"Pretentious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... meet you at San Miguel's to-morrow afternoon, Gail," Eloise said, as we reached a low but pretentious adobe dwelling. ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... Washington" may be put in evidence. Probably this work lost something in incisiveness and brilliancy by being postponed till the writer's old age. But whatever this loss, it is impossible for any biography to be less pretentious in style, or less ambitious in proclamation. The only pretension of matter is in the early chapters, in which a more than doubtful genealogy is elaborated, and in which it is thought necessary to Washington's dignity to give a fictitious importance ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... standing, because we can always build elsewhere; nor need we be anxious as to the breeding of pleasant work in such matters, for there is always room for more and more work in a new building, even without making it pretentious. For instance, elbow-room within doors is to me so delightful that if I were driven to it I would most sacrifice outdoor space to it. Then, of course, there is the ornament, which, as we must all allow, may easily be overdone in mere ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... house of the "overseer" standing apart; or, as in the case of the plantation Besancon, at the end of the double row, and fronting the main avenue. This, of course, is of a more pretentious style of architecture; can boast of Venetian blinds to the windows, two stories of height, and a "porch." It is enclosed with a paling to keep off the intrusion of the children, but the dread of the painted cowhide renders ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... beautiful horses, not needing whip or spur—natives on dromedaries so swift, sure-footed, and strong there was no occasion for fear. Men, and often women and children, on ragged saddle-cloths, others in pretentious boxes, and now and then a person whose wealth and rank were published by the magnificence of the litter in which he was borne, swinging luxuriously between ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... additional seamen and one thousand additional marines should be provided; and an increase in the officers should be provided by making a large addition to the classes at Annapolis. There is one small matter which should be mentioned in connection with Annapolis. The pretentious and unmeaning title of "naval cadet" should be abolished; the title of "midshipman," full of ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... of our friend the bad man we shall find that he does not care two straws for the axioms or deductions, but that he does want to know what the Massachusetts or English courts are likely to do in fact. I am much of this mind. The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by ...
— The Path of the Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... saw for the first time in his life the intrepid maiden who seems to dare a man to come and master her. That she should be the daughter of Robert Grimston, with his commercial primness, and Mrs. Grimston, with her pretentious snobbery, was a mystery he made no attempt to solve. It was enough for him that this proud creature was in the world, especially as her bearing toward him inspired the hope that he might win her. It was a pity that he should have turned aside from such high endeavor ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... border of the lake, sometimes over a small stretch of rough or hilly shoreland, but usually through heavy growths of hemlock, white pine, oak, and other trees more or less characteristic of the country. Here and there along the way was a cottage, or summer house of more pretentious proportions, usually constructed near the water or some distance up on the side of the hill-shore, with a kind of terrace-walk leading ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis
... was shown in the pretentious titles which he assumed and in the gorgeous pomp with which he was accompanied on public and even on private occasions. On August 15th, after bathing in the porphyry font in which the emperor Constantine had been baptized, he was crowned with seven crowns representing the seven gifts ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... rendered more striking by the spires of several large churches peeping above the foliage of the trees in the distance, whitewashed school-houses glistening here and there amidst sunlight and green; gentlemen's houses of pretentious dimensions and grassy lawns and elaborate fencing, the seats of retired officers of the Hudson's Bay Company occasionally interspersed; here an English bishop's parsonage, with a boarding or high school near by; and over ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews
... eagerly at the opportunity of improving her style of living. The old Wales house was quite a pretentious edifice for those times. All the drawback to her delight was, that Grandma should have the southwest fire-room. She wanted to set up her high-posted bedstead with its enormous feather-bed in that, and have it for her fore-room. Properly, it was the fore-room, being right across the entry from the ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... often-mentioned gates. After a glance at the barns and cattle-sheds, and at the garden which supplies the family with fruits and vegetables (on flowers, alas! but little store is set in the northern provinces), we cross the threshold, a spot hallowed by many traditions, and pass, through what in more pretentious houses may be called the vestibule, into the "living room." We become well acquainted with its arrangements, with the cellar beneath its wooden floor, with the "corner of honor" in which are placed the "holy pictures," and with the stove which occupies ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... us know what the uncompromising iconoclasts have to tell about the universal belief in immortality. They have a very pretentious line of reasoning, which I may summarise thus. Life appeared on earth not less than three hundred thousand years ago. First of all our planet hung in the form of vapour, and drifted with millions of other similar clouds through space; then the vapour became liquid; then the globular form was ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... money without limit so far as national laws affected it. That was the scheme presented to us by very intelligent gentlemen engaged in the banking business. They were honest and in earnest, but it appeared to me as pretentious and even ludicrous. ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... an autumn trip to an unhackneyed land is much better worth reading than many more pretentious volumes.... The authoress has an eye for what is worth seeing, a happy knack of graphic description, and a literary style which is commendably ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... I like best this "Rezanov," though I have not found many to agree with me. It is not so pretentious as others more frequently commended. It is a simple story, almost one might say an incident or an anecdote. It is not literally sophisticated. For me that is its unfailing charm. I find in it not a little of the ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... carpets and hangings were a bit faded, but the rooms were generously broad, the chairs, as the old man remarked, were "made to sit in," and the cuisine was held, by a few knowing old epicures who still frequented the place, to be superior even to that of the more pretentious Hightower. The service, it is true, was apt to be slow. Strangers who chanced in to order a meal not infrequently became enraged, and left before their food came, trailing plain short words of extreme dissatisfaction ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... aim of its supporters has always been to write in the vulgar tongue, a fortunate circumstance which renders this vast body of literature extremely valuable to the philologist, since it can be relied on as representing the spoken language of its day more accurately than those pretentious works whose authors ...
— Chaitanya and the Vaishnava Poets of Bengal • John Beames
... a new and pretentious place upon a wide street and directly opposite a small, green park. There was a great deal of brass and marble and show about the entrance, and a uniformed attendant announced them by means of a telephone. In a few moments ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... Gospel power is that preaching which consists largely in the presentation of old worn-out theories, musty scholastic philosophies about religion, usually paraded under the pretentious title ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... because it is not the office of the hat or bonnet to shelter the whole person from sun or rain.] But the brooch and the button must fasten, the chain suspend, the ring bear a device, or they sink into pretentious, vulgar shams. And there must be keeping between these articles and their offices. To use, for instance, a massive golden, or, worse, gilded chain to support a cheap silver watch is to reverse the order ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... senses of the traveler. Naples was less strident, less vocal than ever before. That mob of hungry Neapolitans, which usually seizes violent hold of the stranger and his effects, was thin and spiritless. Naples was almost quiet. The Santa Lucia was deserted; the line of pretentious hotels with drawn shutters had the air of a summer resort out of season. The war had cut off Italy's greatest source of ready money—the idler. Naples was living to itself a subdued, zestless life. Cook's was an empty inutility. The sunny slopes of Sorrento, where during the ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... Iturbide in 1822 was doomed to a speedy fall. "Emperor by divine providence," that ambitious adventurer inscribed on his coins, but his countrymen knew that the bayonets of his soldiers were the actual mainstay of his pretentious title. Neither his earlier career nor the size of his following was sufficiently impressive to assure him popular support if the military prop gave way. His lavish expenditures, furthermore, and his arbitrary replacement of the ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... substantial breakfast, in which fried eggs and Johnny cake formed an important item, we again started off over the same sort of corduroy road as on the previous evening. On either side were numerous clearings with log huts, and here and there a more pretentious store, before each of which several persons were seen taking their morning drams. My father was an abstemious man, and although invited to stop and liquor, declined doing so. We drove on as fast as the horses could go, as he was anxious to ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... to grace the chill and funereal best room in a Wisconsin farmhouse. Ferdinand Brandeis marked it at six dollars and stood it up for the Christmas trade. That had been ten years before. It was too expensive; or too pretentious, or perhaps even too horrible for the bucolic purse. At any rate, it had been taken out, brushed, dusted, and placed on its stand every holiday season for ten years. On the day after Christmas it was always there, its lightning-struck plush face staring wildly ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... afternoon concert; and modern German music was largely represented on the programme. The patient English people sat in closely-packed rows, listening to the pretentious instrumental noises which were impudently offered to them as a substitute for melody. While these docile victims of the worst of all quackeries (musical quackery) were still toiling through their first ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... begun to read the book for the reason that no one in her class at school had read it—usually a compelling reason for the eldest of the Madigans; but the poetic beauty, the extravagance of the romance, had whirled the girl away from her pretentious pose, and she was finishing it now because she could not help it; chained to it, it seemed to her, till she should know ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... many-sided, learned, a philosopher, scientifically depraved, satanic. Perhaps the word is rather pretentious, but it exactly expresses what I want to say, for in other words she loved evil for the sake of evil. She rejoiced in other people's vices; she liked to sow the seeds of evil, in order to see it flourish. And that, too, by fraud on an enormous scale. It was not enough for ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... in mathematics, dialectics, languages, and drawing, and the necessary knowledge of science, without either consuming all the leisure of the boy or destroying his individuality, as it is destroyed by the ignorant and pretentious blunderers of to-day; and there is an equally manifest need of a new type of University, something other than a happy fastness for those precociously brilliant creatures—creatures whose brilliance is too often the hectic indication of a constitutional ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... for centuries, running back to the conquest, been men of mark and fair renown. Pride and modesty of individuality alike forbid the seeking from any source of a borrowed lustre, and the Washingtons were never studious or pretentious of ancestral dignities. But "we are quotations from our ancestors," says the philosopher of Concord—and who will say that in the loyalty to conscience and to principle, and to the right of self-determination of what is principle, that the Washingtons have ever shown, ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... the South Gardens is an ornamental fountain of ample basins topped by a graceful mermaid, behind whose back a fish spouts up a single jet of water. These are formal fountains, but exceedingly harmonious. Without trying to be pretentious, they achieve an effect ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... of the Terrace and Pleasant Street there had long stood a cottage. In the midst of a large lot, with fine shade-trees around it and a beautifully kept lawn, it had never seemed out of place among its more pretentious neighbors; but now upon the death of its owner the property was divided into three lots and offered for sale. What this might mean was at first hardly realized, until one day men were discovered to be at work on the corner, ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... to ooze away. Although much was said that was unintelligible to her, she could see that this was not the result of intellectual deficiency on her part, but merely of an ignorance of the ground on which the conversation was founded. As Cornelia stole glances at the faces, pretty or pretentious, of the young ladies, or at the mustaches, whiskers, or carefully-parted hair of the young gentlemen, it did not seem to her that she could call herself essentially the inferior of any one of them. As to what they thought ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... more devout, or more constant to the service of its gods, than were the Egyptians; and hence, being superstitious, they were pre-eminently under the control of priests, as the people were in India. We see, chiefly in India and Egypt, the power of caste,—tyrannical, exclusive, and pretentious,—and powerful in proportion to the belief in a future state. Take away the belief in future existence and future rewards and punishments, and there is not much religion left. There may be philosophy and morality, but not religion, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... a close little house—one of those houses where they have fried dinners so often that the smell never gets out in Budd Street—a street of a single side, wedged in between the back yards of more pretentious mansions that stood on fair parallel avenues sloping down from a hilltop to the waterside, that Mrs. ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... ability of the seigneur were the determining factors. Men who had been members of the noblesse in France received tracts as large as a Teutonic principality, comprising a hundred square miles or more. Those of less pretentious birth and limited means had to be content with a few thousand arpents. In general, however, a seigneury comprised at least a dozen square miles, almost always with a frontage on the great river and rear limits ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... Dejah Thoris in a search for new quarters, which we found in a building nearer the audience chamber and of far more pretentious architecture than our former habitation. We also found in this building real sleeping apartments with ancient beds of highly wrought metal swinging from enormous gold chains depending from the marble ceilings. The decoration of the walls was most elaborate, and, unlike ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... "without meaning to put forward any pretentious claims to originality, but by simply turning to account some advantages that have never before befallen contemplative mortal eye, why not construct a little hypothesis of our own regarding the nature of these grooves and ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... the same results are clearly manifest in our political fabric. In the latter sphere, hypocrisy is doubly odious, in that while undermining the confidence of the people in law, justice, and government, it places far greater power in the hands of pretentious individuals than would be tolerated were it not for their profession of superior virtue, and thus enables persons who are of small moral stature, or who through defective training and unfortunate environment are thoroughly narrow and bigoted, to wield despotic power, often bringing swift and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... other charges were correspondingly high. Nemesis, however, overtook the shopman, for the camp commandant hearing of his evil deeds placed a sentry in front of the store and so put it out of bounds. He held out for a couple of days, while his more reasonable if less pretentious rival flourished exceedingly, but a daily loss of L200 is too severe a tax on the pertinacity of a Jew, or indeed of anybody, so the rival tariffs were arranged on similar lines, and the sentry sloped rifle and walked off. The mission workers at De Aar—some excellent ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... bedsteads, all of fumed wood. If she has money and understanding the things have probably come from England, not from an emporium, but from one of our artists in furniture whom the Germans know better and value more highly than we do ourselves. But if she has money only she can buy florid pretentious stuff that outdoes in ugliness the worst productions of our "suite" sellers. Her mother, however, probably did without any kind of toilet table or glass in her wardrobe. Twenty years ago you occasionally saw such things in the houses of rich people, ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... all the more pretentious private gardens. Their perfume, hanging in the heavy night air, lay on the village, making one forget the over-curtain of stenching mist. Down by the shore of the Nares Sea, this world of the depths had seemed darkly sinister. But in the village now, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... stands in Rossbach, with the littery Hamlet at its flank: a high, pavilion-roofed, and though dilapidated, pretentious kind of House; some kind of court round it, some kind of hedge or screen of brushwood and brick-wall: terribly in need of the besom, it and its environment throughout. King, I suppose, did lodge there overnight: certain ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... me to be on the alert for quarters, I espied a rather pretentious homestead, cosily placed in a natural shelter half-way up the hillside. This proved to be Mr. Edward Henty's. He was not at home, but Mrs. Henty happily was. Young, ladylike, beautiful, she received me with that high courtesy which sets ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... point to them, as they will to me, and say, 'See, what a ghastly failure! See how feeble after all, are these pretentious women of the new order, who begin by denying the sufficiency of the life assigned them, by common consent, and end by failing in that and in the other which they aspire to. What has become of all the ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... change in her cold sweetness; her smile became a little ambiguous. "You remind me," she said, "that I was speaking in somewhat pretentious similes. I was not asking you what had been done, but what you hoped to do. I was asking—it was that that interested me in you, as it does in all the young men I meet—what was the ideal you brought to ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the Duke of Argyll's criticisms, and the more pretentious one in the last number of the ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... chimpanzee? And if an embrocation may be used with good effects in the latter case, why may it not be used in the former? We need not press these questions; they will serve as they stand to show once more how this whole pretentious philosophy about the unreality, the imaginary nature, of pain breaks down as soon as we subject it to simple tests. So also with the Christian Science attitude towards "drugs," the prescribing of which Mrs. Eddy places in the same category as the denial of God.[8] An obvious ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... for the first time and saw a long bare studio, containing a table covered with etcher's apparatus and some blocks for wood engraving. There was besides an easel, and a picture upon it, with a pretentious historical subject just blocked in, a tall oak chair and stool of antique pattern, and in one corner a stand of miscellaneous arms such as many artists affect—an old flintlock gun or two, some Moorish or Spanish rapiers and daggers. The north window was half blocked by snow, and the ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... but an insignificant speck on earth, well and good! Then let us be patriots and continue to nurse national characteristics; but we ought, at least, not to clothe ourselves in the mantel of Faust, in our pretentious sweep through space. We ought at least declare openly that the life of all peoples is never to be anything else but an outrageous mixture of stupid patriotism, national vanities, everlasting antagonism, and a ravenous greed ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... fairly indicated by the size of the quick-growing umbrella and pepper-trees which had been planted for shade. Thus all the mass of foliage rose like a mound of gentle slope toward the centre of the town, where Jack saw vaguely the outlines of a rambling bungalow, more spacious if no more pretentious than its neighbors in its architecture. At a cement bridge over the ditch, leading to a broad veranda under the soft illumination of a big, wrought-iron lantern, Mary ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... unqualified fashion to extol the men of wealth as great public benefactors and truckle to them, and when sociological inquiry was in an undeveloped stage, there might have been some excuse for this. But it is extremely unsatisfactory to find pretentious writers of the present day glossing over essential facts or not taking the trouble to get them. A "popular writer," who has pretended to deal with the origin of one of the great present fortunes, the Astor fortune, and has given facts, although conventionally interpreted, as to one or two ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... the narrowest part of the road Harry saw approaching him an open buggy of rather a pretentious character, driven by a schoolmate, Philip Ross, the son of Colonel Ross, a wealthy resident ...
— The Tin Box - and What it Contained • Horatio Alger
... Harboro's mind. Good God!—what had become of her? There had been a railroad man, a fellow named Peterson, who was just gross enough to fancy her—a good chap, too, in his way. Courageous, energetic, loyal—at least to other men. He had occasionally thought that Peterson meant to take the poor, pretentious creature away from the dance-halls and establish her somewhere. He had not seen ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... in the school of Bishop Butler, and had learned as a first principle to recognise the limitations of human knowledge, and the unphilosophical folly of trying to round off into finished and pretentious schemes our fragmentary yet certain notices of our own condition and ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... warped with long sagging. There was a hitch-rail outside the gate, and Bud took the hint and left his horses there. From the wisps of fresh hay strewn along the road, Bud knew that haying had begun at Little Lost. There were at least four cabins and a somewhat pretentious, story-and-a-half log house with vines reaching vainly to the high window sills, and coarse lace curtains. One of these curtains moved slightly, and Bud's sharp eyes detected the movement and knew that his arrival was observed in spite of the ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... work how he intended to compel a change in the unchanging character of the people. He built a handsome Mosque—but before he was driven out he wired and mined it for destruction. He built a seat of government, a hospital, and a barracks, all of them pretentious buildings for such a town, well designed, constructed of stone with red-tiled roofs, and the gardens were nicely laid out. There were a railway station and storehouses on a scale which would not yield ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... pardon for intruding, Mistress Thankful Blossom," he said gravely; "but I have here"—he held out a pretentious document—"a letter for you from headquarters. May I hope that it contains good news,—the release of your father.—and that it relieves you from my presence, and an espionage which I assure you cannot be more unpleasant to you than it has been ...
— Thankful Blossom • Bret Harte
... dons (with but one or two exceptions), he himself could speak,—with what more refined logic, with what more polished periods, how much more like Cicero and Burke! Very probably he might have so spoken, and for that very reason have made that deadest of all dead failures,—a pretentious imitation of Burke and Cicero. One thing, however, he was obliged to own,—namely, that in a popular representative assembly, it is not precisely knowledge which is power, or if knowledge, it is but the knowledge of that ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... struck the saddle of his bicycle approvingly, "It was the one foolish thing she ever did. Oh, what a glorious riddance!" And, after a little thought, he negotiated the slope into Windy Corner, light of heart. The house was again as it ought to be—cut off forever from Cecil's pretentious world. ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... have Miss Amidon come in to spend the evening", said a nervous, critical, intellectual man, most of whose life had been passed among far more pretentious people in large cities, "there is such a ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... matin,es and soir,es; they would fail of the chief element of diversion if we invited everybody. Let us, therefore, make sure of the aesthetic and intellectual, the sympathetic and the genial, and sift out the pretentious and the impure. The rogues, the pretenders, the adventurers who push into the penetralia of our social circles are many, and it is to the exclusion of such that a hostess should ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... solidity than elegance or symmetry of proportions. The churches, religious and educational establishments, official buildings and residences—notably the intendant's palace at Quebec—were built of stone. The most pretentious edifice was the chateau of St. Louis—the residence of the governor-general—which was rebuilt by Count de Frontenac within the limits of the fort of St. Louis, first erected by Champlain on the historic ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... fruit of the season, nor even an edible bulb held over from earlier years, for such as it had of former fruitage was dried to worthlessness and made repulsive in its worm-eaten decay. The religion of Israel had degenerated into an artificial religionism, which in pretentious show and empty profession outclassed the abominations of heathendom. As already pointed out in these pages, the fig tree was a favorite type in rabbinical representation of the Jewish race, and the Lord ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... Ha, ha, ha! He always was Huffle Scuffle; a noisy, pretentious, empty-headed fellow. But I oughtn't to say so before you, young man. Come, we'll go into ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... man was not in St. Louis. He was one of those wealthy so-called "kings" which abound in America—in this case a "coal king." I was told that he possessed a really palatial residence in St. Louis—where he did not dwell; and a less pretentious dwelling directly in the coal-fields, where, for the most of his time, he did reside. I crossed the Mississippi River into Southern Illinois, and very soon found him. He was a plain, honest business man; we did not ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... early English stage the "super" had frequent occupation; the Shakespearean drama, indeed, makes large demands upon the mute performers. The stage at this time was not very spacious, however, and was in part occupied by the more pretentious of the spectators, who, seated upon stools, or reclining upon the rushes which strewed the boards, were attended by their pages, and amused themselves with smoking their pipes and noisily criticising the performance. There was ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... its dignity in those days. There were very nice and very old families living there then, and they kept themselves rolled up in their wealth and comfort, and looked coldly down on all new and pretentious people. West Bowling Green, too, put on airs of superiority over East Bowling Green, which it affected to designate with the term "rather vulgar." They were quiet, well brought up people on the West side, people who had made a family name and ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... mother was right,—and in this ability to forego there was a certain amount of unpretentiousness. But when, by way of exception, it became a question of really possessing a thing, it always had to be something out of the ordinary. In this regard she was pretentious. ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... appears in a very typical building representing Bolivia. It is evident that it was not a costly building, but its dignified Spanish faade and the court effect inside are far more agreeable than the pretentious palace erected by the ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... The young poet uses death as an antithesis; and when he shocks his reader by some flippant use of it in that way, he considers he has written something mightily fine. In his gloomiest mood he is most insincere, most egotistical, most pretentious. The older and wiser poet avoids the subject as he does the memory of pain; or when he does refer to it, he does so in a reverential manner, and with some sense of its solemnity and of the magnitude of its issues. It was in that year of revelry, 1814, and while undressing from balls, that Lord ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... reputation, more, perhaps, than Millreagh, for it is a popular holiday town and was once described in the Evening Telegraph as "the Blackpool of Ireland." This description, although it was apt enough, offended the more pretentious people in Pickie who were only mollified when the innocent reporter, in a later article, altered the description to, "the Brighton of Ireland." With consummate understanding of human character, he ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... these wishes, but by other factors in the situation, the wishes of other individuals, for example. The desire for recognition is a permanent and universal trait of human nature, but in the case of an egocentric personality, this wish may take the form of an excessive humility or a pretentious boasting. The wish is the same but the attitudes in which it finds ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... me that he remembered the circumstance to have been generally talked of in the place.' Authentic or not, I have preferred the story to Hohenlinden, as less hackneyed, for one thing, and, for another, less pretentious and rhetorical. The second (Gertrude of Wyoming, 1809) is truly one of 'the glories of our birth and state.' The third (idem) I have ventured to shorten by three stanzas: a proceeding which, however culpable ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... Nor are these pretentious demands specifically denied; every man rather believes that he has a right to take part in her discoveries, to make use of her maxims, and to appropriate whatever else she may have to offer. But as philosophy, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... now drawing on towards late fall. For several weeks the young fireman had not been disturbed by his enemies. Work had gone on smoothly. He was learning more and more every day, and his savings amounted to quite a pretentious sum. ...
— Ralph on the Engine - The Young Fireman of the Limited Mail • Allen Chapman
... slender fringe of European custom bordering native barbarism and dirt was what I anticipated; for, as I looked upon the naked rocks,—which there, as in other Greenland ports, afforded room for a few straggling huts of native fishermen and hunters, with only now and then a more pretentious white man's lodge,—I could hardly imagine that much would be found seductive to the fancy or inviting to the eye. A country where there is no soil to yield any part of man's subsistence seemed to offer such a slender chance for man in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... further attempts at communication, for their boat swept round the bend, and it was plain enough whence the fishers had come, for, beautifully situated in a lake-like curve of the stream, they could see quite a pretentious-looking village with what was evidently a mosque, and just beyond it, a strong-looking stockade. The houses were of exactly the same type as those they had before passed, but in addition there were several of considerable size, whose sides ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... is a very pretentious one, for no one would expect boys and girls to be landscape gardeners. But many boys and girls have excellent taste and taste is the foundation stone of landscape gardening. This work has often been likened to the painting of ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... mistress.—If we trifle with her; if we fall in love with pretentious imitations and elaborate ornamentations which have no beauty in them, but are simply gotten up to sell; then the true and real beauty will never again suffer us to see her face. She will leave us to our idols: and our power to appreciate and admire ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... for my appearance at his humble abode, but he expressed pleasure, and led me up the narrow, steep stairway, whose ceiling almost touched my head as I climbed up after him. On the first floor the landlord, in festal raiment, intercepted us, introduced himself in English (which he spoke with pretentious inaccuracy), and, barring my further ascent, took possession of me, and led the way to his best parlour, as if it were entirely unbecoming for his tenant to receive a gentleman ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... Barkins, as, with his tail flying, Ching ran from hut to hut, and finally stopped before the two more pretentious places, which ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... Warburton was hardly better qualified for the task than Pope, and such improvements as he introduced are mainly borrowed from Theobald and Hanmer. On both these critics he arrogantly and unjustly heaped abuse in his preface. The Bishop was consequently criticised with appropriate severity for his pretentious incompetence by many writers; among them, by Thomas Edwards, whose 'Supplement to Warburton's Edition of Shakespeare' first appeared in 1747, and, having been renamed 'The Canons of Criticism' next year in the third edition, passed through as many ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... good many comfortable farm-houses scattered about Rockland. The best of them were something of the following pattern, which is too often superseded of late by a more pretentious, but infinitely less pleasing kind of rustic architecture. A little back from the road, seated directly on the green sod, rose a plain wooden building, two stories in front, with a long roof sloping backwards to within a few feet of the ground. This, like the "mansion-house," ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... one-storied house with a red porch, and a great sweet-brier bush thereby; while up the hill-side behind stretched a high picket fence, enclosing huge trees, part of the same brook I had crossed here dammed into a pond, and a chicken-house of pretentious height and aspect,—one of those model institutions that are the ruin of gentlemen-farmers and the delight of women. I had to go into the farm-kitchen for the poultry-yard key. The door stood open, and I stepped in cautiously, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... prodigality, brilliant company. It is not rash to suppose that the lex sumptuaria of the year 18 was the first grave cause of disagreement. Julia, given, as Macrobius describes her, to profuse expenditure and pretentious elegance, could not take this law seriously; while it was the duty of Tiberius, who always protested by deed as by word against the barren pomp of the rich, to see that his wife serve as an example of simplicity to the other matrons ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... city is very picturesque with its tropical vegetation, always green, and its quaint houses, many of them raised several feet above the ground on pillars. The more pretentious mansions are surrounded by broad verandas and fine gardens, and scattered here and there among the houses of the better class are those of ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... Besides the biographical notes appended to selections, there are not a few more pretentious sketches that have been given prominent titles in the body of the books. These have been prepared expressly for this work, either by the editor or by some one fully acquainted with the subject and accustomed to writing ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... following that trade so base and vile; And askt what license or what pas they had. "Ah!" said the Ape, as sighing wondrous sad, "Its an hard case, when men of good deserving Must either driven be perforce to sterving, 370 Or asked for their pas by everie squib, [Squib, flashy, pretentious fellow] That list at will them to revile or snib. [Snib, snub] And yet (God wote) small oddes I often see Twixt them that aske, and them that asked bee. Natheles because you shall not us misdeeme, 375 But that we are as honest as we seeme, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... obliterated by Puritanic violence; and I think that there is not a single tomb older than the parliamentary wars, which has not been in like manner battered and shattered, except the Saxon abbot's just mentioned. The most pretentious monument remaining is that of a Mr. Deacon, a gentleman of George I.'s time, in wig and breeches, leaning on his elbow, and resting one hand upon a skull. In the north aisle, precisely opposite to that of Queen Mary, the attendant pointed ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... at pains on more occasions than one to call attention to the fact of his humble birth, and to let it be known that, had he to begin life anew, he was so far from desiring a better ancestry that he would, like Andrew Marvell, have made "his destiny his choice." Nor is this done with the pretentious affectation of the parvenu, eager to bring under notice the contrast between what he is and what he has been, and to insinuate his personal deserts, while pretending to disclaim them. Horace has no such false humility. ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... noise, more or less musical, afloat and ashore; a pretentious orchestra played third-rate music under the hotel colonnade; melody arose from the lantern-lit lake, with clamourous mandolins and young voices singing; and over all hung the confused murmur of unseen throngs, harmonious, capricious; laughter, voice answering voice, and the distant ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... that Ernest placed his men according to a certain plan, thought he would do the same. He, therefore, with not a small amount of pretentious formality, ordered the boys on his side to look out in different directions, and to follow a certain course. Some went where they were told, but others proceeded to where they themselves considered that they should be better ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... not to bring about a juster treatment of the Christians.[386] He wished to represent their cause as the good contrasted with the bad, wisdom as opposed to error, truth in contradistinction to outward seeming, hypocrisy, and pretentious emptiness. His "Address to the Greeks" begins with a violent polemic against all Greek philosophers. Tatian merely acted up to a judgment of philosophers and philosophy which in Justin's case is still concealed.[387] Hence it was not possible ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... the old bear-hunter separates from the less pretentious votary of the chase; as he does so giving the latter a squeeze of the hand, which tells him he may go back in confidence to the negro quarter, and sit, or sleep, by the side of ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... of man; and the power which God permits to the agents of evil,—principles which Bossuet could endorse, but the novelty is that here they are arrayed as forces of Progress. In fact, the point of von Schlegel's pretentious, unilluminating book is to rehabilitate Christianity by making it the key to that new conception of life which had taken shape among ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... houses are for the most part built of wood. The roofs are frequently curved, with projecting eaves, which afford a sort of verandah under which the family sit in summer evenings. Some of the most pretentious structures, especially the inns, have balconies running directly across the upper story. Many of the barns and outhouses have thatched roofs, which are never seen in any other part of Canada. The interiors ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... surely refuse and much more easily succeed in resisting the unequivocally arbitrary impositions of the Roman scheme." Here is the key-note of many of Mr. Gladstone's utterances in after years against the pretentious and aspirations of Rome. The defense of the English Church and its principles and opposition to the Church of Rome have been unchanging features in Mr. Gladstone's religious course. But, in the light of these early utterances, some have ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... brown bark and the salmon tints of old rough boards, and its furniture, wrought painstakingly by an unskillful hand, had the charm of all handwork even when unskilled. Some of the chairs were rudely carved, one great throne especially, awkward, pretentious, ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... I did not go to the place again till long afterwards, when I visited it on an excursion such as I often made, far into the country, at the time when I was conducting the orchestra in Dresden. I was much grieved not to find the old parsonage still there, but in its place a more pretentious modern structure, which so turned me against the locality, that thenceforward my excursions were always made in ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... highly finished. Also two spacious lodging chambers in the second story—a capacious dry cellar with arches &c. &c. &c.' In Upper Canada, owing to the difficulty of obtaining building materials, the houses of the half-pay officers were even less pretentious. A traveller passing through the country about Johnstown in 1792 described Sir John Johnson's house as 'a small country lodge, neat, but as the grounds are only beginning to be cleared, there was nothing ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... almost in tears, was considering this doubtful reassurance when Bobby suddenly pointed again toward that pretentious estate on the hillside, and cried in quick excitement: "Look-ee, Mag, there's a autermobile a-comin' out from the castle, right now—see? She's a-goin' down the hill toward town. Who'll yer bet it is? Old Adam ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... young lady had other attractions besides those of youth and beauty; for she was highly educated, played well upon the lute, understood geometry, and had been accustomed to listen with profit to lectures on philosophy; all this, too, without in any degree becoming unamiable or pretentious, as sometimes young women do when they pursue such studies. Nor could any fault be found either with her father's family or reputation. The disparity of their ages was however not liked by everybody; Cornelia being in this respect a fitter match for Pompey's son. And wiser ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... The remains of his fortune had been lost in that attempt, and the thought made him all the more angry, in presence of the wretched productions with which the shop was crammed. Had anyone ever seen things of such idiotic, pretentious, and complicated ugliness! The vulgarity of the ideas and the silliness of the expressions portrayed rivalled the commonplace character of the composition. You were reminded of fashion-plates, the covers ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... haunting beauty—a mysterious effect being produced by an intentional mixture of tonalities (the sustained B in the flute and oboe being answered by a C on the horns and harp, while beneath are heard fragments of the March theme in the main key on the pizzicato double basses).[238] Berlioz's most pretentious orchestral composition is that called in the full title "Romeo and Juliet, dramatic symphony, with choruses, vocal solos, and a prologue in choral recitative, composed after Shakespeare's tragedy." Notwithstanding many touches of genius, it is a very uneven ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... took Norah out for runs to the Hut at Wisley, to the Burford Bridge Hotel, where the genial Mr. Hunt—one of the last remaining Bohemians of the days of the Junior Garrick Club—welcomed them; to the Wooton Hatch, or up to those more pretentious and less comfortable ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... vers, bien ou mal, dit toujours quelque chose.' This is a prodigious merit, when we reflect with what fatal alacrity human language lends itself in the hands of so many performers upon the pliant instrument, to all sorts of obscurity, ambiguity, disguise, and pretentious mystification. Scaliger is supposed to have remarked of the Basques and their desperate tongue: ''Tis said the Basques understand one another; for my part, I will never believe it.' The same pungent doubt might apply to loftier members of the hierarchy ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... take leave to include lettuce as it grows with a most welcome surprise on certain ledges of the Vatican. That great and beautiful palace is piled, at various angles, as it were house upon house, here magnificent, here careless, but with nothing pretentious and nothing furtive. And outside one lateral window on a ledge to the sun, prospers this little garden of random salad. Buckingham Palace has nothing whatever of the Vatican dignity, but one cannot well think of little cheerful cabbages sunning ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... whose writings he was familiar, he determined to buy a style. He took the step of engaging a person, at a price, to turn the matter which he had got together into ornamental English. Observe, he did not wish for mere grammatical English, but for an elaborate, pretentious style. An artist was found in the person of a country curate, and the job was carried out. His lectures remain to this day, in their own place in the protracted series of annual Discourses to which they belong, distinguished amid ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... July. "The cottage," as I suspected, was twice as large and twice as pretentious as the New York residence; and it sported twice the number of servants. Once again I was caught in the whirl of dinners and dances and motoring, with the addition of tennis and bathing. And always, at my side, was Jerry, seemingly ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... chap with the glad eyes was Cynthia's son! Years ago the mother had tied up his pet hen's leg. And to-day her son had helped him build his most pretentious ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... of the highest order of merit. Their dramatic representations were rather gorgeous than tasteful, their attempts at wit little better than buffoonery, their humor mere personal vituperation. Yet even in matters of taste they are not much inferior to the then more pretentious academies of other lands. It was an age of long religious dramas, of tortured rhymes and impossible metres, when strange and new versification imported from France found favor among a people whose silks and linens and rich tapestries ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... magistrates (however tyrannical and usurping), as Powers ordained of God: it does not recognize nations as Communities ordained of God, or as having any power and authority whatsoever, as against pretentious individuals. To obey a king, is strenuously enforced; to resist a usurping king, in a patriotic cause, is not contemplated in the New Testament as under any circumstances an imaginable duty. Patriotism has no recognised ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... and Lear and that King Lucius who sanctified Cornhill, legends which have their counterpart in all the old histories of Rouen, there are almost as few relics of the fortified barrack on the Thames, or of the more pretentious "Augusta" which followed, as there are of Roman Rouen. The same mud flats along the river bank remained until, in 982, after the first great fire, Cnut made a canal for his boats round Southwark. Into ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... had lied to him. Lied from first to last, deliberately and consummately, over each separate thing and over all the pretentious silliness and waste of it. Norah declared that it was so, and it looked like it. And more than anything it showed where my poor Viola had got to. It was so unlike her to lie, so unlike her to stand aside, where you would have thought she would have ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... and weeping eyes in one humble home, where the loss of two deeply loved ones was mourned; and even in the paternal hall of O'Grady, and in the pretentious mansion of Devereux, sorrow was expressed, and some tears were shed for those who had thus early been cut off in their career of glory. We will not attempt to pry into the grief which existed in Gerrard's home. It did not show itself by loud cries and lamentations, but it was very evident ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... have an intelligent conception of every topic upon which they touched, as they ranged at will in their conversation, evincing such acumen of intellect and such practical comprehension of subjects of which many of her sex, who made much greater pretentious, were entirely ignorant, that Ashton, concluded she was a treasure, indeed, which he would make ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... anyone to assume that he represents the Moral Forces. And "Potentia" sounds too mystic for any land this side of Egypt. Am I not right? Answer in one of your sane moments. You cannot go against ridicule in America. Bishops here are not the same as Lords in England. They cannot save from ridicule pretentious good things. Now Ross and you are wise things. How do you stand for "Moral Forces" and "Potentia"? No, no, dear ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... again, and the awful pageant that rolls past our view under the direction of the aristocrat of literature made my late life seem poor and mean. How low we were! The darkened costers are interesting as studies in animal life; but the more pretentious persons whose humour reaches its highest flight in an indecent story, and whose wit consists in calling someone else a liar—how petty they are, and how fruitless is their friendship! I began to feel like a patrician who surveys ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... this little volume modestly waives all claim to the title of poet, and thus disarms severer criticism. His book, nevertheless, has the merit of being lively and agreeable, which is more than can be said of many more pretentious volumes of verse. His pieces are mostly of the kind called verses of society, a variety whose range is all the way up from Concanen to Horace. It is enough, if they are only passable; but good specimens are easy and sprightly,—their philosophy not worldly precisely, but man-of-the-worldly,—their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... He did not delay Burnside, for the latter was awaiting the return of the Ninth Corps from Vicksburg, and this did not begin to arrive till long after the raid was over. None of the National army's communications were interrupted, and not a soldier under Rosecrans lost a ration by reason of the pretentious expedition. It ended in a scene that was ridiculous in the extreme. Morgan had pressed into his service as guides, on the last day of his flight, two men who were not even officers of the local militia, but who were acting as volunteer homeguards to protect their ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... furniture," appears on p. 193 to give an idea of the fashion of the day; it is evident from the large looking glass which overhangs the sideboard that the fashion had now set in to use these mirrors. Some thirty or forty year later this mirror became part of the sideboard, and in some large and pretentious designs which we have seen, the sideboard itself was little better than a support for a huge glass ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... opened into a hall less pretentious. This hall was between the drawingroom and the family library, and the stairs here were covered ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells
... performance was over we all went to Lorber's—the most pretentious restaurant on the East Side. Matilda and I were mostly left to ourselves. We talked of our native town and of her pious mother, who had died a few years before, but we carefully avoided the few weeks which I had spent in her mother's house, ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... family had moved into a more pretentious home, known as the Crotta House. Little is related of his boyhood life there. It was quiet and uneventful. The boy was of reserved nature, preferring to sit quietly in the corner and listen while others did the talking. Yet when drawn out, he could ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... City. He generally put up, or, as Bob Sawyer had it, "hung out," at the "George and Vulture," also in the City. One side of Goswell Street, in those days—a road ascending to the old Angel Inn—faced, near the top, a number of the pretentious squares and terraces I have been describing. That interesting old theatre, Sadler's Wells, was in the rear, and the New River passed beneath it or beside it, and, quite uncovered in those days, rippled along on ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... the monastery we left the automobile and dipped into the labyrinth of narrow alleyways until at last we were before the greatest temple of Urga with the Tibetan walls and windows and its pretentious Chinese roof. A single lantern burned at the entrance. The heavy gate with the bronze and iron trimmings was shut. When the General struck the big brass gong hanging by the gate, frightened monks began running up from all directions ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... overwrought sentimentality and faulty scansion which marked most of the pieces was one simple little poem that struck a true note, said its little say, and quit—without a superfluous word. Its author set no store by it at all compared with his more pretentious and meretricious work; yet it was the one poem in the whole mass. It described the writing of a letter to his father; he had spent all he had in prospecting and working a small claim, and had just realised that ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... intimate communication with himself. These he could not reveal; nor could she perfectly open her heart to him, for the same reason. They both had an established ideal of their personal qualities, not far above the positive, since they were neither of them pretentious, yet it was a trifle higher and fairer than the working pattern; and albeit they were sincere enough, quite sincere in their mutual intercourse, they had, by what each knew at times of the thumping organ within them, cause for doubting that they were as transparent as the other ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a comb about them to arrange the wigs of their masters, whilst the latter thought it fashionable to comb and arrange their hair in public (see The Pretentious Young Ladies).] ...
— The Bores • Moliere
... named Coomba, to guard the construction crews on the railroad from the attacks of predatory Indians seeking game in their ancient hunting-grounds. A few huts in the sagebrush, a half-dozen miners' shacks under the butte to the south, and one or two rather pretentious frame houses in process of construction completed what was Little Missouri; but Little Missouri was not the only outpost of civilization at this junction of the railroad and the winding, treacherous river. On ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... dinner with him, to view the splendor of "Ciro's" and a keeper of the vestiaire in scarlet breeches and silk stockings. Afterwards they were to go to the little bon-bon play-house up by the more pretentious bon-bon Casino. He was to watch the antics of a band of actors toying with some mimic fate, flippantly, to the sound of music, when his own destiny swung trembling on the last silken thread of tortured ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... Sometimes pretentious pictures representing events in public or family history, were embroidered in crewels on sampler linen. The largest and funniest one I have ever seen was the boarding-school climax of glory of Miss Hannah Otis, sister of the patriot James Otis. It is a view of the Hancock House, Boston Common, ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... our White House looks like that," Bab said, after half a moment's pause. "I was so afraid it would be pretentious. But it is just big and simple and dignified as our President's home ought to be. It makes me feel so glad to be an American," Barbara ended with a flush. She was afraid the other girls ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane
... on, and, a little later, his gaze was attracted by a large shed, in the rear of a white house the pretentious appearance of which indicated that persons of wealth ...
— Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice • Victor Appleton
... said that the superiority of the line, mass, and color composition of Japanese prints and kakemonos to that exhibited in the vastly more pretentious easel pictures of modern Occidental artists—a superiority now generally acknowledged by connoisseurs—is largely due to the conscious following, on the part of the Japanese, of this ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... Holding to a general direction she kept her course. "The Boulevard", known on the tax books of Hot Springs as Boulevard Addition, sprawls over a wide area. Houses vary in size and construction with startling frequency. Few of them are pretentious. Many appear well planned, are in excellent state of repair and front on yards, scrupulously neat, sometimes patterned with flower beds. Occasionally a building leans with age, roof caving and windows and ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... Bonch-Brouyevich, secretary of the Council of People's Commissars, is not a Jew. Kolontai is not a Jewess. There are many other Gentile Commissars. How completely the London Morning Post and the Dearborn Independent misrepresent the essential facts I have already shown by my analysis of the pretentious list of fifty names published by the former. I have before me the official list of the members of the Sovnarkom—that is, the Council of the People's Commissars of the Soviet government. As is well known, the elaborate and intricate ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... newspaper which always exists, like the faithful at prayer, where two or three are gathered together. There were saloons in plenty with irrelevant and picturesque names, a dance hall and a blacksmith shop. The most conspicuous and pretentious building in Crowheart was the Terriberry House, bilious in color and Spartan in its architecture, located in the centre of Main Street on a corner. The houses as yet were chiefly tar-paper shacks or floored ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... report almost an anachronism so far as it pretends to be what it at one time was—a pretty complete report of the scientific and other work of the department. The attempts which I have made through the proper authorities to get Congress to order more pretentious monographic works in quarto volume similar to those issued by other departments of the government have not met with encouragement, and in this direction many of the stations will, let us hope, be ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... Johnson that I need not fear recapture in that city, a comparatively unimportant question arose as to the name by which I should be known thereafter in my new relation as a free man. The name given me by my dear mother was no less pretentious and long than Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. I had, however, while living in Maryland, dispensed with the Augustus Washington, and retained only Frederick Bailey. Between Baltimore and New Bedford, the better to conceal myself from the slave-hunters, I had parted with Bailey ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... is the Bedlamite. Surely, the man who authorizes these suggestions must be, indeed, 'far gone,' whether he be 'a king or a yeoman.' And mad indeed he is. Writhing under the insufficiency and incompetency of these pretentious, but, in fact, ignorant and usurping institutions, his heart of hearts racked and crushed with their failure, the victim of this social empiricism, cries out in his anguish, under that safe disguise of the Robes that hide all: 'Take these away at least,—that will be something gained. Let us ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... statesman than Walpole, no abler churchman than Warburton, no greater poet than Pope. There was a general indifference to lofty speculation. A materialistic philosophy was in fashion,—not openly atheistic, but arrogant and pretentious, whose only power was in sarcasm and mockery, like the satires of Lucian, extinguishing faith, godless and yet boastful,—an Epicureanism such as Socrates attacked and Paul rebuked. It found its greatest exponent in Voltaire, the oracle and idol of intellectual Europe. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord |
