"Rigmarole" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be going now," chimed in Fidge, jumping up eagerly, for all this rigmarole had been very uninteresting ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... hare the subject gracefully introduced without unnecessary palaver or reference to family antecedents—the simple name given without a long rigmarole of dazzling titles or senseless adjectives. The Muse is neither pathetically invoked nor anathematically abused, but the author proceeds at once to describe his hero's present situation, which, it strangely appears, is in ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... which is the work of an author of the fourth century, Critias is introduced pale and wild. His friend asks him if he has seen Cerberus or Hecate; and he answers that he has heard a rigmarole from certain "thrice-cursed sophists"; which he thinks would drive him mad if he heard it again, and was nearly sending him headlong over some cliff as it was. He retires for relief with his inquirer to a pleasant place, shadowed by planes, where swallows and nightingales are singing, and a quiet ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... Hawkins (Life, p. 373) has given a long detail of it, in that manner vulgarly, but significantly, called rigmarole; in which, amidst an ostentatious exhibition of arts and artists, he talks of 'proportions of a column being taken from that of the human figure, and adjusted by Nature—masculine and feminine—in a man, sesquioctave of the head, and in a woman ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... many real tears as Sterne or Dickens do sham ones over their figments. This realism of Carlyle's gives a great charm to his histories and biographies. The amount he tells you is something astonishing—no platitudes, no rigmarole, no common-form, articles which are the staple of most biography, but, instead of them, all the facts and features of the case—pedigree, birth, father and mother, brothers and sisters, education, physiognomy, personal habits, ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... nothing"; "sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal." nonsense, utter nonsense, gibberish; jargon, jabber, mere words, hocus-pocus, fustian, rant, bombast, balderdash, palaver, flummery, verbiage, babble, baverdage, baragouin[obs3], platitude, niaiserie[obs3]; inanity; flap-doodle; rigmarole, rodomontade; truism; nugae canorae[Lat]; twaddle, twattle, fudge, trash, garbage, humbug; poppy-cock [U.S.]; stuff, stuff and nonsense; bosh, rubbish, moonshine, wish-wash, fiddle-faddle; absurdity &c. 497; vagueness &c. (unintelligibility) 519. [routine or reflexive statements ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... war in many British Embassies and in the British Foreign Office there were nearly always men, permanent officials or else special appointees, who quite successfully discounted the prevailing war mind. They discarded the rigmarole of being pro and con, of having favorite nationalities, and pet aversions, and undelivered perorations in their bosoms. They left that to the political chiefs. But in an American Embassy I once heard an ambassador say that he never reported anything to Washington which would not cheer ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... heard such a rigmarole in all my born days." And then, angrily to Rachel, "Go down and look on th' top ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... he might do, I rushed between them, and hastily pushed back the arm-chair to the wall. Then the monk, speaking in a mournful tone, which was rendered still more terrifying by the approach of night, began to pour out some lamentable rigmarole of a confession, and ended by asking pardon for his crimes, and declaring that he was already covered by the black veil which parricides wear when they go to ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... Particular attention should be paid to the transmutation of Antony's funeral oration into French alexandrines. In Voltaire's version, the climax of the speech is reached in the following passage; it is an excellent sample of the fatuity of the whole of his concocted rigmarole:— ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... try to talk like a woman in a Shaw play. I don't like this rigmarole about "pursuit." Say you're in love, like a civilized human being. And take a cigarette, and tell ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... think I'm going to stop here and listen to a long rigmarole about that dreadful hole, you're ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... certainly seemeth good to me, By and large, in part and in whole. I'll put it in practice and find if it fact is, Or only a mystical rigmarole." ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... retire to Hampton Court, and thence into deeper and deeper privacy, to live fifty-three years more and become very venerable, though the more rude of the country-people would persist in calling him "Tumble-Down Dick." In the week of his abdication there was on the London book-stalls a rigmarole poem on the subject, called The World in a Maze, or Oliver's Ghost. It opened with this ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... the tipsy philosopher without understanding one word of his rigmarole; only Monsieur Tudesco struck him as a strange and alarming personage, and taller by a hundred feet than anybody he had ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... through the rigmarole," Power continued gruffly. "We've got to understand one another. There's my cheque book in that safe. A million dollars if you leave this country—alone—within twenty-four hours, and stay away for the rest ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... rigmarole is not in the guide books. Come, Dixon is waving his handkerchief down there, as a ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Mr Bennett lays at the door of his countrymen who command British and Khedivial troops. The Sirdar himself is included in his rigmarole of accusations. But whether dealing with particulars or the general course of events, Mr Bennett discloses that he has scarcely a nodding acquaintanceship with truth. He has said:—"This wholesale slaughter was not confined to Arab servants," i.e., killing wounded dervishes. "The Soudanese ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... Oliver, laughing; "and after all that long rigmarole, I suppose it is something I don't want. Now, then, don't keep it behind you like that. Let's see what it's like. Come, don't ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... soul-stirring tropes and figures, which I cannot enumerate; neither, indeed, need I, for they were of the kind which even to the present day form the style of popular harangues and patriotic orations, and may be classed in rhetoric under the general title of Rigmarole. ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... Miss Monson," he continued, after a very beautiful specimen of rigmarole in the way of love-making, a rigmarole that might have very fairly figured in an editor's law and logic, after he had been beaten in a libel suit, "I think, Miss Monson, you cannot have overlooked the VERY particular attentions I have endeavored to pay you, ever since I have ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... Mary. Instead I found my brother and his wife alone. My sister-in-law, I must say in justice, seemed terribly grieved at what had happened. She could or would tell me nothing. But Angelo—my brother—began some rigmarole about Mary having run away from her convent-school years ago with a man, and—but I won't repeat the story. I refused to listen. I can never forgive ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... and ways in which Lot and Abraham were walked into the conversation were incalculable,—and unintelligible except to the person who understood it only too well. On one occasion Mrs. Evelyn went on with a long rigmarole to Mr. Thorn about sea-breezes, with a face of most exquisite delight at his mystification and her own hidden fun; till Fleda was absolutely trembling. Fleda shunned both the gentlemen at length with a ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... pay SMALL? Rubbish! You pay me altogether too much and what I give you to eat isn't worth half of it. But there, I didn't mean to go into all this at all. What I told you all this long rigmarole for was to see if you could think of any way for me to turn those Development Company shares of mine into money. Not what father paid for them, of course, or even half of it. But SOME money at least. If I thought they weren't worth anything I shouldn't ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... alive! what rigmarole 's this? Married—ay, an' so you shall be, in gude time. You 'm light-headed, lass, I do b'lieve. But doan't fret, I'll ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... down the stairs. Our after-dinner oratory, that sounded so telling as we delivered it before the looking-glass, falls strangely flat amidst the clinking of the glasses. The passionate torrent of words we meant to pour into her ear becomes a halting rigmarole, at which—small ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... decrees laid down ex cathedra, and accepted without question by the poor humble public? I tell you, sir, that I have a brain of my own and that I should feel myself to be a snob and a slave if I did not use it. If it pleases you to believe this rigmarole about ether and Fraunhofer's lines upon the spectrum, do so by all means, but do not ask one who is older and wiser than yourself to share in your folly. Is it not evident that if the ether were affected ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hailed successively, as a grocer's wife upon a party of pleasure with her eldest apprentice—as an old woman carrying her grandson to school—and as a young strapping Irishman, conveying an ancient maiden to Dr. Rigmarole's, at Redriffe, who buckles beggars for a tester and a dram of Geneva. All this abuse was retorted in a similar strain of humour by Greenjacket and his companion, who maintained the war of wit with the same alacrity with which they ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... "The meaning of this rigmarole," Anthony cut him short, speaking in German (which he knew I understood and trusted Bedr didn't) "is, that the fellow wants us to buy information from him. He pretends to have broken with his employers on our account ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... "'That's all rigmarole that somebody hands you when you've won the Wooden Cross and a little garden growing over your tummy,' is the way they put it in their argot. 'The Marseillaise, the Chant du Depart are all right for the youngsters, and the reviews—and ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... "What a rigmarole!" whispered Dick, while the Executioner stretched out the Dodo's effigy on the ground, and, resuming his hideous black mask, ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... certain general. This personage, like the King, had Marx's proposals explained to him in the minutest detail, and expressed his warmest sympathy with the undertaking. 'And there,' said Marx, at the end of this long rigmarole, 'the matter ended, and I never heard another word ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... assertions made by Iago. In the opening scene he tells his dupe Roderigo that three great men of Venice went to Othello and begged him to make Iago his lieutenant; that Othello, out of pride and obstinacy, refused; that in refusing he talked a deal of military rigmarole, and ended by declaring (falsely, we are to understand) that he had already filled up the vacancy; that Cassio, whom he chose, had absolutely no practical knowledge of war, nothing but bookish theoric, mere prattle, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... of all this rigmarole which appealed to Master Boltay most strongly was that this worthy woman had eaten no food that day. So he considered it his Christian duty to there and then take a plate of lard-dumplings and a tumbler full of wine from a cupboard, place them before her on the table, ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... "that this Merlin, or those enchanters who enchanted the whole crew your worship says you saw and discoursed with down there, stuffed your imagination or your mind with all this rigmarole you have been treating us to, and all ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... at her. 'I award you the prize,' he said, at length. 'You deserve it for colossal and immense coolness. Now you can tell me the true inward meaning of all this rigmarole. What ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... me with his shrewd grey eyes all the time that he was uttering this rigmarole, and I gave him a glance in return which showed him that he was not dealing with a fool. He took out a canvas bag ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... weakness, his mother was much in the habit of playing upon it, as the only means of persuasion or dissuasion within her command which was likely to make any impression upon his knotty young rind. So, while she was spinning out her rigmarole, Sprigg was making a great show of amusing himself with Pow-wow, slapping him over the muzzle with his coonskin cap, or setting that ornament in divers ways on the old dog's head; now with the tail over the right ear, then over the left, or over the nose; the young ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... poor old JAB bundles off to the witness-box, and takes some outlandish oath or other with immense gusto, after which he starts telling the Jury a long rambling rigmarole, and is awfully riled when the old Judge pulls him up, which he does about every other minute. This is the sort ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... to fear I have written a strange rigmarole, but still I will send it, for though Irish matters cannot interest you as they do me, yet still a letter is always a pleasant thing to receive, even only that one may have the satisfaction of looking at the Queen's head ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... Nozdrev, even reached the point of his mentioning certain of the postillions by name! Next, the tchinovniks sounded him on the question of Chichikov's possible identity with Napoleon; but before long they had reason to regret the step, for Nozdrev responded with a rambling rigmarole such as bore no resemblance to anything possibly conceivable. Finally, the majority of the audience left the room, and only the Chief of Police remained to listen (in the hope of gathering something more); but at last even he found himself forced to disclaim the speaker ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... harps and lutes in our heaven, only drums; and the preservation of all the essentials of poetry, by the simple enumeration of the utensils to be found in a back kitchen, sounded, I could not help thinking (here it becomes necessary to whisper), not unlike rigmarole. I waited for the master to speak. He had declared that the Republic would fall if it did not become instantly naturalistic; he would not, he could not pass over in silence so important a branch of literature ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... passed through that stage. The pomp and vanity of the tenderfoot he knew not. The bespangled dignity of the second-class and first-class scout, these things he had known and outgrown. His medals were home somewhere. And out of all this alluring rigmarole and romantic glory were left the deeper marks of scout training, burned into his soul as the mark is burned into the skin of a broncho. The woods, the trees, were his. That, after all, is the highest award in scouting. ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... literary expression could possibly excel his mother-in-law's curses. Not that he ever saw her again: his wife and eldest son tracked him to Breslau, but only in quest of ducats and divorce: the latter of which Maimon conceded after a legal rigmarole. But he took no advantage of his freedom. A home of his own he never possessed, save an occasional garret where he worked at an unsteady table—one leg usually supported by a folio volume—surrounded by the cats and dogs whom he had taken to solacing himself with. And even if lodged ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the better. It's very dull, all that story, and quite useless. I understand the character without all that rigmarole and that ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... thus: if the Deity was in the world itself, he was immanent; if he was somewhere outside it, he was transcendent. Nothing could be clearer and more obvious! You knew where you were. But this Kantian rigmarole won't do any more: it's antiquated and no longer applicable to modern ideas. Why, we've had a whole row of eminent men in ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... "The queerest rigmarole you ever heard!" Aurora called that simple Italian spelling-exercise for little beginners. It might have been funny to hear him, only it was disquieting, he did it so earnestly and so obstinately ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... than have asked for another cake, and as I yearned for it in absolute want of food, the boy's ungenerous treatment of me came down in a cloud on my reason. I found myself being led through the crush of people, by an old gentleman, to whom I must have related an extraordinary rigmarole. He shook his head, saying that I was unintelligible; but the questions he put to me, 'Why had I no hat on in the open street?—Where did my mother live?—What was I doing out alone in London?' were so many incitements to autobiographical ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... said Volnay. 'The trick isn't done yet, old fellow. You've got to be formally enlisted, and to answer a rigmarole of questions, and be examined by the regimental doctor, and to take the oath. The trick isn't done ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... is true? Go ahead and let me have all the facts. She is Hare Sahib's daughter; Ali told me that. Precious rigmarole of ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... cackle about, she has fulfilled the purpose for which she came into existence, and women—the average Society women, at least—do not. Then there'll be singing, of a sort, and—but you know, Colonel, all the usual rigmarole. Now I want a long, long talk with you about the subject you have just broached. We could not talk, as we would, in the crowd that will be in the drawing-room presently, so I wonder if you would give me an hour in the library, tomorrow morning after breakfast. I suggest the library because ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... at all! Another rigmarole in which women are mixed up! You know the little singer of Chalons, called Nichoune? She made her first appearance at La Fere, and since then the creature has roved through the rowdy dancing-saloons of Picardy, of the Ardennes—you must know ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... than the heat. Do you know what's happened? The chief has saddled Old Signal Corps on me. Yes, sir, I've got to take his old pet, the major, on the city staff. It seems he's succeeded in losing what little property he had—the chief told me some rigmarole about sudden financial reverses—and now he's down and out. So I'm elected. I've got to take him on as a reporter—a cub reporter sixty-odd years old, mind you, who hasn't heard of anything worth while ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... person, you see,' he went on mischievously. 'You are of so little use to your generation. People do not benefit by your example, or defer to your opinion. There is no St. Ursula in the calendar.' Now what did he mean by all this rigmarole? But he only laughed again in a provoking way, ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... are all the parsons, who seek to excite you and to lull you to sleep with the morphine of their Paradise, so that nothing may change. There are the lawyers, the economists, the historians—and how many more?—who befog you with the rigmarole of theory, who declare the inter-antagonism of nationalities at a time when the only unity possessed by each nation of to-day is in the arbitrary map-made lines of her frontiers, while she is inhabited by an artificial amalgam of races; there are the worm-eaten genealogists, who forge for the ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... a single thing to do with it, but Mr. Roger says they have, and he says a man called Darwin proved it. This is the rigmarole he got off to me the other day. The clover crop depends on there being plenty of bumble-bees, because they are the only insects with tongues long enough to—to—fer—fertilize—I think he called it the blossoms. But mice eat bumble-bees and cats eat mice and old maids keep cats. So your Uncle ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... I had a letter from your Aunt Mary this morning, a long rigmarole. She says she is following her letter, and is coming to have a serious talk with me. Hang it all! Can't a ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... counterfeit money, crazy (dilapidated), crone, crook, croon, cross-grained, cross-patch, cross purposes, cuddle, to cuff (to strike), cleft, din, earnest money, egg on, greenhorn, jack-of-all-trades, loophole, settled, ornate, to quail, ragamuffin, riff-raff, rigmarole, scant, seedy, out of sorts, stale, tardy, trash. How Halliwell ever came to class these words as archaic I cannot imagine; but I submit that any one who sets forth to write about the English of England ought to have sufficient acquaintance with the language to check and reject Halliwell's amazing ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... down the German flag and risked my neck half a dozen times and had myself made King just to boom his Yokohama cable stock? Confound him! You might at least swear back. Tell him just what the situation is in a few words. Here, stop that rigmarole to the paper, and explain to your home office that we are awaiting developments, and that, in the meanwhile, they must put up with the best we can send them. Wait; send this ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... all the characters in Quatre-Vingt-Treize: to continue to spare the guilty, I must sacrifice the innocent. I took the usual course and tried to save both, with the usual consequence of failure. Well rehearsed, I went down to the palace, found the king alone, and obliged him with a vast amount of rigmarole. The cook was too old to learn; I feared he was not making progress; how if we had a boy instead?—boys were more teachable. It was all in vain; the king pierced through my disguises to the root of the fact; saw that the cook ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you ain't never got in. But me, his old pardner and pal! It's a shame, and a sin! He's throwed lots of cold water of late. I am blowed if I likes His wobbleyfied views about Payment of Members, and Strikes. And then that HOOD bizness! Long rigmarole—cheered by the Tories! I fear it's all Ikybod now with our ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various
... of a clue. A wretched hobbledehoy of a fellow, something in the bookseller's shop at the corner of Kettle Street, has come with a rigmarole about a society that he and a few more belonged to, including this Francois Gaspard, who is missing. He protests that the thing was legal, and all that—only a Radical inner ring—but he says that at the last meeting this fellow was dropping hints about putting somebody ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... art a bard completely imbued With genius not to be controlled, Be thou not untractable Within the court of thy king; Until thy rigmarole shall be known, Be thou silent, Heinin, As to the name of thy verse, And the name of thy vaunting; And as to the name of thy grandsire Prior to his being baptized. And the name of the sphere, And the name of the element, ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... the least." What an absurd rigmarole she was uttering! Yet such was the spell of her eyes, her voice, her nearness that I merely felt like saying, "Tell me ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... to understand how all that Vaka says can be an answer to Indra's question. The chief of the gods enquires: What are the joys of those that lead deathless lives? Vaka breaks away unto a confused rigmarole about the merits of independence and the religious merit of entertaining guests and servants. All the printed editions have the passage as ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... he speak out at once?" said Dickenson in a whisper. "Who wants all this rigmarole ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... Charing Cross—'How I lost my Gingham Umbrella, and gained the Acquaintance of Mr. Gozzleton.' So funny! And the exhaustive treatise on the Sources of Light, in the Scientific Saturday. And think of the fuss they make about Homer, a blind old person who wrote a long rigmarole of a poem about battles, and wrote it so badly that to this day no one knows whether it's one complete poem, or a lot of odds-and-ends in the way of poetry, put together by a man with an unpronounceable Greek name. When I think of what Valentine accomplishes in comparison to Homer, and the little ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... had paused in her breathless rigmarole of Johns and memories. Leaning forward suddenly she cried into the newspaper man's ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... are obliged to repeat the alphabet before they can recollect the relative place of any given letter; others repeat a column of the multiplication table before they can recollect the given sum of the number they want. There is a common rigmarole for telling the number of days in each month in the year; those who have learnt it by heart, usually repeat the whole of it before they can recollect the place of the month which they want; and sometimes in running over the lines, people miss the very month which they are thinking of, ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... old man, but he apparently meant just what he said. "All right, Mother," he said finally. "How in hell do I marry her without any rigmarole?" ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... chairman step on to the platform; and, amidst the profoundest gloom, the latter rises to pronounce the prefatory rigmarole. "Archaeology," he says, in a voice of brass, "is a science which bars its doors to all but the most erudite; for, to the layman who has not been vouchsafed the opportunity of studying the dusty volumes of the learned, the bones of the dead will not reveal their ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... him, "do listen to me and hear my story, or else Fritz will begin upon my adventures and tire you out with his rigmarole descriptions." ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... "Oh, the rigmarole the old family seer came out with before they burned him for an unpalatable prediction at the time of the '15. He was very much vexed about it, of course, and he just prophesied any nonsense of a disagreeable ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... a gentleman. The writing was good, but precise; it was sealed with red wax, but the impression was sunk: a proper seal had not been used! Especially where his own family was concerned, Mr. Wylder was not the most delicate of men! he opened the letter, and in it found what he called a rigmarole of poetry and theology! "Confound the fellow!" he said to himself. Lady Ann did well to warn him! There should be no more of this! The scatter-brain took after her mother! He would give ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... his pipes, chanted forth, in a bold and musical voice, a rude rigmarole called "The Royal Blackbird," which, although of no intrinsic merit, yet, as it expressed sentiments hostile to British connection and British government and favourable to the house of Stewart, was very popular amongst the Catholic peasantry of Ireland, whilst, on the contrary, it was looked ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... it was extreme ill-breeding; But there were ample reasons for it, none Of which he specified in this his pleading: His speech was a fine sample, on the whole, Of rhetoric, which the learn'd call 'rigmarole.' ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... the place greeted Colin and proceeded to deliver himself of a humorous rigmarole, designed for the benefit of tourists. It was pure 'nature-faking,' since it ascribed human characteristics to some of the fish in the pool, the various specimens being called the "bride" and "groom" and so forth. ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... over which they build a hut; and a fire is kept lighted for a certain length of time. It is likewise customary for his wife or nearest relation, if at any future period they should happen to pass near the grave, to repair the hut, rekindle the fire, and utter a long rigmarole to the departed, to induce him to lie still, and not come back and torment them. Nothing will induce a stranger to go near a new grave, or to mention the name of the departed for a long time after his death. They always speak of him as So-and-so's brother, or father. ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... offer of an appointment quite beyond his deserts. I was very glad to hear of it, however, and I asked the creature to contribute a paper recording his first impressions of this notable man; instead of which he begins with an opinionated rigmarole about himself, and goes on from bad to worse by describing a long conversation he had about prison reform with that horrid, masculine Mrs. C——, whom all the officers call 'Charlie,' and who thinks that for men to grow humane is a sign of their decadence. Of course I shall 'cut' ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... satisfaction. For the first time in her married life she was led to discuss her husband's ways and actions with another; and, to her amazement, she found that it was easier to talk to Purdy about Richard than to Richard himself. Purdy and she saw things in the same light; no rigmarole of explanation was necessary. Now with Richard, it was not so. In conversation with him, one constantly felt that he was not speaking out, or, to put it more plainly, that he was going on meanwhile with his own, very different ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... steeped in gloom by a veritable pain and evils really undergone. And as I reflect upon what I have written, and try to imagine it read by some brisk person utterly content with life, I can well understand that the whole thing would appear to him incredible, too preposterously strange for belief, a rigmarole of sick fancies beyond the power of hellebore. So be it: I expect small comprehension and no mercy, for indeed I have written caring little for such consequence, yielding to that human thirst for utterance which only confession can slake; as one eases pain ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... readers exclaim, "But where's poetry—the dickens—in all this rigmarole?" We confess we can find none—we can find nothing but a set purpose to be obscure, and an idiot captivity to the jingle of Hudibrastic rhyme. This idle weakness really appears to be at the bottom of half the daring nonsense in this most daringly ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... own days," said Mr. Rigmarole. Have we not heard something very like this lately, as "Berlin to Baghdad," if not "Calais to Calcutta"? And even if we had not, would not the sense and the satire of it be delectable? A great deal has been ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... difficulty in talking easily with strangers. Lensley was prattling as if he were determined to discharge an entire novelful of "chatter" at Lady Cecily, and Boltt's little clipped, pedantic voice recited a long rigmarole about a glorious view in France which he had lately seen while motoring in that country. Boltt admired Nature in the way in which any man of careful upbringing would admire ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... not think of Rachel in words. There were moments of dream when he made plans—a fantastic amorous rigmarole of Rachel and himself walking together over the heads of the world; child dreams that substituted themselves for the realities he demanded. But these were infrequent. He was learning to avoid them as ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... her. She was dressed in black. Her face would have been fresh under her bright hair, but the eyes were drawn, and the lips quivered that spoke to me, quivered in a pitiful fashion. I told her how I came from her husband. I embarked on a longish rigmarole as to the luck that brought me her way after all, against expectations. She listened without saying a word. Then I told her about him, and she listened patiently. 'I seem to have felt him with me on my way,' I said. 'He was so keen that I should bring you his love,' ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... now, you said to him: 'But how did you come by this land and these herds so that you can stand between them and the people who have need of them, exacting this profit?' He would probably either embark upon a long rigmarole, or, what is much more probable, lose his temper and decline to argue. Pursuing your doubt as to the rightfulness of his property in these things, you might admit he deserved a certain reasonable fee for the rough care he had taken of the land ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... knows what rigmarole I've treated her to!" They had parted an hour ago; since when, he believed, ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... tone of disappointed reproach, with apparent pity] Tell me, Etchepare, do you take the jurymen for idiots? [Silence] So that's all you've been able to think of? I said you were intelligent just now. I take that back. But think what you've told me—a rigmarole like that. Why, a child of eight would have done better. It's ridiculous I tell you—ridiculous. The jurymen will simply shrug their shoulders when they hear it. A whole night out of doors, in the pouring rain, to look for a horse you ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... one's own way; they are fidgety, you know, sir,—fidgety, nothing more; 't is a trifle, but it is unpleasant. Besides, my wife was Master Clinton's foster-mother, and she can't hear a word about him, without running on into a long rigmarole of what he did as a baby, and so forth. I like people to be chatty, sir, but not garrulous; I can't bear garrulity, at least in a female. But, suppose, sir, we defer our story till after supper? A glass of wine or warm punch makes ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... going to sleep," says Desmond, drowsily. "I hope somebody will rouse me when he has done, or pick me out of the water if I drop into it. Such a rigmarole of a story I ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... won't find the joke 's fine 's he did at first.' But she was too used up to know when she was havin' good common-sense talked to her; she jus' kep' wipin' her eyes, 'n' then Mrs. Sperrit drove up 'n' the whole rigmarole had to be gone over again for her. I mus' say that she behaved kind of un-neighborly, f'r she laughed fit to kill herself, 'n' Mrs. Craig was nigh to put out over such doin's,—'n' the cat not dead a week yet; but ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... usual rigmarole about "his own family," and "hard times," and "diminished resources," and all those stereotype commonplaces which are for ever on the lips of stereotype insincere people. Mr. Clifford did not perceive the dry and somewhat scornful inuendo, which lay at the bottom of Mr. Edgerton's seemingly ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... "the reason I call her a dreadful old woman is that she's told you all this rigmarole. It makes me quite hot. She sha'n't amuse herself by taking you in like that. I won't ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... replied Mrs. Farquharson. "He is getting a little childish, I think. The other night he told me the greatest rigmarole about some collector or other in Birmingham. He collected weapons, of all things! He had Mr. Rowlandson buy him swords, and daggers, and spears, and even bows and arrows from America, until his house fairly ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... Songs—why (except that Spirit of the Nation which we so audaciously put together), the popular ballads and songs are the faded finery of the West End, the foul parodies of St. Giles's, the drunken rigmarole of the black Helots—or, as they are touchingly classed in the streets, "sentimental, comic, and nigger songs." Yet Banim, and Griffin, and Furlong, Lover and Ferguson, Drennan and Callanan, have written ballads and songs as true to Ireland ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... she would without fail do it and taking leave of him, returned to her house; whilst the scholar, rejoiced for that himseemed his desire was like to have effect, made an image with certain talismanic characters of his own devising, and wrote a rigmarole of his fashion, by way of conjuration; the which, whenas it seemed to him time, he despatched to the lady and sent to tell her that she must that very night, without more tarriance, do that which he had enjoined her; after which he secretly betook himself, with a servant of ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... they came to one accurate enough, in the end. But all this rigmarole is what people call testing a thing by "internal evidence." The Record insists upon the truth of the story because of certain facts—because "the initials of the young men must be sufficient to establish their identity"—because "the nurses must be accessible to all sorts of inquiries"—and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... ministers hearing their lord's last words, took courage, and proceeded to work upon his mind by the figure of speech popularly called "rigmarole." They said: "Great king! that old Brahman has been gone many days, and has not returned; he is probably dead and burnt. It is therefore right that by giving to the grand treasurer's son his daughter-in-law, who is only affianced, not fairly married, you should ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... the defunct, the coolies were bearing the hearse on their backs, the Corean cavalry and infantry forming two lines in good style. There stood the Corean horsemen, each supported by two men, apparently unconcerned at the long Japanese rigmarole, of which they did not understand a word; there rode as stiff as statues outside the ranks the officers of Cho-sen, on their little ponies. All of a sudden, however, the two field-guns went off, and with the most ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... another than if they were as ignorant of the Ten Commandments as the most benighted heathens, to whom even the name of Moses was never spoken. Yet, from your looks, I see that you are wondering within yourselves what all this rigmarole about England, France, the Six Nations, and disputed territories, can have to do with George Washington. Had you held a tight rein on your impatience a little while longer, you would have found out ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... to brace himself for a great effort, and then started on the queerest rigmarole. I didn't get hold of it at first, and I had to stop and ask him questions. But here is ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... in the zeal and public spirit of parliament, and the power and resources of the nation. His majesty's declarations concerning his conduct towards Spain were fully borne out by the manifesto, which was a loose rigmarole, in which scarcely anything else was clear than that war with Great Britain was fully resolved upon. The opposition in both houses took credit to themselves for having prognosticated, in the spirit of true prophets, a war with Spain, and taunted ministers with folly ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... she had on my fraternity pin, and I thought she meant that. So I said, "You can wear it today"; but she only hugged me the tighter and ran on in a rigmarole I ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... that were against her good, and making light of right and wrong, as if they turned on money; but Mary (such a prudent lass, although she was a fool just now) must see through all such shallow tricks, such rigmarole about Parson Beloe, who must be an idiot himself to think so much of Simon Popplewell—for Easter offerings, no doubt—but there, if Mary had the heart to go away, what use to stand maundering about it? Stephen Anerley would be dashed if he ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... "Tell you that in some way I had Kinney's authority to use his facts? Well, I should have done that yesterday if you had let me. In the first place, Kinney's the most helpless ass in the world. He could never have used his own facts. In the second place, there was hardly anything in his rigmarole the other day that he hadn't told me down there in the lumber camp, with full authority to use it in any way I liked; and I don't see how he could revoke that authority. That's the way I reasoned ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... could see them before her when occupying the usual seat in her sitting-room. When this letter arrived, Mr. Dickens was still alive, but wholly unconscious. What to him, at that time, was the courtesy of an earthly sovereign?" I repeat that the only morsel of truth in all this rigmarole is that the books were sent by Dickens, and acknowledged by Mr. Helps at the Queen's desire. The letter did not arrive on the day of his death, the 9th of June, but was dated ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... in this inflated rigmarole that is not adequately expressed in my amended statement, what is it? As to eloquence it will hardly be argued that nonsense, falsehood and metaphors which were old when Rome was young are essential to that. The first ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... ones; but the natural force of both had long been much abated, and both had been not so much critics as essayists; the tendency of Hunt to flowery sentimentality or familiar chat, and that of De Quincey to incessant divergences of "rigmarole," being formidable enemies to real critical competence. The greatest prosemen —not novelists—of the generation now closing, Carlyle and Macaulay, were indeed both considerable critics. But the shadow of death in the one case, the "shadow of Frederick" in the other, had cut short their ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... name. The name Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names of the Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if they had been named by the child's rigmarole,—IERY FIERY ICHERY VAN, TITTLE-TOL-TAN. I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming over the earth, and to each the herdsman has affixed some barbarous sound in his own dialect. The names of men are, of course, as cheap and meaningless as ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau
... he means a landlady," Sebright chuckled. "Old but good, he says. He expected to die there in peace, a good Christian. And what's that about the priests getting hold of his very last bit of silver? I must say that sounded truest of all his rigmarole. For the salvation of ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... you, Winona. It does annoy me, kind of. That miserable Dave Cowan's taught it some new rigmarole—no meaning to it, but bothersome when you want ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... high enough to be just above their reach, and a handful of Scotch snuff on a dry leaf on the ground under it, and the rabbits, while smelling for the apple, would inhale the snuff, and sneeze themselves to death in no tune. Well, I was a child then and simple enough to be gammoned by this rigmarole. I set the apple and the snuff, but I got no rabbit, while I did get laughed at hugely for my credulity. This satisfied me that people should never impose upon the simplicity of childhood. I remember my mortification on the occasion. It was so long ago that ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... deformed, and they complete themselves by being stupid; they repeat the puns of Tiercelin and Potier, they have sack coats, stablemen's waistcoats, shirts of coarse linen, trousers of coarse cloth, boots of coarse leather, and their rigmarole resembles their plumage. One might make use of their jargon to put new soles on their old shoes. And all this awkward batch of brats has political opinions, if you please. Political opinions should be strictly ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... bien" I said in confusion, recalling all the highfalutin rigmarole which Americans believed—(little martyred Belgium protected by the allies from the inroads of the aggressor, etc.)—"why should the French put ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... this rigmarole. Tell the jury right away"—and he faced the prisoner—"what you know about this glass of whiskey. Get right down to the facts; we're not cutting ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... no sooner out of sight, than Godmamma said, with a long rigmarole, that she felt it her duty to you to look after me, and she must tell me that it was inconvenant for a young girl to smile or speak to a man as much as I had done to the Marquis. I was so furious at that, that I said, as I found it impossible to understand their ways, I ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn
... go slow," broke in his excited, self-appointed lawyer. "Can't you see through it? Can't you see what he was after? Why, good Lord, man, he has made you the principal legatee,—he has actually given you everything. All this rigmarole about a trust or a foundation or whatever you want to call it amounts to absolutely nothing. The money is yours to do what you like with as long as you live. You have complete control of every dollar of it. ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... riddles, Lisle; and if there is one thing I hate, it is riddles. When a fellow begins to talk in that way, I always change the subject. Why a man should try to puzzle his brain, with such rigmarole things, is more than ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... a long rigmarole tale of an attack which had been made on his house by a party of brigands, as he called them, from Venezuela, the chief object of which, as he suspected, was to carry off his wife; however, they, or some one ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... parodied in his person the foibles of Mr. Brummell and the King. His diamonds and his equipage and other follies became the gossip of every newspaper in England. Nor did a day pass without the publication of some little rigmarole from his pen. Wherever there was a vacant theatre—were it in Cheltenham, Birmingham, or any other town—he would engage it for his productions. One night he would play his favourite part, Romeo, with reverence and ability. The next, he would repeat his first travesty in ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... off her mask viciously, as she spoke. "Hang me if I didn't think so all the time!" she exclaimed with a sudden change of tactics. "That Jasper's a thief. I heard you say something about those deeds, and Jasper told me a long rigmarole that you wouldn't sign them. Whether that's true or not, Heaven only knows. Jasper's a bad one, an' he's sold me. He's got the coin, and I'll split on him, as I threatened. No, it's no use your trying to make me hush up, I will ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... Jack, and scarcely less so to Carlos, to observe the sympathetic courtesy with which the English Consul listened to all this rigmarole, which, from his manner, one might have believed to have been absolutely convincing—until he ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... took me for a Jacobite, for he began a rigmarole about loyalty and hard fortune. I hastened to correct him, and he took the correction with the same patient despair with which he took all things. 'Twas but another of ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... full well that old-time tales are things to scorn; that such a man as William Tell, in liklihood, was never born. If Gessler lived and had a hat, he didn't hang it on a pole; the rules of Euclid show us that—so goes King Skeptic's rigmarole. But, granting that he had a lid, and hung it on a pole awhile, and granting that the people did bow down to reverence that tile, this does not prove that William shot an apple through an apple's core, and ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... the White House, which seemed to have been "edited" by the President himself—as often royalty revises plays—for his special entertainment, the Cabinet being invited, after a rigmarole of stilted phrases purporting to be by Washington, Franklin, Napoleon, and other past celebrities, Mr. Welles, secretary of the navy, remarked: "I will think this matter over, and see what conclusion to arrive at!" (His ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... Your rigmarole (if you will excuse the word) about the tombstone gives quite a wrong idea of my attitude on that occasion. I stayed away from the funeral for reasons which are, I should think, sufficiently obvious and natural, but which you somehow seem to have missed. Granted that my fancy for ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... examples to the contrary. Huxley and Tyndall have given their brethren in science fine examples of a pure, vigorous, and well-knit style. Yet, how many of them are still quite content to go rumbling along with an interminable rigmarole of dry "memoirs." Our ponderous biographies of third-rate people tend to become mere bags of letters and waste-paper baskets. And all this with such consummate models before us, and so very high a standard of general cultivation. We have ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... dozen, more than fifteen, years ago. He never recognised Miss Pansy, nor, knowing what he was about, would have anything to say to her; and there was no reason why he should. Osmond did, and that was better; though he had to fit on afterwards the whole rigmarole of his own wife's having died in childbirth, and of his having, in grief and horror, banished the little girl from his sight for as long as possible before taking her home from nurse. His wife had really died, you know, of quite another matter and in quite another place: in the Piedmontese ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... Frank," replied Harry, "if he ever did get anything right through this rigmarole and hanky-panky it was simply because he ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... In reply to this rigmarole I asked for food, since my head was beginning to swim from my long fast. This, to my terror, put him into a ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... place, though people had talked glibly about infinity ever since the beginnings of Greek thought, nobody had ever thought of asking, What is infinity? If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all. Twenty years ago, roughly speaking, Dedekind and Cantor asked this question, and, what is more remarkable, they answered it. They found, that is to say, a perfectly ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... the machine now," broke in Sir Ronald, who was by no means anxious to listen to the well-worn rigmarole again. "You can show that to him, and tell him all about it. I shall bring him down, for he knows ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... your society, that would find out another farmer's field if yours were not here. While you are planting the seed he cries,—"Drop it, drop it,—cover it up, cover it up,—pull it up, pull it up, pull it up." But this was not corn, and so it was safe from such enemies as he. You may wonder what his rigmarole, his amateur Paganini performances on one string or on twenty, have to do with your planting, and yet prefer it to leached ashes or plaster. It was a cheap sort of top dressing in which I ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... over there, Dixie," he said, firmly. "I'm going to stick right here, and do the best I can. Folks may talk some about me and Hettie not living together, but I can't put up with all that rigmarole over ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... astonish me! You surely must be jesting, in dishing up this long rigmarole, about Miss Houghton's accomplishments! After what I have told you, I cannot conceive how you can fail to understand, that I am not in a mood for jesting. As for the girl, I very much desire to meet her, that I may have an opportunity to express the regrets and apologies for my unfortunate ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... himself, who was followed by many minions of the law, advanced into the body of the court, and cried, "Silence for His Honor the Queen's Judge!" struck the butt of his long staff upon the floor, and proceeded to deliver a long rigmarole, couched in early English, the tenor of which was that the proceedings about to take place were most solemn and dignified, and all men must keep silence in order that His Honour the Judge might hear ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... some rigmarole of your own, I tell you," laughed the coming bridegroom, speaking to his companion, "It's no matter what it is, only don't make me burst out laughing in the middle of it, for Estella might resent it. She's a bright little one, and that's no josh. ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... can, I should think, now that he sees not only the road but the rate they are going, continue to take a part so contrary to all his own interests and feelings, and to the feelings and interests of all the respectable part of his country.... But what is to be the end of all this rigmarole of mine? To conclude, this—to advise you, for your own sake as a tradesman, for Lord Byron's sake as a poet, for the sake of good literature and good principles, which ought to be united, to take such measures as you may be able to venture upon to get Lord Byron to revise these two cantos, ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... imagined that old Thaddeus McIlvaine had looked somewhat like his nephew when he himself was a young man. But don't let the old man's rigmarole about rejuvenation make too deep an impression on you. The first thing the young fellow did was to get rid of that machine of his uncle's. Can you imagine his uncle ...
— McIlvaine's Star • August Derleth |
