tree and the ostentatious perusal of an old election poster, and sauntered down towards the office door. Like her mother, she was plainly dressed; unlike her, she had a pale, rather refined face, with a demure mouth and downcast eyes. This was all the Colonel ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... calm, scornful face of your sister Charlotte at her side. Do you notice with what ostentatious obedience and attention she devotes herself ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... her child, but a few removes from infancy, being habited as chief mourner, to attend his parent to the grave; rings presented, and an escutcheon hung up, in a garret, at the funeral of a needy prostitute. The whole may be intended as a burlesque upon ostentatious and expensive funerals, which were then more customary than they are now. Mr. Pope has well ridiculed the ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... girls approached the island, the men arose immediately from their work. With an ostentatious carelessness, they went into the Clubhouse. With an ostentatious carefulness, they closed the door. They stayed ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... many works in which you do not show yourself the artist reveal the plenitude of your powers almost as much as the few in which you do. The most empty of your many ostentatious orchestral soliloquies, the most feeble of your many piano-pyrotechnics, the iciest of your bouquets of icy, exploding stars, the brassiest of your blatant perorations, the very falsest of your innumerable paste jewels, declare that you were born to sit among the great ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... people employed in civil strife those arms which had been the terror of Europe. The means of profuse expenditure had long been drawn by the English barons from the oppressed provinces of France. That source of supply was gone: but the ostentatious and luxurious habits which prosperity had engendered still remained; and the great lords, unable to gratify their tastes by plundering the French, were eager to plunder each other. The realm to which they were now confined would not, in ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the old man's counsels prevailed, and the two friends, with grave, pallid, but determined faces, came out into the sunshine, and with much deliberation and somewhat ostentatious calm proceeded to where the ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... cheeks with kisses I realised that each kiss expressed the thought "She is gone; I shall never see her more." Papa had very little to do with us in Moscow, coming to us only at dinner time, and lost much in my eyes, with his ostentatious dress, his stewards, his clerks, and his ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... in the cab again a certain stiffness of manner between them vanished and there was more squeezing of hands. "Ethel Lewisham," said Lewisham several times, and Ethel reciprocated with "Husbinder" and "Hubby dear," and took off her glove to look again in an ostentatious manner at a ring. And she ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... himself superior to its attractions. But now he was not only astonished by the well-ordered and unpretentious comfort of the house, but he was also shaken in his preconceived notions about the rich, when he came to make the acquaintance of the Garmans. Johnsen had expected to find something more ostentatious, especially at table; but the solid tone of the household, and the easy and polished manners of the family, perhaps most of all the presence of Rachel, finally caused him to change his original ideas. He regarded ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... and abuses this aristocracy, as unfit longer to govern the State, as a worn-out power that deserved to fall. He uniformly represents them as extravagant, selfish, ostentatious, luxurious, frivolous, Epicurean in opinions and in life, oppressive in all their social relations, haughty beyond endurance, and controlling the popular elections by means of bribery and corruption. It would be difficult to refute these charges. The Patricians probably gave themselves up to all ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... upon the scale of the balance, it would weigh down sin. I find no quality so easy to counterfeit as devotion, if men do not conform their manners and life to the profession; its essence is abstruse and occult; the appearance easy and ostentatious. ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... drive in a carriage instead of an omnibus; you would sit in the stalls instead of the upper circle; you would give quantities of money to poor people; and you would buy as many second hand books as you pleased. There are rich people, I believe, ostentatious people, who buy new books. But you, my dear, have been better brought up. No books are worth buying till they have stood the criticism of a whole generation at least. Never ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... punishment the severest that the laws allowed—viz. hard labor for ten years. The people raged more than ever; threats public and private were conveyed to the ears of the minister chiefly concerned in the responsibility, and who had indeed, by empty and ostentatious talking, assumed that responsibility to himself in a way ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... of the judge's lips were drawing down, and once John thought he started. The silk hat was pushed to the last extremity of the back of his head; and once he slowly turned and cast a look at his assistant. Dunham, like a schoolboy discovered in idleness, cleared his throat and began making an ostentatious stir among his papers. ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... Romans as allies, but rather as slaves. We are handed over to their prefects and centurions, who, when satiated with our plunder and with our blood, make way for others, who, under different names, renew the same outrages. If even at last Rome deigns to send us a legate, he oppresses us with an ostentatious and costly retinue, and with still more intolerable pride. The levies are again at hand which tear forever children from their parents, brothers from brothers. Now, Batavians, is our time. Never did Rome lie so prostrate as now. Let ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... speak so of any one whose hospitality I have accepted, but unless it is your wish I hope never to accept it again. They all smell of their beer. Everything is so coarse, lavish, and ostentatious. They tell you as through a brazen trumpet on every side, 'We are rich.'" "They give magnificent suppers," ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... clouds was very mild, and so was the color of the sea. A comely fog involved the day, and a decent mist restrained the night from ostentatious waste of stars. It was not such very bad weather; but a captious man might find fault with it, and only a thoroughly cheerful one could enlarge upon its merits. Plainly enough these might be found by anybody ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... side was lined with five-story flat buildings, their dingy-red brick facades regularly broken by equally dingy brownstone stoops, as to the ground floor, by open windows as to those above. The south side was mostly taken up by a towering white apartment hotel with an ostentatious entrance; against one of whose polished stone pillars the short and thick-set man ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... dispelled part of the charm. The hands of big Boone lowered; the others assumed more natural positions, but each, it seemed to Pierre, took particular and almost ostentatious care that their right hands should be always far from ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... rich, Nick," I said to him one day, on his making an ostentatious display of change, as he called it; he sneered with a most unchildish expression of countenance, and replied, "I guess 'twould be a bad job for I, if that was all I'd got ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... sat, Ulysses in his air Had more of state and dignity than he. In the delivery of a speech address'd To the full senate, Menelaus used Few words, but to the matter, fitly ranged, 255 And with much sweetness utter'd; for in loose And idle play of ostentatious terms He dealt not, though he were the younger man. But when the wise Ulysses from his seat Had once arisen, he would his downcast eyes 260 So rivet on the earth, and with a hand That seem'd untutor'd in ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... Marlow I regard as one of our greatest successes. It was dignified and impressive, without being ostentatious. We had insisted at all the shops we had been to that the things should be sent with us then and there. None of your "Yes, sir, I will send them off at once: the boy will be down there before you are, sir!" ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... was indeed no part of the character of Themistocles, although he has been accused of those vices, because guilty, at times, of extortion. He was profuse, ostentatious, and magnificent above his contemporaries and beyond his means. His very vices were on a large and splendid scale; and if he had something of the pirate in his nature, he had nothing of the miser. When he had to choose between two suiters for his daughter, he preferred the worthy to the ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... eyes to follow her with a wistful glance that he or she could intercept. Even Mrs. Yocomb appeared to think that I was recovering in more senses than one, and by frequent romps with the children, jests and chaffing with Mr. Yocomb and Reuben, by a little frank and ostentatious gallantry to Adah, which no longer deceived even her simple mind, since I never sought her exclusive society as a lover would have done, I ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... it, nor will anything induce me to engage in it, except it be the prospect of rendering effectual service to the common cause. I make this declaration, not because I conceive it necessary to you, or from an ostentatious display of those motives, which actuate my conduct, but there may be persons to whom I am not so well known as I have the honor of being to your Excellency, and who from ignorance or interest might give to the present intentions ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various
... completion of the portrait. This taste, or, as it may more properly be called, this passion for monuments, exercised no small influence on his thoughts and projects of glory; yet it did not deter him from directing attention to public improvements; of a less ostentatious kind. He wished for great monuments to perpetuate the recollection of his glory; but at the same time he knew how to appreciate all that was truly useful. He could very rarely be reproached for rejecting any plan without examination; and this examination ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Prodicus and others he learnt to laugh at the common ideas of justice, temperance, holiness and patriotism. The laborious thought, the ascetic life of his master Socrates, he was able to admire, but not to imitate or practise. On the contrary, his ostentatious vanity, his amours, his debaucheries and his impious revels became notorious. But great as were his vices, his ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... companions, also young men dressed expensively and wearing arms, were exchanging jokes with that sort of ostentatious laughter which implies a desire to prove that the laughter is not mortified though some people might suspect it. There were good reasons for such a suspicion; for this broad-shouldered man with the red feather was Dolfo Spini, leader of the Compagnacci, or Evil Companions—that is to say, ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... hazards of the faro table; when he beholds the streets glittering with new equipages, palaces conjured up by the magic of speculation; tradesmen flushed with sudden success, and vying with each other in ostentatious expense; in a word, when he hears the whole community joining in the theme of "unexampled prosperity." let him look upon the whole as a "weather breeder," and prepare for ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... an inward monitor. "How about money, where is that to come from?" And all at once the wealth displayed in the Countess de Restaud's drawing-room rose before his eyes. That was the luxury which Goriot's daughter had loved too well, the gilding, the ostentatious splendor, the unintelligent luxury of the parvenu, the riotous extravagance of a courtesan. Then the attractive vision suddenly went under an eclipse as he remembered the stately grandeur of the Hotel de Beauseant. As his fancy wandered among these lofty regions in the great world of Paris, ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... afterward learned that General Pemberton in Vicksburg had previously dispatched a large force to the assistance of General Bowers, at Grand Gulf and Port Gibson, which force had proceeded as far as Hankinson's Ferry, when he discovered our ostentatious movement up the Yazoo, recalled his men, and sent them up to Haines's Bluff to meet us. This detachment of rebel troops must have marched nearly sixty miles without rest, for afterward, on reaching ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... Economy is rejection of whatever is superfluous; it is not Miserliness. A liberal expenditure is often the best economy, and is always so when dictated by a generous impulse, not by a prodigal carelessness or ostentatious vanity. That man would greatly err who tried to make his style effective by stripping it of all redundancy and ornament, presenting it naked before the indifferent public. Perhaps the very redundancy which he lops away might have aided the reader ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... splendour inferior to none, and their peculiar insignia, gold canes, were elevated in all directions, tied in bundles like fasces. The keeper of the treasury added to his own magnificence by the ostentatious display of his service; the blow pan, boxes, scales and ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... "modern nations" depends for its higher productivity on the picked men who direct it, cannot bring himself to renounce, when he is making his appeal to the masses, the old doctrine that they are the sole producers; and accordingly having started with the ostentatious admission that directive ability is as essential to production as labour is, he endeavours by his verbal jugglery with the case of a printed book to convey the impression that labour produces all ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... men who had risen from poverty to wealth in a short time. From one point of view such a man is a "self-made" man, industrious, frugal, able, energetic, bold. From another point of view he is a parvenu, narrow, overbearing, ostentatious, proud, conceited, uncultivated. The relatively small size of the propertied class and an obvious community of interest tended to make its members reach a class consciousness even during the Civil War. The success of the group in preventing all tariff reduction after 1865 was a striking example ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... her son to read. My friend recommended Hume's. But, upon recollecting that its usher was a superlative panegyrick on one, who endeavoured to sap the credit of our holy religion, he revoked his recommendation. I am really sorry for this ostentatious alliance; because I admire The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and value the greatest part of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Why should such a writer be so forgetful of human comfort, as to give any countenance to that dreary infidelity which would' make ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... struck me was that, contrary to what one is made to expect, I did not find among the clergy that aggressive and ostentatious proselytism. Everything is conducted in a ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... with the entire problem of the Negro and his relationships of every kind. It must be more than a mere flesh-and-blood narrative, descriptive of the material progress of the men and women the Institute has produced and is producing. It must be a book free from ostentatious pretension, breathing the atmosphere of the life of the earnest people it describes. It must, of course, exhibit not only the achievements, but also the ideals, the possibilities of the Tuskegee trained man and woman. This, I feel, ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... sanguine warmth of feeling which threw such a natural grace and genial spirit of enthusiasm over his poetry, was also the cause of its inherent vices and defects. He is affected through carelessness: pompous from unsuspecting simplicity of character. He is frequently pedantic and ostentatious in his style, because he had no consciousness of these vices in himself. He mounts upon stilts, not out of vanity, but indolence. He seldom writes a good line, but he makes up for it by a bad one. He takes advantage of all the most trite and mechanical common-places ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... person was ushered into the same pew with him. The stranger pulled out of his pocket a prayer-book, and offered to share it with the Cantab, though he perceived he had one in his hand. This courtesy proceeded from a mere ostentatious display of his learning, as it proved to be in Latin. The Cantab immediately declined the offer by saying, "Sir, ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... from our journey I wrote a second article, a review of Professor Cairnes' book, published in the Westminster Review. England is paying the penalty, in many uncomfortable ways, of the durable resentment which her ruling classes stirred up in the United States by their ostentatious wishes for the ruin of America as a nation; they have reason to be thankful that a few, if only a few, known writers and speakers, standing firmly by the Americans in the time of their greatest difficulty, effected a partial diversion of these bitter ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... doubt No nation occupies a foot of land that was not stolen No people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined ones Notion that he is less savage than the other savages Only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want Ostentatious of his modesty Otherwise they would have thought I was afraid, which I was Pity is for the living, Envy is for the dead Prosperity is the best protector of principle Received with a large silence that suggested doubt Seventy is old enough—after that, there is ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Mark Twain • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
... being mean or ignoble, seemed to lift her not only above the ordinary weaknesses of her own sex, but made her superior to the men around her. Almost before she knew it, the operation was over, and she regarded with equal curiosity the ostentatious solicitude with which the doctor seemed to be wiping his fateful instrument that bore an odd resemblance to a silver-handled centre-bit. The stertorous breathing below the bandages had given way to a fainter ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... suffered also the drawbacks incidental to these advantages—the odium attending the unjust and despotic measures resorted to for its advancement, the vile character of royal officials, who condoned their private vices by a more ostentatious zeal for their official church, and the well-founded popular suspicion of its pervading disloyalty to the interests and the liberties of the colonies in their antagonism to the encroachments of the British government. ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... her with so much tender solicitude, that I, who occasionally caught her observing his countenance with exultation, was quite out of patience. This pathetic representation lasted the whole evening, and so ostentatious and artful a display has entirely convinced me that she did in fact feel nothing. I am more angry with her than ever since I have seen her daughter; the poor girl looks so unhappy that my heart aches for her. Lady Susan is surely too severe, for ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... so utterly unexpected to him that he turned on his heel in confusion. "I reckon she thinks I'm soft and silly, like Ruth," he soliloquized, and, determining not to look at her again, betook himself to a distant and contemplative pipe. In vain did Miss Euphemia address herself to the ostentatious getting of the dinner in full view of him; in vain did she bring the coffee-pot away from the fire, and nearer Rand, with the apparent intention of examining its contents in a better light; in vain, while wiping a plate, did she, absorbed in the distant prospect, walk to the verge of the ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... this was the breaking down of the morals of the country at large, resulting from the sudden building up of ostentatious wealth in a few large cities, and from the gambling, speculative spirit spreading from these to the small towns and rural districts. From this was developed an even more disgraceful result,—the decay of a true sense of national ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... to those that think ( ), and some may accuse me of an ostentatious independence, in presuming ( ) to inscribe a book to so small a minority. But a volume addressed to those that think ( ) is in fact addressed to all the world; for altho the proportion of those who do ( ) think ( ) be extremely small, yet every individual ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... day every day of the week, and then read it all night, and every night of the week, for his own soul. Let every minister know his Bible down to the bottom, and with his Bible his own heart. He who so knows his Bible and with it his own heart has almost books enough. All else is but ostentatious apparatus. When a minister has neither understanding nor memory wherewith to feed his flock, let him look deep enough into his Bible and into his own heart, and then begin out of them to write and speak. And, then, for ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... day—no expense spared. All that belongs to Mr. Clay, of Clay-hall, is the best of its kind, or, at least, had from the best hand in England. Every thing about him is English; but I don't know whether this arises from love of his country or contempt of his brother. English Clay is not ostentatious of that which is his own, but he is disdainful of all that belongs to another. The slightest deficiency in the appointments of his companions he sees, and marks by a wink to some bystander, or with a dry joke laughs the wretch to scorn. In company he delights to sit by silent and ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... even that should be shown without ostentation." Beatrice laughed. "And you are decidedly ostentatious at the present moment. It would interest mamma and me very much to know the object of ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... in the unnecessary mystery and fuss he made; his affectation of careless indifference to Ben's movements and his clumsy attempts to watch every one of them; his dodgings up and down stairs, ostentatious clanking of keys, and the elaborate traps he set to catch his thief, such as throwing his ball in at the dressing-room window and sending Ben up the tree to get it, which he did, thereby proving beyond a doubt that he alone could have ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... —— Gramercy Park, was one of those dignified, old-fashioned residences that still remain in New York to remind our vulgar, ostentatious nouveaux riches of the days when culture and refinement counted for something more than mere wealth. Overlooking the railed-in square with its green lawns, pretty winding paths and well-dressed children romping at play, it had a high stoop which opened into a wide ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... dining-room, all in one, just over against the end of the lake; and enjoy a rasher of bacon and eggs with as much gusto as if we were in the midst of a palace of fresco. Ornamental eating has become with us a species of gaudy, ostentatious vulgarity; and a dining-room a sort of fool's paradise. I never think of the little simple meal at St. Peter's now, without tenderness ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... low structures wherever you go. Probably the exactions to which wealth is subject here has much to do with this; all are concerned to hide their resources, but I am told the Chinese educated mind has really reached the stage in which ostentatious display is regarded with contempt. It seeks escape from ceremony and show, in sweet simplicity of living, as most truly great men have done and are doing more ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... gentlemen like Jasper do not as a rule waste good remorse except upon successful crime. The origin of the doubt about the real death of Drood is this. Towards the latter end of the existing chapters there appears very abruptly, and with a quite ostentatious air of mystery, a character called Datchery. He appears for the purpose of spying upon Jasper and getting up some case against him; at any rate, if he has not this purpose in the story he has no other earthly purpose in it. He is an old gentleman of juvenile energy, with ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... in complexion and stature and ways of thinking that Billy and Benham contrasted. Benham inclined a little to eloquence, he liked very clean hands, he had a dread of ridiculous outlines. Prothero lapsed readily into ostentatious slovenliness, when his hands were dirty he pitied them sooner than scrubbed them, he would have worn an overcoat with one tail torn off rather than have gone cold. Moreover, Prothero had an earthy liking for animals, he could stroke and tickle strange cats until they wanted ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... humiliation of his position. But it was so evident that the Earl was not himself—so evident that the tirade to which he had just listened was one of those outbursts, noble in sentiment, but verging on the impracticable and the ostentatious, in which Lord Chatham was prone to indulge in his weaker moments, that he felt little inclination to resent it. Yet to let it pass ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... published to the world; while the marquis carefully concealed his gifts, and expressed uneasiness when they were known or blazed abroad; being more anxious to serve the necessities of those to whom he made them, than to make an ostentatious display of his munificence. One example of this is worthy of being mentioned. He learnt that one of his soldiers had lost a horse, on which occasion he went to a tennis-court belonging to his house, expecting to meet the soldier in that place, carrying with him an ingot of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... Jean recognized her uncle's ostentatious attempt at legal phraseology and knew, even without the evidence of his angular writing, that the document was genuine. She knew also that Robert Grant Burns was justified in ordering her off that bench; she had no right there, ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... wrong by our forefathers to surround themselves with beautiful things, and any but the simplest comforts. Some people are of that opinion still, but I do not agree with them. Your own good sense will be the best criterion of what is unduly ostentatious; but never hesitate to have anything you may wish because you fear the verdict of others. In short, be independent, and think for yourself if you wish to be happy. Your Aunt Helen has undertaken the charge ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... rare kind. He is capable of conceiving great ideas, and has besides an insatiable delight in working out details. He may end his days as a victorious general, or even as an emperor. If he prefers a less ostentatious kind of reward, he ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... not the only theater of his ostentatious devotion. In Binondo, in Pampanga, and in the town of San Diego, when he was about to put up a fighting-cock with large wagers, he would send gold moneys to the curate for propitiatory masses and, just as the ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... Forsite,' he had the pheasant proper placed upon his carriage and the buttons of his coachman, and both crest and motto on his writing-paper. The arms he hugged to himself, partly because, not having paid for them, he thought it would look ostentatious to put them on his carriage, and he hated ostentation, and partly because he, like any practical man all over the country, had a secret dislike and contempt for things he could not understand he found it hard, as anyone might, to swallow 'three dexter buckles ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Albert Glinksi, the powerful, ostentatious, and intriguing Duke of Lithuania, was passing, distinguished by his glancing plume and gorgeous mantle, through one of the more retired streets of the city of Cracow, at this time (A.D. 1530) the capital of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... beneath his surface play, Nor heed the laden barques, his surface bear; Now gliding swiftly by the threat'ning rocks, Now swimming smoothly to the distant bay. To meet and bring his liberal tribute too, The modest Octoraro winds his way— Not ostentatious like a boasting world Their little charities proclaiming loud— But silent through the glade retir'd and wild, Between the shaded banks on either hand, Till circling yonder meed—he yields his name. Nor proudly, Susquehanna! boast thy gain, For thence, not ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... have amassed a sum equal to ten or twenty thousand dollars, which is kept in ingots of gold and silver, much of the latter consisting of small Dutch money (not the purest coin) melted down; and of these they make an ostentatious display ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... higher in a crimson tide which refused to be restrained by the most desperate mental efforts. How idiotic to blush at nothing—how senseless, how humiliating, and how quite too ridiculous of Tom to turn aside and stare at the opposite side of the room in that ostentatious manner! Evie felt inclined to shake her, but at that opportune moment Rhoda returned, and during the remainder of Tom's visit there was no opportunity for ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... man. "Give it fair play, give it fair play!" And he came after his own hat quickly but cautiously, with burning eyes. The hat had seemed at first to droop and dawdle as in ostentatious langour on the sunny lawn; but the wind again freshening and rising, it went dancing down the garden with the devilry of a pas de quatre. The eccentric went bounding after it with kangaroo leaps and bursts of breathless speech, of which it was not always easy to pick up ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... superhuman; and the incident itself supernatural. Claudian's ambition was to overlay his story with the gold and jewellery of expression and invention. Nothing is named without being carved, decked, and coloured from the inexhaustible resources of the poet's treasury. This is not done with ostentatious pomp, as the hyperbolical heroes of vulgar novelists are painted, but always with taste, which though lavish ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... it," said Mr. Venn, with ostentatious sentiment. "But the main reason why I am biding here like this is that I want to wait till the ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... Bar