"Barmecide" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Following this as a blind man might, he entered the dining-room, which to his discomfiture was as empty as the salon above. Still following the host's voice, he dropped into a chair before the empty table, wondering what variation of the Barmecide feast was in store for him. Yet the hum of voices from the vacant chairs around the board so strongly impressed him that he could almost believe that he ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... with a wooden leg who carried on a thriving trade in the vicinity of the nearest public school. But the periods between the contributions were so long, and the amount of fruit consumed was so small, that Johnnie was never even a quarter satisfied—except at one of his Barmecide feasts. ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... treasure into some new, strange, superior type of creature, to us for ever unknown and utterly unrecognizable? Tormented by aspirations which neither time nor space, force nor matter, will realize or satisfy, consumed by spiritual hunger fiercer than Ugolino's, we are invited to seize upon the Barmecide's banquet of "The Law which formulates organic development as a transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous;" and that "this universal transformation is a change from indefinite homogeneity to definite heterogeneity; and that only when the increasing multiformity is ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... character of the ranch cuisine, even if he had been unequal to the task of blackening that of the owner. Blake had declared Sancho's homestead to be a den of thieves, and the repast tendered the stage passengers a Barmecide feast—the purport of which was duly reported to Sancho, who declared he would ultimately carve his opinion of Blake on that officer's elongated carcass, and until he could find opportunity so to do it behooved him to lull the suspicions of the ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... Charles Kemble, Fanny Kelly ("Barbara S."), on red-letter occasions Coleridge and Wordsworth,—and sees them discharging the severer offices of the whist-table ("cards were cards" then), and, later, unbending their minds over poetry, criticism, and metaphysics. Elia was no Barmecide host, and the serjeant dwells not without regret upon the solider business of the evening,—"the cold roast lamb or boiled beef, the heaps of smoking roasted potatoes, and the vast jug of porter, often replenished ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... "Mr. Gabbitt is gone off the happiest man in Ireland, with the hopes of surveying my Lord O'Toole's estate; a good job, which I was bound in honour to obtain for him, as a reward for taking a good joke. After mocking him with the bare imagination of a feast, you know the Barmecide in the Arabian Tales gave poor Shakabac a substantial dinner, a full equivalent ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... help feeling that there is a great lack of substance in all this shadowy host——that, as the procession of phantoms glides before us, there is not one that we can pounce upon, and say "Here is a Proposition that must be either true or false!"——that it is but a Barmecide Feast, to which we have been bidden——and that its prototype is to be found in that mythical island, whose inhabitants "earned a precarious living by taking in each others' washing"! By simply translating "telling 2 Truths" into "taking both of 2 condiments (salt and mustard)," "telling 2 ...
— Symbolic Logic • Lewis Carroll
... days, she expected more than a "home of her own." To-night four suitors sat at table with Eudora, and she might have had forty had she desired it. Any one of the four would have cheerfully murdered the remaining three had opportunity presented itself. Supper was a mockery to them, a Barmecide feast. Each watched his rivals—and Eudora. This was a matter of life and death. There was no time for food. The girl revelled in the situation to the full of her untaught, unthinking, primitive ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... Eminence's conversation with which we were subsequently favored. Those "lively dinners" in "Endymion" and "Lothair" at which we were assured the brightest minds in England loved to gather became mere Barmecide feasts when reported to us without a single amusing remark, such waifs and strays of conversation as reached our ears being of the dreariest and most fatuous description. It is not so with the real masters of their craft. Mr. Peacock does not stop to explain to us that Doctor Folliott ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor) |
