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More "Braggart" Quotes from Famous Books



... "Braggart? I? Nay, I am a lover whose words go lamely. They are but chaff blown along the wind of great accomplishment. With thee to fight for I would dare the very ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy

... the braggart shout For some blind glimpse of Freedom, link itself, Through madness, hated by the wise, to ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... The braggart now regretted having told so many lies, for he did not know how to escape the monarch's proposal. After reflecting a short time, he plucked up courage and said "I will gladly accept the position of son-in-law you offer, and will ...
— Roumanian Fairy Tales • Various

... unjust!" He sprang from his chair and towered over her. "You have listened to the lies of that braggart, Thode, and condemned me unheard! His grand-stand play at the time of the raid has blinded you and you will not be fair. You do not even know what love is, but I can teach you and I will! I offended you by my impetuosity when you provoked me to madness, but now I will ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant

... ago Mr. Edward Everett came up from the wilds of Devonshire to study law with Braggart and Pushem, in Chancery Lane. He was placed to board, by a prudent mother, with a quiet family ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various

... the pietists denied the reformers Jewish burial; young men scorning their fathers and crying, "Culture, Culture; down with the Ghetto"; many in the reaction from the yoke of three thousand years falling into braggart profligacy, many more into fashionable Christianity. And the woman of the new generation no less apostate, Henrietta Herz bringing beautiful Jewesses under the fascination of brilliant Germans and the romantic movement, so that Mendelssohn's own daughter, Dorothea, had left her husband and ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... Pole. Of late years, between drama and novels, quite a Benyowsky literature has sprung up about this Cagliostro of the sea. His record in the continental armies preceding his exile would fill a book by itself; and throughout all, Benyowsky appears in the same light, an unscrupulous braggart lying gloriously, but withal as ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut

... longer suppress his indignation when at a little distance he saw his mustang, which this treacherous braggart had ...
— Joe's Luck - Always Wide Awake • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... praise-pipes of babes and sucklings," answered Gibbie; "but it does not follow that they can give advice. Don't you remember your mother saying that the stripling David was enough to kill a braggart giant, but a sore-tried man was wanted to rule ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... eager for honor, then afterwards your father would pluck him softly by the sleeve and whisper in his ear to learn if there was any small vow of which he could relieve him, or if he would deign to perform some noble deed of arms upon his person. And if the man were a braggart and would go no further, your father would be silent and none would know it. But if he bore himself well, your father would spread his fame far and wide, but never make ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Germans, Prussian and Anti-Prussian alike, flung up their caps, with unanimous LEBE-HOCH, at the news of Rossbach, has often been remarked; and indeed is still almost touching to see. The perhaps bravest Nation in the world, though the least braggart, very certainly EIN TAPFERES VOLK (as their Goethe calls them); so long insulted, snubbed and trampled on, by a luckier, not a braver:—has not your exultant Dauphiness got a beautiful little dose administered her; and is gone off in foul shrieks, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle

... man is of high degree, adulation and envy almost kill him; if poor, everybody is ready to trample and despise him. If one would prosper, he must set his mind upon being an intriguer; if one would gain respect, let him be a boaster or braggart; if one would be godly, and attend church and approach the altar, he is dubbed a hypocrite, if he abstain from doing so, he becomes at once an antichrist or a heretic; if he is light-hearted, he is ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne

... as a nun is she; One weak chirp is her only note. Braggart, and prince of braggarts is he, Pouring boasts from his little throat: Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link, Spink, spank, spink, Never was I afraid of man; Catch me, cowardly knaves, if you can, Chee, ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various

... churls last out till we Have duly hardened bones and thews For scouring leagues of swamp and sea Of braggart mobs ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)

... Shakespeare's creation and must live up to his artistic paternity; the irony that he is au fond a cabotin, a footlight strutter, a mouther of phrases metaphysical and a despiser of Ophelia (chere petite glu he names her) that are all so appealing. Intellectual braggart, this Hamlet resides after his father Horwendill's "irregular decease" in a tower hard by the Sound, from which Helsingborg may be seen. An old, stagnant canal is beneath his windows. In his chamber are waxen figures of his mother, Gerutha, and his uncle-father, Fengo. He daily pierces their ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... his words, shaggy Hanak whirled his knobby bludgeon above his head, and shied it frantically at the officer, who warded off the blow with his sword, and the same instant a young private transfixed the braggart so vigorously that the end of his bayonet stuck in the ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai

... asked Kate. She was capable, wit and social strategist that she was, of assuming all this interest by way of leading an inept youth to make a fool and a braggart of himself for her amusement. But she showed not a glimmer of irony, neither in her mouth nor in her green-grey eyes. She spoke with the straight, sincere interest of a dairymaid listening to the self-told heroisms ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin

... For the fact, he was objectionable in every way: as a human being, a man, a citizen, a member of the Slocum County bar, and a veteran of our late civil conflict. He was shiftless, untidy, a borrower, a pompous braggart, a trouble-maker, forever driving some poor devil into senseless litigation. Moreover, he was blithely unscrupulous in his dealings with the Court, his clients, his brother-attorneys, and his fellow-men at large. When I add that he was given to spells of hard drinking, during ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson

... braggart's way. I knew it. Tim knew it, too. He seemed to look right through me. I was angry with him, I was jealous of him, because she had cared for him. I knew she had. I knew why she had. Tim and I were far apart. But he had made ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd

... yet lost his senses through blighted love, which proves abundantly that animals have no souls. The employment of a lover is that of a mountebank, of a soldier, of a quack, of a buffoon, of a prince, of a ninny, of a king, of an idler, of a monk, of a dupe, of a blackguard, of a liar, of a braggart, of a sycophant, of a numskull, of a frivolous fool, of a blockhead, of a know-nothing, of a knave. An employment from which Jesus abstained, in imitation of whom folks of great understanding likewise disdain it; it is a vocation in which a man of worth is required to spend above all things, his ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac

... now to the other a large group. Fernando, I feel gladness in saying, had with him but two or three. And aside stood variations, individuals. Beltran the cook was such an one, a bold, mirthful, likable man. We had several dry thinkers, and a braggart and two or three who proved miserably villainous. We had weathercocks and men who faced forward, no matter what ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston

... a health to General Taylor, whose "rough and ready" blow Struck terror to the rancheros of braggart Mexico; May his country ne'er forget his deeds, and ne'er forget to show She holds him worthy of a ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur

... his son, wishing the prince to win his spurs unaided, and earn the first-fruits of his fame single-handed against the heaviest odds; but the forcible feebleness of a minor poet's fancy shows itself amusingly in the mock stoicism and braggart philosophy of the King's reassuring reflection, "We have more ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... dressed leisurely in his study, frowning and considering what he was to do. The coming of these visitors annoyed him. "What are Prince Vasili and that son of his to me? Prince Vasili is a shallow braggart and his son, no doubt, is a fine specimen," he grumbled to himself. What angered him was that the coming of these visitors revived in his mind an unsettled question he always tried to stifle, one about which ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... legislature 'full justice for Ireland,' or to provide for the contingency of a perseverance in the refusal of that legislature to right the people of Ireland." Accordingly, a large concourse of people assembled at the Corn-exchange, and were addressed by the demagogue in that braggart style which he well knew would win its way to their feelings. In his speech Mr. O'Connell intimated his intention of forming a new association, the exertions of which were to be directed to obtain ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... the Protestants, in the sudden sunshine, were becoming unmanageable and extravagant. On the bench there were but four prelates who were on the moving side,—Cranmer, Latimer, Shaxton, and Barlow,[528]—and among these Cranmer only approved the policy of the government. Shaxton was an arrogant braggart, and Barlow a feeble enthusiast. Shaxton, who had flinched from the stake when Bilney was burnt, Shaxton, who subsequently relapsed under Mary, and became himself a Romanist persecutor, was now strutting ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude

... you are my cousin, very far removed! But you are more than that. Your father saved my life in the Atlas. He has related it all to you—No? Well, that does not astonish me; for he was no braggart, that father of yours; he was a man! Had he not quitted the army, a brilliant career was before him. People talk a great deal of Pelissier, of Canrobert, of MacMahon, and of others. I say nothing against them; they ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet

... among Low's followers who looked upon him as a bold and brave leader, for he was always a blusterer and a braggart, and there were honest seamen and merchants who were very much afraid of him, but time proved that there was no reason for any one to suppose that Edward Low had a spark of courage in his composition. He was ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton

... in fighting wind-mills, who, in time of peace, are "soldiers armed with resolution," but in the real conflict what Shakspeare designates as "soldiers and afeard." There was in our train a young prig, who "played the braggart with his tongue," telling of his brave exploits, like a very Othello recounting the "dangers he passed," ending with a defiant show of how he should act in the event of an attack from marauding Indians, ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms

... scabbard, brave me in my absence, and affect to make love to my lady par amours! And she, too—methinks Brenhilda allows more license than she is wont to do to yonder chattering popinjay. By the rood! I will spring into the apartment, front them with my personal appearance, and confute yonder braggart in a manner he is ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... pushing on to repeat the {290} experience elsewhere, and you will have a good picture of Father Louis Hennepin, a man whose books describing his travels, real or imaginary, had, in their day, the widest popularity in Europe. Though he was an unconscionable braggart, and though he had no scruples about falsifying facts, yet, as the first person to publish an account of the Falls of Niagara, and as the discoverer and namer of the Falls of St. Anthony, he is fairly entitled to a place in a collection ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson

... I do not feel in any very gentle frame of mind," rejoined the squire; "my ire has been roused by this insolent braggart, my blood is up, and I long to ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... box, and trusted himself alone with it to the sea. But in the surf he had to abandon it to save himself. It had perhaps drifted ashore, and might be found; for himself, he abandoned his claim to the reward. Had he looked abashed or mortified, Jenny felt that she might have relented, but the braggart was as all-satisfied, as confident and boastful as ever. Nevertheless, as his eye seemed to seek hers, she was constrained, in mere politeness, to add her own to her father's condolences. "I suppose," she hesitated, in passing him, "that ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... Illustrious," he said, to Sir Geoffrey, "that this braggart having surrendered, I spared his life and now return him to his brother the Page quite unharmed, since I did not wish to wound one who was in my power from the first. Only when he gets home I pray that he will look at his back in a glass and judge which of us it is that has been 'beaten ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard

... trying to see and do anything she suggested, and glorifying myself at being in the lucky way of doing and knowing everything. I told much to some special friends, some of whom wanted to find out my sources of such enjoyments; others thought I was a mere braggart. ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous

... plunderers, but suits not me: Shall I, the terror of this sinful town, Care, if a liveried lord or smile or frown? Who cannot flatter, and detest who can, Tremble before a noble serving-man? O, my fair mistress, Truth! shall I quit thee For huffing, braggart, puffed nobility? Thou, who since yesterday hast rolled o'er all The busy, idle blockheads of the ball, Hast thou, oh, sun! beheld an emptier fort, Than such who swell this bladder of a Court? Now plague ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope

... 'member you by.' Says he, 'Burlman Rennuls,' dat's me, you know, Bushie; 'Burlman Rennuls,' says he, 'you's 'tirely welcome to de skelps, ef you kin take 'em widout cuttin' an' spilin' de skin.' H-yah, h-yah, h-yah!" And the black braggart laughed as sincerely as if he were for the moment self-deceived into thinking that he was dealing in facts. But quickly recovering his lofty air, which had vanished while he laughed, the Fighting Negro thus proceeded with his observations upon the lights ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady

... fallen off, and when they have been behind the scenes and found how bare and gloomy was the framework of the scene they admired. All illusions may be gone; the hero may have sunk into the cowardly braggart; the saint into the hypocritical sinner; the noble aspirant into a man whose mouth alone utters but empty words which his heart can never feel; but still true love remains, "nor alters where it alteration finds." The duration of ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller

... were to happen in your bunch, doubtless when you got to knowing him every one of you would want him for a chum. He was the kind of fellow that real boys like: not a braggart and not a "sissy," but generally when it came to his turn to bat he smashed the ball for a clean hit. Or if he should happen to strike out, he didn't slam the stick to the ground, but with a smile stepped back and turned a handspring and lit on his feet rooting for the next man up. Of course, ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith

... their people in a dream of Spanish world-dominion. Their bulletins had long "filled the earth with their vainglorious vaunts, making great appearance of victories"; they had spread their propaganda "in sundry languages in print," distributing braggart pamphlets in which they boasted, for the benefit of neutrals, of their successes against England, France, and Italy. They had "abused and tormented" the wretched inhabitants of the Low Countries, and they held that the ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... ruler am I to this people, Their tongues are all too bold—nor have they yet Been tamed to due submission, as they shall be. I must take order for the remedy; I will subdue this stubborn mood of theirs, This braggart spirit of freedom I will crush, I will proclaim a new law through the land; ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

... the fraternity. Such unscrupulous quacks sought also to win over the patient's friends by little attentions, flatteries and innuendoes. Many, said this philosopher, recoil from a man of skill even, if he is a braggart. "When the doctor," he continues, "attended by a man known to the patient, and having a right of entry into the house, advances into the dwelling of the sick man, he should make his appearance in good clothes, with ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence

... starry wing, that canst not soar, Confused power, still seeking, still unblest; For ever clutching to a braggart breast The hope portentous and the worldling's lore. Furiously futile, with a raucous roar Thy dizzy moments mock th' eternal quest; To feverish ends, by factions fierce distrest, Toiling, a ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth

... regard for his patron's memory, that when Sallust described him as having a brazen face, and a shameless mind, he lashed the historian in a most bitter satire [882], as "a bull's-pizzle, a gormandizer, a braggart, and a tippler, a man whose life and writings were equally monstrous;" besides charging him with being "a most unskilful plagiarist, who borrowed the language of Cato and other old writers." It is related, that, in his youth, having escaped from slavery by ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus

... high-principled struggle. Its afterclap of 1812 displayed little but empty bombast and greed. In the one, brave leaders risked their lives in that defence of rights which has made their enterprise an epoch in man's history; in the other, a mean and braggart spirit actuated its promoters to strike in the back that nation which almost alone was carrying on, in the best spirit of the Revolution, the struggle for the liberties of Europe against the designs of Napoleon. The brave spirits ...
— An Account Of The Battle Of Chateauguay - Being A Lecture Delivered At Ormstown, March 8th, 1889 • William D. Lighthall

... sat thinking about it all. He had spoken no word of all he meant to say, and he would never speak now. No word of his was needed. He sat rebuked in this man's presence—this man whom, within the hour, he had called boaster and braggart, liar ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson

... man is full of great schemes, he is told, "In Gedanken foert de Bur ok in't Kutsch." "In thought the peasant, too, drives in a coach." A man who boasts is asked, "Pracher! haest ok Lues, oder schuppst di man so?" "Braggart! have you really lice, or do you only scratch yourself as ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... likeness. Many subjects are taken from the life of tradesmen; there appear the— here also inevitable—"Fuller," then the "Ropemaker," the "Dyer," the "Salt-man," the "Female Weavers," the "Rascal"; other pieces give sketches of character, as the "Forgetful," the "Braggart," the "Man of 100,000 sesterces";(10) or pictures of other lands, the "Etruscan Woman," the "Gauls," the "Cretan," "Alexandria"; or descriptions of popular festivals, as the "Compitalia," the "Saturnalia," ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... Sholto's step slowed, and lost its braggart strut and confidence. Behind him Laurence chuckled and laughed, smiting his thigh in ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett

... made a preliminary investigation, from which it appeared that it was possible to lie so flat between the rails that the train could pass over without touching, but to lie there was no joke! Kolya maintained stoutly that he would. At first they laughed at him, called him a little liar, a braggart, but that only egged him on. What piqued him most was that these boys of fifteen turned up their noses at him too superciliously, and were at first disposed to treat him as "a small boy," not fit to associate with them, and that was ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... Shakespeare's developed knowledge of, and experience with, Florio. There are several small but significant links of description between the Parolles of 1598 and the enlarged Armado of the same date. Both of these characters are represented as braggart soldiers and also as linguists, which evidently reflect Florio's quasi-military connection with Southampton and his known proficiency ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson

... many women who love madly with their hearts and souls? You talk like a college braggart. There are conquerors like yourself who, if we are to believe them, would devour a whole convent at their breakfast. These men excite my pity. As for me, really, I have always felt that it was most difficult to make one's self really loved. In these days of prudery, almost all women of rank ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard

... of presenting the necklace, though unauthorized by Shakespeare, had the full approval of the company, and set them in good humour to receive Major Camperton as Armado the braggart. Nothing calculated to stimulate jealousy occurred again till the fifth act; and then there arose ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy

... the Teuton braggart fails to convert the universe into a German empire, his downfall will be partly due to his lack of humour. Among the things that go to make this saving grace are an agile imagination and a nice sense of proportion, and it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 4, 1914 • Various

... as a nun is she, One weak chirp is her only note, Braggart and prince of braggarts is he, Pouring boasts from his little throat: Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link, Spink, spank, spink; Never was I afraid of man; Catch me, cowardly knaves, if you can. ...
— Twilight Stories • Various

... soul and body, as he watched his haphazard audience follow him in his moods and changes, ran the quiet magic of Art Satisfied. It is a noble braggart madness, this glorification of a cheap art by ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various

... met him, and, pleased with his shrewdness and perfect corruption, had attached him to his house. This had occurred in years previous, and as yet Antipas had found no cause to regret the trust imposed. He was a useful braggart, idle, familiar, and discreet; and he had acquired the dialect of ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus

... much oil, with which to lubricate the machinery of his great enterprise. She had heard, at various times, the embittered details of the disappearance of this money, little by little. Nearly a quarter of it, all told, had been appropriated by a sleek old braggart of a company-promoter, who had cozened Joel into the belief that London could be best approached through him. When at last this wretch was kicked downstairs, the effect had been only to make room for a fresh lot of bloodsuckers. ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic

... expediency, and believing that quarrels between nations which cannot be accommodated without loss of self-respect on the one side or the other, had better be fought out in resolute and honourable war. He is the sworn foe of the bully or the braggart. Cruelty is hateful to him. The patriotic instinct nurtures in him a warm and generous humanity. His faith in the future of his nation depends on the confident hope that she will be true to herself, to her traditions, to her responsibilities, to the great ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee

... The vice of all others which he loathed was brought in and burned in on his own soul. He had lied to his mother, to his conscience, to his God. How could he bear it? And then the poor little weak boy, whom he had pitied and almost scorned for his weakness, had done that which he, braggart as he was, dared not do. The first dawn of comfort came to him in swearing to himself that he would stand by that boy through thick and thin, and cheer him, and help him, and bear his burdens, for the good deed done that ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester

... thee fighting for life in the very jaws of death! Fain would I have all men thus tortured out of their proud and tyrannous existence! ... their strength made strengthless, their arrogance brought to naught, their egotism and vain-glory beaten to the dust! Ah, ah! thou that wert the complacent braggart of love,—the self-sufficient proclaimer of thine own prowess, where is thy boasted vigor now? ... Writhe on, good fool! ... thy little day is done! ... All honor to the Silver ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... as himself, clad wholly in black, save for a stiff cambric ruff worn rather fuller than the fashion. He was heavily booted, and sat sideways on a settle with his left hand tucked in his belt and a great right elbow on the board. Something in his pose, half rustic, half braggart, seemed familiar to Gaspard. The next second the two were in ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan

... he, one day when I urged him to make haste and help save the topsails in a squall, "Oh, I'm no soft-horn to be hurried!" It was the time the bark lost her topgallant-mast and was cast on her beam-ends on the voyage to Antonina, already told; it was, in fact, no time for loafing, and this braggart at a decisive word hurried aloft with the rest to do his duty. What I said to him was meant for earnest, and it cowed him. It is only natural to think that he held a grudge against me forever after, and waited only for his opportunity; ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum

... life, his fortunes, everything, In sacred trust for knighthood and his king, And in the battle-field or tilting-yard He met his foe full-fronted, and struck hard. But now it seemed a foolish thing to throw One's whole life to the fortune of a blow. True valor breathes not in the braggart vaunt; True honor takes no shame from idle taunt; So let this wizard, if he wants to, scoff; Why should our hero have his head ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis

... ter the party with me, Sally?" He came insolently over, and stood waiting, ignoring her dismissal with the ease of braggart effrontery. She, in turn, stood rigid, wordless, pointing his way across the doorstep. Slowly, the drunken face lost its leering grin. The eyes blackened into a truculent and venomous scowl. He stepped over, and stood towering above the slight ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck

... never found his earthly close, What sequel? Streaming eyes and breaking hearts? Or all the same as if he had not been? Not so. Shall Error in the round of time Still father Truth? O shall the braggart shout [1] For some blind glimpse of freedom work itself Thro' madness, hated by the wise, to law System and empire? Sin itself be found The cloudy porch oft opening on the Sun? And only he, this wonder, dead, become Mere highway dust? or year by year alone Sit brooding in the ruins of ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson

... enjoyment of the typicality of Pinney. "He hasn't the least chance in the world of working up into any controlling place in the paper. They don't know much in the Events office; but they do know Pinney. He's a great liar and a braggart, and he has no more notion of the immunities of private life than—Well, perhaps it's because he would as soon turn his life inside out as not, and in fact would rather. But he's very domestic, and very kind-hearted to his wife; it seems they have a baby now, and I've no doubt Pinney ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells

... Brandon had seen many an adventure during his life on the continent, which would not do to write down here, he was as little of a boaster as any man I ever met, and, while I am in the truth-telling business, I was as great a braggart of my inches as ever drew the long-bow—in that line, I mean. Gods! I flush up hot, even now, when I think of it. So I talked a great deal and found myself infinitely pleased with Brandon's conversational powers, which were rare; being no less than the capacity for saying ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major

... Americano—a runaway, with some ill-gotten gold," said Miguel, sullenly, yet with unmistakable fear of the old man. "Besides, it was only to frighten him, the braggart. But since thou fearest to touch a hair of ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte

... fault, the fault is the ignorance of the Poet; not that he intended to be guilty of theft. That so it is, you will now be enabled to judge. The Colax is {a Play} of Menander's; in it there is Colax, a Parasite, and a braggart Captain: he does not deny that he has transferred these characters into his Eunuch from the Greek; but assuredly he does deny this, that he was aware that those pieces had been already translated into Latin. But if it is not permitted {us} to use the ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence

... The Pedant, the Braggart, the Hedge-Priest, the Foole, and the Boy, Abate throw at Novum, and the whole world againe, Cannot pricke out fiue such, take each one ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... 'Terrible', seventy-four, (Yo ho! for the swing of the sea!) And ye sank her in fathoms a thousand or more (Alas! for the might of the sea!) Ye taunt me and sing me her fate for a sign! What harm can ye wreak more on me or on mine? Ho braggart! I care not for boasting of thine — A fig for the wrath ...
— In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - With an Essay in Character, by Sir Andrew Macphail • John McCrae

... what it is; and surely their bishops might have been better employed in remedying the neglect of their subordinates, than in attending political meetings, and delivering postprandial orations, savouring more of the braggart boastings of a drunken drumboy, than of the deliberate opinions of a dignified ecclesiastic. In their zeal as politicians, the Roman Catholic clergy have forgotten their duties as priests; and they are now beginning to get a foretaste ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various

... never could a horse provide So fit for such a man to ride, Nor find a man with strictest care, So fit for such a horse to bear. Hung round with instruments of death, The sight of him would stop the breath 1590 Of braggart Cowardice, and make The very court Drawcansir[270] quake; With dirks, which, in the hands of Spite, Do their damn'd business in the night, From Scotland sent, but here display'd Only to fill up the parade; With swords, unflesh'd, of maiden hue, Which rage or valour never drew; With blunderbusses, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill

... imaginative genius and extraordinary manual skill. A goldsmith and sculptor, he was also a soldier, and did service as a fighter and engineer in the wars of his time. Of high personal courage, he was a braggart and a ruffian, who used the dagger as freely as the tools of his craft. His many qualities and complex personality are revealed in his "Autobiography"—one of the most vivid and remarkable records ever ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... and each other. Agamemnon's stately behaviour, Menelaus' irritation, Nestor's experience, Ulysses' cunning, are all productive of no effect; when they have at last arranged a single combat between the coarse braggart Ajax and Hector, the latter will not fight in good earnest, as Ajax is his cousin. Achilles is treated worst: after having long stretched himself out in arrogant idleness, and passed his time in the company of Thersites ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... of man. The whole brave bustling world was astir, little and great ships hasting out of port, the soldier scaling the breach, the adventurer travelling the deserts. And he, the fool, had no share in this braggart heritage. He could not dare to look a man straight in the face, for like the king in the old fable he ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan

... war is included in them. He who is blinded by the semblance of power and cannot resolve to act, will never be able to make political preparations for the inevitable war with any success. "The braggart feebleness which travesties strength, the immoral claim which swaggers in the sanctity of historical right, the timidity which shelters its indecision behind empty and formal excuses, never were more despised than by the ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi

... shortly. "Of course I knew. But what are threats between brothers? I knew they were but the idle boastings of a braggart. You would not dare harm me, or mine. You are a great coward, Rene, and it is to laugh and not to fear. You strut about like a cock partridge in the springtime, you clothe yourself with the feathers of the bluejay, and speak with the tongue of the great grey wolf but your heart is the heart ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx

... blown Osricke to his trial in his chosen kind, and the bubble had burst. The braggart gentleman had no faculty to generate after the dominant fashion, no invention to support his ambition—had but a yesty collection, which failing him the moment something unconventional was wanted, the fool had to look a ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald

... that Achilles does not speak falsely from design, when he is not only a deceiver, but besides being a braggart, in Homer's description of him is so cunning, and so far superior to Odysseus in lying and pretending, that he dares to contradict himself, and Odysseus does not find him out; at any rate he does not appear to say anything ...
— Lesser Hippias • Plato

... "I want me this braggart hewn to pieces, and then the rest beaten;" and added, aloud: "Ax! ax! chop! chop! and work for my profit!" Whereupon the ax leapt forward, and dealt such a blow upon Sir Paul that it pierced through his helmet, and clave him to the saddle. Then it went chopping among ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various

... I am convinced that there is not a grain of bad taste in the matter, and that there is a manly composure and courage in the proceeding deserving of the utmost respect. If Lemon were one of your braggart honest men, he would set a taint of bad taste upon that action as upon everything else he might say or do; but being what he is, I admire him for it greatly, and hold it to be a proof of an exalted nature and a true heart. Your idea of him, is mine. ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... of the fact that his father was a confirmed liar and braggart had for years cast a shadow over his days and the shadow had been made blacker by the fact that in a land where the least fortunate can laugh in the face of want he had more than once stood face to face with poverty. He believed that the logical answer to the situation ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson

... the boots had departed, he fell to gazing at his guest with an equally distrustful air, since certain features in Chichikov's benevolence now struck him as a little open to question, and he had begin to think to himself: "After all, the devil only knows who he is—whether a braggart, like most of these spendthrifts, or a fellow who is lying merely in order to get some tea out of me." Finally, his circumspection, combined with a desire to test his guest, led him to remark that it might be ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... a drama; for the dramatic poet must not indeed in any sense idealize, but he should render only the genuinely human, not the purely accidental, which, because accidental, is rare. For an individual to be at the same time a hero and a braggart is, however, quite accidental, and the result merely of a deficient or a perverted education. If one wishes to find firmness in the fact that a man knows in advance what he wants, that he forms his decision before he is acquainted with the controlling circumstances, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various

... Devil. Insipid braggart! With this form I tear off the mask which belied my courage. Vengeance is at hand, and Leviathan is ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger

... forty years of age. He was an American by birth, but he had lived for many years in Compton County. It was said that he had made a good deal of money by smuggling goods into the States. He had the reputation of being a hard liver, and something of a braggart. ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous

... Judith looked somewhat startled by the vibration of sincerity in his voice, and Sylvia, with her quick sympathy of divination, had turned almost as pale as the little boy, who, all his braggart turbulence gone, stood looking at them with a sick ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... leave—mute young eyes that contained the unutterable secrets of the battlefield, but revealed none. She had seen them since she came to England, sitting with their elders, gray-haired fathers who talked war, war, war, while the young tongues—once so easily braggart—remained speechless. ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway

... however, is no friendship, in which one of the (so-called) friends does not want to hear the truth, and the other is ready to lie. The flattery of parasites on the stage would not seem amusing, were there not in the play braggart soldiers [Footnote: Latin, milites gloriosi. Miles Gloriosus is the title of one of the comedies of Plautus; and one of the stock characters of the ancient comedy is a conceited, swaggering, brainless soldier, who is perpetually ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis

... hold a mass meeting and pass resolutions to the effect that Cooper had rendered "himself odious to a greater portion of the citizens of this community," and why should Fraser's Magazine, three thousand miles away, call Cooper "a liar, a bilious braggart, a full jackass, an insect, a ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb

... to do, indeed? And what would you have done? Bring the horns and tail he must, or perish in the adventure. Otherwise, how could he meet his lady?—why, she would think him a mere braggart. ...
— Prince Prigio - From "His Own Fairy Book" • Andrew Lang

... a braggart!" said the miller. "We've known that for a long time; we knew it when you wrote to the paper saying the Great Man ...
— In Midsummer Days and Other Tales • August Strindberg

... which characterise this Saga, and throw a strange light on the more ordinary matters throughout. The slaying of the bearserks is followed by a feud which Grettir has on his hands for the slaying of a braggart who insulted him past bearing, and so great the feud grows that Grettir at last finds himself at enmity with Earl Svein, the ruler of Norway, and, delivered from death by his friends, yet has to leave the land and betake himself to Iceland again. Coming back there, and finding himself ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris

... as he came on board, though he had never before been at sea. He was a big hulking fellow; and as he had a certain amount of cleverness about him, he tried to make it appear that he knew a great deal more about things than he really did. True Blue instinctively discovered that he was a braggart and ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston

... mentioned as killed by the sheep man, was a typical rough, dark, swarthy, low-browed, as loud-mouthed as he was ignorant. He was a braggart, but none the ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough

... this person various pits were dug there, and covered with leaves, for the purpose of entrapping the beasts. It happened that the seneschal himself went into this forest, and with much exaltation of heart exclaimed internally, "Lives there a being in the empire more powerful than I am?" This braggart thought was scarcely formed, ere he rode upon one of his own ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various

... not the free; Suits tyrants, plunderers, but suits not me: Shall I, the terror of this sinful town, Care if a liveried lord or smile or frown? Who cannot flatter, and detest who can, Tremble before a noble serving-man? O my fair mistress, Truth! shall I quit thee 200 For huffing, braggart, puff'd nobility? Thou, who since yesterday hast roll'd o'er all The busy, idle blockheads of the ball, Hast thou, O Sun! beheld an emptier sort, Than such as swell this bladder of a court? Now pox on those who show a court in wax! It ought to bring all courtiers on their backs: ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al

... steps. In the drawing-room of which mansion, there presently entered to them the most remarkable girl Mr. James Harthouse had ever seen. She was so constrained, and yet so careless; so reserved, and yet so watchful; so cold and proud, and yet so sensitively ashamed of her husband's braggart humility - from which she shrunk as if every example of it were a cut or a blow; that it was quite a new sensation to observe her. In face she was no less remarkable than in manner. Her features were handsome; but ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*

... to round Riggs up down in the village—somewhere in a crowd. I want Riggs shown up as the coward, braggart, four-flush that he is. And insulted, slapped, kicked—driven out ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey

... took the wrong direction, and after an hour of vague wandering was only recalled to the right one by my pertinacious assertions acting on his weak brain. I was inclined to be angry with the incompetent braggart, who had boasted that he could take us to Estes Park "blindfold"; but I was sorry for him too, so said nothing, even though I had to walk during these meanderings to save my tired horse. When at last, at dark, we reached the ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird

... than one who is easily discouraged by difficulties, will frequently demoralize an entire company. I think we have now taken all possible precautions for our safety, but our numbers are few; and for me to say that I am not in hourly dread of the Indians when they appear in large force, would be a braggart boast. ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford

... upon a time,' he would shout, with an arrogant gesture, 'I was known from Blackheath to Hounslow, from Ware to Shooter's Hill.' And the truth is, the only 'crime' he ever committed was plagiarism. The self-assumed title of Captain should have deceived nobody, for the braggart never stole anything more difficult of acquisition than another man's words. He picked brains, not pockets; he committed the greater sin and ran no risk. He helped himself to the admirable inventions of Captain Smith ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley

... suffering, he cannot see, nor a people hardening to Spartan lineaments in the fire, iron men to meet disaster, worshippers of a discerned God of Laws, and just men too, thinking to do justice; he has Bull on the eye, the alternately braggart and poltroon, sweating in labour that he may gorge the fruits, graceless to a scoffer. And this is the creature to whose tail he is tied! Hereditary hatred is approved by critical disgust. Some spirited brilliancy, some persistent generosity (other than the guzzle's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... shoulders is more usually decorated with several stars and rosettes. The backs of the hands are tatued, quite irrespective of bravery or experience in warfare; in fact we have frequently had occasion to note that a man with tatued hands is a wastrel or a conceited braggart, of no account with Europeans or with his own people. This wild and irresponsible system of tatu has been accompanied by an inevitable degradation of the designs. There is a considerable body of evidence to show that the Sea Dayaks have borrowed much in their arts and crafts from tribes ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall

... vice or folly of the shallow-minded; so if you would not be thought so avoid boasting or affectations of any kind. The truly wise man is modest, and the braggart and coxcomb ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost

... because it seemed to fit him better, and also because it seemed to please his majesty. King James was the biggest cattleman between the Alamo plaza in San Antone and Bill Hopper's saloon in Brownsville. Also he was the loudest and most offensive bully and braggart and bad man in southwest Texas. And he always made good whenever he bragged; and the more noise he made the more dangerous he was. In the story papers it is always the quiet, mild-mannered man with light blue eyes and a low voice who turns out to be really dangerous; but ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry

... for a while they suffered it to stay; But with such insolence it flourished there, That, out of patience with its braggart's air, They bade it prove its ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac

... would knuckle under!" he said, without looking at Lily. "The braggart! He prefers a settlement, eh? And quite right too! He knows he's in the wrong. ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne

... for all, they do not refer to Shakespeare, we have the Cambridge farce or comedy on contemporary literature, the Return from Parnassus (1602?). The University wits laugh at Shakespeare,—not an university man, as the favourite poet, in his Venus and Adonis, of a silly braggart pretender to ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang

... false, noisy, hectoring braggart; a kind of Pistol or Bobadil.—Tasso, Secchia Rapita ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... walking at the time with M. de Saintonge, and he muttered, with a sneer, that it was not difficult to see the end, or that within the year the young braggart would sink to be a gaming-house bully. I said nothing, but I confess that I thought otherwise; the lad's disposition of his money and his provision for the future seeming to me so remarkable as to ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman

... his unwillingness to exchange the one for an ermine robe or the other for a crown. As a matter of fact, he invariably purchased the largest and roughest blouse to be found, and his cap was unnecessarily soaked with suet. He was a knight of industry of the very worst description—a braggart, a talker, a windbag. He preached, or rather he shrieked, the doctrine of equality, but the equality he sought was that which would place him on a par with his superiors, while in no way benefiting ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman

... return I found him in this respect greatly changed: he had become a severe critic of nearly everything American; his earlier expectations had evidently been disappointed; we clearly appeared to him big, braggart, noisy, false to our principles, unworthy of our opportunities. These feelings of his became even more marked as the Spanish-American War drew on. Whenever we met, and most often at a charming house which both of us frequented, ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... "packed like a hand-saw"—had kept at bay and put to flight now two, anon four, and then seven, and finally eleven of his assailants. We all can see, too, the roguish twinkle in Prince Hal's eyes as the braggart knight embellishes his lying tale with every fresh sentence, and are as nonplussed as he when, the plot discovered, Falstaff finds a way to take credit for his cowardice. Who would not forgive ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley

... noise of their boastings, with the shouting of their own braggart ineptitudes, they hypnotize themselves so thoroughly that they are quite unable to hear the counsel that sane ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke

... "do not play the braggart. I know the whole story and if I did not, I could read ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger

... of a new railroad then building in Colorado, the two boys did their best to make good. How well they succeeded is known to readers of that volume. Their adventures in the Rocky Mountains were truly astounding; some of them, especially those with "Bad Pete," a braggart and scoundrel of the old school, were sometimes mirth-provoking and sometimes tragic. Other adventures were vastly more serious. When the boys reached the crisis of their work it seemed as though every tree in the mountains concealed an ...
— The Young Engineers in Mexico • H. Irving Hancock

... indulge his pride by following up the threat he had hung over Agricola to kill whosoever should give Palmyre to a black man. He referred the subject and the would-be purchaser to him. It would open up to the old braggart a line of retreat, thought the ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable

... the most inconsistent fashion. For instance, Sir Walter Scott was a devoted adherent of the house of Hanover. When George IV. visited Edinburgh, Scott was completely carried away by his loyal enthusiasm. He could not see that the man before him was a drunkard and braggart. He viewed him as an incarnation of all the noble traits that ought to hedge about a king. He snatched up a wine-glass from which George had just been drinking and carried it away to be an object of reverence for ever after. Nevertheless, in his heart, and ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... over-tendency to express even by tears,—a singular sight in so leonine a man. Enemies called them maudlin and hypocritical, these tears; but that was nowise the complete account of them. On the whole, there did conspicuously lie a dash of ostentation, a self-consciousness apt to become loud and braggart, over all he said and did and felt: this was the alloy of the man, and you had to be thankful for the ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... be all one," retorted Gotthold roughly. "When I see a man, come to years of wisdom, who speaks in double-meanings and is the braggart of his vices, I spit on the other side. 'You, my friend,' say I, 'are not even a gentleman.' Well, she's ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... would far rather have been in Paris. The romantic element in this unexpected adventure did not greatly appeal to him. He had crossed the ocean to help an oppressed people; he was full of enthusiasm for a cause, so much an enthusiast that the two braggart representatives of the people with whom he had come in contact at Tremont had in no way disillusioned him. Refuse must needs be cast on the wave crests of a revolution; but there was also Lafayette. He was the people's true representative, and Barrington longed to be at his side to help ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner

... talented Peire Vidal. On one occasion he caused himself to be sewn into a wolfskin and ran about the fields; but he was set upon by dogs and so badly mangled that he nearly succumbed to his wounds. He was an insufferable braggart, but never had any success in love. The prince of caricatures, however, was the German knight and minnesinger, Ulrich of Lichtenstein. He is responsible for a novel in prose, entitled The Service of Woman, which is faintly ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... the dawning of the judgment day." I do not deny that these words are in a sense wrung from the Playboy, but what I do hold is that they prove how vital was the genius of the man who wrote them, who saw the joy there was yet in life for this braggart wastrel just as he saw that even such a miserable boyhood as Christy's knew a kind of poacher's joy in running wild on the bogs. Even for poor Nora, turned out on the roads with a tramp for companion, there is the joy of the road once ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... hostess's bill, found in his pocket, with such an out-of-the-way charge for capons and sack with only one halfpenny-worth of bread, was not put there by himself as a trick to humour the jest upon his favourite propensities, and as a conscious caricature of himself. He is represented as a liar, a braggart, a coward, a glutton, etc. and yet we are not offended but delighted with him; for he is all these as much to amuse others as to gratify himself. He openly assumes all these characters to shew the humourous ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... truly witty in putting down a young braggart whom he met at dinner at a country-house. There are still to be found, like the bones of dead asses in a field newly ploughed, in some parts of the country, youths, who are so hopelessly behind their age, and ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton

... towards just this sort of record. Cunning, and the vanity which destroys cunning, often exist side by side. The criminal of a certain type almost worships himself; he is profoundly impressed with his own cleverness. He is a braggart; he swaggers; he defeats himself. A strange ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis

... in the route of the British toward Ava, that they could never advance beyond it; and that in fact he would destroy or drive them from the country. The invincible English took the city, however, with perfect ease; and the king being enraged that he had listened for a moment to the braggart, and thus provoked the British officers, had him executed without ceremony, and gave out that it was to punish him for violating his command 'not to fight the English.' The same night, Dr. Price was sent with part of ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart

... been endowed with that charming blindness which keeps them from seeing when they are whipped in the battle of life. The man of success has usually a greater sense of the value of a ten-dollar note than his clerk who, like the braggart Pistol, has got the world for his oyster, and expects to open that tough old mollusk with his rusty sword. The man of success sees each young helper around him given better opportunities than he himself had to begin with. His astonishment ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern

... Long Island, all things incline to a natural somnolence. There are no ambitious mountains, no braggart cliffs, no hasty torrents, no hustling waterfalls ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke

... that he has got the best marbles, and the best kite, and the swiftest sled, and the handsomest velocipede, and the most knowing dog, anywhere in town, we say his talk is all 'great I and little you.' That is, we mean he is always bragging; and a braggart is a very disagreeable person," ...
— The Nursery, August 1877, Vol. XXII, No. 2 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various

... you, they, or I pay it?—we are a' one man's bairns, I hope? But you must help me out too with some reasonable excuse, or else I shall be for taking to Andrew Ferrara; for I like not to be treated like a liar or a braggart at my own board-end, when, God knows, I only meant to support my honour, and that of my family ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott

... this the Eagle-hunter, The valiant fate-confronter, The soldier brave, and blunter Of speech than BISMARCK's self? This bungler all-disgracing, This braggart all-debasing. This spurious sportsman, chasing No nobler prey ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various

... million of American citizens, and which covered the land with mourning from Maine to Florida, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. This Jones is described by the free State men as a bully and a braggart, as only brave when he was not in danger, and as one of the most noisy and obstreperous of the pro-slavery leaders. Though living in Westport, Mo., he was made sheriff of Douglas county, fifty miles from his place of residence. Buckley swore out a peace warrant against Branson—he swore that ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler

... first cares little for this; but the last part of the curse comes on almost at once and makes him afraid to be alone after dark, while the second is not long delayed. On the eve of setting out once more for Norway, he quarrels with and slays a braggart named Thorbiorn; during the voyage itself he is the unintentional cause of a whole household of men being burnt to death; and lastly, by his own quarrelsome temper, and some "metaphysical aid," he misses the chance ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... thee, since I derive no pleasure from gambling with those that are not connected with me by blood. Winning over to-day the beauteous Damayanti of faultless features, I shall regard myself fortunate, indeed, since she it is that hath ever dwelt in my heart.' Hearing these words of that incoherent braggart, Nala in anger desired to cut off his head with a scimitar. With a smile, however, though his eyes were red in anger, king Nala said, 'Let us play. Why do you speak so now? Having vanquished me, you can say anything you like.' Then the play ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... not only a courageous man, but his counterpart, a braggart, a bully, or a dandy. In these ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... way were qualified to discharge the duties of their respective stations. The remarks on the general character of the voyageurs employed as boat-men and Mechanics, and the attempt to cast ridicule on their "Braggart and swaggering manners" come with a bad grace from the author of "Astoria," when we consider that in that very work Mr. Irving is compelled to admit their indomitable energy, their fidelity to their employers, and their cheerfulness under ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere

... as a nun is she, One weak chirp is her only note; Braggart and prince of braggarts is he, Pouring boasts from his little throat: "Bobolink, Bobolink, Spink, spank, spink, Never was I afraid of man, Catch me, cowardly knaves, if ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... all. He was a colorless monarch; an emperor in everything but dignity, a prince in everything but grace; a tactician, not a soldier; a superstitious braggart, afraid of nothing but danger; seducing women to learn their husband's secrets; exiling his daughter, not because she had lovers, but because she had other lovers than himself; exiling Ovid because of Livia, ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus

... that we have challenged the Count; to fight him is my affair, and I have sent a challenge. Since duelling is prohibited in Lithuania, I am going to the borders of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw; the Count, of course, is a braggart, but he does not lack courage, and will appear without fail at the appointed place. We will settle accounts; and, if God grants me his blessing, I will punish him, and then will swim over the Lososna, where the ranks of my brothers await me. ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz

... and never spoke a word to her all night. The next morning we had made up our packs, and had already started, when we became aware that we had a dozen horsemen on our heels. The braggart Andalusians, who had been boasting they would murder every one who came near them, cut a pitiful figure at once. There was a general rout. El Dancaire, Garcia, a good-looking fellow from Ecija, who was called El Remendado, and Carmen herself, kept their wits about ...
— Carmen • Prosper Merimee

... Is it possible to imagine a more tragical destiny than theirs? Never consulted, always immolated, thrust into war, forced into crimes which they have never wished to commit. Any chance adventurer or braggart arrogantly claims the right to cloak with the name of the people the follies of his murderous rhetoric or the sordid interests he wishes to satisfy. The masses are everlastingly duped, everlastingly martyred; they pay ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland

... prisoners had been gathering round her until at last, formed into a faction, they gave themselves out as the Queen's party, and by adopting a high-flown, turgid, and mysterious style of phraseology, and assuming bombastic and braggart airs of authority, coupled with an affectation of capacity and profundity, obtained for themselves from the wits of the Court and city the nickname of The Importants, under which they figured until absorbed a few years later in the more general ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies

... "No braggart Heracles avails to bring Alcestis hence; nor here may Roland see The eyes of Aude; nor here the wakening spring Vex any man with memories: for there be No memories that cling as cerements cling, No force that baffles Death, more ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell

... lied to me an' swindled me terribly, when he put off that old no-count hoss on me. Of course, I might have sued him, for a lie is a microbe which naturally develops into a lawyer's fee. But while it's a terrible braggart, it's really cowardly an' delicate, an' will die of lock-jaw if you only pick ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore

... strange exploits, committed in order to please his lady, was the talented Peire Vidal. On one occasion he caused himself to be sewn into a wolfskin and ran about the fields; but he was set upon by dogs and so badly mangled that he nearly succumbed to his wounds. He was an insufferable braggart, but never had any success in love. The prince of caricatures, however, was the German knight and minnesinger, Ulrich of Lichtenstein. He is responsible for a novel in prose, entitled The Service of Woman, which is faintly ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... the storm approaches; I hear the distant thunder rolling; this way it drives; it points at me; it must suddenly burst! Be it so. Grant me but the spirit of a man, and I yet shall brave its fury. If I am a poor braggart, a half believer in virtue, or virtuous only in words, the feeble victim then ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft

... thinking about it all. He had spoken no word of all he meant to say, and he would never speak now. No word of his was needed. He sat rebuked in this man's presence—this man whom, within the hour, he had called boaster and braggart, ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson

... considered no greater good fortune had ever befallen him, and he could scarcely keep quiet before strangers and in public; to his friends he uttered many foolish and puerile expressions quite inconsistent with his years and temper, for he had never before shown himself in the least degree a braggart or arrogant. But now, being mightily elated, and his head completely turned, he was not for making Syria or Palestine the limit of his victories; but, designing to make the exploits of Lucullus against Tigranes, and those of Pompeius against Mithridates appear mere child's ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch

... Do you know many women who love madly with their hearts and souls? You talk like a college braggart. There are conquerors like yourself who, if we are to believe them, would devour a whole convent at their breakfast. These men excite my pity. As for me, really, I have always felt that it was most difficult to make one's self really loved. In these days of prudery, ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard

... afterwards made a sort of apology, no doubt inspired by interested persons, for personal plus international reasons. They were high of heart, these dauntless confederates, in the early and middle stages of the captivity, and, indeed, they bore themselves with braggart defiance of public opinion, until many strong manifestations of inevitable trouble encompassed them, and, like all despots, who are invariably cowards, they lived in mortal terror lest this creature of theirs ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman

... the hardships of the prisoner's lot, and he now found himself deprived of the former companionship of his friends and surrounded by strangers, the one familiar face remaining being that of Lieutenant Bach, a Danish officer, a braggart swordsman and ruffler, who had always been ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various

... anecdote, that is now going the round of the papers, and respects the commutation of the punishment of that wretched, fool-hardy Barbes, who, on his trial, seemed to invite the penalty which has just been remitted to him. You recollect the braggart's speech: "When the Indian falls into the power of the enemy, he knows the fate that awaits him, and submits his head to the knife:—I am ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... undertaking, cannot perfect. But in this I have imitated their folly, brave Saracen, that in talking to thee of what thou canst not comprehend, I have, even in speaking most simple truth, fully incurred the character of a braggart in thy eyes; so, I pray you, let my ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott

... thousand times, bottle in hand, you made game of the miserly old governor, bidding him by all means rake and scrape together as much as he could, for that you would swill it all down your throat? Don't you remember, eh?—don't you remember?' O you good-for-nothing, miserable braggart! that was speaking like a man, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... looked somewhat startled by the vibration of sincerity in his voice, and Sylvia, with her quick sympathy of divination, had turned almost as pale as the little boy, who, all his braggart turbulence gone, stood looking at them with a ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... was lost in the dim mists of boyhood, the origin and fitness of his nickname were apparent after two minutes' conversation with him. Buzz Werner was called Buzz not only because he talked too much, but because he was a braggart. His conversation bristled with the perpendicular pronoun, and his pet phrase was, "I ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber

... pride by following up the threat he had hung over Agricola to kill whosoever should give Palmyre to a black man. He referred the subject and the would-be purchaser to him. It would open up to the old braggart a line of retreat, thought the planter ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable

... said Paul, with a smile—and when Paul smiled it was as if Eros's feathers had brushed the cheek of a Praxitelean Hermes; and then with an outburst half sincere, half braggart—"I've been on my own ever since I ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... with wrath, The bard his answer waits at home, But lo! his braggart neighbour hath Triumphant with the answer come. Now for the jealous youth what joy! He feared the criminal might try To treat the matter as a jest, Use subterfuge, and thus his breast From the dread pistol turn away. But now all doubt was set aside, Unto the ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

... question—of course you have it—is that there is no salvation but through Europe. Our salvation is here, if we have eyes to see it, and the salvation of Europe into the bargain; that is, if Europe is to be saved, which I rather doubt. Of course you'll call me a bird of freedom, a braggart, a waver of the stars and stripes; but I'm in the delightful position of not minding in the least what any one calls me. I haven't a mission; I don't want to preach; I have simply arrived at a state of mind; I have ...
— The Point of View • Henry James

... of Karasme, a youthful hero! Would he had been Alschiroch! My heart is sick even at the very name. Alas! my trials have not yet begun. Jabaster warned me: good, sincere Jabaster! His talisman presses on my frantic heart, and seems to warn me. I am in danger. Braggart to stand here, filling the careless air with idle words, while all is unaccomplished. I grow dull. The young King of Karasme! Why, what am I compared to this same prince? Nothing, but in my thoughts. In the full bazaar, they would not deem me worthy even to hold his stirrup or ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli

... that threw a pleasant glamour on life. But the coming of Jimmy Simpson altered this agreeable condition of mind. Jimmy was one of those masterful stupid boys who excel at games and physical contests, and triumph over intellectual problems by sheer braggart ignorance. From the first he regarded George with contempt, and when he heard him telling his stories he did ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton

... he would knuckle under!" he said, without looking at Lily. "The braggart! He prefers a settlement, eh? And quite right too! He knows he's in the wrong. ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne

... passing); and, placing these typified traits in juxtaposition in their conflict and contrast, struck the spark of comedy. Downright, as his name indicates, is "a plain squire"; Bobadill's humour is that of the braggart who is incidentally, and with delightfully comic effect, a coward; Brainworm's humour is the finding out of things to the end of fooling everybody: of course he is fooled in the end himself. But it was not Jonson's theories alone that made the success of "Every Man in His Humour." The ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson

... more written about and fought over than those of Amerigo Vespucci. Some will have it that he went only two voyages, and say he was a braggart and a vainglorious fool if he said he went more. Others think that he went at least four voyages and probably six. And most people are now agreed that these last are right, and that he who gave his name to the great double Continent of America was no swaggering pretender but ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall

... into a dogged determination equal to his own. His blind fury against the three partners did not touch her curiosity; she was only struck with the evident depth of his emotion. He had never been a braggart; his hostility had always been lazy and cynical. Remembering this, she had a faint stirring of respect for the undoubted courage and consciousness of strength shown in this wild but single-handed crusade against wealth and ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte

... go ter the party with me, Sally?" He came insolently over, and stood waiting, ignoring her dismissal with the ease of braggart effrontery. She, in turn, stood rigid, wordless, pointing his way across the doorstep. Slowly, the drunken face lost its leering grin. The eyes blackened into a truculent and venomous scowl. He stepped over, ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck

... of the death of the king of France ends the embassy, and the lovers are put on a year's probation of constancy. In the subplot, or minor story, the play is notable for the burlesquing of two types of character—a pompous pedantic schoolmaster, and a braggart who always speaks in high-flown metaphor. These two, happily contrasted with a country curate, a court page, and a country clown with his lass, make much ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken

... Impious braggart, you forget; God is not your conscript yet; You shall learn in dumb amaze That His ways are not your ways, That the mire through which you trod Is not the ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke

... to acquire the reputation it confers by the most dexterous mimicry of its outside expressions; for a swift analysis, which drives directly to the heart of the man, instantly detects the impostor behind the braggart, and curtly declares him to lack "the true grit." The word is so close to the thing it names, has so much pith and point, is so tart on the tongue, and so stings the ear with its meaning, that foreigners ignorant of the language might at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various

... "Leadsman, you're a braggart!" said the miller. "We've known that for a long time; we knew it when you wrote to the paper saying the Great ...
— In Midsummer Days and Other Tales • August Strindberg

... raise his head that he may perform his genuflections, or ritual of prayer; but they are all so sound asleep, that you might conclude they were dead." He replied: "O emanation of your father, you had also better have slept than that you should thus calumniate the failings of mankind.—The braggart can discern only his own precious person; he will draw the veil of conceit all around him. Were fortune to bestow upon him God's all-searching eye, he would find ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous

... tradesmen; there appear the— here also inevitable—"Fuller," then the "Ropemaker," the "Dyer," the "Salt-man," the "Female Weavers," the "Rascal"; other pieces give sketches of character, as the "Forgetful," the "Braggart," the "Man of 100,000 sesterces";(10) or pictures of other lands, the "Etruscan Woman," the "Gauls," the "Cretan," "Alexandria"; or descriptions of popular festivals, as the "Compitalia," the "Saturnalia," "Anna Perenna," the "Hot Baths"; or parodies of mythology, as the "Voyage ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... animal ever yet lost his senses through blighted love, which proves abundantly that animals have no souls. The employment of a lover is that of a mountebank, of a soldier, of a quack, of a buffoon, of a prince, of a ninny, of a king, of an idler, of a monk, of a dupe, of a blackguard, of a liar, of a braggart, of a sycophant, of a numskull, of a frivolous fool, of a blockhead, of a know-nothing, of a knave. An employment from which Jesus abstained, in imitation of whom folks of great understanding likewise disdain it; it is a vocation ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac

... be, sir, depend on it." Beaumaroy's air was suddenly confident, almost braggart. Mr. Saffron nodded approvingly. "But, anyhow, I can't very well start till ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony

... stir," said the prince. "I see the duke quite as well as you do, but he is a liar and a braggart—I dislike him, and he shall not speak with me. Tell me something about the new ballet that you are arranging for the emperor's festival. I hear that Gluck has composed the music. But hush! Here comes ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... of Manassas and Fredericksburg under General John Pope, to operate against Richmond by the flank. General Pope from his infamous orders greatly incensed the people of the South, and from his vain boasting gained for himself the sobriquet of "Pope the Braggart." He ordered every citizen within his lines or living near them to either take the oath of allegiance to the United States or to be driven out of the country as an enemy of the Union. No one was to have any communication ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert

... they say, "He hoert de Flegn hosten," "He hears the flies coughing." If a man is full of great schemes, he is told, "In Gedanken foert de Bur ok in't Kutsch." "In thought the peasant, too, drives in a coach." A man who boasts is asked, "Pracher! haest ok Lues, oder schuppst di man so?" "Braggart! have you really lice, or do you only scratch yourself as if ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... harm all ranks, all arts, all crafts appal: At Mars' harsh blast arch, rampart, altar fall! Ah! hard as adamant, a braggart Czar Arms vassal-swarms, and fans a fatal war! Rampant at that bad call, a Vandal-band Harass, and harm, and ransack Wallach-land! A Tartar phalanx Balkan's scarp hath past, And Allah's standard falls, ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various

... that you make no attempt," he sneered, his old braggart spirit reasserting itself as De Tonty kept silent. "I have guard here to escort you to ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish

... pupils should endeavor to secure variety of interest in roles. At first, assignments are likely to be determined by apparent fitness. The quiet boy is not required to play the part of the braggart. The retiring girl is not expected to impersonate the shrew. In one or two appearances it may be a good thing to keep in mind ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton

... Edward Everett came up from the wilds of Devonshire to study law with Braggart and Pushem, in Chancery Lane. He was placed to board, by a prudent mother, with a quiet ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various

... given to hasty judgments. That promise of notices and articles in the papers and his extravagant praises of her talent seemed to her merely insincere twaddle. Even his face, gestures, and manner of speaking reminded her of a certain notorious braggart living in the vicinity ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont

... distance from his. By the advice of Timotheus he would not let her be seen at his side till the stars had once more been consulted, and he would then conduct Melissa to the Circus as his wife-the day after to-morrow, perhaps. He thanked the matron for having escorted Melissa, and added, with a braggart air of virtue, that the world should see that he, too, could sacrifice the most ardent wish of his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... now our chief friend Philosophy, like many other friends, is found most weak when most needed. In vain do we invoke his approved maxims, hitherto so glibly dealt out to silence all gainsayers; yet now, they are either found inapt or are forgotten wholly, until, after a paltry show of defence, braggart Philosophy fairly takes to his heels, and leaves us abandoned to the will of old mother Nature. Now, indeed, arrives the tug; and I, for my part, pity the man who, however savagely resolute, does not feel and own her power. The adieus of those one loves are, at best,—that is, for the ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power

... and now to the other a large group. Fernando, I feel gladness in saying, had with him but two or three. And aside stood variations, individuals. Beltran the cook was such an one, a bold, mirthful, likable man. We had several dry thinkers, and a braggart and two or three who proved miserably villainous. We had weathercocks and men who faced forward, no matter what the wind ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston

... he had never before been at sea. He was a big hulking fellow; and as he had a certain amount of cleverness about him, he tried to make it appear that he knew a great deal more about things than he really did. True Blue instinctively discovered that he was a braggart and inclined to ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston

... a tremendous braggart, was thoroughly courageous, and each side of the river respected him for one of these attributes. He and a following of similar bravoes were addicted to the pastime of ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry

... dramatic poet Pierre Corneille when he wrote his famous play, Le Cid, in 1636, Ximena is given a much more prominent place in the story than that accorded to her in history. According to this version, Don Diego, father of Don Rodrigo, is given a mortal insult by the braggart Don Gomez, who is the father of Ximena. Young Don Rodrigo, eager to avenge the slight put upon his aged father, provokes Don Gomez to a duel and kills him. Ximena, who has loved Don Rodrigo, overcome by these tragic events, is at a loss to know what to do, and in ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger

... a while they suffered it to stay; But with such insolence it flourished there, That, out of patience with its braggart's air, They bade it prove its claims ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac

... men, how he himself—as witness his sword "packed like a hand-saw"—had kept at bay and put to flight now two, anon four, and then seven, and finally eleven of his assailants. We all can see, too, the roguish twinkle in Prince Hal's eyes as the braggart knight embellishes his lying tale with every fresh sentence, and are as nonplussed as he when, the plot discovered, Falstaff finds a way to take credit for his cowardice. Who would not forgive so ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley

... delicate frame, of the gentlest manners, habituated to all the soft elegances and refined enjoyments that attend high birth and fortune. Her mind alone was formed for such trials.' But in very many cases heroines have been women from whom few would have expected heroism. The blustering braggart does not often prove to be a hero in time of danger, and the gentle, unassuming woman is the type of which heroines are frequently made. The aristocracy the middle and the lower classes, have each given us many heroines of ...
— Noble Deeds of the World's Heroines • Henry Charles Moore

... such, at least; gentlemen by name and descent they were assuredly, but as surely not right gentlemen at heart. Many of them, however, in cooler moments, spoke of the traitor and the braggart with the contempt and disgust he merited. Some friend of Kerguelen's heard what had passed, and deemed it his duty to inform him. The most unhappy husband called the seducer to the field, wounded him mortally, and—to ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various

... small hospital, the name of which I do not know. It was simply a farmhouse turned into a place for the wounded. On the road thither we called at many farms, and at every one men, women, and children came out to see us. Not one taunting word was uttered in our hearing, not one braggart sentence passed their lips. Men brought us cooling drinks, or moved us into more comfortable positions on the trolly. Women, with gentle fingers, shifted bandages, or washed wounds, or gave us little dainties that come so pleasant in such a time; whilst the little children ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales

... madly-wicked men Who sought to kindle flames of border war Have in confusion failed yet, once again, Their braggart plans ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke

... appear before him, and the prince entered the royal justice chamber with the air of a braggart, smiling contemptuously at the learned judges who were seated to right and left of his majesty, and ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa

... of bullies and boors. He shared their work and their sports, but he never stooped to their vulgarity. He very seldom drank with them, and they never heard him speak an oath. He could throw the stoutest in a wrestling match, and was ready, when brought to it, to whip any insolent braggart who made cruel use of his strength. He never flinched from hardship or danger, yet his heart was as soft and tender as a woman's. The great gentle giant had a feeling of sympathy for every living creature. ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne

... colors!" exclaimed Sir Hokus, proudly touching Dorothy's hair ribbon, which still adorned his arm. "Come, my good Lion, let us dispatch this braggart and ...
— The Royal Book of Oz • L. Frank Baum

... young soldiers home on their first leave—mute young eyes that contained the unutterable secrets of the battlefield, but revealed none. She had seen them since she came to England, sitting with their elders, gray-haired fathers who talked war, war, war, while the young tongues—once so easily braggart—remained speechless. ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway

... Captain. If this is a fault, the fault is the ignorance of the Poet; not that he intended to be guilty of theft. That so it is, you will now be enabled to judge. The Colax is {a Play} of Menander's; in it there is Colax, a Parasite, and a braggart Captain: he does not deny that he has transferred these characters into his Eunuch from the Greek; but assuredly he does deny this, that he was aware that those pieces had been already translated into Latin. But if it is not permitted {us} to use the same characters as others, how can it any more ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence

... for capons and sack with only one halfpenny-worth of bread, was not put there by himself as a trick to humour the jest upon his favourite propensities, and as a conscious caricature of himself. He is represented as a liar, a braggart, a coward, a glutton, etc. and yet we are not offended but delighted with him; for he is all these as much to amuse others as to gratify himself. He openly assumes all these characters to shew the humourous part of them. The unrestrained indulgence ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... spoils hanging in thine house?' Thereat he: 'Desire of glory is not gone, nor ambition checked by fear; but torpid age dulls my chilly blood, and my strength of limb is numb and outworn. If I had what once was mine, if I had now that prime of years, yonder braggart's boast and confidence, it had taken no prize of goodly bullock to allure me; nor heed I these gifts.' So he spoke, and on that flung down a pair of gloves of giant weight, with whose hard hide bound about his wrists valiant Eryx was wont to come to battle. They ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil

... Eagle-hunter, The valiant fate-confronter, The soldier brave, and blunter Of speech than BISMARCK's self? This bungler all-disgracing, This braggart all-debasing. This spurious sportsman, chasing No nobler prey ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various

... beautiful by far than the La Mancha knight's Dulcinea. Don Quixote suppressed a scornful smile that threatened to betray him, and controlled the feelings that the boasting errant's words provoked, while wondering at the braggart's audacity. He slyly expressed a doubt, however, that the valiant knight Don Quixote of La Mancha had let himself be vanquished by any living being. The Knight of the Grove then gave a description of Don Quixote which ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... Known all over the border. Gulden's no braggart. But he's been known to talk. He was a sailor—a pirate. Once he was shipwrecked. Starvation forced him to be a cannibal. He told this in California, and in Nevada camps. But no one believed him. A few years ago he got snowed-up in the ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey

... words, which I must perforce repeat as slowly, though every one was a bitter pill. I was made to say that I was entirely mistaken in supposing myself a Christian (in the 'evangelical' sense); that I had been a fool, a braggart, a sort of impostor; that my life had been one series of shams and follies; that I had disgraced my religious profession, etc., etc., ad nauseam, winding up with the abject declaration that I deserved to go straight to 'the city of Dis, and the three-headed ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various

... at the time with M. de Saintonge, and he muttered, with a sneer, that it was not difficult to see the end, or that within the year the young braggart would sink to be a gaming-house bully. I said nothing, but I confess that I thought otherwise; the lad's disposition of his money and his provision for the future seeming to me so remarkable as to set him ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman

... or social suffering, he cannot see, nor a people hardening to Spartan lineaments in the fire, iron men to meet disaster, worshippers of a discerned God of Laws, and just men too, thinking to do justice; he has Bull on the eye, the alternately braggart and poltroon, sweating in labour that he may gorge the fruits, graceless to a scoffer. And this is the creature to whose tail he is tied! Hereditary hatred is approved by critical disgust. Some spirited brilliancy, some persistent generosity (other than the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... composed in the hackneyed style, nor yet like other plays, nor are there in it any ribald lines [12] unfit for utterance: here is neither the perjured procurer, nor the artful courtesan, nor yet the braggart captain. Don't you be afraid because I've said that there's war between the Aetoliains and the Eleans. There (pointing), at a distance, beyond the scenes, the battles will be fought. For this were almost impossible for a Comic establishment[13], ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus

... a true and a false Imperialism. There is the Imperialism of the vulgar braggart, who thinks that one Englishman can fight ten men of any other nationality under the sun; and there is the Imperialism of the man of thought, who believes in the destiny of the English race, who does not ...
— Successful Recitations • Various

... hasten away at once; to-day, uncle, or to-morrow at the latest. You remember that we have challenged the Count; to fight him is my affair, and I have sent a challenge. Since duelling is prohibited in Lithuania, I am going to the borders of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw; the Count, of course, is a braggart, but he does not lack courage, and will appear without fail at the appointed place. We will settle accounts; and, if God grants me his blessing, I will punish him, and then will swim over the Lososna, where the ranks of my brothers await ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz

... hands—but no; When each opines himself, though frighten'd, right Each is, in courtesy, oblig'd to fight! And they DID fight: from six full measured paces The unbeliever pulled his trigger first; And fearing, from the braggart's ugly faces, The whizzing lead had whizz'd its very worst, Ran up, and with a DUELISTIC fear (His ire evanishing like morning vapors), Found nim possess'd of one remaining ear, Who in a manner sudden and uncouth, Had given, not lent, the other ear to truth; ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... sister of the other. Colonel Bath has necessarily united all suffrages. He is of course a very little stagey; he reminds us that his author had had a long theatrical apprenticeship: he is something too much d'une piece. But as a study of the brave man who is almost more braggart than brave, of the generous man who will sacrifice not only generosity but bare justice to "a hogo of honour," he is admirable, and up to his time almost unique. Ordinary writers and ordinary readers have never been quite content to admit that bravery and braggadocio can go together, ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding

... which the heroes entertain of themselves and each other. Agamemnon's stately behaviour, Menelaus' irritation, Nestor's experience, Ulysses' cunning, are all productive of no effect; when they have at last arranged a single combat between the coarse braggart Ajax and Hector, the latter will not fight in good earnest, as Ajax is his cousin. Achilles is treated worst: after having long stretched himself out in arrogant idleness, and passed his time in the company of Thersites the buffoon, he falls upon Hector at a moment when he is defenceless, and ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... from braggart pride Our race to cheapen and defame? Before the world to wail, to chide, And weakness as with vaunting claim? Ere the hour strikes, to abdicate The steadfast spirit that made us great, And rail with ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various

... book is very interesting, but as the man himself was evidently a hopeless liar and braggart, it can only be trusted where it was not for his interest to tell a falsehood. His book was written after McGillivray's death, the object being to claim for himself the glory belonging to the half-breed chief. He insisted that he was the war-chief, the arm, and McGillivray merely ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt

... Princess, not here, not here!... You know I love you; in an unreasoning moment I dared tell you so; and you may think me passion-blind, and that I hung the vow to defend you upon my soul's neck, thinking it light as this favor you were pleased to give me; that love being a braggart, therefore I am a braggart. Let me set myself right in your opinion—your good opinion, O Princess, for it is to me a world of such fair shining I dream of it as of a garden in Paradise.... If ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace

... just because a few humbugs make temperance a piece of cant. I think those who get drunk are fools or who drink when there's a prospect of themselves or those they drink with getting drunk. Drink makes a man an empty braggart or a contented fool. It makes him heartless not only to others ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller

... between drama and novels, quite a Benyowsky literature has sprung up about this Cagliostro of the sea. His record in the continental armies preceding his exile would fill a book by itself; and throughout all, Benyowsky appears in the same light, an unscrupulous braggart lying gloriously, but withal as courageous ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut

... quarrels between nations which cannot be accommodated without loss of self-respect on the one side or the other, had better be fought out in resolute and honourable war. He is the sworn foe of the bully or the braggart. Cruelty is hateful to him. The patriotic instinct nurtures in him a warm and generous humanity. His faith in the future of his nation depends on the confident hope that she will be true to herself, to her traditions, to her responsibilities, to the great virtues; ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee

... wing, that canst not soar, Confused power, still seeking, still unblest; For ever clutching to a braggart breast The hope portentous and the worldling's lore. Furiously futile, with a raucous roar Thy dizzy moments mock th' eternal quest; To feverish ends, by factions fierce distrest, ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth

... Damsel, crowned with rue, Lactiferous spoils from vaccine dugs, who drew Of that corniculate beast whose tortuous horn Tossed to the clouds, in fierce vindictive scorn, The harrowing hound, whose braggart bark and stir Arched the lithe spine and reared the indignant fur Of Puss, that with verminicidal claw Struck the weird Rat, in whose insatiate maw Lay reeking malt, that erst in Ivan's courts we saw Robed in senescent ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous

... the valiant braggart to a captive," he commented, quietly. Then he turned to Brilliana as one who had no further desire for treaty with a fellow of ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... birds are so little calculated to excite pleasurable emotions in the beholder, or to become objects of human interest and affection. The King-Bird is the best-dressed member of the family, but he is a braggart; and, though always snubbing his neighbors, is an arrant coward, and shows the white feather at the slightest display of pluck in his antagonist. I have seen him turn tail to a Swallow, and have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various

... the latter capacity that Antipas met him, and, pleased with his shrewdness and perfect corruption, had attached him to his house. This had occurred in years previous, and as yet Antipas had found no cause to regret the trust imposed. He was a useful braggart, idle, familiar, and discreet; and he had acquired the dialect of the ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus

... a nun is she; One weak chirp is her only note. Braggart, and prince of braggarts is he, Pouring boasts from his little throat: Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link, Spink, spank, spink, Never was I afraid of man; Catch me, cowardly knaves, if ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various

... upon whose hearts most generous sentiments knock in vain, who still are overawed and bowed by the magnitude of this catastrophe. No matter what they believe about it, the effect is the same. The effect is to reduce a man from the swaggering braggart—the vainglorious lord of what he sees—the self-made master of fate, of nature, of time, of space, of everything—to his true microscopic stature in the cosmos. He goes in tears to put together again the fragments of the few, small, pitiful ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various

... thick-set man, about forty years of age. He was an American by birth, but he had lived for many years in Compton County. It was said that he had made a good deal of money by smuggling goods into the States. He had the reputation of being a hard liver, and something of a braggart. ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous

... Enemies called them maudlin and hypocritical, these tears; but that was nowise the complete account of them. On the whole, there did conspicuously lie a dash of ostentation, a self-consciousness apt to become loud and braggart, over all he said and did and felt: this was the alloy of the man, and you had to be thankful for the abundant ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... flycatcher, a large, leather-colored or sandy-complexioned bird that prowls through the woods, uttering its harsh, uncanny note and waging fierce warfare upon its fellows. The exquisite of the family, and the braggart of the orchard, is the kingbird, a bully that loves to strip the feathers off its more timid neighbors such as the bluebird, that feeds on the stingless bees of the hive, the drones, and earns the reputation of great boldness by teasing large hawks, while ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs

... boasted to me. He effected it not, of course, openly, but in some disguise. I am sufficiently, however, in his confidence—any man may be that with so audacious a braggart—to deter him from renewing his attempt for some days. Meanwhile, I or yourself will leave discovered some surer home than this, to which you can remove, and then will be the proper time to take back your daughter. And for the present, if you will send by me a letter to enjoin her to ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... his arm about her waist, lifted her from the floor and put her down in the middle of the room. Truls stood and gazed at them with large, bewildered eyes. He tried hard to despise the braggart, ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... accuse wise Laska, Whose words find access to a monarch's ear, Of a base, braggart lie? It must have been Her spirit that appeared to me. But haply 170 I come too late? It has itself delivered ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... from what it is; and surely their bishops might have been better employed in remedying the neglect of their subordinates, than in attending political meetings, and delivering postprandial orations, savouring more of the braggart boastings of a drunken drumboy, than of the deliberate opinions of a dignified ecclesiastic. In their zeal as politicians, the Roman Catholic clergy have forgotten their duties as priests; and they are now beginning to get a foretaste of the consequences: they became mob leaders at ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various

... more prosaic countries. Spain is virtually a land of poetry and romance, where every-day life partakes of adventure, and where the least agitation or excitement carries every thing up into extravagant enterprise and daring exploit. The Spaniards in all ages have been of swelling and braggart spirit, soaring in thought, and valiant though vainglorious in deed. When the nation had recovered in some degree from the storm of Moslem invasion, and sage men sought to inquire and write the particulars ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various

... me because there was no boy of his age or his nation at the theatre, or anywhere in the neighborhood. We also went together at other times, as well as during the play; and, even while the representations went on, he seldom left me in peace. He was a most delightful little braggart, chattered away charmingly and incessantly, and could tell so much of his adventures, quarrels, and other strange incidents, that he amused me wonderfully; and I learned from him in four weeks more of the language, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... villain who tampers with race-horses, and a dashing young man who is saved from ruin by betting on a race; another drags in a surprisingly lofty-minded damsel who grows up pure and noble amid the most repulsive surroundings; another can never forget the lost will; another depends on a mock-modest braggart who kills scores of people in a humorous way. The mould remains the same in each case, although there may be casual variations in the hue of the material poured out and moulded. All these forlorn folk are either verging toward ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman

... him with his large, bony right hand, in uncouth gestures, as if he would clutch him and shake him. He would often use invectives, which he took care should never appear printed in the official reports, and John Randolph in his braggart prime was never so imperiously insulting as was Mr. Stevens toward those whose political action he controlled. He was firm believer in the old maxim ascribed to the Jesuits, "The end justifies the means," and, ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore

... Grettir's first dealings with the supernatural, which characterise this Saga, and throw a strange light on the more ordinary matters throughout. The slaying of the bearserks is followed by a feud which Grettir has on his hands for the slaying of a braggart who insulted him past bearing, and so great the feud grows that Grettir at last finds himself at enmity with Earl Svein, the ruler of Norway, and, delivered from death by his friends, yet has to leave the land and betake himself to Iceland again. ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris

... which every knight selected some lady as the object of his dutiful devotion. She disdained the attentions of the most potent prince if his addresses were not honorable. Nor would she bestow her love on one of whom she was not proud. She would not marry a coward or a braggart, even if he were the owner of ten thousand acres. The knight was encouraged to pay his address to any lady if he was personally worthy of her love, for chivalry created a high estimate of individual merit. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord

... was admired by Dahlia and Zephine. She had had an establishment of her own very early in life. Her father was an old unmarried professor of mathematics, a brutal man and a braggart, who went out to give lessons in spite of his age. This professor, when he was a young man, had one day seen a chambermaid's gown catch on a fender; he had fallen in love in consequence of this accident. The result had been Favourite. She met her father from time to time, and he bowed to ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... war, Robert Toombs of Georgia played some such part to the Northern imagination as Phillips or Sumner to the Southern. He was regarded as the typical fire-eater and braggart. He was currently reported to have boasted that he would yet call the roll of his slaves at the foot of Bunker Hill monument. But in truth this ogre was made of much the same human clay as the ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... spirit of the Scottish poltroon, who cries to his friend, "Haud me, haud me, or I'll fecht!" The war-god is implored to moderate the martial eagerness of the poet. The original collector here showed lack of discrimination. At no time, however, was Ares a popular God in Greece; in Homer he is a braggart ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang

... throat and breast like water from the neck of a bottle. Here, one had a mouth plugged with shot, and a beard as stiff as though it were made of rope. Another that he turned over was a German he had once heard speak at a diggers' meeting—a windy braggart of a man, with a quaint impediment in his speech. Well, poor soul! he would never mouth invectives or tickle the ribs of an audience again. His body was a very colander of wounds. Some had not bled either. It looked as though ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson

... the vice or folly of the shallow-minded; so if you would not be thought so avoid boasting or affectations of any kind. The truly wise man is modest, and the braggart and coxcomb are ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost

... might make an exception of you.... You who, with all your braggart arrogance, are, after all, outright and simple-hearted. I believe you capable of assuring a woman of all kinds of love-lies ... believing them yourself most of all. But the others!... Ay, the ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... me: such men as he saw there I saw at court, and worse, and more. Low fear Becomes the guilty, not th' accuser; then Shall I, none's slave, of high born or rais'd men Fear frowns, and my mistress, Truth! betray thee To th' huffing braggart, puft nobility? No, no; thou which since yesterday hast been Almost about the whole world, hast thou seen, O Sun! in all thy journey vanity Such as swells the bladder of our court? I Think he which made your waxen garden, and Transported ...
— English Satires • Various

... Paul, with a smile—and when Paul smiled it was as if Eros's feathers had brushed the cheek of a Praxitelean Hermes; and then with an outburst half sincere, half braggart—"I've been on my own ever since ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... [W.3457.] "Avaunt with thy warnings, Thou world's greatest braggart; Nor guerdon nor pardon, [1]Low warrior for thee![1] 'Tis I that well know thee, Thou heart of a cageling This lad merely ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown

... I can set a braggart quailing with a quip, The upstart I can wither with a whim; He may wear a merry laugh upon his lip, But his laughter has an echo that is grim. When they've offered to the world in merry guise, Unpleasant truths are swallowed with a will - For he who'd make his fellow-creatures wise Should always ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert

... for all and all, a man—eats out his heart for you; desires only to live for you, only to die for you, only to lie at your feet afterward—that is nothing to you. You do not even care to listen. You would rather hear through a braggart, indecent mouth that ought to be sewed up what Rodin said about Phidias. It seems finer to you to be an artist than a woman, and you ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris

... answered Prince John, "and it shall not be refused thee. If thou dost beat this braggart, Hubert, I will fill the bugle ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker

... hosten," "He hears the flies coughing." If a man is full of great schemes, he is told, "In Gedanken foert de Bur ok in't Kutsch." "In thought the peasant, too, drives in a coach." A man who boasts is asked, "Pracher! haest ok Lues, oder schuppst di man so?" "Braggart! have you really lice, or do you only scratch yourself as if ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... the Mississippi campaign and had begun his career in the East by boasting of the great things he was about to accomplish, referring contemptuously to his opponents and otherwise advertising himself as a braggart and a babbler. He had come, so he told his soldiers in a flamboyant address, from an army which had seen only the backs of its enemies. He had come to lead them to victories. He wanted to hear no more of "lines of retreat" or backward movements of any kind. His headquarters ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill

... Lemon's portrait over, in my mind, I am convinced that there is not a grain of bad taste in the matter, and that there is a manly composure and courage in the proceeding deserving of the utmost respect. If Lemon were one of your braggart honest men, he would set a taint of bad taste upon that action as upon everything else he might say or do; but being what he is, I admire him for it greatly, and hold it to be a proof of an exalted nature and a true heart. Your idea of him, is mine. I ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... and his king, And in the battle-field or tilting-yard He met his foe full-fronted, and struck hard. But now it seemed a foolish thing to throw One's whole life to the fortune of a blow. True valor breathes not in the braggart vaunt; True honor takes no shame from idle taunt; So let this wizard, if he wants to, scoff; Why should our hero ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis

... in his study, frowning and considering what he was to do. The coming of these visitors annoyed him. "What are Prince Vasili and that son of his to me? Prince Vasili is a shallow braggart and his son, no doubt, is a fine specimen," he grumbled to himself. What angered him was that the coming of these visitors revived in his mind an unsettled question he always tried to stifle, one about which ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... Manassas and Fredericksburg under General John Pope, to operate against Richmond by the flank. General Pope from his infamous orders greatly incensed the people of the South, and from his vain boasting gained for himself the sobriquet of "Pope the Braggart." He ordered every citizen within his lines or living near them to either take the oath of allegiance to the United States or to be driven out of the country as an enemy of the Union. No one was to have any communication with his friends within the Confederate lines, either ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert

... notable simplification of actual life be it observed in passing); and, placing these typified traits in juxtaposition in their conflict and contrast, struck the spark of comedy. Downright, as his name indicates, is "a plain squire"; Bobadill's humour is that of the braggart who is incidentally, and with delightfully comic effect, a coward; Brainworm's humour is the finding out of things to the end of fooling everybody: of course he is fooled in the end himself. But it was not Jonson's theories alone that made the success of "Every Man in His Humour." ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson

... set out from Laurel Hill, and began its tedious tramp across the fifty miles of wilderness that lay between that point and Fort Duquesne. It was headed by Major Grant, a noisy, blustering braggart, who, hankering after notoriety rather than seeking praise for duty well and faithfully done, went beyond the limits of his instructions; which were simply to find out all he could about the enemy, without suffering ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady

... was more truly witty in putting down a young braggart whom he met at dinner at a country-house. There are still to be found, like the bones of dead asses in a field newly ploughed, in some parts of the country, youths, who are so hopelessly behind their age, and indeed every age, as ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton

... He is a regular type," said Maxwell, with tacit enjoyment of the typicality of Pinney. "He hasn't the least chance in the world of working up into any controlling place in the paper. They don't know much in the Events office; but they do know Pinney. He's a great liar and a braggart, and he has no more notion of the immunities of private life than—Well, perhaps it's because he would as soon turn his life inside out as not, and in fact would rather. But he's very domestic, and very kind-hearted to his wife; it seems they have ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells

... Raymond, peppy jade? The braggart Lew, the simple Joe? And where the Irish servant maid That Jimmie Russell used to show? Charles Sweet, who tore the paper snow? Ben Harney's where? And Artie Hall? Nash Walker, Darktown's grandest beau? Into the night ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams

... the after-settling of her handsome features into a dogged determination equal to his own. His blind fury against the three partners did not touch her curiosity; she was only struck with the evident depth of his emotion. He had never been a braggart; his hostility had always been lazy and cynical. Remembering this, she had a faint stirring of respect for the undoubted courage and consciousness of strength shown in this wild but single-handed crusade ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte

... further emphasize his words, shaggy Hanak whirled his knobby bludgeon above his head, and shied it frantically at the officer, who warded off the blow with his sword, and the same instant a young private transfixed the braggart so vigorously that the end of his bayonet ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai

... sudden sunshine, were becoming unmanageable and extravagant. On the bench there were but four prelates who were on the moving side,—Cranmer, Latimer, Shaxton, and Barlow,[528]—and among these Cranmer only approved the policy of the government. Shaxton was an arrogant braggart, and Barlow a feeble enthusiast. Shaxton, who had flinched from the stake when Bilney was burnt, Shaxton, who subsequently relapsed under Mary, and became himself a Romanist persecutor, was now strutting in his new authority, and punishing, suspending, ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude

... presenting the necklace, though unauthorized by Shakespeare, had the full approval of the company, and set them in good humour to receive Major Camperton as Armado the braggart. Nothing calculated to stimulate jealousy occurred again till the fifth act; and then there arose ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy

... have created some men in such poverty and distress as to need the help of others. What does that braggart man mean when he says, "None shall prevail over me; I have and have scattered riches boundless"? Does he not know that there is a Divine eye that sees him? Have not We created him with a capacity of distinguishing ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various

... Colonel Bath has necessarily united all suffrages. He is of course a very little stagey; he reminds us that his author had had a long theatrical apprenticeship: he is something too much d'une piece. But as a study of the brave man who is almost more braggart than brave, of the generous man who will sacrifice not only generosity but bare justice to "a hogo of honour," he is admirable, and up to his time almost unique. Ordinary writers and ordinary readers have never been quite content ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding

... speech of a sleeping man. As the creature gradually awakens, his cry becomes more resonant until it has the true morning ring. Brave as is this note of the full day, it is not to be compared with the crowing of a game-cock, the most splendid braggart sound of all the ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler

... impressed with the objectionable character of the man who by his unselfish decision, he called it his good luck, had got the start of him in rendering the family service. To himself he styled him "a beastly fellow, a lying braggart, a disgustingly vulgar ill-bred rascal." He would have called him an army-cad, only the word cad was not then invented. If there were any more such relations likely to turn up, the sooner he cut the connection the better! But that Hester should not be shocked with ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... brought in and burned in on his own soul. He had lied to his mother, to his conscience, to his God. How could he bear it? And then the poor, little, weak boy, whom he had pitied and almost scorned for his weakness, had done that which he, braggart as he ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey

... old men? No, Paul. De Brissac and I were on excellent terms. You ought to know me better. I do not climb into windows, especially when the door is always open for me. I am like my sword, loyal, frank, and honest; we scorn braggart's cunning, dark alleys, stealth; we look not at a man's back but into his face; we prefer sunshine to darkness. And listen," tapping his sword: "he who has done this thing, be he never so far away, yet shall this long sword of mine find him ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath

... was seated the aging Charles IV (1788- 1808), boorish, foolish, easily duped. By his side sat his queen, a coarse sensuous woman "with a tongue like a fishwife's." Their heir was Prince Ferdinand, a conceited irresponsible young braggart in his early twenties. And their favorite, the true ruler of Spain, if Spain at this time could be said to have a ruler, was Godoy, a vain flashy adventurer, who was loved by the queen, shielded by the king, and envied ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... him certain frigates lately taken from the Malabars. The viceroy added, that he had sent his son in the command of the northern fleet, who, being young, he prayed the captain-major to aid him with his counsel. Thus were the viceroy and I abused by the false reports of a lying braggart. The letter to the sabander thanked him for refusing to allow the English to trade at Surat, willing him to continue the same conduct, which would do great service to the King of Portugal, and for which he should be rewarded. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr

... charms leads an Empress who in turn leads an empire. Half suspicious and wholly unconvinced, he questions and demands the exact number of invulnerables that can be placed in line; and is forthwith assured, with braggart Chinese choruses, that they are as locusts, that the whole earth swarms with them, that the movement is unconquerable. Still unconvinced, the false eunuch takes his departure, and then the Throne decrees and counter decrees in agonised Edicts. It is noticed, too, that the distributors ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale

... Antietam was the first, and if it could have been made for Lee a more decisive failure, might have prevented Gettysburg. It occurred September 15th to 18th, 1862. Lee had just thoroughly whipped that handsome Western braggart, General Pope, and, elated with success, thought he could assume the offensive, cross the Potomac, and collect around his banner great armies of dissatisfied secessionists to the tune of "Maryland, my Maryland." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various

... degrading! In wine is truth, and the truth had all come out, "that is, all the uncleanness of his coarse and envious heart"! And would such a dream ever be permissible to him, Razumihin? What was he beside such a girl—he, the drunken noisy braggart of last night? Was it possible to imagine so absurd and cynical a juxtaposition? Razumihin blushed desperately at the very idea and suddenly the recollection forced itself vividly upon him of how he had said last night on the stairs that the landlady would be jealous of Avdotya ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... all Germans, Prussian and Anti-Prussian alike, flung up their caps, with unanimous LEBE-HOCH, at the news of Rossbach, has often been remarked; and indeed is still almost touching to see. The perhaps bravest Nation in the world, though the least braggart, very certainly EIN TAPFERES VOLK (as their Goethe calls them); so long insulted, snubbed and trampled on, by a luckier, not a braver:—has not your exultant Dauphiness got a beautiful little dose administered her; and is gone off in ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle

... our father's curses now bear fruit. But it beseems not to lament or weep, Lest lamentations sadder still be born. For him, too truly Polyneikes named,— What his device will work we soon shall know; Whether his braggart words, with madness fraught, Gold-blazoned on his shield, shall lead him back. Hath Justice communed with, or claimed him hers, Guided his deeds and thoughts, this might have been; But neither when he fled the darksome womb, Or in ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... give up all hope," said Kretschmer; "the people are timid and fickle, and whoever will give them the sweetest words wins them over to his side. Come, let us try our luck elsewhere. Every thing depends upon our being beforehand with this braggart Gotzkowsky, and getting first the ear of the people. You, Pfannenstiel, come with us, and get up your words strong and spirited, so that the ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach

... true material age is the stupid Chinese age, in which no new or grand revelations of nature are granted, because they are ignorantly and insolently repelled, instead of being diligently and humbly sought. The difference between the ancient fiction of the mad braggart defying the lightning and the modern historical picture of Franklin drawing it towards his kite, in order that he might the more profoundly study that which was set before him to be studied (or it would not have been there), happily expresses to my mind the distinction between the much-maligned ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens

... is a fair judge of his own actions, Sir Gervaise," Caretto said. "A man may believe himself a Solon, or a Roland; others may consider him as a fool, or an empty braggart; and it must be taken that the general opinion of the public is the judgment from which there is no appeal. It is not the mob of Genoa only who regard the services that you have rendered as extraordinary, but it is the opinion of the councillors ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty

... arm about her waist, lifted her from the floor and put her down in the middle of the room. Truls stood and gazed at them with large, bewildered eyes. He tried hard to despise the braggart, ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... who was delighted with the game look of these cavaliers of the mountains, welcomed them heartily to his camp, and ordered a free allowance of grog to regale them, which soon put them in the most braggart spirits. They pronounced the captain the finest fellow in the world, and his men all bons garcons, jovial lads, and swore they would pass the day with them. They did so; and a day it was, of boast, and swagger, and rodomontade. The prime bullies and braves among the free trappers had ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving

... between us, my lord," I answered, "and I claim the right to cross swords in an affair of honour with all save those of royal blood. Grant me the satisfaction I demand, or I will brand you as a braggart and a coward throughout every town ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes

... brethren quelled Ward off the wolves whose hides should line thy throne, Wert thou no coward, no recreant to the bone, No liar in spirit and soul and heartless heart, No slave, no traitor—nought of all thou art. A thing like thee, made big with braggart breath, Whose tongue shoots fire, whose promise poisons trust, Would cast a shieldless soldier forth to death And wreck three realms to sate his rancorous lust With ruin of them who have weighed and found him dust. Get thee to Wales: there strut in speech and swell: ...
— Locrine - A Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... undertake—or, undertaking, cannot perfect. But in this I have imitated their folly, brave Saracen, that in talking to thee of what thou canst not comprehend, I have, even in speaking most simple truth, fully incurred the character of a braggart in thy eyes; so, I pray you, ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott

... and that in fact he would destroy or drive them from the country. The invincible English took the city, however, with perfect ease; and the king being enraged that he had listened for a moment to the braggart, and thus provoked the British officers, had him executed without ceremony, and gave out that it was to punish him for violating his command 'not to fight the English.' The same night, Dr. Price was sent with part of the money, and some of the prisoners, ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart

... may be a very noble man and be a German—though what has become of the noble ones these last three years is more than I can guess. But Frederick was noble and good, as you could see on his face. How he ever came to be the father of such a blasphemous braggart"—Daddy sank into reverie. ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle

... than thou, braggart and coward that thou art!" broke forth Stephen, while Master Headley exclaimed, "How now, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge

... furious antagonists, but deliberately wheels about in that aerial spiral, and mounts and mounts till his pursuers grow dizzy and return to earth again. It is quite original, this mode of getting rid of an unworthy opponent,—rising to heights where the braggart is dazed and bewildered and loses his reckoning! I am not sure but ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs

... just now I gave; I spoke not as an idle braggart better. Henceforward I remain a slave, What care I who puts ...
— Faust • Goethe

... victory. Confidence, however, was no new trait in von Herzmann. He always possessed it, but it stopped just short of blind egotism. Perhaps therein could be found the reason for his fame and his success. He was no blundering, egobefuddled braggart riding for a fall; he was a splendid pilot, a careful tactician, fearless when fearlessness was needed and cautious when caution would bring greater reward than blind valor. In short, his fame rested securely upon ability. He was one of the idols of his countrymen, and he was a ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke

... more upon British soil. Does not the Englishman, consciously or otherwise, put a curse on everything he touches? Doctor Bataille affirms it; indeed this quality of malediction has been specially dispensed to the nation of heretics by God himself; so says Doctor Bataille. Since the British braggart began to embattle Gibraltar, having thieved it from Catholic Spain, a wind of desolation breathes over the whole country. An inscrutable providence, of which our witness is the mouthpiece, has elected to set apart this rock in order that the devil ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... South—awake—awake! And strike for rights full dear as those For which our struggling sires did shake Earth's proudest throne—while freedom rose, Baptized in blood of braggart foes. Awake—that hour hath come again! Strike! as ye look to Heaven's high throne— Strike! for the Christian patriot's crown— Strike! in the name of Washington, Who taught you once to rend the chain, Smiles now from heaven upon our ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various

... discoveries or detections with his own person. The necessity of repelling unjust contempt, forces the most modest man into a feeling of pride and self-consciousness. How can a tall man help thinking of his size, when dwarfs are constantly on tiptoe beside him?—Paracelsus was a braggart and a quack; so was Cardan; but it was their merits, and not their follies, which drew upon them that torrent of detraction and calumny, which compelled them so frequently to think and write concerning themselves, that at length it became a habit to do so. Wolff too, though not a ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... simply because they have been endowed with that charming blindness which keeps them from seeing when they are whipped in the battle of life. The man of success has usually a greater sense of the value of a ten-dollar note than his clerk who, like the braggart Pistol, has got the world for his oyster, and expects to open that tough old mollusk with his rusty sword. The man of success sees each young helper around him given better opportunities than he himself had to begin with. His astonishment ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern

... But it is of the first importance to conceal the fact that Caesarion has any interest in the affairs of the old house-owner. To seek to maintain the old man's right to his own property is a matter of course, and I will undertake to do this and try to get yonder orator home Just see how the braggart is swinging his arms in Iras's service! As for Barine, it will be well to induce her to leave of her own free will a city where it will be made unpleasant for her. Try to persuade her to pursue this course. If I went to her ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... "will the churls last out till we Have duly hardened bones and thews For scouring leagues of swamp and sea Of braggart mobs ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)

... consciousness of the school, and no more does cruelty. A tiny trio of sullen-looking boys gather in corners and seem to have some ugly business always; it may be indecent literature, it may be the beginning of drink, it may occasionally be cruelty to little boys. But on this stage the bully is not a braggart. The proverb says that bullies are always cowardly, but these bullies are more than cowardly; they ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton

... "defend my hold for weeks. But it is only by aid from without that I can finally hope to break the power of this braggart earl." ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty

... mild a ruler am I to this people, Their tongues are all too bold—nor have they yet Been tamed to due submission, as they shall be. I must take order for the remedy; I will subdue this stubborn mood of theirs, This braggart spirit of freedom I will crush, I will proclaim a new law through ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

... which made the court of the Resident Magistrate the antechamber to the cell, and the cell the antechamber to the tomb. In all these ghastly and tragic dramas, enacted all over Ireland, Mr. Carson was the chief figure—self-confident, braggart, deliberate—winding the rope around his victim's neck with all the assured certainty of the British Empire, Mr. Balfour and the ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... Henry A. Wise uttered "a motley compound of eloquence and folly, of braggart impudence and childish vanity, of self-laudation and Virginian narrow-mindedness." After him Hubbard, of Alabama, "began grunting against the tariff." Three days later Black, of Georgia, "poured ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse

... heroes entertain of themselves and each other. Agamemnon's stately behaviour, Menelaus' irritation, Nestor's experience, Ulysses' cunning, are all productive of no effect; when they have at last arranged a single combat between the coarse braggart Ajax and Hector, the latter will not fight in good earnest, as Ajax is his cousin. Achilles is treated worst: after having long stretched himself out in arrogant idleness, and passed his time in the company of Thersites the buffoon, he falls upon Hector at a moment when he ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... Ye stiff-necked braggart!" bawled the priest. "Out wid y'r nonsense, and what good are y' thinkin' ye'll do—? Stir your stumps, ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... Disgrace for guide, Earned to the full the hateful traitor's meed, And bade his hordes advance Through Belgium's cities towards the fields of France; And when at last our patient island race, By the attempted wrong Made fierce and strong, Flung back the challenge in the braggart's face, Oh then, while martial music filled the air, Clarion and fife and bagpipe and the drum, Calling to men to muster, march, and dare, Oh, then thy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 2nd, 1914 • Various

... city walls he waits, His spearmen raven at our seven gates. But ere a torch our crown of towers could burn, Ere they had tasted of our blood, they turn Forced by the Dragon; in their rear The din of Ares panic-struck they hear. For Zeus who hates the braggart's boast Beheld that gold-bespangled host; As at the goal the paean they upraise, He struck them ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles

... already loaded) serv'd to show It might be better they shook hands—but no; When each opines himself, though frighten'd, right Each is, in courtesy, oblig'd to fight! And they DID fight: from six full measured paces The unbeliever pulled his trigger first; And fearing, from the braggart's ugly faces, The whizzing lead had whizz'd its very worst, Ran up, and with a DUELISTIC fear (His ire evanishing like morning vapors), Found nim possess'd of one remaining ear, Who in a manner sudden and uncouth, Had given, not lent, the other ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... am positive," said Chase, insistent in spite of his dejection. They drank their coffee in silence. He knew that the others—including the native who served them—were regarding him with the pity that one extends to the vain-glorious braggart who goes down ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon

... were taken the characters of the Parasite and the Captain. If this is a fault, the fault is the ignorance of the Poet; not that he intended to be guilty of theft. That so it is, you will now be enabled to judge. The Colax is {a Play} of Menander's; in it there is Colax, a Parasite, and a braggart Captain: he does not deny that he has transferred these characters into his Eunuch from the Greek; but assuredly he does deny this, that he was aware that those pieces had been already translated into Latin. But if it is ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence

... will have a good picture of Father Louis Hennepin, a man whose books describing his travels, real or imaginary, had, in their day, the widest popularity in Europe. Though he was an unconscionable braggart, and though he had no scruples about falsifying facts, yet, as the first person to publish an account of the Falls of Niagara, and as the discoverer and namer of the Falls of St. Anthony, he is fairly entitled to a place in a ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson

... peace, braggart! You wish to entice us with your money. Give us half of it, or you will not fare very well here. Well, are you ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere

... through blighted love, which proves abundantly that animals have no souls. The employment of a lover is that of a mountebank, of a soldier, of a quack, of a buffoon, of a prince, of a ninny, of a king, of an idler, of a monk, of a dupe, of a blackguard, of a liar, of a braggart, of a sycophant, of a numskull, of a frivolous fool, of a blockhead, of a know-nothing, of a knave. An employment from which Jesus abstained, in imitation of whom folks of great understanding likewise disdain it; it is a vocation ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac

... not so absorbing but that he took his resolution without any incertitude. He went up to the door too, and ascended the steps too. His friend looked at him with a braggart air, and sang ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... were in the valley of Elah fighting with the Philistines has so unexpected a champion arisen. With brush and pencil this Dutch painter will do even as David did with the smooth stone out of the brook: he will destroy the braggart Goliath, who, strong in his own might, defies the forces of the ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers

... (Don), a pompous, fantastical Spaniard, a military braggart in a state of peace, as Parolles (3 syl.) was in war. Boastful but poor; a coiner of words, but very ignorant; solemnly grave, but ridiculously awkward; majestical in gait, but of very low propensities.—Shakespeare, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... although a tremendous braggart, was thoroughly courageous, and each side of the river respected him for one of these attributes. He and a following of similar bravoes were addicted to the pastime of retrieving ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry

... trance Like his who dreamt he saw hell did advance Itself o'er me: such men as he saw there I saw at court, and worse, and more. Low fear Becomes the guilty, not th' accuser; then Shall I, none's slave, of high born or rais'd men Fear frowns, and my mistress, Truth! betray thee To th' huffing braggart, puft nobility? No, no; thou which since yesterday hast been Almost about the whole world, hast thou seen, O Sun! in all thy journey vanity Such as swells the bladder of our court? I Think he which made your waxen garden, and Transported ...
— English Satires • Various

... Mull told his story with rather wild theatrical gestures, and with a passion I think at least partisan. I was quite conscious of the possibility that the whole was the extravagance of an old braggart and gossip. But before I end this half of my discoveries, I think it due to Dr Mull to record that my two first inquiries have confirmed his story. I learned from an old apothecary in the village that ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... to a past that would never return; while down in the Port the growth of the city went on like the bursting of some magic, monstrous flower. It was impossible not to share in some degree the pride of the braggart Argentine. ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King

... in big headlines. The enemy had attacked in great strength from south of Arras to the Oise; but everywhere he had been repulsed and held in our battle-zone. The leading articles were confident, the notes by the various military critics were almost braggart. At last the German had been driven to an offensive, and the Allies would have the opportunity they had longed for of proving their superior fighting strength. It was, said one and all, the opening of the last phase of ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan

... give in their adhesion to their old master. Liberal promises, indeed, had been made by the emperor, in the name of his grandson Charles, who had already been made to assume the title of King of Castile. But the promises of the imperial braggart passed lightly with the more considerate Castilians, who knew how far they usually outstripped his performance, and who felt, on the other hand, that their true interests were connected with those of a prince, whose superior talents and personal relations all concurred to recommend him to ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott

... of his dutiful devotion. She disdained the attentions of the most potent prince if his addresses were not honorable. Nor would she bestow her love on one of whom she was not proud. She would not marry a coward or a braggart, even if he were the owner of ten thousand acres. The knight was encouraged to pay his address to any lady if he was personally worthy of her love, for chivalry created a high estimate of individual merit. The feudal lady ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord

... grit." It is impossible for anybody to acquire the reputation it confers by the most dexterous mimicry of its outside expressions; for a swift analysis, which drives directly to the heart of the man, instantly detects the impostor behind the braggart, and curtly declares him to lack "the true grit." The word is so close to the thing it names, has so much pith and point, is so tart on the tongue, and so stings the ear with its meaning, that foreigners ignorant of the language might ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various

... During the course of the Revolution there were thirty thousand Hessians in the British armies in America, and, as their owners, the German princelings, received L5 apiece for them it was a profitable arrangement for those phlegmatic, corpulent, and braggart personages. The Americans complained that the Hessians were brutal and tricky fighters; but in reality they merely carried out the ideals of their German Fatherland which remained behind the rest of Europe in its ideals of what was fitting in war. Being uncivilized, ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer

... American liberty and power, as well as to the memory of the immortal heroes of the war of Independence, who first taught manhood to the nations, and hurled to the dust, beneath their feet, the foul and blood-stained braggart who had sought to build up her despotic rule upon their virgin shores. In no way can America so justify the purity and sincerity of her soul in relation to her institutions, as by hurling them against the despotisms of the old world, and diffusing amongst its ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh

... him: "The exquisite of the family, and the braggart of the orchard, is the Kingbird, a bully that loves to strip the feathers off its more timid neighbors like the Bluebird, that feeds on the stingless bees of the hive, the drones, and earns the reputation of ...
— Birds Illustrated by Colour Photography, Vol II. No. 4, October, 1897 • Various

... Mr. Edward Everett came up from the wilds of Devonshire to study law with Braggart and Pushem, in Chancery Lane. He was placed to board, by a prudent mother, with a quiet family ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various

... 1673." Scaramouch was one of the stock characters of the old Italian comedy, which still exists as the harlequinade of the Christmas pantomime, and of which some traces survive in the Punch and Judy show. He was represented as a cowardly braggart dressed in black. The golfer's stance is a doublet of the poet's stanza, both of them belonging to Lat. stare, to stand. Stance is Old French and stanza is Italian, "a stance or staffe of verses or songs" (Florio). A stanza ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley

... Lord Teynham a few days afterwards made a sort of apology, no doubt inspired by interested persons, for personal plus international reasons. They were high of heart, these dauntless confederates, in the early and middle stages of the captivity, and, indeed, they bore themselves with braggart defiance of public opinion, until many strong manifestations of inevitable trouble encompassed them, and, like all despots, who are invariably cowards, they lived in mortal terror lest this creature of theirs should break out into St. Helena leprosy again ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman

... your dialectics!—because any skill you have in them, I taught you! You cannot excuse your own sins by running over the list of mine; that is the only answer I have to make to you! I don't stand before you as the embodiment of truth; I am no braggart. No; but simply as one who has loved you deeply and now is as deeply offended by you, I ask this question of your conscience: What have you done with the love we had for one another? Where is the sacred cause we both used to uphold? Where is our ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson

... Teacher and pupils should endeavor to secure variety of interest in roles. At first, assignments are likely to be determined by apparent fitness. The quiet boy is not required to play the part of the braggart. The retiring girl is not expected to impersonate the shrew. In one or two appearances it may be a good thing to ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton

... hate him for his slavish principles. He wishes to see absolute power restored in this country, and Popery also; and I hate him because—what do you think? In one of his novels, published a few months ago, he has the insolence to insult Hungary in the person of one of her sons. He makes his great braggart, Cour de Lion, fling a Magyar over his head. Ha! it was well for Richard that he never felt the grip of a Hungarian. I wish the braggart could have felt the grip of me, who am "a' Magyarok kozt legkissebb," the least among the ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... that is now going the round of the papers, and respects the commutation of the punishment of that wretched, fool-hardy Barbes, who, on his trial, seemed to invite the penalty which has just been remitted to him. You recollect the braggart's speech: "When the Indian falls into the power of the enemy, he knows the fate that awaits him, and submits his head to ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... town talk directly. My servant, proud of his exploit and sure of my approval, came to tell me that I need not be afraid of going out, as the officer was only a braggart. He did not even draw his sword on the waiter who had caught hold of him, though the man only had a knife ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... haste and help save the topsails in a squall, "Oh, I'm no soft-horn to be hurried!" It was the time the bark lost her topgallant-mast and was cast on her beam-ends on the voyage to Antonina, already told; it was, in fact, no time for loafing, and this braggart at a decisive word hurried aloft with the rest to do his duty. What I said to him was meant for earnest, and it cowed him. It is only natural to think that he held a grudge against me forever after, and waited only for his opportunity; knowing, too, that I was the owner of ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum

... too often is that light only the fugitive phosphorescence of putrefaction; wherefore as one contemplates him one soon begins to realise with bitterness and vexation and disappointment that he is but a sluggard, but a braggart, but one who is petty and weak and blinded with conceit and distorted with envy, but one between whose word and whose deed there gapes a disparity even wider and deeper than the disparity which divides the word from the deed of the man of winter, ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky

... poindra: poignez vilain il vous oindra," is as true of the braggart's soul still, as it used to be in the old days of Froissart, when the proverb ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... companion on his word. Nevertheless, he reflected on the extraordinary things he had seen in four days—the sun on the Rigi, the farce of William Tell—and Bompard's inventions seemed to him all the more probable because in every Tarasconese the braggart ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet

... forego an opportunity to indulge his pride by following up the threat he had hung over Agricola to kill whosoever should give Palmyre to a black man. He referred the subject and the would-be purchaser to him. It would open up to the old braggart a line of retreat, thought the planter ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable

... principles. He wishes to see absolute power restored in this country, and Popery also; and I hate him because . . . what do you think? In one of his novels, published a few months ago, he has the insolence to insult Hungary in the person of one of her sons. He makes his great braggart, Coeur de Lion, fling a Magyar over his head. Ha! it was well for Richard that he never felt the gripe of a Hungarian. I wish the braggart could have felt the gripe of me, who am 'a' Magyarok kozt legkissebb,' the least among the Magyars. I do ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... have risen to that level and are content to stand there, with no thought of self, but only of our country and what we owe her, we need wince at no hostile sneer nor dread any foreign combination. Granted that we have been a little boyish and braggart, as was perhaps not unnatural in a nation hardly out of its teens, our present trial is likely to make men of us, and to leave us, like our British cousins, content with the pleasing consciousness that we are the supreme of creation and under no necessity of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various

... that on the wand'ring brine Thou and this braggart tongue of thine Had sunk beneath the main— Thy mast and planks, made fast in vain! Thee would I drive aboard once more, A slayer and a ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus

... Shore of Long Island, all things incline to a natural somnolence. There are no ambitious mountains, no braggart cliffs, no hasty torrents, no hustling ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke

... furious antagonists, but deliberately wheels about in that aerial spiral, and mounts and mounts till his pursuers grow dizzy and return to earth again. It is quite original, this mode of getting rid of an unworthy opponent, rising to the heights where the braggart is dazed and bewildered and loses his reckoning! I am not sure but is is worthy ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs

... him to round Riggs up down in the village—somewhere in a crowd. I want Riggs shown up as the coward, braggart, four-flush that he is. And insulted, slapped, kicked—driven out ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey

... son of the Basha none dared to laugh outright save his father and Sakr-el-Bahr. But there was no suppressing a titter to express the mockery to which the proven braggart must ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini

... my wound I alone would cut that golden comb of thine, thou braggart; as it is, be sure that two shall ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard

... of their boastings, with the shouting of their own braggart ineptitudes, they hypnotize themselves so thoroughly that they are quite unable to hear the counsel that sane wisdom whispers in ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke

... possess at least this advantage, that they can form an impartial opinion of the merits of those who did. It is the pride and the honor of this noble Commonwealth of ours, that of the hundred thousand brave soldiers and sailors she sent to the war, there was but one notorious braggart; there was but one capable of parading up and down the Commonwealth, vaunting that he had hung a man; exhibiting himself as the Jack Ketch of the rebellion. I bow reverently to the brave, modest, patriotic soldier, who, without thought of personal gain, gave youth, health, limb, life to ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... it possible to imagine a more tragical destiny than theirs? Never consulted, always immolated, thrust into war, forced into crimes which they have never wished to commit. Any chance adventurer or braggart arrogantly claims the right to cloak with the name of the people the follies of his murderous rhetoric or the sordid interests he wishes to satisfy. The masses are everlastingly duped, everlastingly martyred; they pay for others' misdeeds. Above their heads are exchanged ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland

... the circus; in idle moments a tout. It was in the latter capacity that Antipas met him, and, pleased with his shrewdness and perfect corruption, had attached him to his house. This had occurred in years previous, and as yet Antipas had found no cause to regret the trust imposed. He was a useful braggart, idle, familiar, and discreet; and he had acquired the dialect of the ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus

... Petruchio becomes not a brawler, not a kind of damn-my-eyes bully and braggart, but a practical idealist, a man who, happening by chance upon a creature of stupendous undirected power, sets himself to the direction of that power toward nature's, if not humanity's, ends. At the ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble

... opposition developed less on principle than on the belief that spoils are matter rather for distribution than for concentration. The party so formed had, indeed, little ground save personal animosity upon which to fight; and its ablest exertions could only seize upon a doubtful insult to a braggart sea-captain as the pretext of the war it was Walpole's ambition no less than policy to avoid. From 1726 until 1735 the guiding spirit of the party was Bolingbroke; but in the latter year he quarrelled with Pulteney, nominally its leader, ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski

... is, to that extent, interested in the Force, and critical of their behavior. The sight of a soldier annoyed him, for he saw a conqueror, trampling vaingloriously through the capital of his country, and the inability of his land to eject the braggart astonished and mortified him. Landlords had no bowels of compassion. There was no kindliness of heart among them, nor any wish to assist those whose whole existence was engaged on their behalf. He saw them as lazy unproductive gluttons ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens

... doublet, and had an orange feather in his cap and an orange-lined cloak on his shoulder. On entering he stood a moment in the doorway, letting his bold black eyes rove round the room, the while he talked in a loud braggart fashion to his companions. There was a lack of breeding in the man's air, and something offensive in his look; which I noticed produced wherever it rested a momentary silence and constraint. When he moved farther into the room ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman

... she murmured as she rose to her feet. "I wonder? That man may have been a convict; but he is no braggart." ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns

... Justinian elevated to this office Constantine, who was not unacquainted with law, but was very young and had never yet taken part in a trial; besides which, he was the most abandoned thief and braggart in the world. Justinian entertained the highest regard for him and showed him very great favour, condescending to make him the chief instrument of his extortion and sole arbiter in legal decisions. By this means Constantine in a short time ...
— The Secret History of the Court of Justinian • Procopius

... companions had been set upon and robbed by a hundred men, how he himself—as witness his sword "packed like a hand-saw"—had kept at bay and put to flight now two, anon four, and then seven, and finally eleven of his assailants. We all can see, too, the roguish twinkle in Prince Hal's eyes as the braggart knight embellishes his lying tale with every fresh sentence, and are as nonplussed as he when, the plot discovered, Falstaff finds a way to take credit for his cowardice. Who would not forgive so ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley

... lie so flat between the rails that the train could pass over without touching, but to lie there was no joke! Kolya maintained stoutly that he would. At first they laughed at him, called him a little liar, a braggart, but that only egged him on. What piqued him most was that these boys of fifteen turned up their noses at him too superciliously, and were at first disposed to treat him as "a small boy," not fit to associate with them, and that was ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... do thee good. Build on no man's favour but mine—not even on thine uncle's or Lord Crawford's, and say nothing of thy timely aid in this matter of the boar, for if a man makes boast that he has served a king in such a pinch, he must take the braggart humour for its ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... found his earthly close, What sequel? Streaming eyes and breaking hearts? Or all the same as if he had not been? Not so. Shall Error in the round of time Still father Truth? O shall the braggart shout [1] For some blind glimpse of freedom work itself Thro' madness, hated by the wise, to law System and empire? Sin itself be found The cloudy porch oft opening on the Sun? And only he, this wonder, dead, become Mere highway dust? ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson

... art but a great braggart; but get your way, I will find out the truth by myself. Come now, answer me clearly, if you do not wish me to dye your skin red. Will the Great King send us gold? (Pseudartabas makes a negative sign.) Then our ambassadors are seeking to deceive us? (Pseudartabas signs affirmatively.) These ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al

... cares little for this; but the last part of the curse comes on almost at once and makes him afraid to be alone after dark, while the second is not long delayed. On the eve of setting out once more for Norway, he quarrels with and slays a braggart named Thorbiorn; during the voyage itself he is the unintentional cause of a whole household of men being burnt to death; and lastly, by his own quarrelsome temper, and some "metaphysical aid," he misses the chance of clearing himself by "bearing ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... and 'pandarism.' 'Rodomontade' is from Rodomonte, a hero of Boiardo; who yet, it must be owned, does not bluster and boast, as the word founded on his name seems to imply; adopted by Ariosto, it was by him changed into Rodamonte. 'Thrasonical' is from Thraso, the braggart of Roman comedy. Cervantes has given us 'quixotic'; Swift 'lilliputian'; to Moliere the French language owes 'tartuffe' and 'tartufferie.' 'Reynard' with us is a sort of duplicate for fox, while in French 'renard' has quite excluded the old 'volpils' being originally no more than the ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench

... Dare I accuse wise Laska, Whose words find access to a monarch's ear, Of a base, braggart lie? It must have been Her spirit that appeared to me. But haply 170 I come too late? It has itself delivered Its ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... drawing-room." And she was almost frightened by the thought that that skull opposite to her was absolutely impenetrable, and that it would go down to the grave unpierced with all its collection of ideas intact and braggart. ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett

... was so confused that he took the wrong direction, and after an hour of vague wandering was only recalled to the right one by my pertinacious assertions acting on his weak brain. I was inclined to be angry with the incompetent braggart, who had boasted that he could take us to Estes Park "blindfold"; but I was sorry for him too, so said nothing, even though I had to walk during these meanderings to save my tired horse. When at last, at dark, we reached the open, there was a snow ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird

... son to appear before him, and the prince entered the royal justice chamber with the air of a braggart, smiling contemptuously at the learned judges who were seated to right and left of his majesty, and defiantly cracking ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa

... should have spoken more cautiously. I have always been governed by you, like a fool as I am; you play the braggart, and I suffer for it; But they begin to see through your fine-spun arts and contrivances, and I believe you will meet with your deserts one day ...
— The Old English Baron • Clara Reeve

... tasted the rumour of that storm. Then did some mock and some jeer and Punch Costello fell hard again to his yale which Master Lenehan vowed he would do after and he was indeed but a word and a blow on any the least colour. But the braggart boaster cried that an old Nobodaddy was in his cups it was muchwhat indifferent and he would not lag behind his lead. But this was only to dye his desperation as cowed he crouched in Horne's hall. He drank indeed at one draught to pluck up a heart ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... terror of this sinful town, Care if a liveried lord or smile or frown? Who cannot flatter, and detest who can, Tremble before a noble serving-man? O my fair mistress, Truth! shall I quit thee 200 For huffing, braggart, puff'd nobility? Thou, who since yesterday hast roll'd o'er all The busy, idle blockheads of the ball, Hast thou, O Sun! beheld an emptier sort, Than such as swell this bladder of a court? Now pox on those ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al

... scruple, and the avowed champion of every sort of artifice and device employed in ancient, mediaeval, or modern finance to further his own selfish desires, in the minimum of time, and at whatever cost to his fellow-man. In his cups he was a witty, though arrogant, braggart. In his home he was petulant and childish. Of real business acumen and constructive wisdom, he had none. He would hew his way to wealth, if need be, openly defiant of God, man, or the devil. Or he would work in subtler ways, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... to imagine a more tragical destiny than theirs? Never consulted, always immolated, thrust into war, forced into crimes which they have never wished to commit. Any chance adventurer or braggart arrogantly claims the right to cloak with the name of the people the follies of his murderous rhetoric or the sordid interests he wishes to satisfy. The masses are everlastingly duped, everlastingly ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland

... in that aerial spiral, and mounts and mounts till his pursuers grow dizzy and return to earth again. It is quite original, this mode of getting rid of an unworthy opponent,—rising to heights where the braggart is dazed and bewildered and loses his reckoning! I am not sure but it is ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs

... what is common in all specimens of the class, these traits only exist; they constitute the type. Comic types, in literature, are often simple abstractions of some single human quality, and hence easily afford illustrations. The braggart, the miser, the hypocrite, contain that one trait which is common to the class; and in their portrayal this characteristic only is shown. In proportion as the traits are many in any character, the type becomes complex. In ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... young eyes that contained the unutterable secrets of the battlefield, but revealed none. She had seen them since she came to England, sitting with their elders, gray-haired fathers who talked war, war, war, while the young tongues—once so easily braggart—remained speechless. ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway

... provide for the contingency of a perseverance in the refusal of that legislature to right the people of Ireland." Accordingly, a large concourse of people assembled at the Corn-exchange, and were addressed by the demagogue in that braggart style which he well knew would win its way to their feelings. In his speech Mr. O'Connell intimated his intention of forming a new association, the exertions of which were to be directed to obtain for Ireland a greater share ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... neighbors and with one another, no birds are so little calculated to excite pleasurable emotions in the beholder, or to become objects of human interest and affection. The kingbird is the best dressed member of the family, but he is a braggart; and, though always snubbing his neighbors, is an arrant coward, and shows the white feather at the slightest display of pluck in his antagonist. I have seen him turn tail to a swallow, and have known ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs

... chance to get acquainted with the playgrounds of the country. I've been too busy earning a holiday. But I've earned it all right." He turned to emphasize his boast with a nod toward Millicent. She blushed. His very chauffeur must redden at his braggart air, she thought. The Tudor castle grew ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various

... all hope," said Kretschmer; "the people are timid and fickle, and whoever will give them the sweetest words wins them over to his side. Come, let us try our luck elsewhere. Every thing depends upon our being beforehand with this braggart Gotzkowsky, and getting first the ear of the people. You, Pfannenstiel, come with us, and get up your words strong and spirited, so that the stupid people ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach

... there presently entered to them the most remarkable girl Mr. James Harthouse had ever seen. She was so constrained, and yet so careless; so reserved, and yet so watchful; so cold and proud, and yet so sensitively ashamed of her husband's braggart humility - from which she shrunk as if every example of it were a cut or a blow; that it was quite a new sensation to observe her. In face she was no less remarkable than in manner. Her features were handsome; but their natural play was so locked up, that it seemed impossible to guess at their ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*

... inspired by interested persons, for personal plus international reasons. They were high of heart, these dauntless confederates, in the early and middle stages of the captivity, and, indeed, they bore themselves with braggart defiance of public opinion, until many strong manifestations of inevitable trouble encompassed them, and, like all despots, who are invariably cowards, they lived in mortal terror lest this creature of theirs should break out into St. Helena leprosy again ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman

... soon as he came on board, though he had never before been at sea. He was a big hulking fellow; and as he had a certain amount of cleverness about him, he tried to make it appear that he knew a great deal more about things than he really did. True Blue instinctively discovered that he was a braggart and inclined to be ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston

... . Lo, between Him and the judgment-seat there rose The Sword of Menace, ever keen To smite the braggart War-Wolf's foes! ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

... tender and delicate frame, of the gentlest manners, habituated to all the soft elegances and refined enjoyments that attend high birth and fortune. Her mind alone was formed for such trials.' But in very many cases heroines have been women from whom few would have expected heroism. The blustering braggart does not often prove to be a hero in time of danger, and the gentle, unassuming woman is the type of which heroines are frequently made. The aristocracy the middle and the lower classes, have each given us many heroines ...
— Noble Deeds of the World's Heroines • Henry Charles Moore

... that Caesarion has any interest in the affairs of the old house-owner. To seek to maintain the old man's right to his own property is a matter of course, and I will undertake to do this and try to get yonder orator home Just see how the braggart is swinging his arms in Iras's service! As for Barine, it will be well to induce her to leave of her own free will a city where it will be made unpleasant for her. Try to persuade her to pursue this course. If I went to her with such a suggestion, I, who yesterday—No, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... depend on it." Beaumaroy's air was suddenly confident, almost braggart. Mr. Saffron nodded approvingly. "But, anyhow, I can't very well start ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony

... strange dog, Tommy Fox became more of a braggart than ever. He thought that he knew just about all there was to know. But with the coming of winter Tommy found that he had many things to learn. It was almost like living in a different world, for the ground was white everywhere. And though Tommy Fox loved to ...
— The Tale of Tommy Fox • Arthur Scott Bailey

... appeared that it was possible to lie so flat between the rails that the train could pass over without touching, but to lie there was no joke! Kolya maintained stoutly that he would. At first they laughed at him, called him a little liar, a braggart, but that only egged him on. What piqued him most was that these boys of fifteen turned up their noses at him too superciliously, and were at first disposed to treat him as "a small boy," not fit to associate with them, and that ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... to be that!" said the man, with a braggart laugh and swagger. "I tell ye, mar, we're going to have the greatest confederacy ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge

... themselves and each other. Agamemnon's stately behaviour, Menelaus' irritation, Nestor's experience, Ulysses' cunning, are all productive of no effect; when they have at last arranged a single combat between the coarse braggart Ajax and Hector, the latter will not fight in good earnest, as Ajax is his cousin. Achilles is treated worst: after having long stretched himself out in arrogant idleness, and passed his time in the company ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... 1841, Henry A. Wise uttered "a motley compound of eloquence and folly, of braggart impudence and childish vanity, of self-laudation and Virginian narrow-mindedness." After him Hubbard, of Alabama, "began grunting against the tariff." Three days later Black, of Georgia, "poured forth his black bile" for an hour and a half. The next week we find Clifford, of Maine, "muddily ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse

... everything, In sacred trust for knighthood and his king, And in the battle-field or tilting-yard He met his foe full-fronted, and struck hard. But now it seemed a foolish thing to throw One's whole life to the fortune of a blow. True valor breathes not in the braggart vaunt; True honor takes no shame from idle taunt; So let this wizard, if he wants to, scoff; Why should our hero have his ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis

... of Long Island, all things incline to a natural somnolence. There are no ambitious mountains, no braggart cliffs, no hasty torrents, no hustling waterfalls in ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke

... that on my return I found him in this respect greatly changed: he had become a severe critic of nearly everything American; his earlier expectations had evidently been disappointed; we clearly appeared to him big, braggart, noisy, false to our principles, unworthy of our opportunities. These feelings of his became even more marked as the Spanish-American War drew on. Whenever we met, and most often at a charming house which both of us ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... poet must not indeed in any sense idealize, but he should render only the genuinely human, not the purely accidental, which, because accidental, is rare. For an individual to be at the same time a hero and a braggart is, however, quite accidental, and the result merely of a deficient or a perverted education. If one wishes to find firmness in the fact that a man knows in advance what he wants, that he forms his decision before he is acquainted with the controlling ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various

... senses through blighted love, which proves abundantly that animals have no souls. The employment of a lover is that of a mountebank, of a soldier, of a quack, of a buffoon, of a prince, of a ninny, of a king, of an idler, of a monk, of a dupe, of a blackguard, of a liar, of a braggart, of a sycophant, of a numskull, of a frivolous fool, of a blockhead, of a know-nothing, of a knave. An employment from which Jesus abstained, in imitation of whom folks of great understanding likewise disdain it; it is a vocation in which a man of worth is required ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac

... a false Imperialism. There is the Imperialism of the vulgar braggart, who thinks that one Englishman can fight ten men of any other nationality under the sun; and there is the Imperialism of the man of thought, who believes in the destiny of the English race, who does not shrink from the ...
— Successful Recitations • Various

... think the best of Lapham, but his mind was in a whirl of whatever thoughts were most injurious. He thought of him the night before in the company of those ladies and gentlemen, and he quivered in resentment of his vulgar, braggart, uncouth nature. He recognised his own allegiance to the exclusiveness to which he was born and bred, as a man perceives his duty to his country when her rights are invaded. His eye fell on the porter going about in his shirt-sleeves to make the place fast for the night, and he said to himself ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... straight up. His idle braggart words of a few moments before came home to him. In Kibei he found no encouragement. After all Kibei was a samurai; harsh, but with the courage of his caste and profession. He spoke openly—"It was an ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville

... or anywhere in the neighborhood. We also went together at other times, as well as during the play; and, even while the representations went on, he seldom left me in peace. He was a most delightful little braggart, chattered away charmingly and incessantly, and could tell so much of his adventures, quarrels, and other strange incidents, that he amused me wonderfully; and I learned from him in four weeks more of the language, and of the power of expressing ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... Maxwell, with tacit enjoyment of the typicality of Pinney. "He hasn't the least chance in the world of working up into any controlling place in the paper. They don't know much in the Events office; but they do know Pinney. He's a great liar and a braggart, and he has no more notion of the immunities of private life than—Well, perhaps it's because he would as soon turn his life inside out as not, and in fact would rather. But he's very domestic, and very kind-hearted to his wife; it seems they have a baby now, and I've no doubt ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells

... I might not kill for love—no, not that; I was going to kill for hate. And while I never had killed a man, and in my heart of hearts did not wish to kill a man, since I had to kill one, named Daniel, even though he was a bully, a braggart and an infernal over-stepper it was pleasanter to think that I should kill him in hot blood ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin

... she hath, by torrential tongueful tumult (gentle lady!), constrained to don the habit of a base, brawling, beefy and most material Mars! Wherefore at my mother's behest (gracious dame!) I ride nothing joyful to be bruised and battered by any base, brutal braggart that hath the mind to try a tilt with ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol

... Casildea was more beautiful by far than the La Mancha knight's Dulcinea. Don Quixote suppressed a scornful smile that threatened to betray him, and controlled the feelings that the boasting errant's words provoked, while wondering at the braggart's audacity. He slyly expressed a doubt, however, that the valiant knight Don Quixote of La Mancha had let himself be vanquished by any living being. The Knight of the Grove then gave a description of Don Quixote which in every ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... indignant, but in fact glad to make my escape. Like bullies all the world over, the southern ones are cowards; there is, however, great danger here in embroiling yourself with such characters, the pistol and bowie knife being instantly resorted to if the quarrel becomes serious. I saw this braggart on several occasions afterwards, but he evidently kept aloof, and was disinclined to venture in the part of the room I occupied. I ascertained that he kept a dry goods store in King-street, and was a boisterous ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell

... make praise-pipes of babes and sucklings," answered Gibbie; "but it does not follow that they can give advice. Don't you remember your mother saying that the stripling David was enough to kill a braggart giant, but a sore-tried man was wanted ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... a muttered word or two. But the three seated men, one of whom was the gray, weasel-faced Jim Banker, boasted loudly, and profanely calling attention to the "color" and the exceeding richness of the ore. Important, swaggering, and braggart, they assumed the airs of an aristocracy, as of men set apart ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter

... a courageous man, but his counterpart, a braggart, a bully, or a dandy. In these latter ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... advance Itself o'er me: such men as he saw there I saw at court, and worse, and more. Low fear Becomes the guilty, not th' accuser; then Shall I, none's slave, of high born or rais'd men Fear frowns, and my mistress, Truth! betray thee To th' huffing braggart, puft nobility? No, no; thou which since yesterday hast been Almost about the whole world, hast thou seen, O Sun! in all thy journey vanity Such as swells the bladder of our court? I Think he which ...
— English Satires • Various

... is the vice or folly of the shallow-minded; so if you would not be thought so avoid boasting or affectations of any kind. The truly wise man is modest, and the braggart and coxcomb ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost

... rank exists between us, my lord," I answered, "and I claim the right to cross swords in an affair of honour with all save those of royal blood. Grant me the satisfaction I demand, or I will brand you as a braggart and a coward throughout every ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes

... rest, where is it, and who hath obtained it? If a man is of high degree, adulation and envy almost kill him; if poor, everybody is ready to trample and despise him. If one would prosper, he must set his mind upon being an intriguer; if one would gain respect, let him be a boaster or braggart; if one would be godly, and attend church and approach the altar, he is dubbed a hypocrite, if he abstain from doing so, he becomes at once an antichrist or a heretic; if he is light-hearted, he is called a scoffer, ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne

... wholly in black, save for a stiff cambric ruff worn rather fuller than the fashion. He was heavily booted, and sat sideways on a settle with his left hand tucked in his belt and a great right elbow on the board. Something in his pose, half rustic, half braggart, seemed familiar to Gaspard. The next second the two ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan

... they suffered it to stay; But with such insolence it flourished there, That, out of patience with its braggart's air, They bade it prove ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... and shy is she; One weak chirp is her only note. Braggart and prince of braggarts is he, Pouring boasts from his little throat: Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link, Spink, spank, spink; Never was I afraid of man; Catch me, cowardly knaves, if you ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various

... with some ill-gotten gold," said Miguel, sullenly, yet with unmistakable fear of the old man. "Besides, it was only to frighten him, the braggart. But since thou fearest to touch ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte

... by birth, but he had lived for many years in Compton County. It was said that he had made a good deal of money by smuggling goods into the States. He had the reputation of being a hard liver, and something of a braggart. ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous

... natural, outside ideas, full of the show and glitter, and I could not see beneath the surface. I did not know then that it might take more courage to refuse to fight and face the looks and scorn of some people than to go and meet an adversary in the field, after the braggart fashion of some of our French neighbours, whose grand idea of honour is to go out early some morning to meet an enemy about some petty, contemptible quarrel, fence for a few moments till one or the other is pricked or scratched, and then cry, "Ah, ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn

... the free; Suits tyrants, plunderers, but suits not me: Shall I, the terror of this sinful town, Care, if a liveried lord or smile or frown? Who cannot flatter, and detest who can, Tremble before a noble serving-man? O, my fair mistress, Truth! shall I quit thee For huffing, braggart, puffed nobility? Thou, who since yesterday hast rolled o'er all The busy, idle blockheads of the ball, Hast thou, oh, sun! beheld an emptier fort, Than such who swell this bladder of a Court? Now plague on those who show ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope

... fate of William Rufus, his Relative, at once incensed and alarmed Prince John. He satisfied himself, however, with commanding the men-at-arms, who surrounded the lists, to keep an eye on the braggart, pointing to the yeoman. ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott

... mode of presenting the necklace, though unauthorized by Shakespeare, had the full approval of the company, and set them in good humour to receive Major Camperton as Armado the braggart. Nothing calculated to stimulate jealousy occurred again till the fifth act; and then there ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy

... kindred ills to a past that would never return; while down in the Port the growth of the city went on like the bursting of some magic, monstrous flower. It was impossible not to share in some degree the pride of the braggart Argentine. ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King

... "Peace, silly braggart," said the glover in high wrath; "thy loves and thy battles are alike apocryphal. If thou must needs lie, which I think is thy nature, canst thou invent no falsehood that may at least do thee some credit? Do I not see through thee, as I could see ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott

... a wild beast. Neither is it unlikely that this was the view taken by Allen. For, besides the exasperating tendency to self-assertion which such treatment as his must have bred on a man like him, his experience must have taught him, that by assuming the part of a jocular, reckless, and even braggart barbarian, he would better sustain himself against bullying turnkeys than by submissive quietude. Nor should it be forgotten, that besides the petty details of personal malice, the enemy violated every international usage of right and decency, in treating ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville

... wall that bounded Abel Edwards's property. Beyond that was a little grove of old thick-topped pine-trees; beyond that the little woodland pond. It was very shallow in places, but it never dried up, and was said to have deep holes in it. The boys told darkly braggart stories about this pond. They had stood on this rock and that rock with poles of fabulous length; they had probed the still water of the pond, and "never once hit the bottom, sir." They had flung stones with all their might, and, listening sharply ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... cousin, I do not feel in any very gentle frame of mind," rejoined the squire; "my ire has been roused by this insolent braggart, my blood is up, and ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... poetic sense in which every knight selected some lady as the object of his dutiful devotion. She disdained the attentions of the most potent prince if his addresses were not honorable. Nor would she bestow her love on one of whom she was not proud. She would not marry a coward or a braggart, even if he were the owner of ten thousand acres. The knight was encouraged to pay his address to any lady if he was personally worthy of her love, for chivalry created a high estimate of individual merit. The feudal lady ignored all degrees of wealth within her own rank. She was as tender ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord

... perhaps have been more written about and fought over than those of Amerigo Vespucci. Some will have it that he went only two voyages, and say he was a braggart and a vainglorious fool if he said he went more. Others think that he went at least four voyages and probably six. And most people are now agreed that these last are right, and that he who gave his name to the great double ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall

... Dante made him no answer, while he gathered the rose carefully together in the cup of his hand and then slipped it into his bosom. Then he spoke to Simone with a grave impatience. "You are a boisterous braggart, and you scream like the east wind. I am very ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... other. Colonel Bath has necessarily united all suffrages. He is of course a very little stagey; he reminds us that his author had had a long theatrical apprenticeship: he is something too much d'une piece. But as a study of the brave man who is almost more braggart than brave, of the generous man who will sacrifice not only generosity but bare justice to "a hogo of honour," he is admirable, and up to his time almost unique. Ordinary writers and ordinary readers have never been quite content ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding

... been set upon and robbed by a hundred men, how he himself—as witness his sword "packed like a hand-saw"—had kept at bay and put to flight now two, anon four, and then seven, and finally eleven of his assailants. We all can see, too, the roguish twinkle in Prince Hal's eyes as the braggart knight embellishes his lying tale with every fresh sentence, and are as nonplussed as he when, the plot discovered, Falstaff finds a way to take credit for his cowardice. Who would not forgive so ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley

... have eaten scores of dinners at Captain Bragg's charge, yet his hospitality is so insolent, that none of us who frequent his mahogany feel any obligation to our braggart entertainer. ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray

... could no longer suppress his indignation when at a little distance he saw his mustang, which this treacherous braggart had robbed him of, ...
— Joe's Luck - Always Wide Awake • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... and any one of them is of a quality to stamp its maker as a master craftsman of imaginative genius and extraordinary manual skill. A goldsmith and sculptor, he was also a soldier, and did service as a fighter and engineer in the wars of his time. Of high personal courage, he was a braggart and a ruffian, who used the dagger as freely as the tools of his craft. His many qualities and complex personality are revealed in his "Autobiography"—one of the most vivid and remarkable records ever penned. He ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... all one," retorted Gotthold roughly. "When I see a man, come to years of wisdom, who speaks in double-meanings and is the braggart of his vices, I spit on the other side. 'You, my friend,' say I, 'are not even a gentleman.' Well, she's not even ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... rather have been in Paris. The romantic element in this unexpected adventure did not greatly appeal to him. He had crossed the ocean to help an oppressed people; he was full of enthusiasm for a cause, so much an enthusiast that the two braggart representatives of the people with whom he had come in contact at Tremont had in no way disillusioned him. Refuse must needs be cast on the wave crests of a revolution; but there was also Lafayette. He was the people's true representative, ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner

... She was capable, wit and social strategist that she was, of assuming all this interest by way of leading an inept youth to make a fool and a braggart of himself for her amusement. But she showed not a glimmer of irony, neither in her mouth nor in her green-grey eyes. She spoke with the straight, sincere interest of a dairymaid listening to the self-told heroisms ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin

... in the tone of a braggart, but of a man who knew what he was talking about. Hooker did not return to California, but in a few weeks Captain Hooker received from the President a commission ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure

... seen many an adventure during his life on the continent, which would not do to write down here, he was as little of a boaster as any man I ever met, and, while I am in the truth-telling business, I was as great a braggart of my inches as ever drew the long-bow—in that line, I mean. Gods! I flush up hot, even now, when I think of it. So I talked a great deal and found myself infinitely pleased with Brandon's conversational powers, which were rare; being no less than the ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major

... willing to show that a Netherlander would lead wherever Spaniards dared to follow, Aremberg allowed himself to commit the grave error for which he was so deeply to atone. Disregarding the dictates of his own experience and the arrangements of his superior, he yielded to the braggart humor of his soldiers, which he had not, like Alva, learned to moderate ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... take him for all and all, a man—eats out his heart for you; desires only to live for you, only to die for you, only to lie at your feet afterward—that is nothing to you. You do not even care to listen. You would rather hear through a braggart, indecent mouth that ought to be sewed up what Rodin said about Phidias. It seems finer to you to be an artist than a woman, and you so beautiful and ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris

... a shipwright just passing away at the further end might be the shadow of Russian Peter himself. So, the doors of the great patent safe at last close upon me, and I take boat again: somehow, thinking as the oars dip, of braggart Pistol and his brood, and of the quiet monsters of the Yard, with their 'We don't particularly want to do it; but if it must ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... thy brethren quelled Ward off the wolves whose hides should line thy throne, Wert thou no coward, no recreant to the bone, No liar in spirit and soul and heartless heart, No slave, no traitor—nought of all thou art. A thing like thee, made big with braggart breath, Whose tongue shoots fire, whose promise poisons trust, Would cast a shieldless soldier forth to death And wreck three realms to sate his rancorous lust With ruin of them who have weighed and found him dust. Get thee to Wales: there strut in speech ...
— Locrine - A Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... fact. Say that I follow Burr—follow! overtake and pass him! He has a tarnished name and fifty years,—a supple rapier but a shrunken arm. He's daring; but I can be that and more. He plans; I can achieve. I am no dreamer and no braggart when I say that in the West I can play the Corsican. What can I do here? Become, perhaps, Governor of Virginia; wait until Mr. Jefferson is dead, and Mr. Madison is dead, and Mr. Monroe is dead, and then, if the world is yet Republican, become President? The governorship I do not want; the presidency ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston

... wait. The Athenian soldiers stationed at Eion were chafing at their inaction, and mutinous speeches were heard on all sides. What a man was this Cleon, this cowardly braggart, under whom they were to take the field against the most daring and skilful leader in Greece! They had known what to expect from such a general, since the day when they sailed for Thrace. These murmurs reached the ears of Cleon, and he saw that something must be attempted, or ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell

... know that! Well, you are my cousin, very far removed! But you are more than that. Your father saved my life in the Atlas. He has related it all to you—No? Well, that does not astonish me; for he was no braggart, that father of yours; he was a man! Had he not quitted the army, a brilliant career was before him. People talk a great deal of Pelissier, of Canrobert, of MacMahon, and of others. I say nothing against them; they are good men doubtless—at least ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet

... do, indeed? And what would you have done? Bring the horns and tail he must, or perish in the adventure. Otherwise, how could he meet his lady?—why, she would think him a mere braggart. ...
— Prince Prigio - From "His Own Fairy Book" • Andrew Lang

... leads an Empress who in turn leads an empire. Half suspicious and wholly unconvinced, he questions and demands the exact number of invulnerables that can be placed in line; and is forthwith assured, with braggart Chinese choruses, that they are as locusts, that the whole earth swarms with them, that the movement is unconquerable. Still unconvinced, the false eunuch takes his departure, and then the Throne decrees and counter ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale

... and characterisation to Shakespeare's developed knowledge of, and experience with, Florio. There are several small but significant links of description between the Parolles of 1598 and the enlarged Armado of the same date. Both of these characters are represented as braggart soldiers and also as linguists, which evidently reflect Florio's quasi-military connection with Southampton and his known ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson

... yeomen have displayed their skill. If thou carriest the prize, I will add to it twenty nobles; but if thou losest it, thou shalt be stripped of thy Lincoln green, and scourged out of the lists with bowstrings, for a wordy and insolent braggart." ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin

... that his father was a confirmed liar and braggart had for years cast a shadow over his days and the shadow had been made blacker by the fact that in a land where the least fortunate can laugh in the face of want he had more than once stood face to face with poverty. He believed that the logical answer to the situation was ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson

... whether of war or social suffering, he cannot see, nor a people hardening to Spartan lineaments in the fire, iron men to meet disaster, worshippers of a discerned God of Laws, and just men too, thinking to do justice; he has Bull on the eye, the alternately braggart and poltroon, sweating in labour that he may gorge the fruits, graceless to a scoffer. And this is the creature to whose tail he is tied! Hereditary hatred is approved by critical disgust. Some spirited brilliancy, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... heroic treatment," said Uncle Teddy thoughtfully to Aunt Clara, as they wandered off by themselves in the moonlight, "but it took something like that to make any impression on him. He is the most insufferable little braggart that ever lived. I only hope the impression made was ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey

... I'm no soft-horn to be hurried!" It was the time the bark lost her topgallant-mast and was cast on her beam-ends on the voyage to Antonina, already told; it was, in fact, no time for loafing, and this braggart at a decisive word hurried aloft with the rest to do his duty. What I said to him was meant for earnest, and it cowed him. It is only natural to think that he held a grudge against me forever after, and ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum

... last-named were very old men. It would be absurd to call either of them a great commander, but it is indisputable that they all had great parts in great wars. Benningsen can scarcely be called a good general of the second class, and he is mostly spoken of as a foolish braggart and boaster; but it is a fact that he did some things at an important time which indicated his possession of qualities that were highly desirable in a general who was bound to act against Napoleon. Having, in 1807, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various

... is included in them. He who is blinded by the semblance of power and cannot resolve to act, will never be able to make political preparations for the inevitable war with any success. "The braggart feebleness which travesties strength, the immoral claim which swaggers in the sanctity of historical right, the timidity which shelters its indecision behind empty and formal excuses, never were ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi

... thou fulfil The task thy braggart tongue begot, We eat our leek with better will, We'd rather be ...
— New Collected Rhymes • Andrew Lang

... from the neck of a bottle. Here, one had a mouth plugged with shot, and a beard as stiff as though it were made of rope. Another that he turned over was a German he had once heard speak at a diggers' meeting—a windy braggart of a man, with a quaint impediment in his speech. Well, poor soul! he would never mouth invectives or tickle the ribs of an audience again. His body was a very colander of wounds. Some had not bled either. It looked as though the soldiers had viciously ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson

... thought of them to be at the pains of shocking one's delicacy intentionally; but they were by no means displeased to be thought "rough." It made them laugh; it was a tribute to their stout-heartedness. Nor was there anything necessarily braggart in this attitude of theirs. As they realized that work would not be readily offered to a man who might quail before its unpleasantness, so it was a matter of bread-and-cheese to them to cultivate "roughness." I need not, indeed, be writing in the past tense here. It is still bad policy for a workman ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt

... in amazement. Then he said: "I do perceive that thou art a fool; and with fools I never meddle." And seizing him once more by the shoulder, he thrust him into the street. "Speed on thy way, little braggart," he said, "even till thou comest to thy master, who must be the ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger

... King's service, what signifies whether you, they, or I pay it?—we are a' one man's bairns, I hope? But you must help me out too with some reasonable excuse, or else I shall be for taking to Andrew Ferrara; for I like not to be treated like a liar or a braggart at my own board-end, when, God knows, I only meant to support my honour, and that ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott

... simplification of actual life be it observed in passing); and, placing these typified traits in juxtaposition in their conflict and contrast, struck the spark of comedy. Downright, as his name indicates, is "a plain squire"; Bobadill's humour is that of the braggart who is incidentally, and with delightfully comic effect, a coward; Brainworm's humour is the finding out of things to the end of fooling everybody: of course he is fooled in the end himself. But it was not Jonson's theories alone that made the success of "Every Man in His Humour." The play ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson

... sure. Then you can trust him. He has the eye of his race, and is a prating braggart, but Marcian has found him honest. I must see him, Venantius. Will you send him to ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing

... entire company. I think we have now taken all possible precautions for our safety, but our numbers are few; and for me to say that I am not in hourly dread of the Indians when they appear in large force, would be a braggart boast. ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford

... disgrace here; that the Government regards us already with an evil eye, and that a very small thing would lead them to garrison the village, and perhaps oust us from the little the wars have left us. You should have known this, and considered it,' she continued. 'Whereas—I do not say that you are a braggart, M. de Barthe. But on this one occasion you seem to have played the part ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman

... hateful traitor's meed, And bade his hordes advance Through Belgium's cities towards the fields of France; And when at last our patient island race, By the attempted wrong Made fierce and strong, Flung back the challenge in the braggart's face, Oh then, while martial music filled the air, Clarion and fife and bagpipe and the drum, Calling to men to muster, march, and dare, Oh, then thy day, JOHN BRADBURY, ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann

... anybody to acquire the reputation it confers by the most dexterous mimicry of its outside expressions; for a swift analysis, which drives directly to the heart of the man, instantly detects the impostor behind the braggart, and curtly declares him to lack "the true grit." The word is so close to the thing it names, has so much pith and point, is so tart on the tongue, and so stings the ear with its meaning, that foreigners ignorant of the language might at once feel ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various

... that are not connected with me by blood. Winning over to-day the beauteous Damayanti of faultless features, I shall regard myself fortunate, indeed, since she it is that hath ever dwelt in my heart." Hearing these words of that incoherent braggart, Nala in anger desired to cut off his head with a scimitar. With a smile, however, though his eyes were red in anger, king Nala said, "Let us play. Why do you speak so now? Having vanquished me, you can say anything you like." Then the play ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

... others which he loathed was brought in and burnt in on his own soul. He had lied to his mother, to his conscience, to his God. How could he bear it? And then the poor little weak boy, whom he had pitied and almost scorned for his weakness, had done that which he, braggart as he was, dared not do. The first dawn of comfort came to him in swearing to himself that he would stand by that boy through thick and thin, and cheer him, and help him, and bear his burdens for the good deed done that night. Then he resolved ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes









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