said, incidentally, that he was happy to have heard that we were soon to have the advantage of enlisting on the good side, the sound and plain sagacity—not demonstrative or ostentatious, but thoroughly sound and practical—of ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... opposite. The pink cards fell harmless, and for a while the game was a dull one to see. Holding a pair of kings, Cutler won a little from Toussaint, who remarked that luck must go with the money of Uncle Sam. After a few hands, the half-breed began to bet with ostentatious folly, and, losing to one man and another, was joked upon the falling off of his game. In an hour's time his blue chips had been twice reinforced, and twice melted from the neat often-counted pile in which he arranged ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... and, in the mean time, he resumed his general lectures on physics. From these, however, he was speedily driven, or one might say shelled out, by a concerted assault of my sister's. He had been in the habit of lowering the pitch of his lectures with ostentatious condescension to the presumed level of our poor understandings. This superciliousness annoyed my sister; and, accordingly, with the help of two young female visitors, and my next younger brother—in subsequent times a little middy on board many a ship of H.M., and the most ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... Miss Moorsom's eyes stared black as night, searching the space before her. Far away the Editor strutted forward, Willie following with his ostentatious manner of carrying his bulky and oppressive carcass which, however, did not remain exactly ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... is not merely a more common-sense treatment that we want; for here is sufficient simplicity, but a simplicity barren of all satisfaction. And singularly enough, it seems, with all its meagreness, to pass easily into an ostentatious display. In these houses there is no thought of "architecture"; that is considered as something quite apart, and not essential to the well-building of the house. But for this very reason matters are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... he had done in the time of that other lace-wreathed hat six years before. Pat and Jim returned to their dominoes, bored by such foolish proceedings on the part of their parents, while Margot covered her face with her hands, with ostentatious propriety. ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... manner, his manner—by swagger and covert sneer and ostentatious triumph of alleged possession emanating an unwearied challenge to my manhood. My revolver practice, I might mark, moved him to shrugs and flings; when he hulked by me he did so with a stare and a boastful ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... and always exceed their expectations; as if what was yours, was not your own, and not given you to possess, but to bestow on wanting merit. But this is a topic which I must cast in shades, lest I offend your modesty, which is so far from being ostentatious of the good you do, that it blushes even to have it known; and therefore I must leave you to the satisfaction and testimony of your own conscience, which, though it be a silent panegyric, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... side of Mr. Cushing's character. He had also an aristocratic side. During General Grant's administration, a Mr. Kennedy, who had been a merchant at Troy, New York, came to Washington and distinguished himself by his somewhat ostentatious entertainments to diplomats and other notable persons. This proceeding annoyed Mr. Cushing, and he gave voice to his feelings in this manner: —"Mr. Kennedy, an ironmonger, comes here from Troy and sets himself up as a personage. He is not a personage ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... attitude of Juliet's mother. She had always been more than kind to him. On the announcement that he wished to marry her daughter, she had expressed herself well pleased, and during the engagement, which had lasted some six months, she had received him as Juliet's intended husband, with almost ostentatious delight. Now, for some inexplicable reason, she suddenly changed her mind and declined to explain. But rack his brains as he might, Cuthbert could not see how the death of a sister she had quarrelled with, and to whom she had been ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... the species of ostentatious carelessness which essays to travel through life as a child might wander among hives of bees without taking any ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... life: and he seems to have been prouder of this new dignity than became so great a man. For this reason, most of his speeches have a sort of parliamentary preamble to them: there is an air of affected modesty, and ostentatious trifling in them: he seems fond of coqueting with the House of Commons, and is perpetually calling the Speaker out to dance a minuet with him, before he begins. There is also something like an attempt to stimulate ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... circumstances in the male of the better class are, I fancy, first visible in the boots and shirt; the boots offensively exhibiting a degree of polish inconsistent with their dilapidated condition, and the shirt showing an extent of ostentatious surface that is invariably fatal to the threadbare waist-coat that it partially covers. He was a pale man, and, I fancied, still paler from ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... Lady Dauntrey stared with almost ostentatious frankness straight into the cure's face, and her voice had lost its sharpness. She was dressed in purple velvet, and wore a large purple hat. The rich dark hue gave her light eyes a very curious colour, more green than ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... trouble you," she said frostily, and tripped away over the oozing field with Smilash, who held the umbrella over her with ostentatious solicitude. In the same manner he led the rest to the vehicles, in which they packed themselves with some difficulty. Agatha, who came last but one, ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... a well-known hotel near Trafalgar Square, the same that in our girlhood had been the subject of Alma's dreams of future bliss, and I could not help observing that while my husband was selecting our rooms she made a rather ostentatious point of asking for an ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... the style of royalty. Ostentatious and profuse, negligent of his true interests and of his high duties, insatiably eager for frivolous distinctions, he added nothing to the real weight of the state which he governed: perhaps he transmitted his inheritance ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... individuality, there has been, as all men know and no one will dispute, a most perceptible tendency of late years towards what is known as the array of one portion of the community—the preponderating, voting portion—against another—the more ostentatious property-holding portion. It is the natural result, I may say the necessary as well as logical outcome, of a period of too rapid growth,—production apportioned by no rule or system other or higher than ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... him intently for a moment, while he felt again as he had felt at Laura Wilde's, not only her fascination—her personal radiance—but the conviction that she carried at heart a deep disgust, a heavy disenchantment, which her ostentatious gayety could not conceal. Even her beauty gave back to him a suggestion of insincerity, and he wondered if the brightness of her hair and of her mouth was as artificial as her brilliant manner. It was magnificent, but, after all, it was ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... tresses of the Cavaliers waved more luxuriantly, the hair of the Roundheads was more scrupulously shorn. And the same instinctive exaggeration was constantly extending into manners and morals also. Both sides became ostentatious; the one made the most of its dissoluteness, and the other of its decorum. The reproachful names applied derisively to the two parties became fixed distinctions. The word "Roundhead" was first used early in 1642, though whether it originated ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... he was at his desk copying from his Primer on to his slate. The easy, ostentatious way in which he glanced from slate to book was not lost upon Emmy Lou, who lost her place whenever her eyes left the rows of ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... same age with Henry, and who had been his companion and playmate in childhood, was now married to Elizabeth, the daughter of the Emperor Maximilian II. of Austria. Their nuptials were celebrated with all the ostentatious pomp which the luxury of the times and the opulence of the French monarchy could furnish. In these rejoicings the courts of France and Navarre participated with the semblance of the most heartfelt ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... no objective standard of living if we abstract from that where the income simply secures the needs of bare existence. Above that, everything depends upon the habits of those around us. If the community steadily screws up these habits, makes life ostentatious for those of moderate means as well as for the rich, hysterically emphasizes the material values, the will to be satisfied with the income of safe investments has to fight against tremendous odds. The truly strong mind will keep its power to ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... violence of her husband and the insolence of his mistress; it was an ill-omened sort of place for a bride. Around extended the sombre and squalid Rome of the second half of the eighteenth century, with its huge ostentatious rococo palaces and churches, its straggled, black and filthy streets, its ruins still embedded in nettles and filth, its population seemingly composed only of monks and priests (for all men of the middle-classes wore the black dress and short hair of the clergy), or of half-savage peasants ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... drew near Axel's gate, and she was preparing to turn her face away from its ostentatious gaiety, a closed Droschke came through it towards them, followed at a short ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... thing that time had injured, or fashion had degraded, with fragments of tissues, odd yards of brocade, vast bales of faded silk, and innumerable boxes of antiquated ribbons. His shop was soon celebrated through all quarters of the town, and frequented by every form of ostentatious poverty. Every maid, whose misfortune it was to be taller than her lady, matched her gown at Mr. Drugget's; and many a maiden, who had passed a winter with her aunt in London, dazzled the rusticks, at her return, with cheap finery which Drugget ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... exception to this rule, for there the 'nobili' led the same life as their fellow-citizens, and were distinguished by few honorary privileges. The case was certainly different at Naples, which the strict isolation and the ostentatious vanity of its nobility excluded, above all other causes, from the spiritual movement of the Renaissance. The traditions of medieval Lombardy and Normandy, and the French aristocratic influences which followed, ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... seems to have been too easy-going, self-indulgent, and ostentatious, to have made the most of the talents that he unquestionably had. Among his foibles was a certain fondness for the pageantry of war, and he was in all his glory as an officer of the local militia. To his son ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... to all natives who had grown rich, and latterly it was bestowed—more often in a derisive sense—upon Europeans who, having made large fortunes in India, returned to their native land and spent their money in a luxurious and ostentatious way. ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... flattering speeches of her sisters, which she had seen drawn such extravagant rewards, she thought the handsomest thing she could do was to love and be silent. This put her affection out of suspicion of mercenary ends, and showed that she loved, but not for gain; and that her professions, the less ostentatious they were, had so much the more of truth and sincerity than ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... were pending, the king himself made an ostentatious entry into Silesia. The majority of the Silesians were Protestants. The King of Prussia, who had discarded religion of all kinds, had of course discarded that of Rome, and was thus nominally a Protestant. The Protestants, who had suffered so much from the persecutions of ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... York. Is she? You visit her and ought to know. Somebody was telling me her house is magnificently furnished, and she tried footmen and butlers in livery, but she couldn't keep that up. John made such a fuss she had to stop. Mrs. Maxwell always was the most pretentious, ostentatious sort of person, and I never could understand how her son could be such a natural kind of a fellow with such a mother. He's like his father. They say his father's family was rather plain once, but his mother comes of very good New Jersey stock. Mr. Maxwell was a fine man, which is more than you ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... Mrs. Draper, the heroine of the famous "Yorick to Eliza" letters, the list of ladies who seem to have kindled flames in that susceptible breast is almost as long and more real than the roll of mistresses immortalized by Horace. How Mrs. Sterne at first bore herself under her husband's ostentatious neglect there is no direct evidence to show. That she ultimately took refuge in indifference we can perceive, but it is to be feared that she was not always able to maintain the attitude of contemptuous composure. So, at ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... friends, we should ask them to bring their cold mutton round, and have a picnic. What we do actually do is to have a meal which we can't afford, and which our guests know is not in the least like our ordinary meals; and then we expect to be asked back to a similarly ostentatious banquet." ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... direction of the promised reward, fifty dollars. The morning light showed fine copper. Here free metal was distinctly traceable in the scori, and it was the first time that we had seen slag so carelessly worked. Not a little merriment was caused by the ostentatious display of "gold-stones," marked by M. Philipin's copper-nailed boots. Sulaymn, the Bedawi, had killed a Wabar, whose sadly mutilated form appeared to be that of the Syrian hill coney: these men split the bullet into four; ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... many, and often material, points as one book-collector does from another, the entire passion for collecting may be said to focus itself into two well-defined grooves. A man either collects books for his own intellectual profit, or out of pure ostentatious vanity. In the ensuing pages there will be found ample and material facts in regard to the former, so that we may say here all that we have to say regarding the latter. The second type of book-enthusiast ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... things"—she buried her phraseology with her dreams—wore a skull cap, and his moustache dragged down below his chin. Just at present he was engaged in noisily pulling a most unliterary pine table from a dark corner to a place near the window. That accomplished, an ostentatious hunt ensued, resulting in the triumphant flourish of a feather duster. Several knocks at the table, and the dust of many months—perhaps likewise of many dreams—ascended to a resting place on the endorsement of Dr. Bunting's Kidney and Bladder Cure. ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... the style of Mr. DAVIS was indigenous and strongly marked by his individuality. Although he doubtless admired, and perhaps imitated, the condensation and dignity of Gibbon, yet it is certain that he carefully avoided the monotonous stateliness and the elaborate and ostentatious art of that most erudite historian. I look in vain for his model in the skeptical Gibbon, the cynical Bolingbroke, or the gorgeous Burke. These were all to him intellectual giants; but giants of false belief and practice. Not even ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... plate the young bride saw an ostentatious plate of puffy soda biscuits, and involuntarily her eyes searched the table ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... kept with much bountifulness, but after the gracious manner of a Christian Queen who cares more for the welfare of her beloved subjects than for ostentatious display. Her Majesty's Royal bounties to the poor of the metropolis and its environs, and also to others in the country districts surrounding the several Royal Palaces are well known, the ancient Christmas ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... went to work for Graham and Duncan. The Citizen gained eighteen subscribers; four old ones paid up their accounts. Babies were born, people married and died, loved and hated, lived in striving or sloth, accomplished or failed. Roland Barnette paid ostentatious attentions to Bess Gabriel, who tolerated him simply because she didn't much like Josie; but, blighted by Josie's supreme indifference, this budding passion drooped and failed by mutual consent of both parties concerned. Angie Tuthill became more conspicuously than ever the orb of Tracey's ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... Jerry Blazes and hung over him with ostentatious anxiety, while Simmons, weeping with pain, was carried away. " 'Ope you ain't 'urt badly, Sir," said Slane. The Major had fainted, and there was an ugly, ragged hole through the top of his arm. Slane knelt down and murmured. "S'elp me, I believe 'e's dead. ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... sometimes amuse yourself by sending postal orders to people whose addresses look pathetic in the telephone book, or by forgetting to take away the parcels you have bought in poor little shops? Or by standing and looking with ostentatious respect at boy scouts on the march, always bearing in mind that these, in their own eyes, are not little boys trotting behind a disguised curate, but British Troops on the Move? Just two pleased eyes in a crowd, just a hundred ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... Barabbases whom the world could better have done without. Hazlitt mentions that he was more sensible of obligation to Northcote,[19] who had never done him anything he could call a service, than to his whole circle of ostentatious friends; for he thought a good companion emphatically the greatest benefactor. I know there are people in the world who cannot feel grateful unless the favour has been done them at the cost of pain and difficulty. But this is a churlish disposition. A man ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson |
