"Pomposity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "What pomposity of expression!" exclaimed Darvid, with a slight smile. "I observe more and more that exaggeration is a disease in my family. I should prefer ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... was wearing off, and the irritating pomposity of Faltonius was producing its usual effect of arousing antagonism, as it generally did in those he talked to. Brinnaria felt all her wild self ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... who grew up in a shoemaker's shop, and whose boyish games were played in the street of a Welsh hamlet remote from all the refinements of civilization and all the clangours of industrialism, announced to a breathless Europe without any pomposity of phrase and with but a brief and contemptuous gesture of dismissal the passing away from the world's stage of the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns—those ancient, long glorious, and most puissant houses whose history for an aeon was the ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... accuses Palamedes of treachery during the siege of Troy (this is generally considered spurious). According to Alcidamas, the highest aim of the orator was the power of speaking extempore on every conceivable subject. Aristotle (Rhet. iii. 3) criticizes his writings as characterized by pomposity of style and an extravagant use of poetical epithets and compounds and far-fetched metaphors. Of other works only fragments and the titles have survived: Messeniakos, advocating the freedom of the Messenians and containing the sentiment that "all are by nature free''; a Eulogy of Death, in ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... patriotism, he dislikes it in Boers and Irishmen as well as in Englishmen. If he dislikes the vows and bonds of marriage, he dislikes still more the fiercer bonds and wilder vows that are made by lawless love. If he laughs at the authority of priests, he laughs louder at the pomposity of men of science. If he condemns the irresponsibility of faith, he condemns with a sane consistency the equal irresponsibility of art. He has pleased all the bohemians by saying that women are equal to men; but he has infuriated them ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... was a thin man, with a smooth, gentle face, lamblike blue eyes, and curling gray locks that receded gracefully from his forehead. He had just an individualizing amount of the pomposity characteristic of many old-time actors. He was not known to have any living kin. He permitted himself one weakness, a liking for whiskey, an indulgence which was never noticed to have ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... or two Mr. Tufton, who had been in the large garden behind the house, hurried in. He was now quite an old man; and under the influence of age, and the cheerful society of Mrs. Marryat and her daughters, he had lost much of the pomposity which ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... nothing and sawing wood," said Miss Jones, knowingly. "He's too foxy to quit the firm as old Pomposity did! Probably he thinks it won't last, and he's willing ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... without insensibly acquiring an education and a store of knowledge far excelling the ordinary. His manner was gentle, and perhaps somewhat pompous, as is common with very big men; but you could never be sure whether an extremely subdued humour did not underlie his pomposity. He was a bachelor, aged forty-five, and lived quietly with a married sister at the bottom of Woodisun Bank, near the National Schools. The wonder was that, with all his advantages, he had not more deeply impressed himself upon Bursley ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... prospered greatly. In 1759 he was made physician to Christ's Hospital, where, however valued professionally, he is charged with being brutal and offensive to the poor; with indulging his fastidiousness, temper, and pomposity, and with forgetting that he owed anything ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Milk Alley. Daniel Dowlas, when he was raised from the chandler's shop in Gosport to the peerage, employed the doctor "to larn him to talk English;" and subsequently made him tutor to his son Dick, with a salary of [pounds]300 a year. Dr. Pangloss was a literary prig of ponderous pomposity. He talked of a "locomotive morning," of one's "sponsorial and patronymic appellations," and so on; was especially fond of quotations, to all of which he assigned the author, as "Lend me your ears. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... the Tory party than Sir Robert Sawyer. He was a man of ample fortune and aristocratical connections, of orthodox opinions and regular life, an able and experienced lawyer, a well read scholar, and, in spite of a little pomposity, a good speaker. He had been Attorney General at the time of the detection of the Rye House Plot; he had been employed for the Crown in the prosecutions which followed; and he had conducted those prosecutions with an eagerness which would, in our time, be called cruelty by all parties, but ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... on the mind of Lander, that Clapperton was in some respects made the dupe of the pride, pomposity, and deception of the African sultan. It may be remembered that the sultan offered him land on the sea coast, on which to form a settlement, when it was subsequently discovered, that he was not in possession of an inch of territory within several hundred miles of the ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... the pleasure of saying pretension and pomposity do have a wonderful effect here in New York. I don't know whether it was the missionary or the plenipotentiary that brought my cousin to her oats, but rather think it was the latter—having a foreign twang to it, of course, it impressed ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... both again been silent for a short time, when the door opened, and in came the earl. His usual pomposity of demeanour was somewhat softened by a lachrymose air, which, in respect to his ward's grief, he put on as he turned the handle of the door; and he walked somewhat more gently than usual into ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... Lanes. Dorothy Eustis, as an older girl, had been much admired by Sally and Josephine until she married Neil Chase; that event had made a great difference in their warmth of feeling. Sally did not like Neil, never had liked him, and never would like him. A certain pomposity of manner, which had been a characteristic of his, ever since the days when he wore dresses and lorded it over the other infants in the park, had made him unpopular. He had, however, become a successful young attorney in his father's law firm, and had within the last ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... a most curious mixture of humour, pomposity, and business, which made it very hard to know how exactly to take him. If I dared to laugh at a joke, he fired up, and ordered me angrily to get on with my work. And if I did become engrossed in the figures ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... a little absurd in his youthful pomposity. "I suppose you refer to Parker and Einstein—my one mick friend, although he isn't Irish, and my, one Jewish friend. Well, I shall stick to them and see just as much of them as I like. I've told you that before, and you might as well get me straight right ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... its best, and the Senate, when in good temper, was an agreeable body, numbering only some sixty members, and affecting the airs of courtesy. Its vice was not so much a vice of manners or temper as of attitude. The statesman of all periods was apt to be pompous, but even pomposity was less offensive than familiarity — on the platform as in the pulpit — and Southern pomposity, when not arrogant, was genial and sympathetic, almost quaint and childlike in its simple-mindedness; quite a different thing from the Websterian or Conklinian ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... "why not arrange to live together, you and we? I hate throwing away money on mere pomposity and grandiosity and show. We always take a little furnished apartment, elle et moi. Then I go and buy provisions, bon marche—and she cooks them—and we have our meals better than at the hotel and at half the price! ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... as young George had lorded it over the tender, yielding nature of his mother, so the coarse pomposity of the dull old man with whom he next came in contact, made him lord over the latter, too. If he had been a prince royal, he could not have been better brought up to think well of himself, and while his mother was yearning ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... younger boy in delight. "You're a buster, Joe, and no mistake. The president himself couldn't have rolled that sentence off better, or that old piece of pomposity who conies to the secret ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... conjunction 'and,' he uses a comma after the 'and,' not before it as most people do. Before such words as 'yet' and 'but,' he without exception uses a semicolon. The word 'only,' he always puts in its correct place. In short, he is so academic as to savour somewhat of the pomposity of ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... always retaining a sympathy for the scholar's life and temper. Accordingly, his style acquired something of the old elaboration, though the attempt to conform to the canons of a later age renders the structure disagreeably monotonous. His tendency to pomposity is not redeemed by the naivete and spontaneity ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... with laughing. This Mr. B—y half convulses me ; yet I cannot make you laugh by writing his speeches, because it is the manner which accompanies them, that, more than the matter, renders them so peculiarly ridiculous. His extreme pomposity, the solemn stiffness of his person, the conceited twinkling of his little old eyes, and the quaint importance of his delivery, are so much more like some pragmatical old coxcomb represented on the stage, than like anything in real and common life, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... Mrs. Thrale, vol. ii. p. 284. BOSWELL. In a second letter (ib. p. 347) he says:—'Cator has a rough, manly independent understanding, and does not spoil it by complaisance.' Miss Burney accuses him of emptiness, verbosity and pomposity, all of which she describes in an amusing manner. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... unlike the others; but he carried himself with a gentle pomposity, and he faced the gathering with a proud gesture, holding up his hand to enjoin silence. After a few muttering ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... way. . . . All right! I won't say anything more. I promise that I won't disgrace you, and that I'll put on a grand manner that will fill those worthy notabilities and their wives with awe and reverence. And now, I'd best go," she added whimsically, "ere my good resolutions break down before your pomposity . . . I suppose the louts from the village will be again braced up in those moth-eaten liveries, and the bottles of thin Medoc purchased surreptitiously at a local grocer's will be duly smothered in ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... The offspring of a beggar's brat. As eels delight to creep in mud, To eels we may compare his blood; His blood in mud delights to run; Witness his lazy, lousy son! Puff'd up with pride and insolence, Without a grain of common sense, See with what consequence he stalks, With what pomposity he talks; See how the gaping crowd admire The stupid blockhead and the liar. How long shall vice triumphant reign? How long shall mortals bend to gain? How long shall virtue hide her face, And leave her votaries in disgrace? ——Let ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... subject in his eager ebullient childhood. His mother found him at thirteen inditing a letter on the subject of The Faerie Queene to a school-friend, in which, with a sincerity which made her forgive the pomposity, he remarked— ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... The next morning a dozen Japanese quarantine officers appeared, covered all over with straps and bands of gold lace. They looked so insignificant and put on such an air of austere authority that one did not know whether to laugh or cry at their pomposity. They checked us off by squads and dozens, and by 12 o'clock we were ready to land. It was our first touch of Japanese soil, and we were about to take our first ride in a Jinricksha. It was very beautiful to hear as a greeting, "Ohio." ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... his feet, ducked his head between his shoulders, and trotted out to the sidewalk at Sam's heels, both following Penrod and assuming a stooping position in imitation of him. Verman was delighted with this phase of the game, and, also, he was profoundly amused by Penrod's pomposity. Something dim and deep within him perceived it to be cause for such merriment that he had ado to master himself, and was forced to bottle and cork his laughter with both hands. They proved insufficient; sputterings burst forth ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... gave him a quick look—his senior warden was trembling! The cloak of careful pomposity with which for so many years this poor maimed soul had covered its scars, was dropping away. He was clutching at it—clearing his throat, swinging his foot, making elaborate show of ease; but the cloak was slipping and slipping, and there was the man of fifty-six cringing with the mortification ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... Chautauqua orators leave off. The most modest of them (barring, perhaps, a few unearthly traitors to the craft) matches the conceit of the solitary pretty girl on a slow ship. In their lofty eminence of pomposity they are challenged only by Anglican bishops and grand opera tenors. I have spoken of the danger they run of bursting. In the case of tenors it must sometimes actually happen; even the least of them swells visibly as he sings, and permanently as he ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... and commenting earnestly as he read. I can just remember the titles of some of the works. There were the "Ordonnance of Philip le Bel on Single Combat"; the "Theatre of Honor," by Favyn, and a treatise "On the Permission of Duels," by Andiguier. He displayed, also, with much pomposity, Brantome's "Memoirs of Duels,"—published at Cologne, 1666, in the types of Elzevir—a precious and unique vellum-paper volume, with a fine margin, and bound by Derome. But he requested my attention particularly, and with an air of mysterious sagacity, to a thick octavo, written ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... was dressed in the uniform of a Spanish officer, with a breast-plate over his quilted doublet, and a steel cap, from the front of which rose a frayed and weather-worn plume of feathers. The face had changed; there was none of the old pomposity about those handsome features; it looked worn and cowed, like that of an animal which has been trained to do tricks by hunger and the use of the whip. Yet, through all the shame and degradation, Foy seemed to catch the glint of some kind of light, ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... plane-tree, occupied with some wood-carving, when the constables appeared in the yard. Charlotte Arlabosse rushed up to him and seized his arm, but he shook her off, saying: "Let them have their way, the abscess has been ripe a long time." Stepping forward to meet the gendarmes with satirical pomposity, he cried: "Your ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... and party aggrandizement. "It is evident," they said, "that a scheme is maturing with the Loco-focos of this Territory to involve the people in the support of a State government" for the "express purpose, as we believe, of benefitting such men as Ex-Governor Lucas (Lord Pomposity) and Judge Williams, and a few others ...
— History of the Constitutions of Iowa • Benjamin F. Shambaugh
... is, as long as she sets that prodigious value upon herself, upon her name, upon her outward appearance, and indulges in that intolerable pomposity; as long as she goes parading abroad, like Solomon in all his glory; as long as she goes to bed—as I believe she does—with a turban and a bird of paradise in it, and a court train to her night-gown; as long as she is so insufferably ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... less wear and tear,—a benevolent, kindly face, without any evidence of commanding intellect, but with no lack of sense in its pleasant lines; his form not tall, but upright and with an air of consequence,—a little pompous, but good-humouredly so,—the pomposity of the Grand Seigneur who has lived much in provinces, whose will has been rarely disputed, and whose importance has been so felt and acknowledged as to react insensibly on himself;—an excellent man; but when you glanced towards the high brow and dark eye of the countess, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... realizing the larger issues. But in your ambition to attach that poor girl to the chariot-wheels of Progress'—his voice put the drag of ironic pomposity upon the phrase—'you quite ignore the fact that people fitter for such work, the men you look to enlist in the end, are ready waiting'—he pulled himself up in time for an anti-climax—'to give ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... schemes—when they are not, what most are, mere wastes of tumid pomposity—are apt to fail for one of two reasons: either they are too much like pictures or too little like works of art. Because very few artists are capable by taking thought of adapting their means to an unfamiliar end, it will happen that a sensitive and gifted painter sets about a decoration ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... eye and the deepening voice, and the old awful ecclesiastical superiority suddenly thundering upon them quite cowed the two smaller magistrates. Williams, whose pomposity the priest had so rudely shaken, gasped for breath with rage. Magisterial arrogance was not prepared for ecclesiastical arrogance, and the blow ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... N. ostentation, display, show, flourish, parade, etalage[Fr], pomp, array, state, solemnity; dash, splash, splurge, glitter, strut, pomposity; pretense, pretensions; showing off; fuss. magnificence, splendor; coup d'oeil[Fr]; grand doings. coup de theatre; stage effect, stage trick; claptrap; mise en scene[Fr]; tour de force; chic. demonstration, flying colors; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... who were late, no asking permission of senior officers to leave the table early. Within the hours fixed for meals everyone came in and out as they pleased. There was no special table for the Staff, no rule against bringing evening papers into dinner, no aloofness, no pomposity. The only un-English formalities were the habit of turning and bowing as one left the Mess, if a number of officers were still present, and the universal Italian custom by which a newcomer at his first appearance would walk round and shake hands ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... have heard of my method from others; have heard that it differs widely, in its frank simplicity, from the empty pomposity of the old-school "orthodox" elements, though of the principles of the old-school teaching they have really little or no conception, beyond a crude, unwholesome, fear of the unknown, consequent upon the, very ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... seemed to imply a consciousness even in the wood and leather of the dignity of the person within. He, for his own part, though a graceful and very courtly personage, full of high talent, policy, and wit, had nothing about him at all of the pomposity of his vehicle; and at the moment which we refer to, namely, about two hours after nightfall, tired with his long journey, and seated with solitary thought, he had drawn a fur-cap lightly over his head, and, leaning back in the carriage, enjoyed not ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... "All the pomposity went out of Mr. Campbell, he became flurried, then excited, then he lost his temper. After that he was allowed to leave the court, and Sir James Fenwick resumed his seat, and waited like a vulture for ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... the doctor, that night, concluding his narrative of busy days in the city, "but I have been appointed," with a great affectation of pomposity, "the magistrate for ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... majority for the Opposition, and Sir Henry has resigned with the worst possible grace, having forfeited any regret that might have been felt for his overthrow by the abuse which he lavished on his opponents when he saw that the elections were going against him, and the ridiculous pomposity with which he has told the electors that they were not educated up to appreciating him. As to the cause of his fall, it may partly be attributed to the opposition of the Roman Catholics or denominational-education party, and of the publicans; but it is chiefly due to a strong feeling ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... stomachs." The last touch made the grand-prior of the cathedral wince a little, but it was welcomed with a roar from the multitude. The song proceeded; but if the prior had frowned at the first stanza, the podesta was doubly angry at the second, which sneered at Venetian pomposity in incomparable style. But the prior and podesta were equally outvoted, for the roar of the multitude was twice as loud as before. Then came other touches on the cavalieri serventi, the ladies, the nuns, and the husbands, till every class had its share: but the satire was so witty, that, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 340, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... the command, which, at so early an age, my rare conduct and great natural talents had given me; sanguine as was my mind, and brilliant as were my prospects: yet I had seen so much of the meannesses, the unjust partialities, the insolent pomposity, the disgusting dissipations of that way of life, that I was weary of it: I longed, exchanging my fine laced coat for the Yankee farmer's home-spun, to be where I should never behold the supple crouch of servility, and never hear the hectoring voice of authority, again; and, on the ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... a kind of family name, pronounced 'Ma-rill- yer,'" explained Mrs. Spruce with considerable pomposity; "Many folks never gets it right—it wants knowledge and practice. But if you remember the pictures in the gallery at the Manor, sir, you may call to mind one of the ancestresses of the Vancourts, painted in a vi'let velvet; ridin' dress and holdin' a huntin' crop, and the name underneath ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... he must be made to understand. It cannot have been put to him properly." Then, with a certain recovery of fullness and even pomposity in the voice, "I shall go and ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... Langlais, the fifth financier sent by Napoleon III to organize the finances of the empire, caused considerable excitement and aroused the hopes of the court. His appointment to succeed M. de Bonnefons had been heralded by the French official papers with much pomposity. ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... The Doctor's pomposity always amused Esme. "And what does Science so far from its placid haunts?" she mocked. "Are you scattering the blessings of Certina amongst ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... to business in small matters, how can you hope to succeed when you go out into life?" he asked with some pomposity. He had intended, when he opened his mouth, to say something very different. His pomposity, he felt, grew out of his embarrassment; he had a dim feeling that he was ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... be inferred that there was a touch of pomposity about this admirable gentleman, who was so excellent a landlord and so hard working a member of the British aristocracy. But pomposity would be far too superficial a word to apply to him; it would not adequately connote his deep-abiding and essential conviction that on ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... example! Dr. Hoxton little knows what you have been doing. It is a mockery, as I have always said, to see that old fellow sit wrapped up in his pomposity, eating his good dinners, and knowing no more what goes on among his boys than this umbrella! But he will listen to me—and we'll make those boys confess the whole— ay, and have up Ballhatchet himself, to say what your traffic with him was; and we will see what old Hoxton says to ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... ludicrous pomposity, which must suffer a little by being quoted from memory: it describes ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... how to speak the truth. He would have sacrificed much to establish the innocence of Phineas Finn,—not for the love of Phineas, but for the love of innocence;—but not even to do that would he have lied. But he was a bad witness, and by his slowness, and by a certain unsustained pomposity which was natural to him, had already taught the jury to think that he was anxious to convict the prisoner. Two men in the Court, and two only, thoroughly understood his condition. Mr. Chaffanbrass saw it all, and intended without the slightest scruple to take advantage of it. And the ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... great matters as religion and politics, it may seem trifling to illustrate the subject from little boys. But it is not trifling. The bane of philosophy is pomposity: people will not see that small things are the miniatures of greater, and it seems a loss of abstract dignity to freshen their minds by object lessons from what they know. But every boarding-school changes as a nation changes. Most of us may remember thinking,' ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... possible pomposity was so amusing and so clever that it drew a laugh from the boy ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... their actions even before the case is called to trial. It may be that among the spectators who have been sitting beside the lawyers in the back of the room, waiting for the case to be called, are those who may afterwards be called as jurors. Any affectation of manner or pomposity is quickly detected. ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... the interlocutors. I had a vague impression of listening to gigantic marionettes, perorating through a trumpet, with the emphasis of Spaniards. There is power in it, but we have before us heroic idols rather than human beings. The element of artificiality, of strained pomposity and affectation, which is the plague of classical tragedy, is everywhere apparent, and one hears, as it were, the cords and pulleys of these majestic colossi creaking and groaning. I much prefer Racine and Shakespeare; the one from the ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... not send her away into the terra incognita of a London hotel. Ascott, at first considerably annoyed at the presence of what he called a "skeleton at the feast," had afterward got over it; and run on with a mixture of childish glee and mannish pomposity about his plans and intentions—how he meant to take a house, he thought, in one of the squares, or a street leading out of them: how he would put up the biggest of brass plates, with "Mr. Leaf, surgeon." and soon get an extensive ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... delight to creep in mud, To eels we may compare his blood; His blood delights in mud to run, Witness his lazy, lousy son! Puff'd up with pride and insolence, Without a grain of common sense. See with what consequence he stalks! With what pomposity he talks! See how the gaping crowd admire The stupid blockhead and the liar! How long shall vice triumphant reign? How long shall mortals bend to gain? How long shall virtue hide her face, And leave her votaries in disgrace? —Let indignation fire ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... back with a sigh. The temptation had been hard to resist. A democratic girl, pomposity was a quality which she thoroughly disliked; and though she loved him, she could not disguise from herself that, ever since affluence had descended upon him some months ago, her brother Fillmore had become insufferably pompous. If there are any young men whom ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... Marjorie, Penrod Schofield flushed under his new moustache (repainted since noon) and lectured as he had never lectured before. A new grace invested his every gesture; a new sonorousness rang in his voice; a simple and manly pomposity marked his very walk as he passed from curio to curio. And when he fearlessly handled the box of rats and hammered upon it with cool insouciance, he beheld—for the first time in his life—a purl of admiration eddying in Marjorie's ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... honey—now, don't you cry." The big man had lost all his pomposity, and was comforting his sweetheart as simply as a boy. "It's all been my fault. I've been doing wrong for years—trying to pull myself out of the mire by my bootstraps. By Gad, you're a man, Sam Yesler, that's what you ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... acceptable to Bishop Craye. While he, on his side, felt himself a benefactor to the Church in general, and to the Bishop of Markborough in particular, instinctively he knew that the Bishop's taste ungratefully disapproved of him; and the knowledge contributed an extra shade of pomposity to his manner. ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... prostrated by the scene with Perrin; and a sombre melancholy and foreboding weighed on all their spirits, when presently Edouard Riviere entered briskly, and saluted them all profoundly, and opened the proceedings with a little favorite pomposity. "Madame the baroness, and you Monsieur Aubertin, who honor me with your esteem, and you Mademoiselle de Beaurepaire, whom I adore, and you Mademoiselle Rose, whom I hoped to be permitted—you have this day done ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... about five feet long with a knob at the upper end as thick as a man's wrist. The mace-bearer was known as Chobdar, and it was his duty to carry messages and announce visitors; this latter function he performed with a degree of pomposity truly Asiatic, dwelling with open mouth very audibly on some of the most sounding and emphatic syllables in a way that appeared to strangers almost ludicrous, [493] as shown in the following instance: "On advancing, the Chobdars or heralds proclaimed the titles of this princely cow-keeper ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... Louis Napoleon which was then as now acceptable that side of the Rhine. It was not done with pomposity, but rather with the exuberance of a man whose purse and letter of credit possess an ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... weighed heavily upon Abrahm Kantor in avoirdupois only. He was himself plus eighteen years, fifty pounds, and a new sleek pomposity that was absolutely oleaginous. It shone roundly in his face, doubling of chin, in the bulge of waistcoat, heavily gold-chained, and in eyes that behind the gold-rimmed glasses gave sparklingly forth his ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... because he had the "forehead of a learned man," and because it was his business to go from house to house with a long, thick book under his arm, he affected longish hair, flowing black neckties, and a certain pomposity of manner. One of his ways of being tremendously American was to snap his fingers ferociously and to say, "I don't care a continental!" or, "One, two, three, and there you are!" The latter exclamation he would be continually ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... intemperate in his expressions; upon which Johnson rose, and quietly walked away. When he had retired, his antagonist took his revenge, as he thought, by saying, 'He has a most ungainly figure, and an affectation of pomposity, unworthy of a ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... well as terrible in his exposition of a battle that he was planning. For the first time in his presence and over his maps, I saw that after all there was such a thing as the science of war, and that it was not always a fetish of elementary ideas raised to the nth degree of pomposity, as I had been led to believe by contact with other generals and staff-officers. Here at least was a man who dealt with it as a scientific business, according to the methods of science—calculating the weight ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... officer entered with one or two subordinates and a squad of soldiers. Certain formalities had to be gone through in which I played a prominent part. These completed the officer stood before me with all the pomposity he could command and delivered a harangue at high speed in a worrying monotone. To me it was gibberish, but one of the men who could speak English informed me that the gist of his wail was the intimation that "if I moved a pace ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... that had been bestowed on him, and my consequent resolution to dislike him, I was pleased and familiar with him before I had been ten minutes in his company. Lord Kilrush introduced him to me, with great pomposity, as a gentleman of talents, for whom he and his brother O'Toole interested themselves much. This air of patronage, I saw, disgusted Mr. Devereux; and instead of suffering himself to be shown off, he turned the conversation from his own poems to general subjects. He asked me some ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... keenness and delicacy those analogies between the mind and the things it looks upon, which are the fountains of poetic feeling. The faults of Thomson are triteness of thought when he becomes argumentative and a prevalent pomposity and pedantry of diction; though his later work, "The Castle of Indolence," is surprisingly free from ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... done mind them things so well 'taint no use tryen' to rake up the buried reck'lections o' the pas' times," said the old man, rebukingly, and with a certain pomposity. "I reckon now you 'member all the high quality gentlemen. The New Market Jockey Club, an' how they use to meet reg'lar as clock-work the second Tuesday in May and October; an' how my Mahs Duke, with all the fine ruffles down ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... the people looked at one another. Finally their uneasiness and unspoken question were answered by an edict from the mouth of a small upright Frenchman, who mounted a stump and declaimed with a great flourish of graceful pomposity: ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... is to succeed in giving pleasure. When I addressed you recently, I honestly intended to gratify you by the adoption of a tone of easy familiarity. Surely, I thought to myself, I cannot be wrong if I address my friend POMPOSITY by his name, and speak to him in a chatty rather than in an inflated style. If I chose the latter, might he not think that I was poking fun at him by cheap parody, and manifest his displeasure by bringing ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 17, 1891 • Various
... literary with me. Perhaps I put the idea into old Noddy Gossom's head when he was here the other night. You'll have to humor him, listen to his pomposity. But he has made a success of that People's Magazine. It is an influence, and ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... The Senator was beginning to pull himself together. It was the first time he had ever been ragged in such a way, and his composure had suffered; he spoke now with more than his usual pomposity. ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... of course, simple in structure. When they are in the form of passacaglias they may be huge in design and effect. The grandest pieces are the overtures and choruses. The overtures are often very noble, but without pomposity or grandiloquence; indeed, they move as if unconscious of their own tremendous strength. One may hear half a dozen bars before a stroke reveals, as by a flash of lightning, the artistic purpose with which the parts are moving, and the enormous ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... his gold-topped cane between his legs, which he held very much apart, rest his large white hands on the head, and enunciate the principles of spiritual art, as he hoisted them one by one, as you might say, out of the depths of his moral consciousness. His benignant and imperturbable pomposity gave Roderick the sense of suffocating beneath a large fluffy bolster, and the worst of the matter was that the good gentleman's placid vanity had an integument whose toughness no sarcastic shaft could pierce. Roderick admitted that ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... this was one thing that it said—that all good things are one thing. There is no conflict between the gravestone of Gertrude and a comic-opera tune played by Mildred Wain. But there is everlasting conflict between the gravestone of Gertrude and the obscene pomposity of the hired mute: and there is everlasting conflict between the comic-opera tune and any mean or vulgar words to which it may be set. These, which man hath joined together, God shall most surely sunder. That is what I am feeling . . . now every hour of the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... escape from the preacher, or of the preacher to escape from himself, that drives sophisticated people into the wilderness, as it is the unconquered craving for primitive simplicity, the revolt against the everlasting dress-parade of our civilization. From this monstrous pomposity even the artificial rusticity of a Petit Trianon is a relief. It was only human nature that the jaded Frenchman of the regency should run away to the New World, and live in a forest-hut with an Indian squaw; although he found little satisfaction in his act of heroism, unless ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... my meaning," returned Walter Skinner, a trace of his pomposity returning. "Thou askest me questions. If I answer thee false, I lie. If I answer thee true, I die. And truly, death were not much worse than ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... this Cathedral—ask it whether I have not loved it, adored it, worshipped it as I've worshipped no woman. Ask it whether I have not been faithful, drunkard and sot as I am. And ask it what it thinks of you—of your patronage and pomposity and conceit. When have you thought of the Cathedral and its beauty, and not always of yourself and your grandeur?...Why, man, we're sick of you, all of us from the top man in the place to the smallest ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... aspect and incisive manner made him a sharp contrast to Brummage. The latter personage was flabby in flesh, and the oppressively civil counter-jumper style of his youth had grown naturally into a deportment of most imposing pomposity. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... this little Alban house And shut the windows down so close My spirit cannot see? Who 'll let me out some gala day, With implements to fly away, Passing pomposity? ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... it was an act of the greatest temerity for me to venture upon a controversy with him." Referring to a comparison which had been made of Conkling to Henry Winter Davis, Blaine continued: "The gentleman took it seriously, and it has given his strut additional pomposity. The resemblance is great; it is striking. Hyperion to a Satyr, Thersites to Hercules, mud to marble, dunghill to diamond, a singed cat to a Bengal tiger, a whining puppy to a roaring lion."—Congressional Globe, April 20, 1866, Vol. 37, Part 3, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... The rector's face fell, but it brightened as Sydney proceeded with a touch of youthful pomposity. "Your old pupil is a ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... forehead of Mr. Ito touched the matting floor with the exaggerated humility of conventional gratitude. The lawyer wore a plain kimono of slate-grey silk. His American manners and his pomposity had both been laid aside with the tweed suit and the swallow-tail. He was now a plain Japanese business man, servile and adulatory in his patron's presence. Mr. Fujinami Gentaro bowed slightly in acknowledgment across the remnants ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... took heart. He hated a plug-hat. He disliked Col. Crockett Shaw, for Shaw was a man who employed politics as a business. Colonel Shaw was carrying his shoulders well back and seemed to be taller than usual, his new air of pomposity making him a head thrust above the horde. Colonel Shaw offensively banged the door behind himself. Mac Tavish removed a package of time-sheets that covered a pile of paper-weights. Colonel Shaw came stamping across the room, clapping his gloved hands together, as if he were as cold ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... illiberal and affected style, that they artificially endeavour to move and sway their audience by the facts, and by a skilful arrangement of them, and by their gestures. Consequently a matron will do well to avoid and repudiate over-preciseness meretriciousness and pomposity, and to use tact in her dealings with her husband in every-day life, accustoming him to a combination of pleasure and decorum. But if a wife be by nature austere and apathetic, and no lover of pleasure, the husband must make the best of it, for, as Phocion said, when ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... sir," said Mr. Cox, with much pomposity; "you're an eyesore to an honest man, a vulture, ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... With pomposity. A troupe of skull-faced witch-men came Through the agate doorway in suits of flame, Yea, long-tailed coats with a gold-leaf crust And hats that were covered with diamond-dust. And the crowd in the court gave a ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... chante 'Le Roy Boit.' En la maison de Ville n'y eust point de gasteau party, ni le lendemain a disner." And the loss of the famous "Fete des Rois" at the Hotel de Ville was something more than ordinarily unfortunate. For it was celebrated each year with much pomposity, to the sound of all the carillons of the town ringing lustily while every member of the Council "tirait le roi de la feve," and the lucky winner of the Bean, after being presented with a wax basket of ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... though what I ate was of the plainest sort, and I took no variety, yet even this was partly the effect of accident, and I certainly rather exceeded in quantity, as I was fuzzy and sleepy after dinner.' 'I allowed myself to be disgusted, with — 's pomposity,' he writes a little later, 'also smiled at an allusion in the Lessons to abstemiousness in eating. I hope not from pride or vanity, but mistrust; it certainly was unintentional.' And again, 'As to my meals, ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... all these worthy bourgeois, proud of their accomplishments, considered their society as far superior in attractions to that of Ville-aux-Fayes, and repeated with comic pomposity the local dictum, "Soulanges is a town of society and social pleasures," it must not be supposed that Ville-aux-Fayes accepted this supremacy. The Gaubertin salon ridiculed ("in petto") the salon Soudry. By the ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... not an institution: aristocracy is a sin; generally a very venial one. It is merely the drift or slide of men into a sort of natural pomposity and praise of the powerful, which is the most easy and obvious ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... love her, having indeed undergone a hundred pertnesses from the imperious little lady, now gave a disrespectful and ridiculous account of Madam Esmond, made merry with her pomposity and immense pretensions, and entertained General Braddock with anecdotes regarding her, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... do, Professor?" said the lady, with some little pomposity of manner. "You were very wise to stay out here on so lovely a ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... by becoming more and more august, more and more gracious, more and more ancient and mellow! But this lad has seen how to bowl me out. He has answered me back, vaunt for vaunt, rhetoric for rhetoric. He has lifted the only shield I cannot break, the shield of an impenetrable pomposity. Listen to him. You have come, my Lord, ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... said Peter, with a touch of his father's pomposity. "Surely a bride has a right to look forward to arranging her home as she chooses. And Sarah is mad about old French furniture—Louis Seize, I think it is—but I know nothing about such things. I think ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... Korff, General de Pfuel, and von Buelow the pianist, coming to lunch, and perhaps Wagner, if he could finish his rehearsal of "Lohengrin" in time, he was not sorry to see his table relieved of the dull pomposity and brilliant watch-chain of the pillar of Prague society. How mean to hide one's Judaism! What a burden to belong to such a race, degenerate sons of a great but long-vanished past, unable to slough the slave traits engendered by centuries of slavery! How ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... neglect of those social "taboos" or laws of behaviour which we call modesty, decency, and propriety. They either cause indignation and resentment in the onlooker at the neglect of respect for the taboo, or, on the contrary, the natural man, long oppressed by pomposity or by the fetters of propriety imposed by society, suddenly feels a joyous sense of escape from his bonds, and bursts into laughter—the laughter of a return to vitality and nature—which is enormously encouraged and developed into "roars of merriment" by the sympathy of others ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... he replied, with some pomposity, for who that has just gained an object of ambition can be humble?—"it is that you shut up this whisky shop, and betake yourself to a more decent way of ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... fondness for diminutives marks all the languages of southern Europe, and a love of long terminations generally distinguished Spanish latinity. The language of the Felibres is by no means free from the grandiloquence and pomposity that results from the employment of these high-sounding and long terminations. Toumbarelado, toumbarelaire, are rather big in the majesty of their five syllables to denote a cart-load and its ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... personage, who was not disposed to lessen his dignity by levity or an omission of forms, appeared on deck, where he demanded to be shown the master. An introduction was unnecessary in this instance; for Captain Truck no sooner saw his visitor than he recognized the well-known features and solemn pomposity of a civil officer of Portsmouth, who was often employed to search the American packets, in pursuit of delinquents of all degrees of crime ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... by-the-bye, is the prettiest lass you ever saw, and when dressed has much more the air of a lady than her mistress. Well can I believe that Mrs. White has been an exciseman's daughter, and I am convinced also that Mr. White's extraction is very low. Yet Mrs. White talks in an amusing strain of pomposity about his and her family and connections, and affects to look down with wondrous hauteur on the whole race of tradesfolk, as she terms men of business. I was beginning to think Mrs. White a good sort of body in spite of all her ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... not a little on his professional pomposity to bolster up a certain lack of confidence in himself, and stripped of this legal regalia he shriveled to a ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... pomposity the charge against the prisoners "to wit: That on Pennsylvania Avenue, Northwest, in the District of Columbia they did aid and abet in setting fire to certain combustibles consisting of logs, paper, oil, etc., between the setting of the sun in the said District of Columbia on the sixth ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... were! So soft, so fleecy, so purely white, that at times they almost seemed like the wings of cherubim, striving to soar away and bear Mr. Brimberly into a higher and purer sphere. Again, what Protean whiskers were these, whose fleecy pomposity could overawe the most superior young footmen and reduce page-boys, tradesmen, and the lower orders generally, to a state of perspiring humility; to his equals how calmly aloof, how blandly dignified; and to those a misguided ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... and careful courtship, he had decided to bestow his hand and name upon the daughter of the retired senior partner of his firm: "that dear little girl of old Marvin's," as he described the lady of his choice, "his only child and a good child, too." He bore his surprise and honors with a courteous pomposity. Miss Knowles bore the situation with restraint and decorum. But that "dear little girl of old Marvin's" could not bring herself to bear it at all and wept away her modest claims to prettiness and spirit ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... man who took himself very seriously. There was an air of pomposity and arrogant importance about him which—considering who and what he was—would have been entertaining to any observer gifted with a ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... thought of Macaulay's antithesis. He blames Xenophon for a poor pun, and Plato, less justly, for mere figurative badinage. It would be an easy task to ransack contemporaries, even great contemporaries, for similar failings, for pomposity, for the florid, for sentences like processions of intoxicated torch-bearers, for pedantic display of cheap erudition, for misplaced flippancy, for nice derangement of epitaphs wherein no adjective is used which is appropriate. With a library of cultivated American novelists ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... said the author of my being, with characteristic pomposity, which age had not withered, "there is sufficient for but two. I am not, I hope, insensible to the hunger-light ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce |
