"Meretricious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the one accepted an idle knighthood, and the other became a baron of the empire. The great men who went to their graves as Michael Faraday and George Grote seem to me to have understood the dignity of knowledge better when they declined all such meretricious trappings. [(On the other hand, he thought it right and proper for officials, in scientific as in other departments, to accept such honours, as giving them official power and status. In his own case, while refusing all simple titular honours, he accepted the Privy Councillorship, because, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... rare comfort to the Eubanks ladies that Eustace was a bass instead of a tenor. They had observed that most tenor songs are of a suggestive and meretricious character. Arthur Updyke, for example, who clerked in the city drug store, was a tenor, and nearly all of his songs were distressingly sentimental; indeed, fairly indelicate at times in their lack of reserve about kisses and embraces and sighs and ecstasies. ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... has a certain meretricious beauty," I admitted. "Those red cushions and all that bright metal work give ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... all the building, the south transept, or Blandamer aisle, is constantly in clear daylight. Moreover, while the nave is of the Norman style, and the transepts and choir of the Early English, this window is of the latest Perpendicular, complicated in its scheme, and meretricious in the elaboration of its detail. The difference is so great as to force itself upon the attention even of those entirely unacquainted with architecture, and it has naturally more significance for the professional eye. Westray ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... profound respect for his companion. Aunt Chloe showed them effusively into her parlor, a small but scrupulously neat and sweet-smelling apartment, inordinately furnished with a huge mahogany centre-table and chairs, and the most fragile and meretricious china and glass ornaments on the mantel. But the three jasmine-edged lattice windows opened upon a homely garden of old-fashioned herbs and flowers, and their fragrance filled the room. The cleanest and starchiest of curtains, the most dazzling and whitest of tidies and chair-covers, ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... so-called, pretended, feigned, trumped up, bogus, scamped, fraudulent, tricky, factitious;bastard; surreptitious, illegitimate, contraband, adulterated, sophisticated; unsound, rotten at the core; colorable; disguised; meretricious, tinsel, pinchbeck, plated; catchpenny; Brummagem. artificial, synthetic, ersatz[&German]; simulated &c 544. Adv. under false colors, under the garb of, under cover of; over the left. Phr. "keep the word of promise ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... for their use. These performers, whatever their origin, received the treatment of samurai, and their dainty posturing in the dance became a model for the lords of the Bakufu Court, so that the simple demeanour of military canons was replaced by a mincing and meretricious mien. Another favourite dance in Yedo Castle was the furyu. A book of the period describes the latter performance in these terms: "Sixteen youths made their appearance; they all wore wide-sleeved robes and purple figured silk with embroidery of oak leaves in gold and silver threads. They ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... saying little and looking less, get nigher his heart. I have seen in his face a far different expression from that which hardens it now while she is so vivaciously accosting him; but then it came of itself: it was not elicited by meretricious arts and calculated manoeuvres; and one had but to accept it—to answer what he asked without pretension, to address him when needful without grimace—and it increased and grew kinder and more genial, and warmed one like a fostering ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... of the Trocadero has nothing meretricious about it. It is, like the building of which it is the finest ornament, of Jura marble, while much of the adjacent work is of artificial stone so admirably made that one cannot tell the difference, and is disposed to give the preference to the latter as evincing greater ingenuity ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... shameful criticism, defending Chopin and adducing the opinions of numerous musicians in support of their own. But the valorous editor "ventures to assure the distinguished critics and the publishers that there will be no difficulty in pointing out a hundred palpable faults, and an infinitude of meretricious uglinesses, such as, to real taste and judgment, are intolerable." Three more letters appeared in the following numbers—two for (Amateur and Professor) and one against (Inquirer) Chopin; the editor continuing to insist with as much violence ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... would be heightened by the character of the, locality where the gloomy show was to be presented. The great square of Brussels had always a striking and theatrical aspect. Its architectural effects, suggesting in some degree the meretricious union between Oriental and a corrupt Grecian art, accomplished in the medieval midnight, have amazed the eyes of many generations. The splendid Hotel de Ville, with its daring spire and elaborate front, ornamented one side of the place; directly opposite was the graceful but incoherent facade ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... actual vice, should urge to their sons the necessity of keeping aloof from the allurements of the theatre. If at that time the costume of the stage differed essentially from that of private life, and was the reverse of modest, or if the actresses indulged in meretricious airs which dared not be shown in domestic society, there was a very just pretence, or rather indeed there was the most cogent reason for preaching against the theatre. But at this day, no hypothesis of the kind can be allowed. That beautiful young women ornamented with every decoration ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... bitter shakings of the head here. Business! Standing in a buggy at street-corners, jauntily urging a crowd to buy the magic grease-eradicator, toothache remedy, meretricious jewelry, what not! first playing a fiddle and rollicking out some ribald song to fetch them. Business ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... after our reading together Balzac's "Recherche de l'Absolu," your objecting to the character of Madame de Claees, and very justly, a certain meretricious taint which Balzac seldom escapes in his heroines, and which in some degree impaired the impression that character, in many respects beautifully conceived and drawn, would have produced? Well, there is a vein of something ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... of ignorance, false taste, and pretension, which assumes the dignity of classical feeling, that it may be able to abuse whatever is above the level of its understanding, but bursts into genuine rapture with all that is meretricious, if sufficiently adapted to ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... that promotion in the U.S. services will be based solely on fitness, without regard to seniority. These are the sort of revolutionists who would cover up grave defects in army organisation by the meretricious expedient ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... more cultured peoples, he does so at the expense of construction and adaptability to use. An example of such work is presented in Fig. 290, a weak, useless, and wholly vicious piece of basketry. Other equally meretricious pieces represent goblets, bottles, and tea pots. They are the work of the Indians of the northwest coast and are executed in the neatest possible manner, bearing evidence of the ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... revival has taught us all by degrees to appreciate the beauty and delicacy of a style which to our eighteenth century ancestors was mere barbaric mediaevalism; has taught us to admire its exquisite purity, and to dislike the obstrusive introduction into its midst of incongruous and meretricious Bernini-like flimsiness. ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... pageant, ostentatious, pompous; garish, gaudy, meretricious, gorgeous, flashy, bedizened, gay, conspicuous, tinsel. Antonyms: ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... things more weaken the power of the Gospel that Paul preached than the lowering of the flag in conformity with desires of men of sense, and substituting for the simple glory of the preached Word the meretricious, and in time impotent, and always corrupting, attractions of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... He always walked near to the dingy river when he could. The contrast of its life to the town's life through which it flowed had a perpetual fascination for him. In the early evening, too, the river presents many Dore effects. It is dim, mysterious, sometimes meretricious, with its streaks of light close to the dense shadows that lie under the bridges, its wailful, small waves licking the wharves, and bearing up the inky barges that look like the ferry-boat of the Styx. Henley loved to feel vivaciously despairing, and he hugged himself in the belief that the ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... and distorted the facts respecting this country, and particularly respecting the great province of New Netherlands, as will be perceived by any who will take the trouble to compare their romantic effusions, tricked out in the meretricious gauds of ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... for instructing the Italians was not thrown away. False liberty was already strewing their path with its meretricious allurements. "As true liberty diffuses around it peace and grace and calm, so does false liberty disseminate, wherever it is implanted, terror, dismay and horror. The brows of one are illuminated with the splendid halo of order, and those of the other ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... axe they had made Zion but a station on the great highway between the seas; a place where curious and irreverent Gentiles stopped to gaze in wonder at and perhaps to mock the Lord's chosen; a place that would become but one link in a chain of Gentile cities, that would be forced to conform to the meretricious ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... thick with rage. Her face is convulsed. Her eyes are burning coals. She has never been so nearly a great actress, this meretricious little dancer and comedian, as in this moment ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... painter, D. Maclise, R.A., has most gallantly disregarded. If there be effect, it certainly is not in the right place, or rather there is no concentration of effect; it possesses the glare of a coloured print, and that too of a meretricious sort—incidents there are, but no plot—less effect upon the animate than the inanimate. The toilet-table takes precedence of the lady—the couch before the sleeper—the shadow, in fact, before the substance; and as it is a sure mark of a vulgar ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 12, 1841 • Various
... of the earnestness and variety of the Scripture a word about the simplicity of its literary expression. There is nothing meretricious in its style. There is no effort to say a thing finely. The translators have avoided all temptation to grow dramatic in reproducing the original. Contrast the actual English Bible with the narratives or other literary works that have been built up out of it. Read all that the Bible tells about ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... victim to the prejudices of mankind, who have made women the property of their husbands? I discovered even, by his conversation, when intoxicated, that his favourites were wantons of the lowest class, who could by their vulgar, indecent mirth, which he called nature, rouse his sluggish spirits. Meretricious ornaments and manners were necessary to attract his attention. He seldom looked twice at a modest woman, and sat silent in their company; and the charms of youth and beauty had not the slightest effect on his senses, unless the possessors were initiated in vice. ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... plaster churches, with a piece of lighted candle inside, which the Italian image-boys display at times for sale in the streets. Nothing in the course of the evening pleased Artemus more than to notice the satisfaction with which this meretricious piece of absurdity was received ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 6 • Charles Farrar Browne
... evident, for the weather was so hot that had rouge been used it would have inevitably been detected; but the island damsels trusted to their good figures and features, and their lively manners and conversation, rather than to any meretricious charms, to win admiration. Stella was generally considered the most charming of the maidens present, as undoubtedly she was the most blooming, and she seemed to enjoy the ball as much as any one. She danced with Captain Hemming, ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... and rise with the thought or emotions to be conveyed. Who can tell what would be the effect of such a church music? What a feeling of earnestness and sincerity would it not lend to services now often marred by the shallowness or meretricious glitter of their musical portions? The range is wide, the field broad; there is scope for grandeur, sublimity, power, jubilation, the brightest strains of extatic joy, mourning, pathos, and the passionate pleading of ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... sympathy and vigour. Its perfect freshness and perpetual fount of youth keep your age from withering. It crimsons the sunset and lives in the afterglow. If these delights thy mind may move, leave, oh, leave the meretricious town, and come to the airy peaks. Such joy is ours, unknown to the squalid village which spreads its swamps where the poet's silver Thames runs dull ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... their high arch when to close Half o'er the swimming orb, and when to raise, Disclosing all the artificial blaze Of unfelt passion, which alone can move Him whom the genuine eloquence of love Affected never, won with wanton wiles, With soulless sighs, and meretricious smiles; By nature unimpress'd, uncharm'd by thee, Sweet goddess of my ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... fault lies in the general reader himself, whose very opposition to poetry because it is poetry makes him a difficult person to write for. Commercialized minds, given over to convention, denying their sentiment and idealism, or wasting them upon cheap and meretricious literature, do not make a good audience. Our few poets in English who have possessed some universality of appeal have had to make concessions. Kipling has been the most popular among good English poets in our time; but he has had to put journalism into much of his poetry in order to ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... of it; but what were the reflections of poor Hodgkinson when he learned that the very person to whom he had said "D—n you, you cowardly rascal, and all your d——d breed," was no other than that very duke who has since cut so conspicuous a figure in the annals of gallantry with Mrs. CLARK, of meretricious notoriety, or in other words the duke of York himself. By means which shall hereafter be related, the interest of the royal family had been engaged for Hodgkinson, and even the first personage of it had agreed to do him a signal favour, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... enemy, now against that one,—first hate of English, then hate of Italians, now hate of Americans—it is natural that a high government functionary should despise all popular effervescence and misread its manifestations as merely the meretricious, bought noise of the mob, quickly roused in the Southern temperament and badly controlled by a weak, and probably corrupt, government. The elements in the piazza have no power in the close organization ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... delicate gold of the tooling, glowing in the blood-red splashes of the lettering pieces; it fell slant-wise on the black chimney piece, chiselling afresh the Harden motto: Invictus. There was nothing meretricious, nothing flagrantly modern there, as in that place of books he had just left; its bloom was the bloom of time, the beauty of a world already passing away. Yet how he had loved it; how he had given himself up to it; how it had soothed him with its suggestion of immortal ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... they reached Sydney, into a serious affair, and had been the determining cause why he had not written even to George. Godfrey Radmore had not thought of that woman for years. But to-night her now hateful, meretricious image rose, with horrid vividness, before him. It had been an ugly, debasing episode, and had dragged on and on, as such episodes have ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... he had he gathered with a catholicity of taste from all the renowned masters. Not one of his immediate ancestors had stirred beyond the confines of their simple home. Well for him was it so. No late meretricious Neapolitan tinsel could exist in the quiet, calm beauty of his Thuringian dwelling-place. Nature lay before him. "Come," she said, "seek to understand me. I have treasures that ye know not of, treasures that can only be gathered by the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... Voices" waltz, and tell a girl to keep her feet still; as if one were to lend "Robinson Crusoe" to a boy, and warn him not to think of running away to sea. Still, I must even add my voice to the orthodox chorus, and affirm that warfare is bad, brutal, fraudful, a thing of meretricious gauds, a clay idol, fetish of humbug and havoc, whose feet are soaking in muddy gore and salt tears; yet in the privacy of my own study I might sadly admit that the Millennium is remote, that the Parliament of Nations exists but ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... he was a kind and indulgent husband and father. He left a legacy of $400,000 for the establishment of the Astor Library; for this and this alone his memory has been preserved as that of a philanthropist. The announcement of this legacy was hailed with extravagant joy; yet such is the value of meretricious glory and the ideals of present society, that none has remarked that the proceeds of one year's pillage of the Indians were more than sufficient to found this much-praised benevolence. Thus does society blind itself to the origin ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... spite of herself, in spite of her consciousness of the melodrama and meretricious glitter of the scene, her heart was beating. She was more deeply moved, even now, than she had ever been by all the services ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... a view to their amendment, surely they may—the task could hardly be executed with a chaster and less offensive pencil. De Bernard paints immorality—it would be unjust to say that he encourages it. He neither deals in highly-coloured and meretricious scenes a la Sue and Dumas; nor supports, with the diabolical talent and ingenuity of a Sand, the most subversive and anti-social doctrines. His works are not befouled with filth and obscenity, such as that impure old reprobate Paul de Kock ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... saw herself putting the boy to bed by the light of a single candle on the deserted top floor of a "business house," dark under the roof and scintillating exceedingly with lights and cut glass at the level of the street like a fairy palace. That meretricious splendour was the only one to be met in Mrs Verloc's visions. She remembered brushing the boy's hair and tying his pinafores—herself in a pinafore still; the consolations administered to a small ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... the part of those who oppose the bill, on the subject of its injustice to the white inhabitants of the District of Columbia. Indeed, the argument on that side of the question is, when divested of all that is immaterial, meretricious, and extravagant, reduced almost entirely to that single position. Abstract this from the excited declamation to which you have listened, and what is left is but the old revolting argument in favor of slavery, and a selfish ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... he laughs to scorn. The harp of Homer, the trump of Pindar and of Alcaeus are still. The decencies of costume, the decorations of vanity are stripped off without mercy as barbarous, idle, and Gothic. The jewels in the crisped hair, the diadem on the polished brow are thought meretricious, theatrical, vulgar; and nothing contents his fastidious taste beyond a simple garland of flowers. Neither does he avail himself of the advantages which nature or accident holds out to him. He chooses to have his subject a foil to his invention, to owe nothing ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... "d'un age mur"—but his own observations are generally limited to events occurring since the peace of "fifteen." To his personal attractions, such as they are, he has never been solicitous of contributing by the meretricious aids of dress. His coat, calculating from its length of waist, and ample skirt, would fit Bumbo Green, while his trowsers, being made of some cheap and shrinking material, have gradually contracted their limits, and look now exactly like knee-breeches, without ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... simplicity here," observed Patching, "No meretricious effects. Nothing but strokes of green paint, up and down, representing the density of an African jungle. Yet how admirably these seemingly careless strokes, laid on by the hand of genius, convey the idea of DEPTH! You do not fail to notice ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... my heart was resentment. That my name should be prostituted by the foul mouths of such wretches, and my money be squandered for the gratification of a meretricious vagabond, were indignities not to be endured. I was carried involuntarily towards my brother's house. I had lost all that awe in his presence and trepidation at his scorn which had formerly been so troublesome. His ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... painted windows are quite as fine as those of Strasbourg; and, in one point, it excels all the cathedrals I have seen, which is the choir, handsomely carved in oak, and with good pictures let into the panels. It is in better taste, more solid, and less meretricious in its ornaments, than any I know of. It has also a very fine pulpit, the whole of which, as well as the steps and balustrade leading up to it, is of fine marble. At Colmar, the eye will be struck with the peculiarity of architecture ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... Louis XV., which was worthy of the degenerate nobles and crapulous financiers for whom it was invented, and was, in fact, a sort of Byzantine of the boudoir, which succeeded the nobler and simpler manner of the age of Louis XIV., and tormenting every straight line into meretricious curves, ended with over-loading ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... he managed by the third day after his return to reach a less despondent frame of mind. While busy writing in his office a lady was announced, and looking up he encountered the meretricious smile of the courtesan with whom he had forgotten himself. She had taken a fancy to her victim, and having learned that he was well to do, she had come in order to establish, if possible, on a more permanent basis, her relations with him. She was a young woman, who had been drifting from ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... office came wafted through an off-channel of his trade. He did an intermittent business in the gilding of small idols, to be shipped overseas and traded as objects of worship among the negroes of the American plantations. Jewellery, however, was his stand-by. In the manufacture of meretricious ware he had a plausibility amounting to genius, in the disposing of it a talent for hard bargains; and the two together had landed him in affluence. Well, sir, being headed off my boyhood's dream by the geographical ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... time to it, and, in a few months, attained so creditable a proficiency, that he went through a course of instruction with a local teacher of music, who, scenting talent, dismissed preliminaries with the assurance of his kind, and initiated his pupil into all that is false and meretricious in the literature of the piano—the cheaply pathetic, the tinsel of transcription, the titillating melancholy of Slavonic dance-music—to leave him, but for an increased agility of finger, not a whit further forward than he had found him. Then followed months when the ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... and useful in their way, but are merely the incidents and measures by which the truth of the matter is reached. The client looks puzzled at the argument and the decision, the jurors have a not very clear conception of what is going on, the lawyers have a meretricious feeling that perhaps they are cheapening themselves a little by making so many motions, yet they, nevertheless, have a legal right to do so and they must take advantage of every legal right for the protection ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... students of the art of the past has one chief object; namely, to train them to understand the works of the masters in order that they may discriminate between what is beautiful and what is meretricious in the art of the present day; to learn the lessons of art from the monoliths of Egypt, the tawny marbles of ancient Greece, the balanced thrusts of the Gothic cathedral, the gracious and reverent harmonies of the primitives, the delicate handicrafts ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... three days away from home. He led me through several big rooms downstairs before we got to his own particular quarters above. The furnishing of these rooms impressed me at the time; but I know, now, that they were heavy and clumsy when they were meant to be rich and massive, and were meretricious when they were meant to be elegant. It was all of the Second Empire, qualified by an erratic, exaggerated touch that was natively American. I am afraid I found it rather superb and was made uncomfortable—was ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... she had got no more than she asked for. The trouble was, she no longer wanted it. She had been the dupe of her own folly, by her own romantic bent and the magnetism of the man blinded to the essentially meretricious spirit clothed in the flesh ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... amongst their servants; we cannot but suspect that their good qualities are only apparent, and their motives selfish. The true character of every person is to be learned at home, and at times when no exterior influences operate to make persons different from themselves. Then the mask is taken off, meretricious ornaments are dispensed with, and consequently native qualities appear. Tyrannical conduct may compel obedience, but an amiable spirit alone can command affection, and render servitude pleasant. There are, indeed, great constitutional differences; but it is no apology for ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... hot-headed person," he observed. "Nobody but you ever accused me of such a thing. Marriage concerns the race and a man's whole future. If the children of the marriage are likely to be unsatisfactory, the marriage will certainly be so. We moderns bedeck and bedrape us in all sorts of meretricious togas, till a pair of fine eyes and a dashing manner pass for beauty; but when life tries the metal—when nature applies her inevitable test—the degenerate or neurotic ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... the others, furnished in large part by the previously existing writings of Watts and Doddridge, has been greatly improved, in at least the composition, by the emendations of Morrison and Logan. With all its faults, we know of no other collection equal to it as a whole. The meretricious stanzas of Brady and Tate are inanity itself in comparison. True, the later Blair, though always sensible, was ofttimes quite heavy enough in the pieces given to him to render—more so than in his prose; though, even when first introduced to that, Cowper could ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though possibly a meretricious, effect. Now, it was not really difficult, by an inspection of the groove between your left forefinger and thumb, to feel sure that you did NOT propose to invest your small capital in ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... arch when to close Half o'er the swimming orb, and when to raise, Disclosing all the artificial blaze Of unfelt passion, which alone can move Him, whom the genuine eloquence of love Affected never, won with wanton wiles, With soulless sighs and meretricious smiles, By nature unimpress'd, uncharm'd by thee. Sweet goddess of my ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... die in hospitals, and prisons, and are unclaimed by their friends. The graceful new cemetery, at no great distance from it, though yet unfinished, has already many graves among its shrubs and flowers, and airy colonnades. It might be reasonably objected elsewhere, that some of the tombs are meretricious and too fanciful; but the general brightness seems to justify it here; and Mount Vesuvius, separated from them by a lovely slope of ground, exalts ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... Empire period, many of them gave place to whitewash and stucco. In the Ducal Palace, side by side with the masterpieces of the Renaissance, are to be found the overcrowded canvases of Vicentino, Giovanni Contarini, Pietro Liberi, Celesti, and others like them. Some of the poor and meretricious mosaics in St. Mark's are from designs by Palma Giovine and Fumiani. Carlo Ridolfi, who was a painter himself, as well as the painter's chronicler, has an "Adoration of the Magi" in S. Giovanni Elemosinario, poor enough ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... advantageous illustration from the repulsiveness of his theme. That a subject is dull, however unfortunately it may operate for the impression which he seeks to produce, must at least acquit him of seeking any aid to that impression from alien and meretricious attractions. Is a subject hatefully associated with recollections of bigotry, of ignorance, of ferocious stupidity, of rancour, and of all uncharitableness? In that case, the reader ought to be persuaded that nothing less ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... difficult to ply their trade unless under the influence of alcohol. Turning to the man's point of view, there is quite a considerable proportion of young men who, however strong their sexual impulse, object to meretricious intercourse at once on ethical and aesthetic grounds. The ethical ground is that intercourse with a prostitute infringes the elementary principle of civilised morals, that one human being should not use another as a mere means to the ends of the former, ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll |
