"Farrago" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... having inveigled Joan of Arc into signing this farrago of blasphemous nonsense, her judges, it seems, added fraud to their crime by reading to the prisoner a different recantation from that to which they had forced her to sign her mark. The one she marked contained only six lines, and it did not take ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... have said that the execrable trash entitled "Tears of Sensibility" was merely a burlesque on the style of the magazine verses of the day. I could not suppose that you could have suspected me of seriously composing such a farrago of false metaphor and unmeaning epithet. It was meant solely for a caricature on the style of the poetasters of newspapers and journals; and, (though I say it who should not say it,) has excited more attention and received more praise at Cambridge than it deserved. If you have it, read ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... And so the farrago of unrelated memories continued to rise vocal on Skipper's lips to the heave of his body and the beat of his arms, while Jerry, crouched against the side of the bunk mourned and mourned his grief and inability to be of help. ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... letters than with medicine. He worked hard at Greek, and as the result of his studies published somewhat prematurely a treatise, De Immortalitate Animorum, a collection of extracts from Greek writers which Julius Caesar Scaliger with justice calls a confused farrago of other men's learning.[76] He published also about this period the treatise on Judicial Astrology, and the Essay De Consolatione, the only one of his books which has been found worthy of an English translation.[77] In 1541 he became Rector of the College ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... had done. He bowed apologetically to Marius; he waved his hands and filled the air with Italian phrases, frenziedly uttered, as if by the very vigour of them he sought to drive explanation into his master's brain. Marius watched and listened, but his rage nowise abated; it grew, instead, as if that farrago of a language he did not understand were but an added insult. An oath was all he uttered. Then he swung round and caught Garnache's sword from the chair beside him, where it still rested, and Garnache in that moment cursed the oversight. Whipping the long, keen blade from its sheath, Marius ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... variety of extracts from rare and curious books—stories about Job beating his wife, about surgical experiments tried upon criminals, about women with horns, and a man who swallowed a poker, and "looked melancholy afterwards." Well might he suppose that people would think this farrago a composite production of many authors, and he says that if it were so he might have given it instead of the "Doctor" a name to correspond with its heterogeneous origin, such as—Isdis Roso Heta Harco Samro Grobe Thebo Heneco Thojamma ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... spinning that yarn to me —I'm not green. May be not, taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, but I rayther guess you'll be done brown if that ere harpooneer hears you a slanderin' his head. I'll break it for him, said I, now flying into a passion again at this unaccountable farrago of the landlord's. It's broke a'ready, said he. Broke, said I — broke, do you mean? Sartain, and that's the very reason he can't sell it, I guess. Landlord, said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... Dr. Johnson said he never saw Rolt, and never read the book. "The booksellers wanted a preface to a dictionary of trade and commerce. I knew very well what such a dictionary should be, and I wrote a preface accordingly." This may be believed; but the book is a most wretched farrago of articles plundered without acknowledgment, or judgment, which, indeed, was the case ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... all this farrago about savages to do with Dionysus?" I conceive some scholar, or literary critic asking, if such an one looks into this book. Certainly it would have been easier for me to abound in aesthetic criticism of the Hymns, and on the aspect of ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... theatre, I saw it performed four or five times and I remember noticing the wonderful attraction that it had for minds of a certain class (and no very limited class), while for others it was just such an unintelligible farrago of wearisome 'Zeug' as Dante's Paradiso and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony are sometimes said ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... expectations as to the present interview brought to humiliating discomfiture, but the influence of the disillusionment instantly retroacted with the effect of making the entire noble and romantic cult which had led up to this unlucky confrontation seem a mere farrago of extravagant and baseless sentiment. What on earth had Regnier been thinking of, to plan deliberately a situation calculated to turn a cherished sentiment into ridicule? If he had seriously thought his daughter capable of supporting the role he had assigned her, had there ever been a like case ...
— A Positive Romance - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... that hid his fury and his shame. He stole out of the place while the lights were still low. He feared for his self-restraint if he were to remain, and he realized what a poor figure he would make standing up there and replying to the malicious farrago of the woman ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... tell him I know not what glib and convincing farrago, with every excellence, I made no doubt, of accent and gesture. But I could not listen; I had affairs of my own by this time. The lackeys had come up close round me, more interested in me than in ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... Mr. Mordred Booth, the well-known correspondent, who was, to our knowledge, in Plazac for his own purposes, to send us full (and proper) details. We take it our readers will prefer a graphic account of the ceremony to a farrago of cheap menus, comments on his own liver, and a belittling of an Englishman of such noble character and achievements that a rising nation has chosen him for their King, and one whom our own nation loves ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... not, it will not, I trust, be expected that I should, either now or at any time, separate this farrago into parts, and answer and examine its components. I shall barely bestow upon it all a general remark or two. In the run of forty years, Sir, under this Constitution, we have experienced sundry successive violent party contests. ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... be sorry to think the American Ambassador has been taking too much wine—as you well know, my knowledge of the barbarous English tongue is but limited, and yet—I thought, as I joined you, he was talking some farrago of nonsense about ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... recommending most extraordinary dishes and drinks, "all made out of the artist's brain," which he said were sovereign remedies for nautical illness. I remember to this day some of the preparations which, in his revelry of fancy, he would advise me to take, a farrago of good things almost rivalling "Oberon's Feast," spread out so daintily in Herrick's "Hesperides." He thought, at first, if I could bear a few roc's eggs beaten up by a mermaid on a dolphin's back, I might be benefited. He decided that a gruel made from ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... which has given it its strength, makes it incapable of adjusting itself to Socialism and Trade Unionism, which are vigorously persecuted by the Government. And on the other hand Socialism and Trade Unionism cannot accept Mikado-worship and the whole farrago of myth upon which the Japanese State depends.[55] There is therefore a likelihood, some twenty or thirty years hence—assuming a peaceful and prosperous development in the meantime—of a very bitter class conflict between the proletarians ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... manifold. He might have said, with even greater truth than Juvenal, 'quidquid agunt homines, nostri est farrago libelli.' He does not go beneath the surface, but almost every aspect of the kaleidoscopic world of Rome receives his attention at one time or another. His attitude is, on the whole, satirical, though ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... he said, with a mixture of irony and contempt, 'for the interest you take in my private history. I should have thought it had been as little to the taste as it is to the honour of some of you to listen to such a farrago of lies.' ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... into his heart at last; and then his trade is ruined. A little more politics and Plato, and the natural disappears altogether from Mr. Bulwer's writings: the individual man becomes as undistinguishable amidst the farrago of philosophy in which he has chosen to envelope himself, as a cutlet in the sauces of a French cook. The idiosyncracy of the mutton perishes under the effects of the adjuncts: even so the moralising, which may be compared to the mushrooms, of Mr. Bulwer's style; the poetising, which ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... theological would seem to be the divagations of a lunatic; and the Cure Bonnet proclaims the necessity of passive obedience by the masses to the Church's rule in matters civil as well as ecclesiastic. To add spice to this farrago of absurdity, Balzac spits out his hatred of the English, albeit he is compelled to acknowledge their common sense. As he confessed to the Marquis de Custine, it was his delight to abuse England, and its inhabitants, whether ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... down to his nose. His fancy was already wandering, and began to mingle up the present scene with the crater of Vesuvius, the French Opera, the Coliseum at Rome, Dolly's Chop-house in London, and all the farrago of noted places with which the brain of a traveller is crammed; in a word, he was just ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... exclaimed: "It reads like a communication from the spirit of Nat Lee, rendered through a bedlamite medium, failing in all the ordinary laws of sense and sound, melody and prosody." It urged the commissioners to "save American letters from the humiliation of presenting to the assembled world such a farrago as this." For several weeks Lanier could not pick up a newspaper without seeing his name held up to ridicule, the Southern papers alone, out of purely sectional pride and with "no understanding of the PRINCIPLES involved," coming to his rescue. The spirit in which he received ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... the sentence; also of that prolix and cumbrous manner of expression, called le stile empese; again, of that mere waste of words which consists in pouring them out like a flood; finally, of that trick of concealing the direst poverty of thought under a farrago of never-ending chatter, which clacks away like a windmill and quite stupefies one—stuff which a man may read for hours together without getting hold of a single clearly expressed and definite idea.[1] However, people ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... farrago of this character always prefaced one of Germaine's tales, so that I hardly ever interrupted the rogue when he became fluent about social theories, but waited patiently, in confidence that I was shortly to be entertained with ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... of water, and then begged Aaron to tell her some more stories, to which she listened with her chin resting in her hand and her eyelids now and then drooping with drowsiness, despite the interest she took in the narrator's ingenious farrago of fact and ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... short, I am willing to do "anything in reason"! Only if a Portrait is to be, I confess I should rather avoid going abroad under the hands of bunglers, at least of bunglers sanctioned by myself. There is a Portrait of me in some miserable farrago called Spirit of the Age;* a farrago unknown to me, but a Portrait known, for poor Lawrence brought it down to me with sorrow in his face; it professes to be from his painting; is a "Lais without the beauty" (as Charles ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... public, could have induced us to wade through such a labyrinth of absurdity in quest of information. It is astonishing how the honest knight could have patience to translate 1019 closely printed folio pages of such a farrago; and on closing the work of the Inca for ever, we heartily joined in the concluding pious thanksgiving of the translator, Praised be God. This enormous literary production of the Inca Garcilasso, is most regularly divided and subdivided into parts, books, and chapters; which contain ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... in despair. The poor old man was mad. He had poured out the wildest farrago without ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... boiling of ideas in my mind; ideas difficult to clothe with words, and composed of I know not what farrago of occultism, mysticism, and Oriental magic; but at last I managed to simmer them ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... the block books, and works printed upon vellum. This room is connected with another, at right angles, (if I remember well) which receives the more valuable works of the fifteenth century—the number of which latter, alone, are said to amount to nearly twenty thousand. In such a farrago, there must necessarily be an abundance of trash. These, however, are how under a strict assortment, or classification; and I think that I saw not fewer than half a dozen assistants, under the direction of M. Bernhard, hard at work in the ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... stood forth in white from his feet to the crown of his silvery head. It was a magnificent coup, and he dearly loved a coup; but the magnificent speech which he made, tearing to shreds the venerable farrago of nonsense about nonproperty in ideas which had formed the basis of all copyright legislation, made you forget even ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... moments this strangely assorted trio reached the apartment in which the Sepoy had but a short time before disported himself, so to speak, with such waspish reprisal, and delivered such a farrago of ridicule and cynicism upon the defenseless head of the silent ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... need never twice speak to him; does not want explanations, translations, limitations, as Professor Godwin does when you make an assertion: up to anything, down to everything—whatever sapit hominem. A perfect man. All this farrago, which must perplex you to read, and has put me to a little trouble to select, only proves how impossible it is to describe a pleasant hand. You must see Rickman to know him, for he is a species in one. A new class. An exotic, any ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... are composed of two sounds, both beautiful—the bright pure gushing robin-like note, and the more tender expressive swallow-like note. And that is all; the song scarcely begins before it ends, or collapses; for in most cases the pure sweet opening strain is followed by a curious little farrago of gurgling and squeaking sounds, and little fragments of varied notes, often so low as to be audible only at a few yards' distance. It is curious that these slight fragments of notes at the end ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... Dow, was so totally unintelligible that the audience were continually asking each other—What is it about? What is it about?—That such nonsense should be written is not so very marvellous, as that the miserable farrago should have had a run of nine nights, which has been frequently denied to ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... slaughter. Well, not being powerful enough to throw him overboard when I realized the state of the case, I did the next best thing. I became cloyingly sweet to him. I smiled upon him: I listened to his farrago of nonsense about the chemical components of his various notable inventions, as if a girl attends a ball to study chemistry! Before half an hour had passed the infant had come to the conclusion that here ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... source of error is the vivacity of our ideas of imagination, which perpetually intrude themselves by various associations, and compose the farrago of our dreams; in which, by the suspension of volition, we are precluded from comparing the ideas of one sense with those of another, or the incongruity of their successions with the usual course of nature, and thus to detect their fallacy. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... as if at a language she had never heard, a farrago, a galimatias. Her life was made up of items, but she had never had to deal, intellectually, with a fine shade. Then while her needles, which had paused an instant, began to fly again, she rejoined: "Do you know what ...
— The Chaperon • Henry James
... So profound and friendly a thinker as the late Mr. Grote held this raising of the veil inexpedient, but he proved, by a mistake he fell into, the necessity of looking at the matter in the concrete. He acknowledged the force of Mr. Mill's argument, that "The Infinite" must include "a farrago of contradictions;" but so also, he said, does the Finite. Now undoubtedly finite things, taken distributively, have contradictory attributes, but not as a class. Still less is there any one individual thing, "The ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... description of some kind: the whining cant of love, except in real passion, and by a masterly hand, is to me as insufferable as the preaching cant of old Father Smeaton, whig-minister at Kilmaurs. Darts, flames, cupids, loves, graces, and all that farrago, are just a Mauchline * * * * a ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... psalm-singing rascal has frightened the boy, with his farrago about flames and brimstone. I'll step in and cheer him ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... a great deal too tempting a subject for romancers of any kind to have kept their hands off. If you read the apocryphal gospels you will see how eager they are to lay hold of any point in the true gospels, and spin a whole farrago of rubbish round about it. And do you think they could ever have let this incident alone without spoiling it by expanding it, and putting all manner of vulgarities into their story about it? But the men who told the story were telling simple facts, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... farrago of Chinese, so like the voice of Ah Moy, that again, though for the last time, Michael sought about the steerage ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... by a comparison of incidents and dialogue, down to the very last word he may have written a fortnight before, do your utmost to anticipate his plot—all this without his permission, and against his will; and then, to crown the whole proceeding, publish in some mean pamphlet, an unmeaning farrago of garbled extracts from his work, to which your name as author, with the honourable distinction annexed, of having perpetrated a hundred other outrages of the same description. Now, show me the distinction between such pilfering as this, and picking a man's pocket in the street: unless, ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... began to address them, if indeed it were they whom he addressed, and not some phantom audience of Princes, Marshals, Admirals, or trembling sheep-like re emits. It was difficult to hear the words, hopeless to make out the sense. It was a farrago of nonsense, part of his own inventing, part (as it seemed) wild and confused reminiscences of the published speeches of the man he aped, all strung together on some invisible thread of insane reasoning, delivered with a mad vehemence and intensity ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... you are pleased, ever so little, with this fresco, think what that pleasure means. I brought you, on purpose, round, through the richest overture, and farrago of tweedledum and tweedledee, I could find in Florence; and here is a tune of four notes, on a shepherd's pipe, played by the picture of nobody; and yet you like it! You know what music is, then. Here is another little tune, by the same player, and sweeter. I let ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... imagine myself telling such a story to the counsel for my defense. I could see the face with which he would listen to it; I could read in the lines of it his thought, that to put forward such an impudent farrago would mean merely the disappearance of any chance there might be of a commutation of ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... flourished dramatically before Bourne. There was a touching simplicity about Raffles' bill-making that would in ordinary times have made Jack split with laughter, but, naturally, at the present time he did not feel in a very jovial frame of mind. Hence he read through the farrago with only one very strong desire—to kick Raffles neck and crop out of the ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... all this farrago of nonsense there is of course no foundation of truth; Robison was a well-known savant who lived sane and respected to the end of his days. On his death Watt wrote of him: "He was a man of the clearest head and the most science ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... possible, more averse to exertion. Bob was essentially a speculative man—that is, in a philosophical sense. He had once got hold of a stray volume of Adam Smith, and muddled his brains for a whole week over the intricacies of the "Wealth of Nations." The result was a crude farrago of notions regarding the true nature of money, the soundness of currency, and relative value of capital, with which he nightly favoured an admiring audience at "The Crow"; for Bob was by no means—in the literal acceptation ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... the community who decided the fate of every literary performance, far from being contented with EFFECT upon the stage, condemned it, if it were not produced by an adequate CAUSE in nature. To that body the Farrago of Melodrame, written spectacle, and mysterious agency, would have been objects of ridicule or disapprobation, and the just influence of their opinions upon the public would have driven back the German muse with ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various |
