"Gimcrack" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that no body will deny this play its due applause; at least I know, says he, that the university of Oxford, who may be allowed competent judges of comedy, especially such characters as Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, and Sir Formal Trifle, applauded it. And as no man ever undertook to discover the frailties of such pretenders to this kind of knowledge before Mr. Shadwell, so none since Johnson's time, ever drew so many different characters of humour, and with ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... number of pieces of apparatus of a generally useless kind which he had ordered on the strength of their much advertising, and he observed sententiously, "We armatures get badly imposed upon." Here were patent gimcrack printing devices, although he had scarce anything worth printing; all sorts of atrocious fancy borders with which he sought in vain to embellish out-of-focus under-exposures; orthochromatic filters and colour screens with which ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... her a good deal; for they were poor, living in a poor way, their only sitting-room where they took their meals being small and musty and mean-looking, with its rickety chairs and sofa covered with cheap washed-out cretonne, its faded carpet and vulgar little gimcrack ornaments on the mantelpiece. And this friend gave one the idea that her husband had fallen from a somewhat better position in life than he was now in. There was an intangible something about him which showed him to be one of those favoured children ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... the stern was a vague mass which proved to be a few yards of canvas carefully tented on the floor. Some gimcrack belonging to the ship's ornamentation had been freshly gilded and left to dry, protected by an old sail-cloth. This, weighted down by a rusty marlinespike, spread couchwise along the taffrail, and offered to Jim just the ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... time a secret agent of Mary's—for murdering the Queen. Babington then confided the scheme to some other Catholic gentlemen who were his friends, and they joined in it heartily. They were vain, weak-headed young men, ridiculously confident, and preposterously proud of their plan; for they got a gimcrack painting made, of the six choice spirits who were to murder Elizabeth, with Babington in an attitude for the centre figure. Two of their number, however, one of whom was a priest, kept Elizabeth's wisest minister, SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM, acquainted ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... Roman architecture. Broad, ponderous, substantial, tufted here and there with flowering weeds, and surmounted with mediaeval machicolations, proving it to have sometimes stood for city gate or fortress, it contrasts most favourably with the slight and somewhat gimcrack arch of Trajan in the sister city of Ancona. Yet these remains of the imperial pontifices, mighty and interesting as they are, sink into comparative insignificance beside the one great wonder of Rimini, the cathedral ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... way," and Dotty smiled good-naturedly at her chum, "but here's my decision. That thing is lost. Somehow or other, for some ridiculous reason, blame seems to be attached to my Dollyrinda. I won't stand it! I hereby announce that I'm going to find that missing gimcrack before I go back to my native heath,—if I ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... eleven, a motor arrived in charge of an army driver, and Bridget set out. They were to pick up Vincent in the town of X—— itself and run on to the Camp. The sun was out by this time, and all the seaside village, with its gimcrack hotels and villas flung pell-mell upon the sand, and among the pines, was sparkling under it. So were the withered woods, where the dead leaves were flying before the wind, the old town where Napoleon gathered his legions for the attack on England, and the wide sandy ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... worth having next door to that lodging-house. Drat the woman, if she must peck, why don't she go in the churchyard and peck her own grave; which we shall never be quiet till she is there. And these here gimcrack houses, they won't stand no more pecking at than a soap-sud. Ay, that's what hurts me, Mr. Penfold. The Lord had given him and me health and strength and honesty; our betters had wed for love and wrought for money, as the saying is; but I must go again Nature, that cried 'Come couple'; ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... It has but two objects of interest (in Persian eyes)—the lighthouse (occasionally lit) and a palace of the Shah, built a few years since as a pied-a-terre for his Majesty on the occasion of his visits to Europe. It is a tawdry gimcrack edifice, painted bright blue, red, and green, in the worst possible taste. The Shah, on returning from Europe last time, is said to have remarked to his ministers on landing at Enzelli, "I have not seen a single building in ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... like a page out of the Misses' Home Guide" said Polly Stevens. "You ought to have this table photographed, it would take the first prize! But where are we going to eat? Surely you don't expect us to sit down at this Louis XlV. gimcrack?" ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... had just, in the course of the day, taken the odds in one little bet; and he had just happened to win. When his wife charged him with the crime, he was about to avow it. "But no," he thought; "it will be a surprise for her. I will buy her the necklace she scolded me about at Lacy and Gimcrack's; it's just the sum. She has been sulky all day. It's about that she is sulky now. I'll go and have another shy at the sticks." And he went away, delighting himself with this notion, and with the idea that at last he could satisfy ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... the glory of my whole lifetime is to be trampled into nothingness for lack of what others spend upon one dress? Yes, of my whole lifetime! My whole lifetime! Give me but what another will spend upon one foolish gimcrack that he never looks at again, and I will live for a whole lifetime! And I will write such ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... head, and 'twill appear a foot-ball full of fumes and rotten smoke. Lady, I pity you; you are a handsome and a sweet young Lady, and ought to have a handsom man yok'd t'ye, an understanding too; this is a Gimcrack, that can get nothing but new fashions on you; for say he have a thing shap'd like a child, 'twill either prove ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher - Vol. 2 of 10: Introduction to The Elder Brother • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher |
