"Pinchbeck" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he kept them tethered to his pillow, blotting out the memory of whole months of fretfulness and unkindness in one short hour when he chose to display for them the ever-new treasures of his pinchbeck tenderness and charm of manner—a system of paternity that yielded him an infinitely better return than his own father's indulgence had formerly gained. At length his bodily infirmities reached a point when the task of laying ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... were South Carolina, in fact, as absolutely as Louis XIV. was France. In their hands—but a few score in number—was concentrated about all there was of South Carolina education, wealth, culture, and breeding. They represented a pinchbeck imitation of that regime in France which was happily swept out of existence by the Revolution, and the destruction of which more than compensated for every drop of blood shed in those terrible days. Like the provincial 'grandes seigneurs' ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... the Gazette, that Lord Cowper's pinchbeck principality is allowed. I wonder his Highness does not desire the Pope to make one of his sons ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... polishing up a steel chain that might on an emergency have served to chain up a very large bull-dog; but the Squire adapted it to the more fashionable use of adorning himself, and making safe his ponderous pinchbeck watch. Belhash now puffed, and blowed, and swore, and sweated, and piled on the chalk, and rubbed and tugged criss-crass his knee, until, with the motion and fritting, he had well nigh covered his cloth with the white substance, from the knee downward. Getting it to the dignity point of brightness ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... his mother's kindly, practical blue eyes. For surely the eyes of practical people are always quite different from those of all others; and not many people are practical, though I never knew anybody who did not think he or she was, except pinchbeck artists, writers, and players, who are sure that since they must be geniuses, it is necessary to be Bohemians in order to show it. The really big ones are always trying to be practical, like Sir Isaac Newton when he ordered a good-sized ...
— The Little City Of Hope - A Christmas Story • F. Marion Crawford
... fellow-dramatists will just as surely reveal his powers of discrimination. Lamb was often carried away by a pioneer's fervor and misled persons like Lowell, who, returning to Ford late in life, found "that the greater part of what [he] once took on trust as precious was really paste and pinchbeck," and that as far as the celebrated closing scene in "The Broken Heart" was concerned, Charles Lamb's comment on it was "worth more than all Ford ever wrote."[92] Hazlitt's dispassionate sanity in this instance forms ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... know. That is what Prince Panine is, my dear Jeanne. A gentleman of good appearance, who lives as carefully as an old maid. The world sees him elegant and happy, and its envies his luxury; but this luxury is as deluding as watch-chains made of pinchbeck. You understand now that I cannot seriously ask you to ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... peacefully in the arms of the Duchess Charlotte; and that the drink-soiled broken body, from which she must so often have recoiled in disgust and terror, had been laid out, with the sad mock royalty of a gilt wooden sceptre and pinchbeck crown, in state in the cathedral of Frascati; when, I say, the news reached Paris, this woman, so confident of having been in the right, and who had written so frankly that if she did not hate her husband it was from mere Christian charity ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... of women who want it, and could conceive of nothing else. But the very thought of it sends me MAD. One must be free, above all, one must be free. One may forfeit everything else, but one must be free—one must not become 7, Pinchbeck Street—or Somerset Drive—or Shortlands. No man will be sufficient to make that good—no man! To marry, one must have a free lance, or nothing, a comrade-in-arms, a Glckstritter. A man with a position in the social world—well, it ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... in June when they were busy over a lot of small curios, arranging bits of jade, odd silver watches, seals, and pinchbeck rings, in a glass case that had been cleaned and revarnished, the door opened and an old fellow strolled in—an odd-looking old fellow, with snow-white hair and beard, wearing a black sombrero and a shirt cut very low in the neck. But for a pair of kindly ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of the county of Barsetshire, which, as all the world knows, is, politically speaking, as true blue a county as any in England. There have been backslidings even here, it is true; but then, in what county have there not been such backslidings? Where, in these pinchbeck days, can we hope to find the old agricultural virtue in all its purity? But, among those backsliders, I regret to say, that men now reckon Lord Lufton. Not that he is a violent Whig, or perhaps that he is a Whig at all. But he jeers and sneers at the old county doings; declares, when solicited ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... price of ten guineas, and whom, for as many shillings, I have heard sing half-a-dozen at the Opera House; no, but I was curious to see an English Earl [Cowper] who had passed thirty years at Florence, and who is more proud of a pinchbeck principality and a paltry order from Wirtemberg than he was of being a peer of Great Britain when Great Britain was something.' Elsewhere he speaks admiringly of Mrs. Cosway, and describes her reception as a Diet at which representatives of all the ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... as the Marriage of Figaro, for I am told it approaches to those of Mrs. Behn in Spartan delicacy; but I shall see Miss Farren, who, in my poor opinion is the first of all actresses.' Sir Walter Scott admired and praised her warmly. But the pinchbeck sobriety of later times was unable to tolerate her freedom. She was condemned in no small still voice as immoral, loose, scandalous; and writer after writer, leaving her unread, reiterated the charge till it passed into a byword of criticism, and her ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... to be Lady Tristram of Blent, you know, Iver. That's none of your pinchbeck. The real thing—though, as I say, young Harry's only got it by the skin of ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... peevish and severe on others, if we are not constantly rubbed against and polished by them. I need not name friends and relations of yours and mine as instances. My prophecy on the short reign of faro is verified already. The bankers find that all the calculated advantages of the game do not balance pinchbeck parolis and debts of honourable women. The bankers, I think, might have had a previous and more generous reason, the very bad air of holding a bank:—but this country is as hardened against the petite morale, as against the greater.—What should ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Wellesley, suitable arrangements being also in contemplation for his family. An Irish marquisate was far from the magnificent reward which the Viceroy desired; and on 28th April 1800 he expressed his anguish of mind at receiving only an Irish and pinchbeck reward for exploits neither Irish nor pinchbeck. Nevertheless, while requesting a speedy recall so that he might hide his chagrin in retirement, he uttered no vindictive word against Pitt. Despite its morbid expressions, the letter is that of a friend to a friend. On ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... of political rectitude and decency which characterised the period of the Second Empire, a little band of Republicans refused to bow the knee to the new pinchbeck Caesar, "the man," says Freeman, "whose lips uttered the words je le jure and kept the oath by a December massacre." Inspired by Victor Hugo, their fiery poet and seer, whose Chatiments have the passionate ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... a deal to her, you see; he had been the one man she trusted. She had gloried in his fustian rhetoric, his glib artlessness, his airy scorn of money; and now all this proved mere pinchbeck. On a sudden, too, there woke in some bycorner of her heart a queasy realisation of how near she had come to loving Kennaston. ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... that others would find out the same),[632] And rather wished in such things to stand neuter, For silly wards will bring their guardians blame: So when he saw each ancient dame a suitor To make his little wild Asiatic tame, Consulting "the Society for Vice Suppression," Lady Pinchbeck ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... sensible like men, you know. And always the footlights made a halo about him; and when you saw him as Castalio or Romeo, all beauty and love and vigor and nobility, how was a woman to understand his splendor was a sham, taken off with his wig, removed with his pinchbeck jewelry, and as false? No, they thought it native, poor wretches. Yet one of them at least, my Lord—a young girl—found out her error before it was too late. The man was a villain through and through. God grant he sups ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... and at her wits' end at being thus surprised in all the disorder of her lover's apartments, and pale with shame and terror, hid herself behind the bed curtains, while he, who was an officer of dragoons, very much vexed at being mixed up in such a pinchbeck scandal, and at being caught in a silk shirt by these men who were so correctly dressed in frock coats, frowned angrily, and had to restrain himself so as not to fling his ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... shrugged his shoulders as he left the room, and returned in three minutes to say that there was no name at all resembling Talboys in the letter rack. There was Brown, and Sanderson, and Pinchbeck; only three ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... differently towards her husband. She was of the comparatively rare women who hate pretence even in another woman, but especially in a man. The really eccentric she was not afraid of—could even love, being a searcher after the new and strange, like so many modern pilgrims. But pinchbeck eccentricity—Brummagem originalities—gave to her views of the poverty of poor human nature leading her to a ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... to so often accuse others; but more than forty years of revolutionary and public life and experience have taught me to discriminate between deep convictions and assumed ones—to highly venerate the first, and to keep aloof from the second. Gold is gold, and pinchbeck is pinchbeck, in ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... because there is no hostile prejudice in his mind to prevent it sinking in. When he reads more of the life of this madman, he will find that all his great plans resulted in his death at the hands of a woman, and instead of admiring this pinchbeck heroism, what will he see in the exploits of this great captain and the schemes of this great statesman but so many steps towards that unlucky tile which was to bring life and schemes alike to a ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... and kept the little shop over against the 'Plume of Feathers,' where you might have your pick and choice of all sorts of nice and useful things—bacon, brass snuff-boxes, penny ballads, eggs, candles, cheese, tobacco-pipes, pinchbeck buckles for knee and instep, soap, sausages, and who ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... handmaiden to Miss Bell at the post office, and knows the contents of all the letters, except Father Tiernay's, before the people they belong to. Fanny is at home with her father and mother, and is supposed to be too fond of fal-lals, pinchbeck brooches and cheap ribbons, which come to her from her sisters out in the world. She often talks of emigration, and is not sought after by the young men of the Island, who regard her ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... with the Bowery interrogative "Sa-ay," and ending with a reference to the "land of the free and the home of the brave," which the late ELIJAH POGRAM, or the present NATHANIEL BANKS might have written, it is simply the weakest of rhymed buncombe wedded to the cheapest of pinchbeck music. And yet we fancy ourselves inspired when ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... run dry in him, and his youth fades to early desiccation. The instincts, feelings, intuitions, the work of which is always play, are superseded by method, grind, and education by instruction which is only an effort to repair the defects of heredity, for which, at its best, it is vulgar, pinchbeck substitute. The best play is true genius, which always comes thus into the world, and has this way of doing its work, and all the contents of the memory pouches is luggage to be carried rather than the vital ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... and an enormous fan; the latter, when opened, represented the metamorphosis and death of Actaeon. From her stomacher, to which it was attached by a multitude of glittering steel chains, depended an immense turnip-shaped watch, in a pinchbeck case. Her hair was gathered up behind, in a sort of pad, according to the then prevailing mode; and she wore a muslin cap, and pinners with crow-foot edging. A black silk fur-belowed scarf covered her shoulders; and over the kincob gown hung a yellow ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Dr. Chetwynd's eyes were fully open to the mistake he had made and that he realised the fact that you cannot fashion a Dresden vase out of earthenware, and though pinchbeck may pass muster for gold, it does not ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... occasional qualms of conscience when little words or incidents had impressed him with the knowledge that Annie's love for him was a more serious matter than his for her. He felt that by insisting on exchanging the pure gold of her earnest affection for the pinchbeck of his passing fancy, she was making a rogue of him. He should be in no position to marry for years, nor did he want to; and if he had wanted to, though he felt terribly hard-hearted when he owned it to himself, his feeling toward Annie was not quite so deep ...
— Potts's Painless Cure - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... it is the negro with his glass beads; the wrong side is foolish, it is the philosopher with his rags. I weep over the one and I laugh over the other. What are called honors and dignities, and even dignity and honor, are generally of pinchbeck. Kings make playthings of human pride. Caligula made a horse a consul; Charles II. made a knight of a sirloin. Wrap yourself up now, then, between Consul Incitatus and Baronet Roastbeef. As for the intrinsic value of people, it is no longer respectable in the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... her sister Lady Caroline Fox, to the great mortification of the haughty Duchess-mother. They have not given her a shilling, but the King endows her, by making Lord Kildare a Viscount Sterling:(1340) and they talk of giving him a Pinchbeck-dukedom too, to keep him always first peer of Ireland.(1341) Sir Everard Falkener is married to Miss Churchill, and my sister is brought to bed of ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... widow's weeds, exhibiting a grief so intense that she may well have been made larger than life, in order to support a misery which would crush a mortal woman. It is so fine, this emblem of divine suffering, that it obscures its tawdry surroundings, its pinchbeck tabernacle, gilding and red paint. When she is carried in a paso, as whiles she is, no spangled robe is put over her, no priest's vestment, no crown or veil. Seven swords are driven into her bosom: she is unconscious of them. ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... reek of the "old clothes" shop was more offensive than usual. The six pounds ten, however, was worth fighting for. Then some cheap hosiery had to be purchased—more collars of the bearing-rein type, some stiff shirts, made-up white ties, pinchbeck studs and cufflinks. As he emerged from the shop, Anthony found himself wondering whether he need have been so harsh with himself about the collars. After all, it was an age of Socialism. Why should a footman be choked? He was as good ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... supposititious, so-called, pretended, feigned, trumped up, bogus, scamped, fraudulent, tricky, factitious;bastard; surreptitious, illegitimate, contraband, adulterated, sophisticated; unsound, rotten at the core; colorable; disguised; meretricious, tinsel, pinchbeck, plated; catchpenny; Brummagem. artificial, synthetic, ersatz[&German]; simulated &c 544. Adv. under false colors, under the garb of, under cover of; over the left. Phr. "keep the word of promise to the ear and break it to the hope" [Macbeth]; fronti nulla fides[Lat]; "ah ...
— Roget's Thesaurus |
