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Fustian

noun
1.
Pompous or pretentious talk or writing.  Synonyms: blah, bombast, claptrap, rant.
2.
A strong cotton and linen fabric with a slight nap.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Fustian" Quotes from Famous Books



... in the other,—and carrying a few small volumes in his pocket to study in spare moments in the fields. "The collection of songs" he tells us, "was my vade mecum. I pored over them driving my cart or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse, carefully noting the true, tender, sublime or fustian." He lingered over the ballads in his cold room by night; by day, whilst whistling at the plough, he invented new forms and was inspired by fresh ideas, "gathering round him the memories and the traditions of his country till they became a mantle and a ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... for ever; convince yourselves that the mighty attribute not more survives from good than evil deeds, though, like poverty, it makes its votaries acquainted with the strangest of strange bedfellows! The regal ermine and the murderer's fustian ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... the poet says that one book in particular, A Select Collection of English Songs, was his vade mecum. He pored over them, driving his cart or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse, carefully noting the true, tender, or sublime from affectation or fustian. 'I am convinced,' he adds, 'I owe to this practice much of my critic craft, ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun

... with the Thames police. It was from a walk with Leech through Chatham by-streets that he gathered the hint of Charley Hexam and his father, for Our Mutual Friend, from the sight of "the uneducated father in fustian and the educated boy ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin

... eight lines a year; He who, still wanting, though he lives on theft, Steals much, spends little, yet has nothing left: And he who, now to sense, now nonsense leaning, Means not, but blunders round about a meaning: And he, whose fustian's so sublimely bad, It is not poetry, but prose run mad: All these, my modest satire bade translate, And own'd that nine such poets made a Tate. 190 How did they fume, and stamp, and roar, and chafe! And swear, not Addison ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al

... his country of Scotland, courteous, lowly, lovely, glad to teach, desirous to learn, and was well travelled; having on him for his habit or clothing never but a mantle or frieze gown to the shoes, a black Millian [i.e. Milan] fustian doublet, and plain black hosen, coarse new canvas for his shirts, and white falling bands and cuffs at his hands,—all the which apparel he gave to the poor, some weekly, some monthly, some quarterly, as he liked, saving his French cap, which ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell

... glass cases beneath. About the room were placed long tables, with stands for reading and writing, and around these were a number of men busily engaged in looking over some chosen author. Old men with grey hairs, young men with mustaches—some in cloth, others in fustian, indicating that men of different rank can meet here. Not a single word was spoken during my stay, all appearing to enjoy the silence that reigned throughout the great room. This is indeed a retreat from the world. No one inquires who the man is who is at his side, and ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown

... wardrobe of both sexes, and cotton has taken their place. Shirts are made of bleached or coloured cotton goods; the dresses of the women are chiefly of cotton print goods, and woollen petticoats are rarely to be seen on the washline. The men wear chiefly trousers of fustian or other heavy cotton goods, and jackets or coats of the same. Fustian has become the proverbial costume of the working-men, who are called "fustian jackets," and call themselves so in contrast to the gentlemen who wear broadcloth, which latter words are used as ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels

... dressed—just an old flannel shirt and a pair of fustian trousers, while his head was covered by one of the regular, broad-brimmed, flop felt hats so common amongst Englishmen ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn

... not realize the extent of his misfortune. How could he? Fate is always expected to deal its great blows in the grand manner. But our expectations are fustian spangled with pinchbeck; we look for tragedy to be theatrical. Meanwhile, every day before our eyes, fate works on, employing for its instruments the infinitesimal, the ignoble and the ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington

... day's work at the rate of pay to able-bodied men:—which he is not, but the deception is not disingenuous. The contrast flashed with the rapid exchange of two prizefighters in a ring, very popularly. The fustian suit and string below the knee, on the one side, and the purple plush breeches and twinkling airy calves (fascinating his attention as he makes his humble request to his own, these domestic knights) to right and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... and Friar Bungay" is characterized by Knight as "the old story of the Brazen Head. There is here, unquestionably, more facility in the versification, much less of what we may distinguish by the name of fustian, and some approach to simplicity and even playfulness. But whenever Greene gets hold of a king, he invariably makes him talk in the right royal style which we have already seen; and our Henry III. does not condescend to discourse in a bit more simple English ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith

... clothes, and other furnishings, for seamen, by Maydman, in 1691. In Chaucer's time, sloppe meant a sort of breeches. In a MS. account of the wardrobe of Queen Elizabeth, is an order to John Fortescue for the delivery of some Naples fustian for "Sloppe for ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... pretty ready with the tongue, and rarely came off second best when his opponents dragged him into a controversy, although his arguments were called by them, when he was not present, "mere fustian." ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur

... part of the public, but was constantly compelled to dominate a multitude that never heard any sound short of thunder and never felt anything till it was hit with a club. The bulk of Forrest's great fortune was gained by him with Metamora, which is rant and fustian. He himself despised it and deeply despised and energetically cursed the public that forced him to act in it. Forrest's best powers, indeed, were never really appreciated by the average mind of his fervent admirers. He lived ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter

... collar of his doublet just over the fore-part of the left shoulder was quit broken asunder, cloth and stiffening, streight downwards, as if cut or chop'd asunder, but with a Blunt tool; only the inward linnen or fustian lineing of it was whole, by which, and by the view of the ragged Edges, it seem'd manifest to me, that it was by the stroak inward (from without) not ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various

... philosophic freedom, as they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning amongst them was brought; that this was it which had damped the glory of Italian wits; that nothing had been there written now these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought. And ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton

... Fustian and taffeta were less costly, but frequently used in important work, as also were sarcenet and camora. Velvet and satin were of later date, not occurring until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Baudekin, a good silk and golden weave, ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison

... came from Hertfordshire 12 months ago, and I met with a man in a fustian jacket, who asked me to go with him to Buckingham House. I went, and have been there ever since. I got my victuals in the kitchen, and I thought myself very well off, because I came to London to ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton

... You must not think that he is a navvy in fustian and corduroys. He seems a sensible man: his address is really remarkably good, considering what he is. As to his being savage, he is quite the reverse. His head is full of figures and machinery; and I am told that he does nothing at home but play the piano. He must bore Marian terribly. ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw

... time away from morning till night, living in an atmosphere that for months had been vitiated by the germs arising from the half-crazed mob. He read the newspapers and was an assiduous frequenter of public meetings, where he would often smile and shrug his shoulders at the rant and fustian of the speakers, but nevertheless would go away with the most ultra notions teeming in his brain, ready to engage in any desperate undertaking in the defense of what he considered truth and justice. ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... add, there is no touch of sentimentality. No man could be less the romantic, blubbering over the sorrows of his own Werthers. No novelist could have smaller likeness to the brummagem emotion-squeezers of the Kipling type, with their playhouse fustian and their naive ethical cocksureness. The thing that sets off Conrad from these facile fellows, and from the shallow pseudo-realists who so often coalesce with them and become indistinguishable from them, is precisely his quality of irony, and that ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken

... renomination,—though Tilden decrepit was incomparably stronger than Hancock "the superb." It was hard work enthusing over "Hancock and Hooray" after "Tilden and Reform;" the latter cry had substance, the former was just fustian. ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy

... cooled already at the medical examination, where, to my horrible embarrassment, I was made to strip stark naked, and was inspected by an elderly gentleman in a pince-nez, with half a dozen uninterested people looking on, amongst them two or three louts in fustian who were awaiting their turn. I was put into a variety of postures, all of which I felt to be ridiculous and humiliating; and when this ordeal was over there came the swearing-in and a visit to the depot canteen, where I received payment of a sum of ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray

... acknowledge the pathetic beauty of many of the songs. It is a matter for regret, as well as for some surprise, that Bellini's works should now be entirely banished from the Covent Garden repertory, while so many inferior operas are still retained. In an age of fustian and balderdash, Bellini stood apart, a tender and pathetic figure, with no pretensions to science, but gifted with a command of melody as copious, unaffected, and sincere as has ever fallen to the lot of a composer ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild

... possesseth acres, But the landscape I; Half the charms to me it yieldeth, Money cannot buy. Cleon harbors sloth and dullness, Freshening vigor I; He in velvet, I in fustian, Richer man am I. ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various

... ordinary rate of speech In loftiness of sound was rich; A Babylonish dialect, Which learned pedants much affect; It was a parti-color'd dress Of patch'd and piebald languages: 'Twas English cut on Greek and Latin, Like fustian heretofore on satin. It had an odd promiscuous tone, As if h' had talk'd three parts in one; Which made some think, when he did gabble, Th' had heard three laborers of Babel; Or Cerberus himself pronounce ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... Mr. Brooke have great merit, he needs not all this sound of trumpets; if he have it not, he is only rendered the more contemptible by it. I have some of the play-bills of John Kemble's last performances before me, and there is none of this fustian: the fact, the performance, and the name are simply announced. If our taste improves in some respects, it does not in this; it is a retrogression—a royal theatre sinking back into the booth of a fair. Shakspeare's ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various

... what prodigious scarcity of wit Did the new authors starve the hungry pit! Infected by the French, you must have rhyme, Which long to please the ladies' ears did chime. Soon after this came ranting fustian in, And none but plays upon the fret were seen, Such daring bombast stuff which fops would praise, Tore our best actors' lungs, cut short their days. Some in small time did this distemper kill; And had the savage authors gone on ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... apparelled in samite and scarlet silk, with mantles of ermine and vair; then the weavers richly bedight, and the ten master tailors in white with crimson stars. Then the master clothworkers passed, carrying boughs of olive and wearing crowns of olive on their heads; then the fustian makers in furred robes of their own weaving, and the quilt makers with garlands of gilt beads and white cloaks sewn with fleurs-de-lis, marching two by two, with little children singing chansonettes and cobles before them. Then came the makers of cloth ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power

... dusty death. Other hours she spent with Mr. Charles Stagg in the long room downstairs, or, when Mistress Stagg had customers, in the theatre itself. As in the branded schoolmaster chance had given her a teacher skilled in imparting knowledge, so in this small and pompous man, who beneath a garb of fustian hugged to himself a genuine reverence and understanding of his art, she found an instructor more able, perhaps, than had been a greater actor. In the chill and empty playhouse, upon the narrow stage where, ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston

... blunder, muddle, bull; Irishism^, Hibernicism^; slipslop^; anticlimax, bathos; sophism &c 477. farce, galimathias^, amphigouri^, rhapsody; farrago &c (disorder) 59; betise [Fr.]; extravagance, romance; sciamachy^. sell, pun, verbal quibble, macaronic^. jargon, fustian, twaddle, gibberish &c (no meaning) 517; exaggeration &c 549; moonshine, stuff; mare's nest, quibble, self- delusion. vagary, tomfoolery, poppycock, mummery, monkey trick, boutade [Fr.], escapade. V. play the fool &c 499; talk nonsense, parler a tort et a travess [Fr.]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... fully two hours to reach their destination. And two hours on a raw drizzly November morning is quite a long enough time to spend in a third-class carriage, shivering if the windows are down, and suffering on the other hand from the odours of damp fustian and bad tobacco if ...
— Great Uncle Hoot-Toot • Mrs. Molesworth

... that we have no use for the distorted and mystical figure that they present as Christ, a conservative member of the Property Defence League, a thing neither man nor woman, but a third sex—not understood of us except as a rightful object of suspicion; we have no use for this rant, cant and fustian of his holiness and immaculate qualities. That presentation has always been repellent to us and always will be, no matter how much he may be proclaimed as the friend of the workingman.... Christ, the democrat, the agitator, the revolutionary, the rebel, the bearer of the ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto

... I as lazy as a Turk; but while I am constitutionally and habitually opposed to labor, I swear I should prefer to plough or break stones till sundown, sooner than listen to all the rant and fustian that spectators will be called on to endure this morning. I have not sufficient courage to remain and witness what would certainly recall 'the manner of Bombastes Furioso making love to Distaffina!' Will you have a ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans

... great-coats. Perhaps it was the cold that made his knees tremble as he got down at the lodge-gate, or it may be that he was agitated at the notion of seeing the kind creature for whose love he had made so selfish a return. Old John was in waiting to receive his master's baggage, but he appeared in a fustian jacket, and no longer wore his livery of drab and blue. "I'se garner and stable man, and lives in the ladge now," this worthy man remarked, with a grin of welcome to Pen, and something of a blush; but instantly as Pen turned the corner of the shrubbery and was out of eye-shot ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... is a strange mixture of fustian and maudlin in all these things," answered De Montaigne; "but they are but the windfalls of trees that may bear rich fruit in due season; meanwhile, any new school is better than eternal imitations of the old. As for critical vindications of ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... cold window panes and raised sash tilted a trifle towards the remote heavens. I bent my head, and entered by the open door. Near the threshold Nilushka was lying on a narrow chest against the wall. The folds of a dark-red pillow of fustian under the head set off to perfection the pale blue tint of his round, innocent face under its corona of golden curls; and though the eyes were closed, and the lips pressed tightly together, he still seemed to be smiling ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky

... she was bound, and after she was moored and everything made trim, running gear coiled round the belaying pins, every bight being regular and equal, sails stowed in a cloth, and yards laid perfectly square, the sailors then proceeded to arrange themselves in spotless white fustian trousers and blue jerseys adorned in front with their names or initials worked in red or white worsted. The latter article of apparel was usually knit by their wives if they were married, or their intended wives if they were not, and in either case there ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman

... play together in Consort. He has a particular Squeak to denote the Violation of each of the Unities, and has different Sounds to shew whether he aims at the Poet or the Player. In short he teaches the Smut-note, the Fustian-note, the Stupid-note, and has composed a kind of Air that may serve as an Act-tune to an incorrigible Play, and which takes in the whole ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... pit-head when the engine-man shouted that he had just heard the master's knock from below, and in another moment Hugh Ritson, in flannels and fustian, ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine

... a society of natural philosophers, Quakers, and I do not know who besides. Being tempted to become one of their members, he is elected, and in order to ridicule these would-be philosophers, but real knaves, a fine flowery fustian speech is put into his mouth, which he delivers with prodigious pomp and importance, and is listened to by the philosophers with infinite complacency. The two scenes of the Quakers and philosophers, who, with countenances full of imaginary importance, were seated at a green table with their ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz

... impression produced by the novels of Flaubert is that of solidity. This is particularly the case with his historical books. The bric-a-brac and fustian of the Romantics has disappeared, to be replaced by a clear, detailed, profound presentment of the life of the past. In Salammbo, ancient Carthage rises up before us, no crazy vision of a picturesque and disordered ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey

... preceding this, but he had not prepared for coursing fields, and had left Charlie Purdie's troop for Sir Walter's on a sudden thought; and his fisherman's costume—a brown hat with flexible brim, surrounded with line upon line, and innumerable fly-hooks, jack-boots worthy of a Dutch smuggler, and a fustian surtout dabbled with the blood of salmon,—made a fine contrast with the smart jackets, white cord breeches, and well-polished jockey-boots of the less distinguished cavaliers about him. Dr. Wollaston was in black, and, with his noble, serene dignity of ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton

... pompously up and down and delivering commands to this and that and the other constable or jailer, and calling them Grand Chamberlain, and Prince This and Prince That, and Admiral of the Fleet, Field Marshal in Command, and all such fustian, and was as happy as a bird. He ...
— The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain

... During recess he learned from Yozhov that Smolin, too, was rich, being the son of a tan-yard proprietor, and that Yozhov himself was the son of a guard at the Court of Exchequer, and very poor. The last was clearly evident by the adroit boy's costume, made of gray fustian and adorned with patches on the knees and elbows; by his pale, hungry-looking face; and, by his small, angular and bony figure. This boy spoke in a metallic alto, elucidating his words with grimaces and gesticulations, and he often used ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky

... translator of the tinsel song, To whom such glittering ornaments belong, Hibernian STRANGFORD! with thine eyes of blue, [41] And boasted locks of red or auburn hue, Whose plaintive strain each love-sick Miss admires, And o'er harmonious fustian half expires, [xxi] 300 Learn, if thou canst, to yield thine author's sense, Nor vend thy sonnets on a false pretence. Think'st thou to gain thy verse a higher place, By dressing Camoens [42] in a suit ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron

... which he enjoyed greatly, and which is really excellent. All these preparations ended, I put on him light flannel or cashmere slippers, white silk stockings, the only kind he ever wore, and very fine linen or fustian drawers, sometimes knee-breeches of white cassimere, with soft riding-boots, sometimes pantaloons of the same stuff and color, with little English half-boots which came to the middle of the leg, and were finished with small silver spurs which were never more than six lines in length. All his, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... have seemed frightful in the condition she was in, for all the dress she had on was a scanty old petticoat, with a night jacket of plain fustian, and turned back at the top of her head a yellow cap, which let her hair fall in disorder on her shoulders; and yet dressed even thus she shone with a thousand attractions, and all her person was ...
— The Impostures of Scapin • Moliere

... replied Colonel Everard; "I know verses written by a friend of the Commonwealth, and those, too, of a dramatic character, which, weighed in an impartial scale, might equal even the poetry of Shakspeare, and which are free from the fustian and indelicacy with which that great bard was sometimes content to feed the coarse appetites of his ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... O.'s, cotton-India dimity, cotton jump stripe, linen filled with tow, cotton striped with silk, Roman M., Janes twilled, huccabac, broadcloth, counterpain, birdseye diaper, Kirsey wool, barragon, fustian, ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford

... another article, rather curious than decisive of any point of history. One entry is thus; "To the lady Brygitt, oon of the daughters of K. Edward ivth, being seeke (sick) in the said wardrobe for to have for her use two long pillows of fustian stuffed with downe, and two pillow beres of Holland cloth." The only conjecture that can be formed from this passage is, that the lady Bridget, being lodged in the great wardrobe, was not ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole

... the evidence of her own senses. She began to fear in good earnest that love had produced a disorder in her lover's understanding; but after a thousand conjectures by which she attempted to account for this extraordinary fustian of style, she concluded that it was the effect of mere levity, calculated to ridicule the passion he had formerly professed. Irritated by this supposition, she resolved to balk his triumph with affected indifference, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... stop, between myself and the waggons. He was quite young, probably not more than one or two and twenty, tall and well-built, although he walked with a slouching gait. He wore corduroy trousers fastened round the waist by a narrow strap, and a blue shirt, with an unbuttoned jacket of fustian. On his head was a limp-brimmed, dirty, drab felt hat, and in his left hand he carried a red handkerchief, which apparently contained all his possessions, and in his right a stout stick which had been obviously cut from ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various

... senses. Bits of veritable Shakspearean gold, burnished star-bright, embossed in pewter! Diamonds set in dirt! Sentences illuminated with words of power, suddenly rising and sinking, through a flare of fustian! Here ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various

... Dragon in Babylon, under King Belshazzar. Yet Gaster had the manners to own that he was no god, but a poor, vile, wretched creature. And as King Antigonus, first of the name, when one Hermodotus (as poets will flatter, especially princes) in some of his fustian dubbed him a god, and made the sun adopt him for his son, said to him: My lasanophore (or, in plain English, my groom of the close-stool) can give thee the lie; so Master Gaster very civilly used to send back his bigoted worshippers to his close-stool, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... Chapter of Longinus will find, that 'tis impossible for a Tory to succeed in Eloquence, and that if they cannot impose so far on Men's Understandings, as to make Fustian pass for Oratory, their Project of an Academy, will be as Chimerical as if they shou'd flatter us with a Trade and Settlements in the Moon. The Reader will not be displeas'd, to see what the Ancients thought of the Capacity of Men ...
— Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter to Harley (1712) and The British Academy (1712) • John Oldmixon

... of fustian in it. There's sure to be," she said. "I don't think anything could be really good that was produced with so little pain. I daresay I'll be for tearing it up, so you'd better lock it away. Do you feel equal to walking ten miles? If not, get your bicycle ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan

... April! all in green, Say, Robin April! hast thou seen In all thy travel round the earth Ever a morn of calmer birth? But Morning's eye alone serene Can gaze across yon village-green To where the trooping British run Through Lexington. Good men in fustian, stand ye still; The men in red come o'er the hill, Lay down your arms, damned rebels! cry The men in red full haughtily. But never a grounding gun is heard; The men in fustian stand unstirred; Dead calm, save maybe a wise ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)

... interrogatory, it occurred to me that I might caulk the hole with a rag from my jacket. It was fustian, and would answer admirably. ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid

... heart of a female, unimproved by reason, and untinctured with natural good sense, should flutter at the sight of such a gaudy thing, among the number of her admirers: this impression is enforced by fustian compliments, which her own vanity interprets in a literal sense, and still more confirmed by the assiduous attention of the gallant, who, indeed, has nothing else to mind. A Frenchman in consequence of his mingling with ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett

... into the common room, found a seat by the fireplace, and let my eye wander over the company. There were present some half dozen yokels, the vicar's curate, a country blood or two, and a little withered runt of a man in fustian with a weazened face like a wrinkled pippin. The moment I clapped eyes on him there came to my mind the dim recollection of a former acquaintance and the prescient fear of an impending danger. That I had seen him I was ready to take oath, yet I could not put my finger upon the circumstances. ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine

... no more than a stutter. He was an extremely little man, dressed in the Sunday garb of a civilian—fustian breeches, moleskin waistcoat, and a frock of blue broadcloth, very shiny at the seams. His hat had fallen off in the struggle, and his eyes, timorous as a hare's, seemed to plead for mercy while ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... strains, from hard-bound brains, eight lines a year; 180 He, who still wanting, tho' he lives on theft, Steals much, spends little, yet has nothing left: And He, who now to sense, now nonsense leaning, Means not, but blunders round about a meaning: And He, whose fustian's so sublimely bad, 185 It is not Poetry, but prose run mad: All these, my modest Satire bade translate, And own'd that nine such Poets made a Tate. How did they fume, and stamp, and roar, and chafe! And swear, not ADDISON himself ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope

... she saw Will standing at the corner of the Cribserth, just where the rocky rampart edged the hillside. She turned at once and slowly retraced her footsteps, Will coming to meet her with more speedy progress. He had changed his clothes, and in his work-a-day fustian looked far better than he had in the black cloth suit which he ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine

... garment of gold skins } and fustian, of Naples black, } and sleeved with red, green, } yellow, ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various

... meblaro. Furniture (piece of) meblo. Furrier felisto. Furrow (wrinkle) sulko. Furrow tersulko. Further plie. Further plimalproksima. Fury furiozo. Fury (mythol.) furio. Fuse fandi. Fusilade pafado. Fusion fandigxo. Fustian fusteno. Futile vana. Future ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... the word, when a brawny Porter in a fustian jacket, with his knot slung across his shoulder, manifested dislike to the manner in which the Irish jontleman ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... were three battles of men. In black with red hats, horns branching above them and in the centre a great devil with a triple tiara, who danced holding up an enormous key. These stood on the right. On the left were priests in fustian, holding enormous flagons of Rhenish wine and dancing in a drunken measure with their arms round more drunken doxies dressed like German women. In the centre stood grave and reverend men wearing horsehair beards and the long gowns of English bishops ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford

... want it. Our taste differs so much from that of the time which admired Home's "Douglas," and "The Regicide" was so often altered to meet objections, that we can scarcely criticise it. Of course it is absolutely unhistorical; of course it is empty of character, and replete with fustian, and ineffably tedious; but perhaps it is not much worse than other luckier tragedies of the age. Naturally a lover calls his wounded lady "the ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang

... fustian invocations, Captain, will serve as well as the best, so you rant them out well; or you may go to a Pothecaries shop, and take all the words from ...
— The Puritain Widow • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]

... room on the ground floor of DREISSIGER'S house at Peterswaldau, where the weavers deliver their finished webs and the fustian is stored. To the left are uncurtained windows, in the back mall there is a glass door, and to the right another glass door, through which weavers, male and female, and children, are passing in and out. All three walls are lined with shelves for the storing of the fustian. ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann

... sound of trumpets, came marching up Cheapside two thousand of the watch, in white fustian, with the City badge; and seven hundred cressett bearers, eache with his fellow to supplie him with oyl, and making, with theire flaring lights, the night as cleare as daye. After 'em, the morris-dancers and City waites; the Lord Mayor ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... As for Keats, he was born a Greek, it has been said; but had he been born with a knowledge of Greek, he never, probably, would have been guilty of his chief literary faults. This is not certain, for some modern men of letters deeply read in Greek have all the qualities of fustian and effusiveness which Longinus most despised. Greek will not make a luxuriously Asiatic mind Hellenic, it is certain; but it may, at least, help to restrain effusive and rhetorical gabble. Our Asiatic rhetoricians might perhaps ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang

... Malmsbury; we know much evil of him, and we could expose many of his tricks effectually. We also hate Dean Swift, and upon what we think substantial arguments. Some of our own contemporaries we hate particularly; Cobbett, for instance, and other bad fellows in fustian and corduroys. But for that very reason we will not write their lives. Or, if we should do so, only because they might happen to stand as individuals in a series, and after warning the reader of our own bias. For it is too odious ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... for several months to have cherished the secret purpose of enlisting in the American army, and with that view laid aside a small sum from her scanty earnings as a school-teacher, with which she purchased a quantity of coarse fustian; out of this material, working at intervals and by stealth, she made a complete suit of men's clothes, concealing in a hay-stack each article as it ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler

... been built in, sloping upwards to the tops of the walls. Above, instead of a ceiling, a great flight of crows passed slowly across a square of grey cloud. Right up to the topmost benches the folk were banked—broadcloth in front, corduroys and fustian behind; faces turned everywhere upon him. The grey reek of the pipes filled the building, and the air was pungent with the acrid smell of cheap, strong tobacco. Everywhere among the human faces were to be seen the heads of the dogs. ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle

... an ear was Dairyman Jinks, an old gnarled character who wore a white fustian coat and yellow leggings; the only man in the room who never dressed up in dark clothes for marketing. He now asked, 'Married abroad, was they? And how long will a wedding abroad stand ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy

... actual, modern, a thing in the very heart of the very life in which she moved. And here he sat, this Jadwin, quiet, in evening dress, listening good-naturedly to this beautiful music, for which he did not care, to this rant and fustian, watching quietly all this posing and attitudinising. How small and petty it must ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris

... declaring that he had only climbed the tree to "have a look at Master Darwin's pigeons," and had not picked so much as a leaf, let alone a walnut; and the gardener, "shaking the truth out of him" by the collar of his fustian jacket, was preaching loudly on the sin of adding falsehood to theft, when the parson's daughter came up, and, in the end, acquitted poor Jack, and gave him leave to amuse himself as ...
— Jackanapes, Daddy Darwin's Dovecot and Other Stories • Juliana Horatio Ewing

... master to put on an old fustian shooting jacket, which he took down from a peg in the passage; and Squeers, arming himself with his cane, led the way across a yard to a door in the ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... of imaginative pathos, alike pervaded by her bubbling humour; on the other hand there are moments, if rare, when in an ill-considered attempt to assume the buskin tread she reveals in her paste-board fustian somewhat of the unregeneracy of the plebian trull. The time may yet come when Randolph's reputation, based upon his other works—the Jealous Lovers, a Plautine comedy, clever, but preposterous in more ways than one, the Muses' Looking Glass, a perfectly ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg

... woman-child born into this world were trained to be a lady, and every man-child a gentleman! But then I do not use those much-abused words by way of distinguishing people who wear fine clothes, and live in fine houses, and talk aristocratic slang, from those who go about in fustian, and live in back slums, and talk gutter slang. Some inborn plebeian blindness, in fact, prevents me from understanding what advantage the former have over the latter. I have never even been able to understand why pigeon-shooting at Hurlingham should be refined and polite, while a rat-killing ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley

... beef before me, smoking like Vesuvius, and twice as large; a plateful (the plate was pewter,—is there not a metal so called?) of this mingled flame and lava sent under my very nostril, and upon pain of ill-breeding to be despatched down my proper mouth; an old gentleman in fustian breeches and worsted stockings, by way of a butler, filling me a can of ale, and your worthy brother asking me if I would not prefer port; a lean footman in livery,—such a livery, ye gods!—scarlet, blue, yellow, and ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... To be the great original For man to dress and polish his uncourtly mind, In what mock habits have they put her since the fall! More oft in fools' and madmen's hands than sages', She seems a medley of all ages, With a huge farthingale to swell her fustian stuff, A new commode, a topknot, and a ruff, Her face patch'd o'er with modern pedantry, With a long sweeping train Of comments and disputes, ridiculous and vain, All of old cut with a new dye: How soon have you restored her ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... in the world, and with such a stretch of power as will be equal to every thing but absolute despotism over the king and kingdom. A few days will show whether he will take his part, or that of continuing on his bank at Hayes, (his country-seat,) talking fustian, excluded from all ministerial, and incapable of all parliamentary service; for his gout is worse than ever, but his pride may disable him more than ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various

... as little a gainer by the revolution as morals. The pieces which were best calculated to form and refine the minds of the people, all abound with maxims of loyalty, with respect for religion, and the subordinations of civil society. These are all prohibited; and are replaced by fustian declamations, tending to promote anarchy and discord —by vulgar and immoral farces, and insidious and flattering panegyrics on the vices of low life. No drama can succeed that is not supported by the faction; and this support ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady

... Ramsay's works, formed the staple of their reading. Above all there was a collection of songs, of which Burns says, "This was my vade mecum. I pored over them driving my cart, or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse; carefully noting the true tender or sublime, from affectation and fustian, I am convinced I owe to this practice much of my critic-craft, such as it is!" And he could not have learnt it ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp

... true manliness. Velvet robes and gilded coronets go for nothing with him, if not worn by muscular integrity; and fustian is cloth-of-gold, in his eyes, when it covers a stout heart in the right place. He has no mercy on snobbism, flunkeyism, or dandyism. He whips smartly the ignoble-noble fops of the household-troops,—parading ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various

... forward into the cottage,—a tall, strong, bright-eyed man, of fifty. His long, massive features were embrowned by habitual exposure to the weather, and he wore the mud-stained fustian dress of a quarryman. He was followed by a healthy lad, about twelve years of age,—a kind of pocket-copy of himself. They were as like one another as a new shilling and an old crown-piece. The lad's dress was of the same kind as his father's, and he seemed to have studiously acquired the same ...
— Th' Barrel Organ • Edwin Waugh

... made for somebody else, I should say for a man, and pieces of the legs had been cut off, and the upper part came well over his back and chest. He had no waistcoat, but he wore a jacket that must have belonged to a man. It was a jacket that was fustian behind, and had fustian sleeves, but the front was of purple plush with red and yellow flowers, softened down with dirt; and the sleeves of this jacket were tucked up very high, while the bottom came down to ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn

... common grievances, and prayed the governor that the gold licence be reduced to thirty shillings a month. There was further a great waste of yabber-yabber about the diggers not being represented in the Legislative Council, and a deal of fustian was spun against the squatters. I understood very little of those matters at the time: the shoe had not pinched ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello

... budding forth, brother, lilac our cot embowers, And the meadows soon shall be a-scent with the snowy hawthorn flowers; But a bonnier sight shall be the tramping crowds in fustian grey, Flushed with the Promise o' May, brother, the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, May 3, 1890. • Various

... disappointment followed the reply. Then, after a pause, 'Is the assistant within?' This was followed by a heavy tread in the passage and, next moment; an enormous man, in very ragged fustian, with a bronzed hairy face, and a reaping-hook under his arm, stood in the surgery, his head almost touching ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne

... the fact that it was not a black coat nor a dark garment of any sort that he wore, there was something about him which suggested that he naturally belonged to the black-coated tribes of men. His clothes were of fustian and his boots hobnailed, yet in his progress he showed not the mud-accustomed bearing ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various

... letter for you." So saying, the woman pulled up her dirty apron, then her gown, and at last arrived at a queer fustian pocket, out of which she produced the missive, which had been jumbled in company with a bit of wax, a ball of blue worsted, some halfpence, a copper thimble, and a lump of Turkey rhubarb, from all of which companions it had received a variety ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat

... assures me he has not, but he is sunk very low, drinks hard to drown his sorrow, and is ashamed to be seen. No wonder. You'd scarce know 'im, Phil, workin' like a coal-heaver, in a suit of dirty fustian, about the wharves—tryin' to keep out of sight. I've come across 'im once or twice, but pretended not to recognise 'im. Now, Phil," added little Pax, with deep earnestness in his face, as he laid his hand impressively on his friend's arm, ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne

... is countless: cloth, as fine as a spider's web, and coarse fustian, here finest batiste, and there, strong drill for overalls. Each finished article requires its own particular raw material, low qualities cannot produce fine goods, and it is also impossible to utilise ...
— Bremen Cotton Exchange - 1872/1922 • Andreas Wilhelm Cramer

... upon me, I never punished thee at all, as many another queen might do, but took pity on thy desolation and forgave and overlooked all thy insolence, without being in the very least deceived by thy fustian beginning, which I easily discerned to be a ruse, to enable thee perhaps to steal back into my favour, all founded on a misinterpretation of the woman that I am. For had I really been what people say, and ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain

... the frontmost German defenses. I knew that stretching away to the southeast of us and to the northwest was a line some two hundred miles long, measuring it from tip to tip, where sundry millions of men in English khaki and French fustian and German shoddy- wools were fighting the biggest fight and the most prolonged fight and the most stubborn fight that historians probably will write down as having been fought in this war or any lesser war. I knew this fight had been going on for weeks ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... to be despised than to deceive so good a commander with so slight, so drunken, and so indiscreet an officer. Drunk? and speak parrot? and squabble? swagger? swear? and discourse fustian with one's own shadow? O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... wrought in my spirit an inevitable revulsion. My soul acquired tone—acquired temper. I went abroad. I took vigorous exercise. I breathed the free air of Heaven. I thought upon other subjects than Death. I discarded my medical books. "Buchan" I burned. I read no "Night Thoughts"—no fustian about churchyards—no bugaboo tales—such as this. In short, I became a new man, and lived a man's life. From that memorable night, I dismissed forever my charnel apprehensions, and with them vanished the cataleptic disorder, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... woman's labour tends to fall below man's, although in some cases superior deftness or lightness of hand related to physical fragility may compensate. Even in modern textile factories the superior force of man's muscles often gives him a great advantage. In fustian and velvet cutting, where the same piece-wages are paid to men and women, the actual takings of the men are about double. "Every person has two long frames upon which the cloth is stretched ready for cutting, and while ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson



Words linked to "Fustian" :   ornateness, rhetoric, rant, textile, bombast, magniloquence, claptrap, material, grandiosity, cloth, grandiloquence, fabric



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