"Frippery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... find it wet upon the street and slippery; Never bother if the street is full of ooze; Do not fret that you'll upset, that you will spoil your summer frippery, You may turn about as sharply as you choose. For those myriad claws will grip the road and keep the car from skidding, And your steering gear will hold it fast and true; Every atom of the car ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams
... paid the cabman, and Nina walked across the pavement into one of the most famous repositories of expensive frippery in the world, she thrilled with the profoundest pleasure her tiny soul was capable of. Foolish, simple Nina had achieved the nec plus ultra of ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... Rodrigo the swiftest and most brilliant. A great siege tests the fighting quality of any army as nothing else can test it. In the night watches in the trenches, in the dogged toil of the batteries, and the crowded perils of the breach, all the frippery and much of the real discipline of an army dissolves. The soldiers fall back upon what may be called the primitive fighting qualities—the hardihood of the individual soldier, the daring with which the officers will lead, the dogged loyalty with which the ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... mummer as I am within the walls, and thou knowest that well enough, dame," replied the apprentice. "I can touch the players themselves, at the Ball and at the Fortune, for presenting any thing except a gentleman. Take but this d—d skin of frippery off me, which I think the devil stuck me into, and you shall put me into nothing else that I will not become as if I were born ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... neat as you please," interrupted I, "and I shall love you the better for it; but all this is not neatness, but frippery. These rufflings and pinkings and patchings will only make us hated by all the wives of our neighbors. No, my children," continued I, more gravely, "those gowns must be altered into something of a plainer cut, for finery is very unbecoming in us who ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... that Tony had no idea of being a humble dependent; but Mr. Webb would occasionally come and dine with him—and often asked him in return. Mrs. Webb too was civil to his wife and the girls—always lent them the Dublin pattern for their frills, frocks, and other frippery—and seldom drove into Drumsna without calling. The consequence was, that the Counsellor was a man after Tony's own heart. Though they were of different religions, they had, generally speaking, the same ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... of our good Queen Bess, and called her mighty extravagant; but beshrew me if she were half as vain or extravagant as our noble King Jamie! It is a marvel he cannot see how ten-fold uglier he makes his ugly person by trapping himself out in all such frippery and gorgeous apparel." ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... not so happen. On the contrary, the dislike which Lady O'Shane took at sight to both the mother and daughter—to the daughter instinctively, at sight of her youth and beauty; to the mother reflectively, on account of her matronly dress and dignified deportment, in too striking contrast to her own frippery appearance— increased every day, and every hour, when she saw the attentions, the adoration, that Sir Ulick paid to Miss Annaly, and the deference and respect he showed to Lady Annaly, all for qualities and accomplishments in which Lady O'Shane ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... curse of life arises from a misconception of its significance. We delve in the mine for paltry gems, explore old ocean's deep for pearls; we toil and strive for gold until the hands are worn and the heart is cold; we attire ourselves in Tyrean purples and silks of Ind and strut forth in our gilded frippery on the narrow bridge of time, between the two eternities; we despoil the thin purse of the poor to erect brazen altars and priceless fanes, when the whole earth's a sacred shrine, the universe a temple through which rings the voice of God and rolls the eternal ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... deliver us from realism?" Nothing is so tiring as a constant close imitation of life. One comes back inevitably to imaginative work. Homer's fictions will always be preferred to historical truth, Rubens' fabulous magnificence to all the frippery copied exactly from ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... more weeks. Under his roof now ought I to take my rest, but that back-looking ambition tells me I might yet be a Londoner! Well, if we ever do move, we have encumbrances the less to impede us; all our furniture has faded under the auctioneer's hammer, going for nothing, like the tarnished frippery of the prodigal, and we have only a spoon or two left to bless us. Clothed we came into Enfield, and naked we must go out of it. I would live in London shirtless, bookless. Henry Crabb is at Rome; advices to that effect have reached Bury. But by solemn legacy he bequeathed at ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... to dress with exceeding care, but I fretted much for my own easy garments which permitted a man to use his limbs with the freedom God had given them. Verily there would be no regret when all this frippery could be cast aside, and by my faith, it was much simpler to lay it off than to array one's self in. I never did learn all the eccentricities of that remarkable rig my fashionable friend ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... untamed, lawless and unabashed. For all they are robed in crimson and saffron, and are with such fine pearls necklaced, these dames do exhale from their exuberant bodies the essence of a quite primitive and simple era; but for the ease of their deportment in their frippery, they might be Maenads in masquerade. They have nothing of the coyness that civilisation fosters in women, are as fearless and unsophisticated as men. A 'wooing' were wasted on them, for they have no sense of antagonism, and seek ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... passed by the Concert of Musard, then held in the Rue St. Honore; and round this, in the wet, a number of coaches were collected. The ball was just up, and a crowd of people in hideous masquerade, drunk, tired, dirty, dressed in horrible old frippery, and daubed with filthy rouge, were trooping out of the place: tipsy women and men, shrieking, jabbering, gesticulating, as French will do; parties swaggering, staggering forwards, arm in arm, reeling to and fro across ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... corroborates the Puritan's report about the bad manners of the undergraduates. Yet Oxford, then as now, did not lack her exquisites, and her admirers of the fair. Terrae Filius thus describes a "smart," as these dandies were called—Mr. Frippery: ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... chairs drawn closer. The nobles did not hesitate to express their fear; the other party endeavoured to treat the matter lightly. "Shame on the country," said Ryland, "to lay so much stress upon words and frippery; it is a question of nothing; of the new painting of carriage-pannels and the embroidery ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... poetry in any of the 15 forthcoming combinations of show and emptiness, yclept Annuals. Let me whisper in your ear that wholesome sacramental bread is not more nutritious than papistical wafer stuff, than these (to head and heart) exceed the visual frippery of Mitford's Salamander God, baking himself up to the work of creation in a solar oven, not yet by the terms of the context itself existing. Blake's ravings made genteel. So there's verses for thy verses; and now let me tell you that the sight ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... he would interpolate new matter, or alter it so that it was impossible to recognise it. Once upon a time, one of those gentlemen who, like the usurers at our yearly fairs, clutch and beg and steal every sort of frippery, and issue mean little volumes, no thicker than an A B C book, every month, or even every week, wormed this same story out of Thoma Grigorovitch, and the latter completely forgot about it. But that same young gentleman, in the ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... furnished by Miss Roberts was that "A lady on ship-board, spruced up for the Park or the Opera, would only be an object of ridicule to her experienced companions. Frippery which would be discarded in England is often useful in India. Members of my sex," she adds, "who have to study economy, can always secure bargains by acquiring at small cost items of fashion which, while outmoded in London, ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... remembered always, that in this work it was not alone the well-born and the wealthy who made sacrifices, and gave grand gifts. Not from the sacrifice of gauds and frippery did the humble charities of these hired nurses come, but from the yielding up of a thousand needed comforts for themselves, and the forgetfulness of their own wants, in supplying the mightier wants ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... throw a mysterious grandeur about its possessor? You will call this romantic; but consider I was born in the land of talisman and spell, and my childhood lulled by tales which you can only enjoy through the gauzy frippery of a French translation. O, Matilda, I wish you could have seen the dusky visages of my Indian attendants, bending in earnest devotion round the magic narrative, that flowed, half poetry, half prose, from the lips of the tale-teller! No wonder that European ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... on frippery sets his heart May purchase titles such as Bart.; These garish gauds my spirit spurns, I'm greater as I am," ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various
... other and importunate young fops, the senior Ensign and his frippery and his marked attention to Lois, and his mincing but unfeigned devotion to her, had irritated me to the very verge ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... and knocked yet none opened, and to call at the openings of those dark streets where Wisdom herself hath stretched forth her hands and no man regarded,—thirty minutes to raise the dead in,—let us but once understand and feel this, and we shall look with changed eyes upon that frippery of gay furniture about the place from which the message of judgment must be delivered, which either breathes upon the dry bones that they may live, or, if ineffectual, remains recorded in condemnation, perhaps ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... the court frequently donated old ribbons, feathers, or flowers, from discarded millinery or other finery, and all these were utilized by the frippery loving courtiers. ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... with a smile upon those days, realizing what a ridiculous sight I must have been, but at the time, their tragedy was for me a very real and living one. Newton had passed some years in London, and had picked up there the graces of the court, as well as much of its frippery gossip, which latter he was fond of retailing, to my great disgust, but to the vast entertainment of the ladies, who found no fault with it, though it was four or five years old. He could tell a story well and turn a joke to a nicety,—a fact which I was at that time far from admitting,—and ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... her sat a lady in a riding habit, whom I soon found to be Mrs. Dobson;(120) below her sat a gentlewoman, prim, upright, neat, and mean; and, next to her, sat another, thin, haggard, wrinkled, fine, and tawdry, with a thousand frippery ornaments and old-fashioned furbelows; she was excellently nick-named, by Mrs. Thrale, the Duchess of Monmouth. On the opposite side was placed Mrs. Thrale, and, next to her, Queeny. For my own part, little ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... immediately reduced to something concrete—something he can understand—then we take away the amount of his debt, and if there are still some made beaver remaining, he knows he has something left over to spend for finery and frippery. Rarely does he use these extra skins for the purchase of food or necessary clothing—he contracts a new debt for that. But, wait till spring when the Indians come in, and you will witness the trading for yourself. It is then you will see ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... figures; and, in the midst of the innovations of the times, was regarded, towards the decline of her life, as a lady of the old school, clinging as she did to the national cloth, in preference to the frippery of the European calicoes. But the art of printing the tappa is unknown upon the Marquesan Islands. In passing along the valley, I was often attracted by the noise of the mallet, which, when employed in the manufacture of the cloth produces at every stroke ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... tables, and beds also retreat; all except the ancient bookcase, full of his "ragged veterans." This I saw, years after Charles Lamb's death, in the possession of his sister, Mary. "All our furniture has faded," he writes, "under the auctioneer's hammer; going for nothing, like the tarnished frippery of the prodigal." Four years afterwards (in 1833) Lamb moves to his last home, in Church Street, Edmonton, where he is somewhat nearer ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... has manoeuvred for at the expense of manliness, truth, consistency, and honesty, does he not conjugate the verb valoir negatively? When Madame Favorita has made her last curtsy for the night behind the foot-lights, has thrown off her tawdry frippery, and sits in her lonely chamber, glowering at the image of the young rival who has won all the applause,—when she bemoans her waning charms and the wearisome life which has lost its sparkle, and sees its emptiness and hollowness,—does she not look wistfully at that little ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... latitudinarianism, which ignores sin—the central fact of human life—and therefore can find no place for the Atonement. Heresy is preached more unblushingly than it was thirty years ago; and when it tries to disguise itself in the frippery of aesthetic Anglicanism, it leads captive not a few. In the churches commonly called Ritualistic, I note one great and significant improvement. English Churchmen have gradually discovered that they have an indigenous ritual of their own—dignified, expressive, artistic, ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... he said, bitterly, "that you understand the frippery taste of this trivial age better than I. A capability to appreciate solid reading, reading that cultivates the understanding while it amends the heart, seems to be with the forgotten learning before the flood. They who pander to this diseased ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... wonderful art of preaching sermons which the wheelwright and the blacksmith can understand; not because he talks condescending twaddle, but because he can call a spade a spade, and knows how to disencumber ideas of their wordy frippery. Look at him more attentively, and you will see that his face is a very interesting one —that there is a great deal of humour and feeling playing in his grey eyes, and about the corners of his roughly-cut mouth: a man, ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... fiction out may trick her, And in paste gems and frippery deck her; Oh! flickering, feeble, and unsicker I've found her still, Aye wavering like the willow-wicker, 'Tween good ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... chairs which were a part of some one else's aesthetic plan. As a matter of fact many of our millionaires would be more at home in an atmosphere concocted from the ingredients of plain pine tables and blanket-covered mattresses than they are surrounded by the frippery of China and the frivolity of France. If these gentlemen were fortunate enough to enjoy sufficient confidence in their own taste to give it a thorough test it is not safe to think of the extreme burden that would be put on the working capacity of ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... separable charm. For it has everything—a sufficient scheme, a definite meaning and purpose, a sustained and adequate command of poetical presentation, and passages and phrases of the most exquisite beauty. Although it begins as a pastoral, the mere traditional and conventional frippery of that form is by no means so prominent in it as in the later (and, I think, less consummate) companion and sequel Thyrsis. With hardly an exception, the poet throughout escapes in his phraseology the two main dangers which so constantly beset him—too great stiffness and too great ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... quite a sensation in the house; the Lorilleuxs sneered; Lantier, whose mouth sneered, turned the girl round to sniff at her delicious aroma; the Boches had forbidden Pauline to associate with this baggage in her frippery. And Gervaise was also angered by Nana's exhausted slumber, when after one of her adventures, she slept till noon, with her chignon undone and still full of hair pins, looking so white and breathing so feebly that she seemed to be dead. Her mother shook her five or six times in the course of the ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hung it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune, and talked of "the dear cottage where so many joyful hours had flown." Well, this thatching of hovels is the custom of the country. Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated, they fascinate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... seriously. "In every human heart, Cary, there is a place where the man or the woman dwells inside all the frippery and mannerism; the real creature itself, stripped of all disguises. Dig down to that place if ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... the room a good deal of second-hand frippery in the way of silk and lace, rather faded velvet, even, eight-button gloves that had been cleaned several times, and perfumes abstracted from madame's dressing-table, but the faces were happy, thoughts given wholly to gaiety, and I was able to make a little corner for ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... fascinating than its products, Browning has described how he discovered this forgotten tale and forged its glowing metal into the Ring. The chance finding of an "old square yellow book" which aroused his curiosity among the frippery of a Florentine stall, was as grotesquely casual an inception as poem ever had. But it was one of those accidents which, suddenly befalling a creative mind, organise its loose and scattered material with a magical potency unattainable by prolonged cogitation. The ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... the useful," said Flora. "The Cleveland set will be sure to deal in frippery, and I have been looking over Mrs. Hoxton's stores, where I see quite enough for mere decoration. There are two splendid vases in potichomanie, in an Etruscan pattern, which are coming for me ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... unknown, I hate a priest or monk with beard o'ergrown; A doting husband, or a tradesman's son, Who apes a noble, and would pass for one. I hate much water and too little wine, A prosperous villain and a false divine; A niggard lout who sets the dice aside; A flirting girl all frippery and pride; A cloth too narrow, and a board too wide; Him who exalts his handmaid to his wife, And her who makes her groom her lord for life; The man who kills his horse with wanton speed, And him who fails his ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... shaped as the slimmest tail of the swallow! My brother, a man of experience, had said: "One must have a dress coat if one wishes to make one's way in the world." And the dear fellow counted much upon this piece of frippery for the advancement ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... of the tribe as a workshop. The walls were gay with the handicraft which had been hung up to clear a space for the tables. There were braided or woven baskets of all sizes and every hue; there were beaded skins and frippery of feathered gewgaws and moccasins and miniature canoes and plaques of birch, hand carved. And subordinating all else, even the scents and savors of the food, was the perfume of the ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... Turns it all ways, then civilly declines. "What! Says me nay?" "'Tis even so, sir. Why? Can't say. Dislikes you, or, more likely, shy." Next morning Philip searches Mena out, And finds him vending to a rabble rout Old crazy lumber, frippery of the worst, And with all courtesy salutes him first. Mena pleads occupation, ties of trade, His service else he would by dawn have paid, At Philip's house,—was grieved to think, that how He should have ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... period we write of) they succeeded so completely in changing the aspect of the building, that it looked, within, more like a vast pagan toyshop than a Christian church. Here and there, it is true, a pillar or an altar rose unencumbered as of old, appearing as much at variance with the frippery that surrounded it as a text of Scripture quoted in a sermon of the time. But as regarded the general aspect of the basilica, the decent glories of its earlier days seemed irrevocably ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... superlative Genius) and now and then penning a Catch or a Ditty, instead of inditing Odes, and Sonnets, the Gentlemen of the Bon Goust in the Pit would never have been put to all that Grimace in damning the Frippery of State, the Poverty and Languor of Thought, the unnatural Wit, and inartificial Structure of his Dramas. I am, SIR, Your very humble ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... saw the difference. There had never been a woman's hand in that place. It was the room of a man who had a passion for frippery, who had a perverted taste for soft delicate things. It was the complement to his bluff brutality. I began to see the queer other side to my host, that evil side which gossip had spoken of as not unknown in the German army. ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... finances, and all her industry to the building up of a vast array of wonderful church edifices, and starving half her citizens to accomplish it. She is to-day one vast museum of magnificence and misery. All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathedrals. And for every beggar in America, Italy can show a hundred—and rags and vermin to match. It is the wretchedest, princeliest ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... raising her countenance, bathed in tears, and purple with shame; "is it not shameful of me to be dressed in all this frippery, and throwing away so much money in follies, while you are thus miserably clad, and in need of everything—perhaps dying of want, for I have never seen your poor face ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... hear English men and women talk of their dear country. There is nothing like Old England, say they; yet paramount as their love of country appears to be, their love of French frippery is a stronger passion! They will lament the times, the stagnation of trade, the scarcity of money, the ruin of manufacturers, but they will wear Parisian productions. It is a comfort, however, to know that they are often deceived, and benefit their suffering ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 386, August 22, 1829 • Various
... intercepted. M. Coudray has the character of the first engineer in the kingdom, and his manners and disposition will, I am confident, be highly pleasing to you, as he is a plain, modest, active, sensible man, perfectly averse to frippery and parade. My friends here rejoice at the acquisition, and considering the character of the man, and at whose hands I in effect received him, I must congratulate you on it. Several young gentlemen of fortune, whose families are nearly connected ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... clothes to be made, and have done with the subject; women make their own clothes, necessary or ornamental, and are continually talking about them; and their thoughts follow their hands. It is not indeed the making of necessaries that weakens the mind; but the frippery of dress. For when a woman in the lower rank of life makes her husband's and children's clothes, she does her duty, this is part of her business; but when women work only to dress better than they could otherwise afford, it is worse than sheer loss of time. To render the poor virtuous, ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... in an arch, akin to this, His idol-canker seated is: Then in a round is placed by these His golden god, Cantharides. So that, where'er ye look, ye see, No capital, no cornice free, Or frieze, from this fine frippery. Now this the fairies would have known, Theirs is a mixed religion: And some have heard the elves it call Part pagan, part papistical. If unto me all tongues were granted, I could not speak the saints here painted. Saint Tit, Saint Nit, Saint Is, Saint Itis, Who 'gainst Mab's-state placed ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... which we English and Americans are perhaps the truest types, stands revealed, from beneath its froth, frippery, and vulgar excrescences, sound at core—a world whose implicit motto is: "The good of all humanity." But the herd-life, which is its characteristic, brings many evils, has many dangers; and to preserve a sane ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... back to my boy; 'tis like he waits for me at the pease- puddingry, or the curiosity shop; yet stay; his instructions were to meet me at the frippery. Ah, hither comes he in the nick of time: ay, and has purchased a beesting-pudding and girdle-cakes and leeks, sausages and steak, dewlap and tripe and collops.—Good, Atticion, you have made most of my journey ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... back, he told the company he had been teased by a very importunate beggar. Addressing himself to our adventurer, "You took notice," says he, "of a fine lady flaunting about our walk in all the frippery of the fashion. She was lately a gay young widow that made a great figure at the court-end of the town; she distinguished herself by her splendid equipage, her rich liveries, her brilliant assemblies, her numerous routs, and her elegant taste in dress and furniture. ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... Mohi looked highly offended; and nervously twitching his beard, uttered something invidious about frippery young poetasters being too full of silly imaginings to tell a ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... habits, fathers and sons in succession resigned their breath. It is not unusual to see one of these apartments now transformed into a modern drawing-room, where a thoughtful mind can scarcely forbear comparing the past and present,—the spindled frippery of modern furniture, the frail but elegant apparatus of a tea-table, the general decorum, the equal absence of everything to afflict or to transport, with what has been heard, or seen, or felt, within the same walls,—- the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... Parts), than other grouling Mortals know, or battering half-a-dozen fair new Windows in a Morning after their debauch, whilst the dull unjantee Rascal they belong to is fast asleep. But I'll proceed no farther in their character, because that miracle of Wit (in spite of Academick frippery) the mighty Echard hath already done it to my satisfaction; and whoever undertakes a Supplement to anything he hath discourst, had better for their reputation ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... perplex, Whom maids and metaphors conspire to vex! In studious dishabille behold her sit, A lettered gossip and a household wit; At once invoking, though for different views, Her gods, her cook, her milliner and muse. Bound her strewed room a frippery chaos lies, A checkered wreck of notable and wise, Bills, books, caps, couplets, combs, a varied mass, Oppress the toilet and obscure the glass; Unfinished here an epigram is laid, And there a mantua-maker's bill unpaid. There new-born plays foretaste the ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... mind perplex, Whom maids and metaphors conspire to vex! In studious deshabille behold her sit, A letter'd gossip and a housewife wit: At once invoking, though for different views, Her gods, her cook, her milliner, and muse. Round her strew'd room a frippery chaos lies, A chequer'd wreck of notable and wise. Bills, books, caps, couplets, combs, a varied mass, Oppress the toilet and obscure the glass; Unfinished here an epigram is laid, And there a mantua-maker's bill unpaid. There new-born plays foretaste ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... and affection, to be sure. But among the revolutions in France must be reckoned a considerable revolution in their ideas of politeness. In England we are said to learn manners at second-hand from your side of the water, and that we dress our behavior in the frippery of France. If so, we are still in the old cut, and have not so far conformed to the new Parisian mode of good breeding as to think it quite in the most refined strain of delicate compliment (whether in condolence or congratulation) to say, to the most humiliated creature that crawls upon ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... strive, lovingly and earnestly, in her own sphere. "Life is real! Life is earnest!" Not less for her than for man. She has no right to bury her talent beneath silks or ribands, frippery or flowers; nor yet has she the right, because she fancies not her task, to grasp at another's, which is, or which she imagines is, easier. This is baby play. "Life is real! Life is earnest!" Let woman so read it—let woman so learn it—and she has no need to make her influence ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... thrown into a state of great agitation. She was dressed in rather a frippery of mousseline de soie, all cream-laced, with wide-hanging short sleeves, a large diamond at the low open neck, the ivory-brown skin there contrasting with the powdered bluish-white of her face, where, however, the freckles ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... managed to come out of all political troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family estate. Young women of such birth, living in a quiet country-house, and attending a village church hardly larger than a parlor, naturally regarded frippery as the ambition of a huckster's daughter. Then there was well-bred economy, which in those days made show in dress the first item to be deducted from, when any margin was required for expenses more distinctive of rank. Such reasons would have been enough to account for plain ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... chose [Fr.]; child's play, kinderspiel. toy, plaything, popgun, paper pellet, gimcrack, gewgaw, bauble, trinket, bagatelle, Rickshaw, knickknack, whim-wham, trifle, trifles light as air; yankee notions [U.S.]. trumpery, trash, rubbish, stuff, fatras^, frippery; leather or prunello; chaff, drug, froth bubble smoke, cobweb; weed; refuse &c (inutility) 645; scum &c (dirt) 653. joke, jest, snap of the fingers; fudge &c (unmeaning) 517; fiddlestick^, fiddlestick end^; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... panoramas and exhibitions of the triumphs of art; for them a whole world of suffering and pain, and a universe of joy, must resolve through the boulevards or stray through the streets of Paris; for them encyclopaedias of carnival frippery and a score of illustrated books are brought out every year, to say nothing of caricatures by the hundred, and vignettes, lithographs, and prints by the thousand. To please those eyes, fifteen thousand francs' worth ...
— Gaudissart II • Honore de Balzac
... time by entering into any lengthened detail of this ridiculous nonsense: indeed, it is quite unnecessary; almost every one of the books published on Spain, and their name at present is legion, being crammed with details of this same Majeza—a happy combination of insolence, ignorance, frippery, and folly. The majo or Tomfool struts about the streets dressed something like a merry Andrew with jerkin and tight hose, a faja or girdle of crimson silk round his waist, in which is sometimes stuck a dagger, his neck exposed, and a queer kind ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... I know all about his breeding—by Stormcloud out of Frippery—but he never ran to his breeding before. The way he ran for Jimmy Miles you'd have thought he was by a steam roller out of a wheelbarrow. What in Sam Hill have you been doing to him—sprinkling powders on ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... of the earth is so intimately known to us as the magnificent histrion, whose tinselled grandeur and pompous egoism have been laid bare by the Duke of St. Simon, prince of memoirists. Never has the frippery of a court been shrivelled by such fierce and consuming light, glaring like a fiery sun on its meretricious splendours. And what a court it is! What a gilded crowd of princes and paramours, harlots and bastards, struts, fumes and intrigues through these Memoirs! By ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... divides philosophy into the three stages of Theological, Metaphysical, and Positive. This general theorem he completes by particular applications,—to costume among others. In this he distinguishes the three stages of Tattooing (including paint), Frippery, and Clothes. Man has reached the third stage, he says; woman is in the second, and not entirely out ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... streaming with unguents, fell low not only on either side of the face, but on the neck and even the shoulders of the owner. The face was saturnine and strongly marked, but handsome and striking. There was a mixture of frippery and sternness in its expression,—something between Madame Vestries and T. P. Cooke, or between "lovely Sally" and a "Captain bold of Halifax." The stature of this personage was remarkably tall, and his figure was stout, muscular, and well knit. In fine, to complete ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "Great Pan is dead!" And Jove's high palace closed its portal, The fallen gods, before they fled, Sold out their frippery to ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... proportion, the grace of form, and divinity of sentiment of his nymph or his goddess—so with Burns the fashion of a lady's boddice, the lustre of her satins, or the sparkle of her diamonds, or other finery with which wealth or taste has loaded her, are neglected us idle frippery; while her beauty, her form, or her mind, matters which are of nature and not of fashion, are remembered and praised. He is none of the millinery bards, who deal in scented silks, spider-net laces, rare gems, set in rarer workmanship, and who shower diamonds ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... interior of this temple are beautiful, all of jaune antique and one entire stone each. How much better would it have been to replace the statues of the Dii Majorum Gentium which occupied the niches, by statues in marble of the Apostles, instead of the dolls dressed in tawdry colors, and the frippery gilding of the altars on which they stand, which disfigure this noble building. The Pantheon was built by Agrippa as the inscription shews. In the interior are sixteen columns of jaune antique. The bronze that formerly ornamented this temple was ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... conversation happened to turn on dress, of which Miss Staunton spoke scornfully and disparagingly, as mere useless vanity and frippery—an empty substitute for real beauty of person as well as the higher beauty of mind. And I, emboldened by the courtesy with which I was always called on to take my share in everything that was said or done, ventured to object, humbly enough, to ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... men, bricks, warriors. Such female frippery as this shall never degrade them. Into the rag-bag with it, and sell it to the Jews for a pair of China sheep or a crockery ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... are not less subdued. In 1824 there was a noisy dapper dandyism abroad. Vulgar, as we should now think, but yet genial—a matter of white greatcoats and loud voices—strangely different from the stately frippery that is rife at present. These men are out of their element in the quadrangle. Even the small remains of boisterous humour, which still clings to any collection of young men, jars painfully on their morbid sensibilities; and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in large companies, and that is why he did not please everybody at St. Petersburg. You will easily see the reason why this incomparable man in such companies, where people talk of fashion, of clothes, of frippery, and all other sorts of triviality, neither gives pleasure to others nor finds pleasure himself." And the friendly Swede rises to the height of generalisation in the quaint maxim, Where an empty head shines, there a thoroughly cultivated man ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... shall Folly condescend to stay near one who has the effrontery to own that she does not want to be introduced to Lady Fashion!" and, snatching up her cockatoo, Parade, Miss Folly rushed out of the cottage as fast as her mass of frippery would ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... sometimes a new movement will intensify an old habit. The Romanticists, though reformers in other respects, did little or nothing to render the stage more real. Their lyricism, in front of the footlights, needed buskins and frippery, or, at any rate, fostered them, as the pieces of ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... strain? "'Twas such as England loved to hear, "Ere thou and all thy frippery train, "Corrupted both her ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Title difficult to understand. Landscape easy to comprehend. A close study of Nature, admirably painted. A wholesome Phillippic against namby-pamby prettiness. "On the Thames," by G.A. FRIPP, honestly painted, and no frippery about it. Miss CLARA MONTALBA has a large number of pictures of Venice—and Mr. RIDGE comes up and says he is the Keeper. What Keeper? He whispers, he is the Keeper of the Cold Out—What an oridginal remark!—and will ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 6, 1890 • Various
... husbands who had rendered the same homage to their deceased wives; and out of the number there must have been so many who had long ago married again! In fine, there was so much in the place that would have seemed more frippery to a stranger, save for the consideration that the lightest paper flower that lay upon the poorest heap of earth was never touched by a rude hand, but ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... with evident awe. I regarded it myself with interest—it seemed so the tattered remnant of a fashion that had gone out for ever. I thought again of the poor disinherited Pope, wondering whether, when such venerable frippery will no longer bear the carpenter's nails, any more will be provided. It was hard to fancy anything but shreds and patches in that musty tabernacle. Wherever you go in Italy you receive some such ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... with red laces, a gown, usually striped with red and green, and of scarlet stockings. They wear enormous shoes, large, awkward, and heavy, made of the very thickest leather, and adorned with the eternal red frippery. The soles are an inch thick, with huge heels, stuck full of nails, and placed, not where the heel of the foot is, but in front, under the toes; and as these remarkable shoes lift at every step, the heels of the stockings are covered ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... can not understand; skepticism becomes the synonym for intelligence; men no longer repeat; they doubt; they dissect; they sneer; they reject; they invent. If the myth survives this treatment, the poets take it up and make it their stock in trade: they decorate it in a masquerade of frippery and finery, feathers and furbelows, like a clown dressed for a fancy ball; and the poor barbarian legend survives at last, if it survives at all, like the Conflagration in Ovid or King Arthur in Tennyson—a hippopotamus smothered in ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... amount of good, to be selfish like that now and then. It reconciles one so splendidly to existence. It's like a spring cleaning of the soul. And then, I think, when one opens one's eyes again one sees—one must see—everything more rightly, not dressed up in frippery, not horribly naked either, but truly, accurately, neither overlooking graces nor dwelling on distortions. D'you understand what I mean? Perhaps I don't put ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... to shelter me till the Empress should deign to arrive, there my complaisance ended. Again the matter of clothes was harped upon. The three gorgeously caparisoned chamberlains, who had inducted me to the shelter, laid before me changes of raiment bedecked with every imaginable kind of frippery, and would have me transform myself into a popinjay ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... the last that any Roman would have selected as the master of the world. He was young. He was small. He seemed almost frail. He was an unspeakable egotist. He was fastidious in his dress. I have read that he even used perfumes. And how could the common eye discern, through all of these externals of frippery, the lion heart, the eagle vision, and the mind of conquest ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... the Italian school with much vigor," said Gambara, somewhat warmed to his work by the champagne, "and, for my part, you are very welcome. I, thank God, stand outside this more or less melodic frippery. Still, as a man of the world, you are too ungrateful to the classic land whence Germany and France derived their first teaching. While the compositions of Carissimi, Cavalli, Scarlatti, and Rossi were being played throughout Italy, the violin players of the Paris opera house enjoyed the singular ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... wonderful, of the nature of fal-lal as we say, and for which she had an inborn turn, being of good draper family, and polished above the yeomanry. Nevertheless I could never bear it, partly because I felt it to be out of place in our good farm-house, partly because I hate frippery, partly because it seemed to me to have nothing to do with father, and partly because I never could tell the reason of my hating it. And yet the poor soul had put them on, not to show her hands off (which were above her station) ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... suburb whore. What are we to think of the fine-dressed sparks, proud of their own personal deformities, which appear the more hideous by the contrast of wearing scarlet and gold, with what they call toupees[1] on their heads, and all the frippery of a modern beau, to make a figure before women; some of them with hump-backs, others hardly five feet high, and every feature of their faces distorted: I have seen many of these insipid pretenders entering into conversation with persons of learning, constantly making the grossest blunders in every ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... thought her vanquished, and to complete his victory he put the finishing touch to the burlesque picture he had drawn of kings in exile. "What a pitiful figure they cut, all these poor princes in partibus, figurants of royalty, who drape themselves in the frippery of the principal characters, and declaim before the empty benches without a farthing of receipts! Would they not be wiser if they held their peace and returned to the obscurity of common life? For those who have money there is some excuse. Their riches give them some right to cling to these ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... not uncommon"—and here, as he unravelled, to his own satisfaction, the tangled web of his impressions, his brow cleared, and he smiled gravely,—"I was, I say, moved by an insane desire to draw that dainty small bundle of frippery and prettiness into my arms—yes,—it was so, and why should I not confess it to myself? Why should I be ashamed? Other men have felt the same, though perhaps they do not count so many years of life as I do. At any rate with me the feeling was momentary,—and passed. Then,—some moments ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... heat, and sooterkins of wit. Next o'er his books his eyes began to roll, In pleasing memory of all he stole— How here he sipped, how there he plundered snug, And sucked all o'er like an industrious bug. Here lay poor Fletcher's half-eat scenes, and here The frippery of crucified Moliere; There hapless Shakespeare, yet of Tibbald sore, Wished he had blotted ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... marble and the walls are frescoed. The high altar is a remarkable composition, with pillars of porphyry mingled with a confusion of images, candlesticks, and tinsel. The stalls for the priests are handsomely carved in mahogany. It was annoying to see Gothic grandeur and modern frippery so mingled as was observable in this church. When mass is being performed women attend in goodly numbers, but one rarely sees any of the male population present, unless they be, like the author, strangers come hither from curiosity to see ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... as much for the theatre as did Adrienne Le Couvreur, especially in discarding, in her Phedre, the plumes, spangles, the panier, the frippery, which had been the customary equipments of that role. She and Lecain, the prominent actor of the day, introduced the custom of wearing the proper costume of the characters represented. The grace and dignity of her stage presence caused her ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme |
