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More "Glib" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to another, for our monk is a glib talker, we come to the cheese-makers, the goatherds. "Even these honest rustics," says he, "are becoming sophisticated (mafsudin). Their cheese is no longer what it was, nor is their faith. For Civilisation, passing by their huts in some shape ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... Hiram's questions in a flurry, though he had been glib enough. He had had no fear that his father would appreciate that he was getting half-truths, or, rather, truths prepared skillfully for paternal consumption; his flurry had come from a sense that he was himself not doing quite the manly, ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... ahead, knew nothing of the love scenes just behind them. They talked of many things, of the moonlight and the river and the scent of the flowers, but all the time Hugh felt diffident and tongue-tied. He had not the glib tongue of Gavan Blake, and he felt little at ease talking common-places. Mary Grant thought he must be worried over something, and, with her usual directness, went to ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... vive to see the "white fighter." Every body was crazy to feel the "white skin" she had healed. Then, with a sudden, childish freak of caprice, they ran off from me as if afraid, and at once rushed back again like a flock of glib-tongued and playful monkeys. I could not comprehend a word they said; but the bevy squealed with quite as much pleasure as if I did, and peered into my eyes for answers, with impish devilry at my ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... plot, a proposal to compromise the whole matter amicably might serve to beguile him to the chateau of his friend at Ebernburg till his safe-conduct should expire, and then the liars could throw off the mask and dispose of him with credit in the eyes of Rome. The glib and wily Glapio led in the attempt. Von Sickingen and Bucer were entrapped by his bland hypocrisy, and lent themselves to the execution of the specious proposition. But when they came to Luther with it, he turned his back, saying, "If the emperor's confessor has anything to say to me ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... teeth, but thou must bark outright? What devil wrings thee?"—" Now," said I, "be dumb, Accursed traitor! to thy shame of thee True tidings will I bear."—" Off," he replied, "Tell what thou list; but as thou escape from hence To speak of him whose tongue hath been so glib, Forget not: here he wails the Frenchman's gold. 'Him of Duera,' thou canst say, 'I mark'd, Where the starv'd sinners pine.' If thou be ask'd What other shade was with them, at thy side Is Beccaria, whose red gorge distain'd The biting ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... that anything she said would be taken down by myself and used in evidence against her," was the glib response. ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... was the very pride of intellect that had almost been his ruin. He could not admit that some dozens of men, among them his brother, had the right, on the ground of what they were told by some hundreds of glib volunteers swarming to the capital, to say that they and the newspapers were expressing the will and feeling of the people, and a feeling which was expressed in vengeance and murder. He could not admit this, because he neither saw the expression of such feelings in the people among whom ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... a various and motley company of the riff-raff and raggabash of the island,—young and elderly, silent and glib—rough as a pigskin, and smooth as their sleeves at the elbow; with just one feature common to the whole pack of pick-thanks, and that was ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... turned and twisted my question around and about, trying to strike that man's average, but failed. He could not make out what I wanted. Now Mr. X arrived, faced this same man, looked him in the eye, and emptied this sentence on him, in the most glib and confident way: "Can man ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... knew nothing. It seemed to have swallowed up Aunt Margaret's money; it might very well have left her defenceless. Her stepmother seemed familiar with its powers, and able to evoke them at will; and though she did not trust her, there was something in her glib utterance that struck fear into the girl's heart. She did not answer, and Mrs. ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... sop, my head's a mop; I'm vet as any think; Oh! shan't ve cotch a cold!" "Your tongue is glib enough!" his rib exclaim'd, and made him shrink, —For ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... a glib Martinique negro, with an incongruous British accent and a tendency to be surly, whom Anthony detested. The passing of the old man had approximately the same effect on him that the kitten story had had on Gloria. He was reminded of the cruelty of all life and, in consequence, ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... out too. Every one will know what we mean, that we are honest men and true; and you will be spared this everlasting palaver. Then we will have some rules, or by-laws, or something, for the workmen. Talk to Mr. Winston about it. He would make a capital speaker, with his glib tongue." ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... ketch's native rig, and to the glib Tripolitanese of the Sicilian pilot, no suspicion was excited in the Philadelphia's watch by the answer to their hail that she had lost her anchors in a gale and would like to run a line to the war-ship ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... day passed. During dinner Aratoff chatted a great deal with Platosha, questioned her about old times, which, by the way, she recalled and transmitted badly, as she was not possessed of a very glib tongue, and had noticed hardly anything in the course of her life save her Yashka. She merely rejoiced that he was so good-natured and affectionate that day!—Toward evening Aratoff quieted down to such a degree that he played several games ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... not need their asseverations of veracity; the truth shone through their uncouth stories. They were widely different from the glib patter that runs out of a crook's mouth in the presence of an official. Some of these men were seasoned criminals; often they did not themselves understand how iniquitous was the "deal" that had been given ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... a long conversation with him," continued the earl, "in the book-room, and I think I have convinced him that it is for your mutual happiness"—he paused, for he couldn't condescend to tell a lie; but in his glib, speechifying manner, he was nearly falling into one—"mutual happiness" was such an appropriate prudential phrase that he could not resist the temptation; but he corrected himself—"at least, I think I have convinced him that it is impossible that he ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... and here the old Jew clothes-man under his dingy tiara; here the soldier in his scarlet, and here the undertaker's mute in streaming hat-band and worn cotton gloves; here the musty scholar fumbling his faded leaves, and here the scented actor dangling his showy seals. Here the glib politician crying his legislative panaceas, and here the peripatetic Cheap-Jack holding aloft his quack cures for human ills. Here the sleek capitalist and there the sinewy laborer; here the man of science and here the shoe-back; here the poet and here the ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... and at its mouth a pool two yards wide, a black and limpid water that leisurely wheeled, discharging a little rivulet from the cave: and in it I saw three owl-eyed fish, a finger long, loiter, and spur themselves, and gaze. Leda, who cannot be still in tongue or limb, chattered in her glib baby manner as we ate, and then, after smoking a cigarette, said that she would go and 'lun,' and went, and left me darkling, for she is the sun and the moon and the host of the stars, I occupying myself that night ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... there were some glib-tongued fellows who spoke the language without foreign accent, all of them of the lowest order of Democratic ward-politicians, of creatures skulking from the outstretched arm of avenging law; while the most degraded of the German population were represented; while it is ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... was offered at Chinningfold. Admiral Fakenham's butler refused at first to take a name to his master. Gower persisted, stating the business of his mission; and in spite of the very suspicious glib good English spoken by a man wearing such a hat and suit, the butler was induced ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... plunged into plans. It was a gusty March day when the Falkners went out with the architect to consider the lot, and spent an afternoon trying to decide how to secure the most sun. Falkner, weary of the whole matter, listened to the glib young architect. Another windy day in April they returned to the lot to look at the excavation. The contracts were not yet signed. Lumber had gone soaring, and there was a strike in the brick business, the kind of brick they had chosen being ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... relative of his, a niece of Mr. Cheng's wife, a Miss Wang, and has now been married for the last two years. This Mr. Lien has lately obtained by purchase the rank of sub-prefect. He too takes little pleasure in books, but as far as worldly affairs go, he is so versatile and glib of tongue, that he has recently taken up his quarters with his uncle Mr. Cheng, to whom he gives a helping hand in the management of domestic matters. Who would have thought it, however, ever since his marriage with his worthy wife, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... do at all," announced Foreman Owen, turning to the inventor. "I know their kind. They're glib talkers, and all that, but they belong to the know-it-all class of boys. I've had a lot of experience with that kind of 'prentices, and I don't want 'em bothering our work here. So I say, sir, the only thing for you to do is to send them about ...
— The Submarine Boys on Duty - Life of a Diving Torpedo Boat • Victor G. Durham
... assured her that I was as mad as a dingo dog. From the moment after the phrase's utterance to that of the slapping of my knee, it had been altogether absent from my mind. Now it haunts me. It reiterates itself after the manner of a glib phrase. I am glad I am not in a railway carriage; the cranks would amuse the wheels with it all night long. As it is, the surf tries to thunder it out on the shingle just a few yards away from my window. I keep asking ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... brow deepened, and Yates was quick to see that he had lost ground again, if, indeed, he had ever gained any, which he began to doubt. She evidently did not relish his glib talk about the university. He was just about to say something deferentially about that institution, for he was not a man who would speak disrespectfully of the equator if he thought he might curry favor with his auditor by doing ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... animating the breasts of his companions. Dealing blows right and left, they simultaneously set upon the surrounding Arabs, the old fellow who had bought the girl being the first knocked over, and the auctioneer with the glib tongue the second, the others, who drew their daggers, having their weapons whirled from their hands; while the greater number, astonished by the suddenness of the attack, took to flight in all directions, pursued by the now ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... lexicographer, he had gained an amount of miscellaneous information such as falls to the lot of very few minds of his order of intelligence. He had recently directed the compilation of a large Universal Geography or Gazetteer, the Carton or Vivien de St. Martin if those days—hence his glib references to the manners and customs of Laplanders, Caffres, Kamskatchans, and other recondite types of breeding. His imaginative faculty was under the control of an exceptionally strong and retentive memory. One may venture to say, indeed, without danger of exaggeration that his testimonials ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... well-bred mare, in Bourke, and he was anxious to get her into the yards before the horse sales were over; this was to be the last day of the sales. Jim was the best "barracker" of the two; he had great imagination; he was a very entertaining story-teller and conversationalist in social life, and a glib and a most impressive liar in business, so it was decided that he should hurry on into Bourke with the mare and sell her for ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... brute leans forward and wags his head to and fro with ignoble solemnity; another has fallen asleep and snores at intervals with a nauseous rattle; smart young men, dressed fashionably, fling chance witticisms at the busy barmaids, and the nymphs answer with glib readiness. This is the home of Jollity and Good-fellowship; this is the place from which Care is banished; this is the happy corner where the social glass is dispensed. Alas for the jollity and the sociability and all the rest ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... these gallant strangers, one of them with such fiery eyes and vivacious ways, and the other so tall and so dignified, with fair skin well-bronzed by the sun and large firm mouth that had such a pleasant smile on it; her eyes sparkled at sight of them both and her glib tongue rattled away at truly ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... slavery abroad will tell more upon the hearts and consciences of slaveholders, than if I was attacking them in America; for almost every paper that I now receive from the United States, comes teeming with statements about this fugitive Negro, calling him a "glib-tongued scoundrel," and saying that he is running out against the institutions and people of America. I deny the charge that I am saying a word against the institutions of America,{327} or the people, as such. What I have to say is against slavery and slaveholders. I feel at liberty ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... my God, that glib-tongu'd Aiken, My very heart and saul are quakin', To think how we stood groanin', shakin', And swat wi' dread, While he wi' hingin' lips and snakin', Held ...
— English Satires • Various
... proceeded, starting to put in the fancy touches. I dare say you have noticed on these occasions that the difficulty is to plant the main idea, to get the general outline of the thing well fixed. The rest is mere detail work. I don't say I became glib at this juncture, but I certainly became a dashed ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... advantageous: friendship with the upright, friendship with the sincere, and friendship with the man of observation. Three are injurious: friendship with a man of spurious airs, friendship with the insinuatingly soft, and friendship with the glib-tongued. ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... remarks are not more than the glib commonplaces of a man who had found Christianity convenient, but not exactly sufficient. In another place he says: "The wisest course evidently is to combine a portion of the philosophy of the tombstone with a portion of the philosophy of the publican ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... cheer, a man about thirty years of age came in, he said, to make our acquaintance. He was quite a sharp-looking fellow, with small, keen black eyes, a "glib" tongue, and told us that he was an out-and-out rebel, proud to meet us and ready to oblige. Steve forthwith proposed, as evidence of his good-will, an exchange of headgear. He dilated eloquently on the historic value of his own cap, and, while it did not entirely suit him, ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... influence of sympathy. There are some natures that are gifted with a blessed power to bring consolation to men. It is not that they are glib of tongue or facile of speech, but somehow the very pressure of their hand is grateful to the saddened heart. The simple and kindly action, of which we think nothing, may tell powerfully on others, and unclose fountains of feeling deep ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... who, with a glib tongue, protests that his conscience drove him from the Church, that his enslaved intelligence needed deliverance, search him and you will find a skeleton in his closet; and if you do not find it, it is there just the same. A renegade priest some years ago, held forth before a gaping audience, at ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... more self-conscious, had a more glib way of expressing his convictions, but even he hid his purpose in the war under a covering of irony and cynical jests. It was the spirit of the old city and the pride of it which helped him to suffer, and in his daydreams was the clanging of 'buses from Charing ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... Major. He lost to others but I was careful never to win from him. He fell into the way of dropping around at my quarters. Like most of his set, the Major was a heavy drinker. When his face would become very hushed and his tongue very glib, I would try to draw things out of him, but I never could get anything worth while. The slightest suspicious question made him close up ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... a person skilful in the arts of the harper and the senachie, and by no means contemptible in the quality of a second-sighted person or seer. While making this exposition, Major Dalgetty stammered and hesitated in a way so unlike the usual glib forwardness of his manner, that he could not have failed to have given suspicion to Allan M'Aulay, had not that person's whole attention been engaged in steadily perusing the features of the person thus introduced to him. This steady gaze so much embarrassed Ranald MacEagh, that his hand ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... that car certainly has been drove last night. Some of the battery connections got wet." The chauffeur was glib enough. ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... varlets, I would I knew which of ye burst Our wine-skin—what, ho! must I perish with thirst! Go, Henry, thou hast a glib tongue, go and ask Thy lord to send Ralph to yon inn ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... the lie that comes glib to a man's tongue. None of that for me. I leave the sneaking off to them soft-spoken chaps you're thinking of. No! If you love me you take me. And if you take me—why, then, the capstan-song of deep-water ships is sure to settle ...
— One Day More - A Play In One Act • Joseph Conrad
... I'm so happy! I wonder if any two people were ever so happy as Edwin and I. Am I not glib with my "Edwin"? I found it rather hard at first to keep from calling him Professor Green, but it seemed to mean so much to him that I have at last ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... looked up to him ever since they were children. Yet, all the time, he had a feeling that, since he alone knew all the circumstances of his case, he alone was entitled to blame or to excuse himself. The glib judgments that moralists would pass upon his conduct could be nothing but the imbecilities of smug and pharisaic fools—of those not under this drugging spell—of such as had not blood enough, perhaps, ever to fall ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... because of the rather mawkish sentimentality with which it is decked out; for if any scoundrel is really the instrument of God's will, why should he be blamed for his scoundrelism? And we observe how yet once more, by a glib and vapid phrase—"I believe in the {62} infinitude of wisdom and love; there is nothing else"—the fact of evil has been triumphantly got rid of. In words, that is to say, but not in reality; for in reality there is a great deal else—sin, and shame, ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... is never silent talks much folly; a glib tongue, unless it be bridled, will often talk ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... the village charged with novel ideas about the immortality of the soul, accepting the literal truth of the text "The soul that sinneth, it shall die." I attended the meetings and took notes of the speaker's glib talk. I distinctly remember that it was from his mouth that I first heard the word "encyclopaedia." When he cited the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" in confirmation of some statement, I had no doubt of its truth, and I resolved sometime ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... to Gerald's lie to her. Indeed, Chirac had heard it. She knew Gerald for a glib liar to others, but she was naively surprised ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... instant, looking absently at the headstone of "Hephzibah," who was the later of Robert McCoy's two beloved wives, then she said, with an effort, for these staid descendants of Scottish ancestry were not given to glib talking of ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... had experience of Vooda's persuasive tongue and knack of casuistry, did not wish to argue the point—knowing, as he did full well, the object of Vooda's visit—and at once made up his mind that he would not see the glib-tongued constable alone. ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... Himself, the unchaste and the idle, the unjust and the unmerciful, and the covetous man, who is an idolater, says the scripture, though he may call himself seven times a Protestant, and rail at the Pope in public meetings, while he justifies greediness and tyranny by glib words about the necessities of business and the laws of trade, and by philosophy falsely so called, which cometh not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish. Such a man loves and makes a lie, and the Lord of truth will surely send him to his ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... always in trouble, but provided with a programme of glib excuses and prepared at a moment's notice to call witnesses (false), always escape punishment. Some do not care if punished or not and who boast that they had full value for their "two days C.B." ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... of the New and Honourable Fraternity of war correspondents, who all possess the inalienable right of doing as much work as they can and getting as much for it as Providence and their owners shall please. To these things are added in time, if the brother be worthy, the power of glib speech that neither man nor woman can resist when a meal or a bed is in question, the eye of a horse-cope, the skill of a cook, the constitution of a bullock, the digestion of an ostrich, and an infinite ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... the cynical smile which so often disconcerted glib liars like Petit. "It is hopeless to expect you to tell the truth. However, I think I know a way to clear your wits. You must be brought face to face with La Belle Chasseuse. Perhaps when you are confronted with that lady in the room between the cafe ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... intimate," says he, "with a man who was a poet; he could neither read nor write; but he was a poet by nature, having a muse wonderfully glib at making triplets and quartets. He was nicknamed Tum Tai of the Moor. He made an englyn for me to put in a book in which I was inserting all the verses I ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... constraint that hung over the assembly must have stirred a fear that something terrible had happened, which would be increased by Peter's question. It was a merciful opportunity given her to separate herself from the sin and the punishment; but her lie was glib, and indicated determination to stick to the fraud. That moment was heavy with her fate, and she knew it not; but she knew that she had the opportunity of telling the truth, and she did not take it. She had to make the hard choice which we have sometimes to make, to be true to some sinful ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... needs be shallow. But it will be easily believed that the best and highest of their own idols had better means and skill of measurement: I can never forget the pregnant expression of one of the ablest of that school and party—Lord Cockburn—who, when some glib youth chanced to echo in his hearing the consolatory tenet of local mediocrity, answered quietly: "I have the misfortune to think differently from you—in my humble opinion, Walter Scott's sense is a still more wonderful thing than ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... child, be reasonable. Your mamma, poor dear! is dead, and, let us trust, in heaven." The good soul's conscience pricked her when she said this glib formula, of which in this present instance she believed nothing. "Your father has the most perfect right to marry again. Neither the Church nor the Bible forbids it; and you cannot expect him to remain single all his life—when he needs a wife so much, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... to her, but she never turned her head. He stood glowering, grinding his teeth together, his glib tongue finding for once no way to better his sorry case. He was the picture of trickery rewarded; I could not repress a grin at him. Marking which, he burst out at me, vehemently, yet in a low tone, for Mayenne had not closed ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... chieftains desired Lewis to tell the Governor of Virginia that "they had taken up the Hatchet against all Nations that were Enemies to the English"; but Lewis, an astute student of Indian Psychology, rightly surmised that all their glib professions of friendship and assistance were "only to put a gloss on their knavery." So it proved; for instead of the four hundred warriors promised under the treaty for service in Virginia, the Cherokees sent only seven warriors, accompanied by three women. Al though the Cherokees petitioned ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... Marquess of Donnaz had sent his daughter, by Odo's hand, a letter recommending her to select her son's governor with particular care, choosing rather a person of grave behaviour and assured morality than one of your glib ink-spatterers who may know the inside of all the folios in the King's library without being the better qualified for the direction of a young gentleman's conduct; and to this letter Don Gervaso appended ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... sole and a flounder. I don't want to know. I don't want to be continually told. I wish these people would meet me on my own ground. I wish the Macleods would begin to talk after dinner about the Lord Chamberlain's interference with the politics of burlesque, and then perhaps they would not be so glib. I am tired of hearing about John Maclean's boat, and Donald Maclean's horse, and Sandy Maclean's refusal to pay the road-tax. And as for the drinking of whiskey that these sailors get through—well, it seems to me that the ordinary condition of things is ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... of swift deeds was performed with such a glib precipitancy that if was as though the action had been rehearsed a score of times. The garden was all drowsy peace now that Orestes spread his palms in a gesture of deprecation. A little distance from him, Ahasuerus with his forefinger drew upon the ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... their husbands, and talked in the same large ways about policy, and the duties and responsibilities of the rich. They were swayed by the same ethic that dominated their husbands—the ethic of their class; and they uttered glib phrases that their own ears did ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... his hands on Sid's shoulders, half to shake him, I think, but half to keep from falling over. And for the one time I ever saw it, glib old Siddy had nothing ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... again to his companion. "I'm sorry, very sorry, that I asked you; sorry most of all that—" He halted diffidently, his great hands hanging loose at his side, his broad shoulders drooping wearily. He was not glib of speech, at best, and this second blow was hard to bear. A full half minute he stood so, hesitant, searching for words; then heavily, clumsily, he turned, started for the door. "I really must be ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... to take him to see the skaters on the river. Willie was in great glee, and when they arrived at the river, he wanted to go on the ice but his mother was afraid to venture. The river was frozen very hard, and the merry skaters seemed almost to fly, they went so fast over the glib ice. Now and then one of them would fall down, causing a burst of laughter from the others; but he would jump up and go it again. Skating is a pleasant and healthful exercise, but sometimes dangerous, for should the ice break many would probably ...
— The Skating Party and Other Stories • Unknown
... to come and dine with you in London, and see what a genial and charming person he can be—what a quick bosom friend, and with what a glib and silver tongue to praise the warmth of ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... Van Buren Sluysdael, died, you know—a year after they left Greyport. The widow was left all the money in trust for Johnny, except about twenty-five hundred a year which he was in receipt of as a separate income, even as a boy. Well, a glib-tongued parson, a fellow by the name of Belcher, got round the widow—she was a desperate fool—and, by Jove! made her marry him. He made ducks and drakes of not only her money, but Johnny's too, and had to skip to Spain to avoid the trustees. And Johnny—for the Sluysdaels are all fools or ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... fairly launched in a recital glib on his lips, regained the dominance of manner which the attitude of his subordinates had momentarily imperiled. Increased composure brought with it a certain hauteur, and he paused again—perhaps to gratify the actor's ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... boatman dead and bleeding at my feet. A wild cry arose. The mob seized me, and I was carried to prison. Next day the case was investigated before the court of justice. I related the simple fact. A glib advocate doubted my asseverations; but the spectators, who were numerous, gave the fullest credit to the story, and I was spared the doom of a murderer, because the judges were of opinion that I could have no motive to commit the crime, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 481, March 19, 1831 • Various
... God! that glib-tongu'd Aiken, My vera heart and flesh are quakin, To think how we stood sweatin', shakin, An' p-'d wi' dread, While he, wi' hingin lip an' snakin, Held ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... for it but to leave all, save what I actually felt, unsaid. Diplomacy I was trained in, and on most matters I had a glib enough tongue. But to palter with women was a lightness I had always neglected, and if I had invented would-be pretty speeches out of my clumsy inexperience, Phorenice would have seen through the fraud on the instant. She had been nurtured ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... moment, the prince hesitated, but brief as the pause, scarcely the durance of an eye-flash, Lal Lu saw it, and gazed upon the prince with a disconcerting directness as he added, with the haste we note in the accused who attempt to distract suspicion by the utterance of glib generalities: ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... she, "to hear me quote holy writ so glib. I have pored over it this four years, and why? Not because God wrote it, but because I saw it often in thy hands ere thou didst leave me. Heaven forgive me, I am but a woman. What thinkest thou ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... he never married, Hakon had a son Harald Slettmali (smooth-talker, or glib of speech), and two daughters, Ingibiorg and Margret. Ingibiorg afterwards married Olaf Bitling, king of the Sudreys; and Ragnvald Gudrodson, the great Viking, was of her line, and, as we shall see, in 1200 ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... take, Keep it, heap it hard and dry, That the gather'd flame may break Through the furnace, wroth and high. Smolt the copper within— Quick—the brass with the tin, That the glutinous fluid that feeds the Bell May flow in the right course glib ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... Early, into the then wealthy and powerful family of Lavillotte, old-timers of Louisiana soil, was considered the opposite of an honor by them, with the exception of the young girl, educated in the north, who had been fascinated by his fine looks and glib tongue. Therefore, when Joyce was born, an edict was issued by its leading members—two patriarchal uncles who held control of the property—that she should be cut off from her maternal rights in the family estate unless allowed ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... he was appalled at his own ignorance. Something was wrong somewhere; something which would have to be put right. And the trouble was that it did not seem a matter of great ease to put it right. He felt that the glib phrases about Capital and Labour pulling together, about better relations between employers and men, about standing shoulder to shoulder, failed to hit the point. They were rather like offering a hungry lion a halfpenny bun. They could always be relied on to raise a cheer from ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... it this morning," proceeded the money-lender, with a grim contempt for all our raillery, "when you played your pretty trick upon me, so glib and smooth, and up to every move, the pair of you! One borrowing the money, and the other paying me back in ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... Cree. Hooliam's answer was prompt and glib. "He says that the water was too low to bring a ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... years of the republic they seem honestly to have dignified their submission as "respect for the popular verdict." They even quoted from the Latin language the sentiment that "the voice of the people is the voice of God." And this hideous blasphemy was as glib upon the lips of those who, without change of mind, were defeated at the polls year after year as ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... man," said Marcus, as the shepherd concluded his glib recital. "Couldst thou identify these knaves, if once ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... until quite later years, can have lived in the spirit of their ancient worthies, or reverenced the most illustrious among these, we may argue from the fact that they should have endured so far to degrade the name of one among their noblest, that every glib and loquacious hireling who shows strangers about their picture- galleries, palaces, and ruins, is called 'cicerone,' or a Cicero! It is unfortunate that terms like these, having once sprung up, are ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... to his sergeant with a triumphant expression. "Just what I thought. Anybody that can't give a better account of himself than that had better be locked up. Spies—aha! Another of you came ashore a while ago—a glib-tongued, story-telling gentleman who fooled us into letting him off, but we've got you safe and sound and here you'll ...
— The Wonderful Bed • Gertrude Knevels
... it is, old chap," he confided, "you'll be making yourself unpopular before long. Another criminal at large, thanks to that glib tongue and subtle brain of yours. The crooks of London will present you with a testimonial ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... us at every step; we are to follow Christ's example. Be humble, it is said, as Christ was humble. Theology indeed would prescribe annihilation rather than humiliation. Man in presence of the Infinite is absolutely nothing. Science, according to a glib commonplace of popular writers, agrees with theology in prescribing humility. But that very ambiguous word has a totally different meaning in the two cases. Science bids us recognize the inevitable limitation of our ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... satisfy them," returned Robert Turold. "The first Robert Turold reverted to the Norman spelling when he settled in Suffolk. Turrald is the corrupted form, doubtless due to early Saxon difficulties with Norman names. The Saxons were never very glib at Norman-French, and there was no standardized spelling of family ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... is a familiar story, although the depth of its significance is beyond the compass of any living human intelligence. It is easy to say in a glib sentence that the amount of wealth produced every few years nowadays is equal to all the accumulated wealth of all the centuries down to the early part of the nineteenth; but the social meaning of so great a change baffles all attempt ...
— The business career in its public relations • Albert Shaw
... hence, and with this parting kiss, Which joins two souls, remember this: Though thou be'st young, kind, soft, and fair And may'st draw thousands with a hair; Yet let these glib temptations be Furies to others, friends to me. Look upon all, and though on fire Thou set their hearts, let chaste desire Steer thee to me, and think, me gone, In having all, that thou hast none. Nor so immured would I have Thee live, as dead and in thy grave; But walk abroad, yet wisely well ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... the rhymester with no poetic gift, but full of "subtle" ideas; in the circle young lads of seventeen talk glibly and learnedly of women and of love, while in the presence of women they are dumb or talk to them like a book—and what do they talk about? The circle is the hot-bed of glib fluency; in the circle they spy on one another like so many police officials.... Oh, circle! thou'rt not a circle, but an enchanted ring, which has been the ruin of many a ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... that glib and ready lie come so aptly to your lips? Your father never said a word to you on the subject. It is doubtful if he knew you were going to Burnsville at all, and he never had seen Mr. Burns in his life. How carefully, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... history Comfortable reassurance that one was still his client Dumb grief which has never learned to moan Gilt-edged orthodoxy Glib assurances that naive souls make so easily to others He have all the pleasure, I have all the work He was asleep, for he knew not remorse In work alone man rests from grief Kind of sporting energy, a defiant spurt Meaning what one says, so necessary to keep dogs virtuous Private grudge against Time ...
— Quotations from the Works of John Galsworthy • David Widger
... alone would not be heeded. Hartwell, the Eastern manager of the company, was a shallow, empty-headed man, insufferably conceited. He held the position, partly through a controlling interest in the shares, but more through the nimble use of a glib tongue that so man[oe]uvred his corporal's guard of information that it appeared an able-bodied regiment of knowledge covering ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... of a fight for independence, were heard throughout Norway. Meetings were held more or less secretly, and at each of them was some one with well-filled pockets and glib tongue, to enlarge on the country's wrongs, and promise assistance from an outside irresistible power as soon as they showed that they meant to strike for freedom. No one openly named the power. That was not necessary; it was everywhere felt and understood. Men who were real patriots began to believe ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... yes!" replied Brother Roach, heartily; "none more so. Felix Kendrick's ways is in good shape for some preacher wi' a glib tongue. Felix was a good man; he wanted his just dues, but not if to take them would hurt a man. He was neighbourly; who more so? And, sir, when you got to rastlin' wi' trouble, he'd find you and fetch you out. I only hope the Chinee ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... Lords, what seaman casts away his card because it has four-and-twenty points of the compass? and yet those are very near as many and as difficult as the orders in the whole circumference of your commonwealth. Consider, how have we been tossed with every wind of doctrine, lost by the glib tongues of your demagogues and grandees in our own havens? A company of fiddlers that have disturbed your rest for your groat; L2,000 to one, L3,000 a year to another, has been nothing. And for what? Is there one of them that yet knows what a commonwealth is? And are you yet afraid of ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... the surface,) are to be sternly tallied with the poets themselves, and tried by them and their lives. Who wants a glorification of courage and manly defiance from a coward or a sneak?—a ballad of benevolence or chastity from some rhyming hunks, or lascivious, glib roue? ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... have told them that I will be their backer at need; I made the deal wi' them direct and ye have nowt to do with it. You are ill to please, young man! You come here with a very singular story, and nowt to back it but a glib tongue and your smooth, innocent-like young face—and you go back hame with a heaped gowpen of gold, and mair in the kist ahint of that. I think ye do very ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... went on, "ought to bring great happiness, great position, great love; and how can I let you throw yourself away at eighteen on a commonplace boy with a glib tongue and a high opinion of himself? Don't tell me that it will make you happy. That would be the worst of all, if you turned out to be so limited that you were satisfied,—that would be a living death. O my darling, I give you my word that if ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... gentlemen, before that toast is honoured I beg to propose to you a toast. The toast, always the premier toast in every gathering composed of English gentlemen." The joke was then mine. In the most perfunctory and glib manner I gave the Royal Toast. After it was duly honoured I gave the second Loyal Toast, "The House of Lords," "The Houses of Parliament," "The Army, Navy and Reserve Forces,"—each time calling upon some one or two to respond. The reply for "The Navy," I recollect, fell to Sir Spencer ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... was a High German doctor, of the first class. He had taken his diploma of Beelzebub in the Black Forest, and was gifted with as fine a hand to force a card—with as glib a tongue to harangue a mob at wakes and fairs, as any professor since the birth of the fourth grace of life,—swindling. He would talk until his head smoked of his list of miraculous cures—of his balsams, his anodynes, his elixirs; in the benevolence ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 6, 1841, • Various
... answer any of these telegrams," he muttered, tearing up the offending messages. "Oh, why did Radwin have to take wings at the very time when I need him most! Fred Radwin, with his cool nerve, his steely eyes and his glib, lying tongue, would have been ready with answers for all these questions. But I can't do it. I'll need a strait-jacket, if these telegrams ...
— The Submarine Boys' Lightning Cruise - The Young Kings of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... isn't that we are simply backward in these things, we are antagonistic. The British mind has never really tolerated electricity; at least, not that sort of electricity that runs through wires. Too slippery and glib for it. Associates it with Italians and fluency generally, with Volta, Galvani, Marconi and so on. The proper British electricity is that high-grade useless long-sparking stuff you get by turning round a glass machine; stuff we used ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... sweetened and enriched the mere act of living. Though he was less demonstrative than Lucy, who had outgrown the plainness and the reticence of her childhood and was developing into a coquettish, shallow-minded girl, with what Miss Priscilla called "a glib tongue," Virginia learned gradually, in the secret way mothers learn things, that his love for her was, after his ambition, the strongest force in his character. Between him and his father there had existed ever since his babyhood a curious, silent, yet ineradicable hostility. Whether the ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... about the Guttenchild crowd putting over a big steal on the public that the party leaders are scared stiff. I couldn't pick up a newspaper anywhere without seeing your name in the headlines. It was fierce." Selfridge had found his glib tongue ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... patrons as to teach Cobbett's grammar at school, he always recommended it to me as the one by which alone I could learn to write good English. The learning of anything, especially of arithmetic and grammar, by the glib repetition of rules was a system that he held in contempt. With the public, ability to recite the rules of such subjects as those went farther than any actual demonstration of the power to cipher ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... gentlemen of the highest birth and most spotless integrity act when they wish to make themselves agreeable to their constituents, and have some end to gain of the country folks. How is it that we allow ourselves not to be deceived, but to be ingratiated so readily by a glib tongue, a ready laugh, and a frank manner? We know, for the most part, that it is false coin, and we take it: we know that it is flattery, which it costs nothing to distribute to every body, and we had rather have ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... painfully, after reading those most interesting Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, that the especial danger of this time is intellectual sciolism, vagueness, sentimental eclecticism—and feeling, too, as Socrates of old believed, that intellectual vagueness and shallowness, however glib, and grand, and eloquent it may seem, is inevitably the parent of a moral vagueness and shallowness, which may leave our age as it left the later Greeks, without an absolute standard of right or of truth, till it tries to escape from its own scepticism, as the later Neoplatonists did, ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... look-out for dramatic and instructive contrast in the House of Commons, one could not do better than study Mr. Morley and Mr. Chamberlain for a week. Mr. Chamberlain—glib, shallow, self-possessed, well-trained by years of public life—debates admirably. Nobody can deny that—not even those who, like myself, find his speaking exasperatingly empty and superficial and foolish. He is master of all his resources; ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... sudden prosperity, there were deeply-marked dark circles about his eyes. The Bowery's delights were telling upon the frightened lad, who had sealed his glib tongue now behind lying lips. Flattered by the "cop's" familiar manner, Emil greedily swallowed the ground bait artfully scattered by the ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... immigration will probably become negligible not only during the war, but for some time after it. Usually the reason for leaving home lies in the crowded population of European States and the lack of opportunity for advancement, plus the glib tongue of some agent of a contractor or of a steamship company. In recent years those who have come have not been desirable additions to our population because they came from nations alien in blood, language, ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... longhand to his manager's dictation, and was strengthened in the conviction that Penton had stolen that parcel of silver. Usually the manager composed hesitatingly, especially when addressing head office, but now he was glib, and seemed familiar with his subject. He even appeared to be in suppressed good humor over ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... forth in a manner that is worthy of Athens, and are already in action. Words without the reality must always appear a vain and empty thing, and above all when they come from Athens; for the more we seem to excel in the glib use of such language, the more it is distrusted by every one. {13} The change, then, which is pointed out to them must be great, the conversion striking. They must see you paying your contributions, marching to war, doing everything with a will, if any of them is to listen ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... been able to howl, but he certainly could not talk, and it was hard for him to follow such a glib speaker as the president. However, the fact remained that he had distinguished himself, and brought honour to the Fifth Form in general by taking seven wickets; and for this reason his comrades would have been content had he merely stood up and reeled off the list of prepositions ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... son.' 3. Tsze-lu said, 'There are (there) common people and officers; there are the altars of the spirits of the land and grain. Why must one read books before he can be considered to have learned?' 4. The Master said, 'It is on this account that I hate your glib-tongued people.' CHAP. XXV. 1. Tsze-lu, Tsang Hsi, Zan Yu, and Kung-hsi Hwa were sitting by the Master. 2. He said to them, 'Though I am a day or so older than you, do ...
— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge
... auctioneer, in his glib tones, "we are presenting to-day a most unusual opportunity. Prizes will be distributed to many enterprising people of Gridley, though these prizes are all so valuable that I trust none of them will go for the traditional 'song.' It is seldom, indeed, in any community, however ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock
... of Duchemin's doubts? To tell the sad truth, they were just as strong as ever. The man was somehow prejudiced: he found Monk's story entirely too glib, and knew a mean sense of gratification when the cure interposed a ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... time," thinks I, "Mr. Smarty from the metrolopin deestricts, you're liable to git waxed—shore!" But the feller didn't 'pear to think so at all, and played right ahead as glib-like and keerless as ever—'casion'ly a-throwin' in them sircastic remarks o' his'n,—'bout bein' "slow and shore" 'bout things in gineral—"Liked to see that," he said:—"Liked to see fellers do things with plenty o' deliberation, and even ef a feller wuzn't much of a checker-player, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... have believed. The state is justified in insisting that children shall be educated, but it is not justified in forcing their education to proceed on a uniform plan and to be directed to the production of a dead level of glib uniformity. Education, and the life of the mind generally, is a matter in which individual initiative is the chief thing needed; the function of the state should begin and end with insistence on some kind of education, and, if ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... resplendar De [12], bold dame," cried the knight by the side of Edward, while a lurid flush passed over his cheek of bronze; "but thou art too glib of tongue for a subject, and pratest overmuch of Woden, the Paynim, for the lips of ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was partly Scotch, by nature he was entirely Irish. He possessed a glib tongue of the latter order and his habit was to address every one he met, be he Indian, Highland Scot, or French Canadian, in the dialect which the person was supposed to favour. So he roared out in his magnificent baritone, as he picked his ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... of the frontier. An echo of Pigeon Creek informed the young storekeeper's first state paper, the announcement of his candidacy, in the year 1832. His first political speech was in a curious vein, glib, intimate and fantastic: "Fellow citizens, I presume you all know who I am. I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the Legislature. My politics are short and sweet like the old woman's dance. I am in favor ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... by an effort. His sharp glance at Blair made him keep quiet also. Neither was at all impressed at the story Crane told them, except to be moved to ridicule. Well they knew how a Ouija Board will make glib statements as ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... with the commander of the ship, and startled anew by his expression of blank incredulity, the glib flow of words conned so often during the steadfast but dreadful hours spent in ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... should come. Men rolled their bodies through the forests in a kind of pagan ecstasy of self-sacrifice to meet Him. So credulous are the negroes of the Black Belt, says a resident white lawyer, that if a fellow with a wig of long hair and a glib tongue should appear among them and say he is the Christ, inside of a week the turmoil of ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 4, April 1896 • Various
... his earnest importunitie, after I had moistned my lips, to make my lie run glib to his journies end, forward I went as followeth ..." And the good apostle stops again; the cider and his own words have moved him; he is a little fuddled, so is mine host; they both fall to weeping. The innkeeper is ready ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... the packman, was a young fellow who wanted more than evil weather and a dreich, black night to depress him. A fine, upstanding lad he was, with a glib English tongue that readily sold his wares, and which, along with a handsome, merry face, helped him with ease into the good graces of those whom he familiarly knew as "the lasses." Dandy Jim had had many a flirtation, but now he felt that his roving days were nearly past. ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... word did the usually glib Henri vouchsafe in answer,—but clutching his sister's fingers in his own dirty, horny palm, he trotted meekly beside her out of the house and across the Square into the silence and darkness of Notre Dame. Their mother watched ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... I bear your reply to this gentle captain? For by my faith, Madame, you require a more careful go-between than this, one more discreet and less glib ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... two hundred dollars. It is no more than just that the laborer should have a share—he only asks a beggarly share—of the prosperity which he has helped to build up." This was specious and taking. Then there came down from the great city a glib person disguised as The Workingman's Friend,—no workingman himself, mind you, but a ghoul that lives upon subscriptions and sucks the senses out of innocent human beings,—who managed to set the ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... have taken Hurree into the creaking gloom utterly beyond their reach—to the shelter and food of the nearest village, where glib-tongued doctors were scarce. But he preferred to endure cold, belly-pinch, bad words, and occasional blows in the company of his honoured employers. Crouched against a ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... which was puzzling Birralong. The last man in the district whom they expected to be carried away by the glib tales of nuggets by the bucketful and gravel running two ounces to the dish, was Tony Taylor; still less did they expect that he would leave his selection home, to say nothing of the charms of Birralong and Marmot's verandah, ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... for the pleasure of airing himself. He was essentially glib, as becomes the young advocate, and essentially careless of the truth, which is the mark of the young ass; and so he talked at random. There was no particular bias, but that one which is indigenous and universal, to ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... school in England, that is, the most expensive, and also at College, was almost totally illiterate, so we let the Church scheme follow that of the coach. At last, bethinking me that he was tolerably glib at the tongue, as most people are who are addicted to the turf, also a great master of slang; remembering also that he had a crabbed old uncle, who had some borough interest, I proposed that he should get into the House, promising in one fortnight to ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... spit-box over dere. By chance, have you got any 'bacco? Make me more glib if I can chew and spit; then I 'members more and better de things done ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... by no means,' he began, listening vaguely to the glib patter that seemed to come from another mouth. 'Your father, my dear young lady, I venture to think is now really on the road to recovery. Dr Simon makes excellent progress. But, of course—two heads, we know, are so much better ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... companions to give a true account of what they had seen. The wonderful things lost nothing in the telling, the climax always being that they had finished the whole world, and had turned only when there was no more land. One glib old gentleman asked, "Then you reached Ma Robert (Mrs. L.)?" They were obliged to confess that she lived a little beyond the world. The presents were received with expressions of great satisfaction and delight; and on Sunday, when Sekeletu made his appearance at church ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... Tony, listening to her brother's glib excuses. "Thank goodness he can lie like that. Larry never could." And as her eyes met Ted's a moment later when they passed each other in the maze of dancers he murmured "All right" in her ear and she was well ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... able to form a pretty clear estimate how much of this glib story was fact and how ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... bar and whispered something in the ear of the landlord, a burly man, who stood with his coat off and shirt sleeves rolled up. Drinks were now quickly compounded for each man, who seized his glass as the Captain, who was glib of tongue, commenced a speech in compliment of me. It surprised me not a little, that he made me the hero of more political conquests than were written down in our history since the declaration of independence; but as he vouched for the truth of every one of them, with an oath to every sentence, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... hypnosis of the conventional—provided it be glib. One reads such an assertion, and provided it be suave and brief and conventional, one seldom questions—or thinks "very strange" and then forgets. One has an impression from geography lessons: Mediterranean not more than three inches wide, on ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... explanation (readily accepted, since a police commissary gave it) that the man who belonged with the machine had met with an accident; indeed, this was true, for the genuine chauffeur had used Gibelin's bribe money in unwise libations and appeared the next morning with a battered head and a glib story ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... once was a fortress named Gib, Whose manners were haughty and glib! If you tried to get in, She replied, with a grin, 'I'm Great ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... man, or a serpent-tongued liar, a chosen master of craft whose seeming guilelessness had helped to delude us? It had been a crude first idea on his part to suggest the admission as refugees of a swarm of armed men, but, when this had failed, there had been glib readiness with the other and more subtle plan that had so nearly succeeded. And as I reflected on these things, I marked the young hypocrite for my own ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... Coombe regarding her with an expression of speculative interest. Her airy bringing forth of her glib time-worn little scraps of orthodoxy—as one who fished them out of a bag of long-discarded remnants of rubbish—was so true to type that it almost fascinated him for ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... some dreary private lodging-houses—then, at right angles to these, a street of shops; the cheese-monger's very small, the chemist's very smart, the pastry-cook's very dowdy, and the green-grocer's very dark, I was still looking out at the view thus presented, when I was suddenly apostrophized by a glib, disputatious voice ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... reason for suspecting him. He is too glib with his Princeton. Himmel! Did you ever hear a man talk so fast and so much and use such words? I can speak as good English as any man my age, but there were words, dozens of them, that I had never ...
— The Boy Scouts in Front of Warsaw • Colonel George Durston
... bottle to Swanson, who stood listening to his glib tongue in amused wonder, and invited him to test the medicine. Nothing loth, the giant ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... if John Fletcher hadn't really done a good deal to make Abrahama think he did want her," said Sylvia. "He was just that kind of man. I never did think much of him. He was handsome and glib, but he was all surface. I guess poor Abrahama had some reason to cut off Susy. I guess there was some double-dealing. I thought so at the time, and now this will makes me think so ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... well. But the truth is, of course, that his achievement consists precisely in making patent the impenetrable mystery of her, and of the tangled complex of striving and aspiration of which she is so helplessly a part. It is in this sense that "Sister Carrie" is a profound work. It is not a book of glib explanations, of ready formulae; it is, above all else, a ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... swallow up my poem in thy glib clumsiness, Zabastes!" he said lightly—"And thus wilt them hold up the most tasteless portions of the whole for the judgment of the public! 'Tis the manner of thy craft,—yet see!"—and with a dexterous movement of his arm he threw the fruit-peel through the window far out into the garden ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... his glib English fashion as we descended to my study, but I did not hear half that he said. He looked surprised at two or three of the answers I made to his questions, and I am sure there were several of them that I didn't respond to at all. He must ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... Full many a clime in, Tolling sublime in Cathedral shrine, While at a glib rate Brass tongues would vibrate— But all their music Spoke naught like thine; For memory, dwelling On each proud swelling Of the belfry knelling Its bold notes free, Made the bells of Shandon Sound far more grand on The pleasant waters Of ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... people would meet me on my own ground. I wish the Macleods would begin to talk after dinner about the Lord Chamberlain's interference with the politics of burlesque, and then perhaps they would not be so glib. I am tired of hearing about John Maclean's boat, and Donald Maclean's horse, and Sandy Maclean's refusal to pay the road-tax. And as for the drinking of whiskey that these sailors get through—well, it seems to me that the ordinary condition of things is reversed here altogether; ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... earnest importunitie, after I had moistned my lips, to make my lie run glib to his journies end, forward I went as followeth ..." And the good apostle stops again; the cider and his own words have moved him; he is a little fuddled, so is mine host; they both fall to weeping. The innkeeper is ready to believe anything, and at this moment, which is the right one the page ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... moment. The lank, black twine-like hair, pingui-nitescent, cut in a straight line, along the black stubble of his thin gunpowder eyebrows, that looked like a scorched aftermath from a last week's shaving. His coat collar behind in perfect unison, both of colour and lustre, with the coarse, yet glib cordage that I suppose he called his hair, and which with a 'bend' inward at the nape of the neck, (the only approach to flexure in his whole figure) slunk in behind his waistcoat; while the countenance lank, ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... enmity—at least, nothing to call for cold-blooded murder in reprisal. Yet the man was acting very curiously. Much of the time he scarcely appeared to hear what Miss Brewster was saying to him. Moreover, he had lied. Lidgerwood recalled his glib explanation at the meeting beside the displaced rail. Flemister claimed to have had the news of the disaster by 'phone: where had he been when the 'phone message found him? Not at his mine, Lidgerwood decided, since he could not have walked from the Wire-Silver to the wreck in an hour. It was ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... sombre draperies, being men, suffered this violence as only men bear with a woman in a temper. With the letting in of the fresh air, fresh energy in the prosecution manifested itself. The witnesses were being subjected to inquisitorial torture; their answers were still glib, but the faces were studies of the passions held in the leash of self-control. Not twenty minutes had ticked their beat of time when once more the jury, to a man, showed signs of shivering. Half a dozen gravely took out their pocket-handkerchiefs, and as gravely covered their heads. Others knotted ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... a new thought. Just why had he chosen St. Martin's? Was it only a coincidence? Or had he, subconsciously at least, picked this particular world? He had always considered himself the unwilling subject of glib persuaders ... but mightn't some inner compulsion of his own have put the monkey on ...
— Monkey On His Back • Charles V. De Vet
... instrument, of which she knew nothing. It seemed to have swallowed up Aunt Margaret's money; it might very well have left her defenceless. Her stepmother seemed familiar with its powers, and able to evoke them at will; and though she did not trust her, there was something in her glib utterance that struck fear into the girl's heart. She did not answer, and Mrs. Rainham followed up ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... Mary, walking on ahead, knew nothing of the love scenes just behind them. They talked of many things, of the moonlight and the river and the scent of the flowers, but all the time Hugh felt diffident and tongue-tied. He had not the glib tongue of Gavan Blake, and he felt little at ease talking common-places. Mary Grant thought he must be worried over something, and, with her usual directness, ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... was destined to be the scene of the most dramatic portion of the struggle between the entrenched interests and the union loggers. Here the long persecuted industrialists made a stand for their lives and fought to defend their own, thus giving the glib-tongued lawyers of the prosecution the opportunity of accusing them of "wantonly murdering unoffending paraders" on ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... of the work of the Fabian Society through their influence, one dominant question has prevailed. Assuming the truth of the two main generalizations of Socialism, taking that statement of intention for granted, how is the thing to be done? They put aside the glib assurances of the revolutionary Socialists that everything would be all right when the People came to their own; and so earned for themselves the undying resentment of all those who believe the world is to be effectually mended by a liberal use of chest notes and red flags. They ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... comes glib to a man's tongue. None of that for me. I leave the sneaking off to them soft-spoken chaps you're thinking of. No! If you love me you take me. And if you take me—why, then, the capstan-song of deep-water ships is sure to settle it all some ...
— One Day More - A Play In One Act • Joseph Conrad
... Glib as I was in the defence of others I found it difficult to argue in my own behalf. At any rate, it would have availed nothing. I had been tried, convicted, and sentenced in my absence, and it was vain to hope for pardon. These is something in ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... meant a deal to her, you see; he had been the one man she trusted. She had gloried in his fustian rhetoric, his glib artlessness, his airy scorn of money; and now all this proved mere pinchbeck. On a sudden, too, there woke in some bycorner of her heart a queasy realisation of how near she had come to loving Kennaston. The ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... and the idle, the unjust and the unmerciful, and the covetous man, who is an idolater, says the scripture, though he may call himself seven times a Protestant, and rail at the Pope in public meetings, while he justifies greediness and tyranny by glib words about the necessities of business and the laws of trade, and by philosophy falsely so called, which cometh not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish. Such a man loves and makes a lie, and the Lord of truth will surely send him to his ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... see, I call him the orator, for he's mighty glib with his tongue, and reels off all he has to say like as if he had it by heart. He's mighty rough on you, too, sometimes, for all his high-toned style. Ef he thinks a man is hidin' anything he jest scalps him with his tongue, and blamed if I don't think he likes the chance of doin' ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... over the whole thing from bottom to top. Through it all, he kept up the glib patter of a showman; the ironic intent of it becoming more and more ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... quoth Tanty, with impatience, "you are glib enough for two anyhow, my dear! All this does not tell me how Adrian came to live on a lighthouse, and why you put ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... they are not stones as glass seems to be. The child will be pleased too to see a crystal or a bit of mica, but the main thing is that we should not imagine we have disposed of the wonder by a mere name with a glib, "Oh, that's just because it's transparent," but that we realise, and reinforce and deepen the child's sense of wonderfulness. So teacher and child enter into the ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... niece of Mr. Cheng's wife, a Miss Wang, and has now been married for the last two years. This Mr. Lien has lately obtained by purchase the rank of sub-prefect. He too takes little pleasure in books, but as far as worldly affairs go, he is so versatile and glib of tongue, that he has recently taken up his quarters with his uncle Mr. Cheng, to whom he gives a helping hand in the management of domestic matters. Who would have thought it, however, ever since his marriage with his worthy wife, not a single person, whether high or low, has there been who ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... allowed myself to heed the glib tongue of a hotel-runner before I left the rice-steamer, and he had commandeered my bag and taken it to the Oriente Hotel, of which I knew nothing except that it was in the walled city and across the river from the cable office. To recapture ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... eloquent coadjutor. Eloquent Attorney-General! He blows out from him, better or worse, what crude or ripe thing he holds: not without result to himself; for it leads to a Bishoprick, though only a Constitutional one. Fauchet approves himself a glib-tongued, strong-lunged, whole-hearted human individual: much flowing matter there is, and really of the better sort, about Right, Nature, Benevolence, Progress; which flowing matter, whether 'it is pantheistic,' or is pot-theistic, only the greener ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... with biting scorn. "Tell the Duke and Lord Cheisford where I found them! Let us hear your glib young tongue telling the truth ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... side of the empty fireplace when we arrived, he smoking his evening pipe of Oronooko, and she working at her embroidery. The moment that I opened the door the man whom I had brought stepped briskly in, and bowing to the old people began to make glib excuses for the lateness of his visit, and to explain the manner in which we had picked him up. I could not help smiling at the utter amazement expressed upon my mother's face as she gazed at him, for the loss ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Herzegovinian-Montenegrin question, private machinations have recently been the most successful, and consequently the most injurious to order and the general weal. The energy of some of the foreign employes has been truly astounding, while their glib tongues and manoeuvring minds have worked metamorphoses worthy of Robin or the Wizard of the North. This distortion of facts was somewhat naively described by a French colleague of ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... exaggerated on both sides, the left more so than the right, and ankle clonus was present on the left side. Babinski phenomenon was absent. While the reflexes were being tested he volunteered the information that his left patellar reflex was very much stronger than the right. He was a very glib talker and spoke fluently in five foreign languages. He gave his name as E. J. B., Count de C., the son of the chamberlain to the Austrian Emperor and of a famous Austrian countess. In the official papers which ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... a greater gift o' speech than you can make pretence to," said the woman abruptly. "I often wonder that of two twin-brothers one should be so glib ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... thou swallow up my poem in thy glib clumsiness, Zabastes!" he said lightly—"And thus wilt them hold up the most tasteless portions of the whole for the judgment of the public! 'Tis the manner of thy craft,—yet see!"—and with a dexterous movement of his arm he threw the fruit-peel through the window far out into the garden ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... I plunged into a glib account of our supposed wanderings to find the Grantline camp; its location off in the Mare Imbrium—hidden in a cavern there. Potan, with the drink, and under the gaze of Anita's eyes, was in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... has slid down the channels Of history's annals Disguised as the child of a king, But that is a glib And iniquitous fib, For she never was any such thing: They called her the Fair One with Golden Locks, And it's true she had lovers who swarmed in flocks, But the rest is ironic; Her business chronic Was selling hair-tonic ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... the bumble-bee; now, however, he went further, declaring himself, to a subrident host, to be a chuckle-headed ass, only fit to herd with savages. He would listen, with childlike envy, to Adrian, glib of tongue, exchanging with Doria the shibboleths of the Higher Life. He had been considerably impressed by Adrian as the author of a successful novel; but Adrian as a co-treader of the stars with Doria, appeared to him in the ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... so moral, or so immoral if it comes to that. I notice it's always the folks that ain't had much to do with morals one way or the other that's so almighty glib about them." ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... his richer college companions, whose convictions were stronger than his power of expressing them, was selected as Candidate for a remote constituency, where speakers were not easily obtained. The glib Barrister was remembered, and appealed to. At an immense sacrifice of time and money, he rushed to the rescue, his travelling and hotel expenses being defrayed by the Candidate. He spoke much, he spoke triumphantly; he referred, in touching ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 19 April 1890 • Various
... friendship with the upright, friendship with the sincere, and friendship with the man of observation. Three are injurious: friendship with a man of spurious airs, friendship with the insinuatingly soft, and friendship with the glib-tongued. ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... displeasing me he moderated his furie, and onely sending him for the other fresh pint, wild him looke to the barre, and come when hee is cald with a deuilles name. Well, at his earnest importunitie, after I had moistned my lips, to make my lie runne glib to his iourneies end, forward I went as followeth. It chaunced me the other night, amongst other pages, to attend where the king with his Lords, and many chiefe leaders sate in counsel, there amongst sundrie serious matters that were debated, ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... Adelaide went on, "ought to bring great happiness, great position, great love; and how can I let you throw yourself away at eighteen on a commonplace boy with a glib tongue and a high opinion of himself? Don't tell me that it will make you happy. That would be the worst of all, if you turned out to be so limited that you were satisfied,—that would be a living death. O my darling, ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... car certainly has been drove last night. Some of the battery connections got wet." The chauffeur was glib enough. ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... with infinite possibilities of moral harm, the more so because of the rather mawkish sentimentality with which it is decked out; for if any scoundrel is really the instrument of God's will, why should he be blamed for his scoundrelism? And we observe how yet once more, by a glib and vapid phrase—"I believe in the {62} infinitude of wisdom and love; there is nothing else"—the fact of evil has been triumphantly got rid of. In words, that is to say, but not in reality; for in reality there is a great deal else—sin, and shame, and remorse, and ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... eulogies, and the bulk of the public, who cannot be decided by anything but the event, looked upon it as the source of all our woes." The counsels of Abbe de Bernis had for some time past been pacific; from a court-abbe, elegant and glib, he had become, on the 25th of June, minister of foreign affairs. But Madame de Pompadour remained faithful to the empress. In the month of January, 1758, Count Clermont was appointed general-in-chief of the army of Germany. In disregard of the convention of Closter-Severn, the Hanoverian ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... more securely based upon impartial intelligence than before; it owed less to her weakness for seeing the best in people. As for Edwin, he was saying to himself: "I wish to the devil I could talk to her without spluttering! Why can't I be natural? Why can't I be glib? Some chaps could." And Edwin ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... came here to New-York, I see so many things to make me sigh, that my hooks and eyes keep flying off like Peggotty's buttons. There—run along, now, and don't you come this way again, with that little glib tongue, and those bright eyes, or ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... all the things that a crowd says when they've got hold of a feller that they see they can plague. Well, some things they said WAS funny,—yes, and mighty witty too, I ain't denying that,—but all the same it warn't fair nor brave, all them people pitching on one, and they so glib and sharp, and him without any gift of talk to answer back with. But, good land! what did he want to sass back for? You see, it couldn't do him no good, and it was just nuts for them. They HAD him, you know. But that was his way. I reckon he couldn't help it; he was made so, I judge. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... harp by Scrooge's niece by marriage, is described after all, as may be remembered by the readers of the Carol, to to have been intrinsically "a mere nothing; you might learn to whistle it in two minutes." Say that in twenty minutes, or, at the outside, in half-an-hour, any ordinarily glib talker might have rattled through these comic recollections of Mr. Magsman, yet, when rattled through by Dickens, the laughter awakened seems now in the retrospect to have been altogether out of proportion. In itself the subject was anything but ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... Antinous sat Eurymachus, who was next to him in power and rank. This was a smooth and subtle villain, not less dangerous than Antinous, but glib and plausible of speech. And he too made answer after his kind: "Telemachus, thou sayest well, and none can dispute thy right. But with thy good leave I would ask thee concerning the stranger. He seemed a goodly man; but why did he start up and leave us so ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... this case, he said that he started out with the idea of shooting the rapids, and if we hadn't flustered him so, he would not have bumped into the bank and turned about so many times. Dutchy was a very glib talker. He nearly persuaded us that it was all done intentionally, and his thrilling account of the wild dash between the rocks and through the shower of spray stirred us up so that we all had to try ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond
... and lance. With that he pulled it up easily, plucked off the boughs, and trimmed it at his pleasure. In the meantime his mare pissed to ease her belly, but it was in such abundance that it did overflow the country seven leagues, and all the piss of that urinal flood ran glib away towards the ford of Vede, wherewith the water was so swollen that all the forces the enemy had there were with great horror drowned, except some who had taken the way on the left hand towards the hills. Gargantua, being come to the place of ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... electric lighting outfit I have here, is perfectly hateful to the English mind.... It isn't that we are simply backward in these things, we are antagonistic. The British mind has never really tolerated electricity; at least, not that sort of electricity that runs through wires. Too slippery and glib for it. Associates it with Italians and fluency generally, with Volta, Galvani, Marconi and so on. The proper British electricity is that high-grade useless long-sparking stuff you get by turning round a glass machine; stuff we used to call frictional electricity. Keep ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... superficial advantage, and one gained at the expense of the child's growth in power to think and act independently. It is an advantage closely akin to the parrotlike recitation of the pupil who catches a few glib phrases and gives them back without thought, as compared with the recitation of the pupil who thinks and expresses his thoughts in his own ...
— Primary Handwork • Ella Victoria Dobbs
... arduous road, but it leads to reality. All short and easy answers to the supreme question dissatisfy after the first flush. The confidence of the dogmatic answer, we soon discover, has no sufficient authority to back it. The glib theoretical answer leads us, after all, to a Balance of Probabilities. That is the best God that theoretic philosophy can give us. It may be better than nothing. But who can love a Balance of Probabilities? Who can feel the hand of such a deity as that ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... pingui-nitescent, cut in a straight line along the black stubble of his thin gunpowder eye-brows, that looked like a scorched after-math from a last week's shaving. His coat collar behind in perfect unison, both of colour and lustre, with the coarse yet glib cordage, which I suppose he called his hair, and which with a bend inward at the nape of the neck,—the only approach to flexure in his whole figure,—slunk in behind his waistcoat; while the countenance lank, dark, very hard, and with strong perpendicular furrows, gave me a dim notion ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... not raise them again to his companion. "I'm sorry, very sorry, that I asked you; sorry most of all that—" He halted diffidently, his great hands hanging loose at his side, his broad shoulders drooping wearily. He was not glib of speech, at best, and this second blow was hard to bear. A full half minute he stood so, hesitant, searching for words; then heavily, clumsily, he turned, started for the door. "I really ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... finding it intolerable to scheme and watch himself, and mislead one who had looked up to him ever since they were children. Yet, all the time, he had a feeling that, since he alone knew all the circumstances of his case, he alone was entitled to blame or to excuse himself. The glib judgments that moralists would pass upon his conduct could be nothing but the imbecilities of smug and pharisaic fools—of those not under this drugging spell—of such as had not blood enough, perhaps, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... High German doctor, of the first class. He had taken his diploma of Beelzebub in the Black Forest, and was gifted with as fine a hand to force a card—with as glib a tongue to harangue a mob at wakes and fairs, as any professor since the birth of the fourth grace of life,—swindling. He would talk until his head smoked of his list of miraculous cures—of his balsams, his anodynes, his elixirs; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 6, 1841, • Various
... indolence is sure to generate intellectual conceit,—a little Jack Horner, that ensconces itself in lazy heads, and, while it dwarfs every power to the level of its own littleness, keeps vociferating, "What a great man am I!" It is the essential vice of this glib imp of the mind, even when it infests large intellects, that it puts Nature in the possessive case,—labels all its inventions and discoveries "My truth,"—and moves about the realms of art, science, and letters ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... he began, listening vaguely to the glib patter that seemed to come from another mouth. 'Your father, my dear young lady, I venture to think is now really on the road to recovery. Dr Simon makes excellent progress. But, of course—two heads, we know, are so much ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... O'er fair free hills and valleys I can converse and carry on ad lib.; On active tennis-courts (between the rallies) I can be confident, and none more glib; But not in drawing-rooms my bright star dallies— I'm not that sort ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... is paved with good intentions" is no longer a glib phrase to me; it is a conviction born of seeing some of the suffering of this country. The doctor has just been ashore to see a woman with a five-days old baby. No attempt whatever had been made to get her or her bed clean ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... informs us that the Lord God wrought for Adam and his wife robes of honor from the cast-off skin of the serpent. We learn elsewhere that Nimrod came into possession of Adam's coat through Ham, who stole it from Noah while in the Ark. The glib tongue of tradition also tells how Esau slew Nimrod and appropriated the garment, and wore it for luck when hunting; but that on the day when he went to seek venison at the request of his dying parent, in his hurry he forgot the embroidered robe of Adam, and had bad luck in consequence. Then ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... a manner that is worthy of Athens, and are already in action. Words without the reality must always appear a vain and empty thing, and above all when they come from Athens; for the more we seem to excel in the glib use of such language, the more it is distrusted by every one. {13} The change, then, which is pointed out to them must be great, the conversion striking. They must see you paying your contributions, marching to war, doing everything with a will, if any of them is to listen to you. And ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... lecture, when the lecturer holds up some substance, and says, 'You all know well that calcium tungstate or barium hydrocyanide has this or the other property,' the hearers nod assent like sheep, being afraid to contradict so glib a statement from so ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... superlatives in conversation; and, though the dissipated artificial life which they lead prevents their cherishing any strong legitimate passion, the language of passion in affected tones slips for ever from their glib tongues, and every trifle produces those phosphoric bursts which only mimick in the dark the ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... fain would say Her word, but in his restless way Sir Barbour nipped that word; The other three were dumb perforce— Except Sir Barbour's glib discourse, No human sound ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... correspondence, so often remarked, between the Poet's style and the peculiar moods, tempers, motives, and habits of his characters, as if the language had caught the very grain and tincture of their minds. So, for instance, we find him rightly making the most glib-tongued rhetoric proceed from utter falseness of heart; for men never speak so well, in the elocutionary sense, as when they are lying; while, on the other hand, "there are no tricks in plain and simple faith." Thus, in Macbeth, when the murder of Duncan is first announced, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... 'mazement at this young generation. They is happy all right. Times not hard for them glib and well as they seems. Times have changed a sight since I was born in this world and still changing. Sometimes it seems like they are all right. Ag'in times is tough on old folks like me. This is all in the Bible—about ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... to find English equivalents for terms which were used for a century or two past in every-day Japanese speech. Those who know most about these facts, are most modest in attempting with English words to do justice to Japanese thought; while those who know the least seem to be most glib, fluent and voluminous in showing to their own satisfaction, that there is little difference between the ethics of Chinese Asia and ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... held strong opinions. Some years later he did not conceal his conviction that Prince Bismarck would be worsted in his conflict with Rome on the Education Laws, and the event proved his forecast to be perfectly correct. This is an example of the dangers which beset a too glib and superficial treatment of political events which were conducted in secret, and with ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... that is never silent talks much folly; a glib tongue, unless it be bridled, will often ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... of Furness," said the merry taunter, with many interruptions from laughter and want of breath; "thy heels are as glib as thy tongue: for which—oh, oh! I am breathed—blown—dispossessed of my birthright, free quaffing o' the air. Ha, ha! I cannot laugh. Oh! what a mouth didst thou make at old blacksleeves. Gaping so, I wonder he mistook not thy muzzle for ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... scheming Yankee, James Early, into the then wealthy and powerful family of Lavillotte, old-timers of Louisiana soil, was considered the opposite of an honor by them, with the exception of the young girl, educated in the north, who had been fascinated by his fine looks and glib tongue. Therefore, when Joyce was born, an edict was issued by its leading members—two patriarchal uncles who held control of the property—that she should be cut off from her maternal rights in the family estate unless allowed to take the family name. Now, the loss of money ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... might ask the way thither if I should come into a valley where I could not have pointed it out any longer. I pleased the young girl very much by presenting her with my card, and induced her to use her glib tongue volubly in telling me about their schools—what they studied, how long the terms last, &c. She would get along very well in our Pennsylvania German dialect. When we parted, she skipped away and proudly showed the card which she had received from an "American," to one of her schoolmates ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... right with the world if millions and millions of our fellow creatures are in endless torment, and other millions on their way. I fear Browning's words are often repeated with a glib optimism. All is right with the world, or all will be right, when the whole race is redeemed from suffering and sin; not otherwise. But the love and power of God are equal ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... Italian?" asked Orsino, surprised by her glib enunciation of the difficult sentence she had quoted. "Why are ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... listening—sitting or standing—walking or resting—his long, white, lissom fingers are never still; they cannot handle the commonest object without betraying a swift, subdued dexterity. Look closer yet, and all his glib, sham-soldier talk will not deceive you. That gallant belongs to a great army, whose spoils—if not bloodless—must be won with knife and pistol, instead of rifle and sabre; to an order whose squires ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... information such as falls to the lot of very few minds of his order of intelligence. He had recently directed the compilation of a large Universal Geography or Gazetteer, the Carton or Vivien de St. Martin if those days—hence his glib references to the manners and customs of Laplanders, Caffres, Kamskatchans, and other recondite types of breeding. His imaginative faculty was under the control of an exceptionally strong and retentive memory. One may venture to say, indeed, without ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... the dinners there was gambling. I always lost to the Major. He lost to others but I was careful never to win from him. He fell into the way of dropping around at my quarters. Like most of his set, the Major was a heavy drinker. When his face would become very hushed and his tongue very glib, I would try to draw things out of him, but I never could get anything worth while. The slightest suspicious question made him close up ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... describe his ready utterance; his glib use of the most sacred expressions; his familiar handling of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... educational advantages of her daughter, simpered up with "Madame Newcome pas ici—votre excellence nouvellement arrive—avez-vous fait ung bong voyage? Je recois chez moi Mercredi prochaing; lonnure de vous voir—Madamasel Miles ma fille;" and, Mira, now reinforcing her mamma, poured in a glib little oration in French, somewhat to the astonishment of the Colonel, who began to think, however, that perhaps French was the language of the polite world, into which he was now making his ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... licked his lips, hesitated, and abruptly went on again, this time speaking with almost glib facility: "There was an engineers' contest for a projected bridge over Michamac Strait. I started to draw plans, that I might enter the contest, but I did not finish in time. The plans of the other engineers were all rejected. I continued to work on mine. After the contest ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... pretty glib by this time; I had reeled it off with increasing particulars to the Westchester Park station-master, and the head man at the stables, and General Filbert, and I was so letter-perfect that I had a vision of the whole thing, especially ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... Shield" there was usually at least one Rabbi. One of the sons of Anselm Moses must be a Rabbi. The parents of little Mayer Anselm set him apart for the synagogue—he was so clever at reciting prayers and so glib with responses. Then he had an eczema for management, and took charge of all the games when the children played Hebrew I-Spy through the hallways and dark corners of the big, rambling ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... ashamed and humbled at this miserable chaffering, glad also to get a little money now and then. But this time he was obstinate, and took to insulting the picture-dealer, who, giving tit for tat, all at once dropped the formal 'you' to assume the glib 'thou,' denied his talent, overwhelmed him with invective, and taxed him with ingratitude. Meanwhile, however, he had taken from his pocket three successive five-franc pieces, which, as if playing at chuck-farthing, he flung from a distance upon the ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... she said would be taken down by myself and used in evidence against her," was the glib response. ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... Frank thought he could see Atwater shrug his shoulders and look to him for the required explanation. For Abram was a fellow of few words, and Frank was glib of speech. ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... I will be their backer at need; I made the deal wi' them direct and ye have nowt to do with it. You are ill to please, young man! You come here with a very singular story, and nowt to back it but a glib tongue and your smooth, innocent-like young face—and you go back hame with a heaped gowpen of gold, and mair in the kist ahint of that. I think ye do very weel ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... at the Bar, that while Mr. Stryver was a glib man, and an unscrupulous, and a ready, and a bold, he had not that faculty of extracting the essence from a heap of statements, which is among the most striking and necessary of the advocate's accomplishments. But, a remarkable improvement ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... The glib people who talk about Japan biting off more than she can chew, and with a light heart borrowing money she will find a difficulty in repaying, have apparently not grasped the fact that Japan possesses many very eminent financiers who have quite ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... shape and colour are not quite the same for the two men, this raises a difficulty, hastily solved, or rather covered up, by declaring what each sees to be purely "subjective"—though it would puzzle those who use this glib word to say what they mean by it. The truth seems to be that space—and time also—is much more complicated than it would appear to be from the finished structure of physics, and that the one all-embracing three-dimensional space is a logical construction, obtained ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... for Lane to take this latter remark for anything but the glib boldness of an erotic child. But he was not making any assurances to himself that he was right. Bessy Bell was fifteen years old, according to time. But she had the physical development of eighteen, and a mental range beyond his ken. The lawlessness unleashed ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... work of art. He may seek rather to deepen its mystery, to raise round it, and round its maker, that mist of wonder which is dear to both gods and worshippers alike. Ordinary people are 'terribly at ease in Zion.' They propose to walk arm in arm with the poets, and have a glib ignorant way of saying, 'Why should we read what is written about Shakespeare and Milton? We can read the plays and the poems. That is enough.' But an appreciation of Milton is, as the late Rector of Lincoln remarked once, the reward of consummate scholarship. ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... vote aye." The last name had been called, and all knew that only fifty votes had been cast for the amendment, lacking one of the required three-fifths of all members elect. The chief clerk of the House, B. D. Slaughter, usually so glib, slowly repeated the names of those who had voted and more slowly footed up the result. Two favorable members were outside; if only one could be reached! The speaker, who had just voted against the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... the frailties and infamies, a guilty knowledge of which he had dragged from many an unwilling sinner! To oust him, when installed, was a plain impossibility, for this wringer of hearts was only too glib in the surrender of another's scandal; and as he accepted the last scurrility with Christian resignation, his unfortunate employer could but strengthen his vocabulary and patiently endure the presence of this smiling, ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... in a recital glib on his lips, regained the dominance of manner which the attitude of his subordinates had momentarily imperiled. Increased composure brought with it a certain hauteur, and he paused again—perhaps to gratify the actor's ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... Headingly had dropped behind, for the glib comments of the dragoman, and the empty, light-hearted chatter of the tourists jarred upon their sense of solemnity. They stood in silence watching the grotesque procession, with its sun-hats and green veils, as it passed in the vivid sunshine down the front of the old ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... early stages I am persuaded there was no malice. He talked but for the pleasure of airing himself. He was essentially glib, as becomes the young advocate, and essentially careless of the truth, which is the mark of the young ass; and so he talked at random. There was no particular bias, but that one which is indigenous and universal, to flatter himself and to please and interest the present friend. And ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body. O! these encounterers so glib of tongue That give a coasting welcome ere it comes, And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts To every tickling reader! Set them down For sluttish spoils of opportunity, And daughters ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... them), even when they are fallen phantasmal, and to make persons of them again, we will give this Piece; sorry that it is the last we have of that fine hand. How welcome, in the murky puddle of Dryasdust, is any glimpse by a lively glib Wilhelmina, which we can discern to be human! Hear what Wilhelmina says (in a very ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... are not more than the glib commonplaces of a man who had found Christianity convenient, but not exactly sufficient. In another place he says: "The wisest course evidently is to combine a portion of the philosophy of the tombstone with a portion of the philosophy ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... boys cheered the Bartholdi statue. It makes some whites uncomfortable. It converts into strange reading glib eulogies ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... old woman has the same sort of girls come to her with the same old stories, over and over again, and she has a hundred dodges and gets a hundred straight tips where nobody else would see anything; and of course she has the same replies all ready. There is nothing like being glib. And there's really a great deal of the same in the regular doctor business, as I know, coming close on to it and calling myself one. Why, I've been called into a regular consultation in Chicago, where I had an office,—'pon my honor I was, and no great honor ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... I said, 'By George! Sam, I've found Sol.' 'So you have,' said he. 'Now let me try. Blow, Joe, blow!' Sam, he found Re and La. And in the course of two months we got so we could play Old Hundred. I don't pretend to say we could do it as glib as you run over the ivory, ma'am; but it was Old Hundred, and no mistake. And we played Yankee Doodle, first rate. We called our instrument the Harmolinks; and we enjoyed it all the more because it was our own invention. ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... me favourably. He is glib, ingratiating, and distinctly 'greasy.' He has a ready answer for everything almost before the question is out of your mouth. ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... the circle young lads of seventeen talk glibly and learnedly of women and of love, while in the presence of women they are dumb or talk to them like a book—and what do they talk about? The circle is the hot-bed of glib fluency; in the circle they spy on one another like so many police officials.... Oh, circle! thou'rt not a circle, but an enchanted ring, which has been the ruin ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... Thy chatt'ring teeth, but thou must bark outright? What devil wrings thee?"—"Now," said I, "be dumb, Accursed traitor! to thy shame of thee True tidings will I bear."—"Off," he replied, "Tell what thou list; but as thou escape from hence To speak of him whose tongue hath been so glib, Forget not: here he wails the Frenchman's gold. 'Him of Duera,' thou canst say, 'I mark'd, Where the starv'd sinners pine.' If thou be ask'd What other shade was with them, at thy side Is Beccaria, whose red gorge distain'd The biting axe of Florence. Farther on, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... a fight for independence, were heard throughout Norway. Meetings were held more or less secretly, and at each of them was some one with well-filled pockets and glib tongue, to enlarge on the country's wrongs, and promise assistance from an outside irresistible power as soon as they showed that they meant to strike for freedom. No one openly named the power. That was not necessary; it was everywhere ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... direct to you in your route. Nay, I don't know whether it is not already too late: I am sure it will be, if I am to stay for an answer to this; but I hope you will have thought on it before you receive this. I am so much recovered as to have been abroad. I cannot say my arm is glib yet; but, if I waited for the total departure of' the rheumatism, I might stay at home till the national debt is paid. My fair writing is a proof of my lameness: I labour as if I were engraving; and drop no words, as I do ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... that," said Nancy in a glib voice. "I was at a first-rate school myself for years. Weren't we kept strict, just! My word! we couldn't call our noses our own. The only language was parlez-vous. But it was a select school—very; and now that I have left, I like to feel that I am accomplished. None of you ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... (there) common people and officers; there are the altars of the spirits of the land and grain. Why must one read books before he can be considered to have learned?' 4. The Master said, 'It is on this account that I hate your glib-tongued people.' CHAP. XXV. 1. Tsze-lu, Tsang Hsi, Zan Yu, and Kung-hsi Hwa were sitting by the Master. 2. He said to them, 'Though I am a day or so older than you, do not think ...
— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge
... swinging the shoulders atop of the little waist in a somewhat provocative fashion, only too conscious of the grey-blueness of her fine eyes, and the modish cut of her clothes. She had a knack which seemed to Laura both desirable and unattainable: that of appearing to be engrossed in glib chat with her companion, while in reality she did not hear a word Laura said, and ogled everyone who passed, out of the tail ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... of the powers conferred upon me by the Defence of the Realm Acts, I arrest you for espionage... Matthews rolled off in glib, official gabble the formula of arrest ending with the usual caution that anything the prisoner might say might be used against her at her trial. Then he ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... a piece of Greek Testament to translate, for mercy's sake do not be too glib. Dinna translate a thing until you are sure it is there. They have an unholy habit of leaving out a couple of verses some place in the middle, and you're just the one to tumble head-first into the lacuna. (I ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... thee," said Glumm sharply, "and thy tongue was glib enough when ye talked with Ada ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... the cause, or against it—caught its quick rebuke, at the hands of some glib funmaker. Once an enthusiastic admirer of the hero of Charleston indited a glowing ode, of which ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... But it will be easily believed that the best and highest of their own idols had better means and skill of measurement: I can never forget the pregnant expression of one of the ablest of that school and party—Lord Cockburn—who, when some glib youth chanced to echo in his hearing the consolatory tenet of local mediocrity, answered quietly: "I have the misfortune to think differently from you—in my humble opinion, Walter Scott's sense is a still more wonderful thing ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... Indian negro slave, by name Antony Ulrich. And Antony was an interesting man. He had been baptized; he had been taught the rudiments of the Christian faith; he had met two other Brethren at the court; his tongue was glib and his imagination lively; and now he poured into Zinzendorf's ears a heartrending tale of the benighted condition of the slaves on the Danish island of St. Thomas. He spoke pathetically of his sister Anna, of his brother Abraham, and of their ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... gentlemen," began the auctioneer, in his glib tones, "we are presenting to-day a most unusual opportunity. Prizes will be distributed to many enterprising people of Gridley, though these prizes are all so valuable that I trust none of them will go for the traditional 'song.' It is seldom, indeed, in any ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock
... to discuss with him matters of a more profound artistic nature, as I invariably came up against the real Frenchman then, who, fluent and glib of tongue, was so sure of himself that it never occurred to him to doubt whether he had understood his companions aright. Once, in a pleasant glow of inspiration (having suddenly mastered the French language, to my own great surprise), I tried to express to him my idea of the ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... chiming full many a clime in, Tolling sublime in cathedral shrine; While at a glib rate brass tongues would vibrate;— But all their music spoke naught like thine. For memory dwelling on each proud swelling Of thy belfry knelling its bold notes free, Made the bells of Shandon sound far more grand on The pleasant waters of the ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... degrade us by magnifying trifles. The countryman finds the town a chop-house, a barber's shop. He has lost the lines of grandeur of the horizon, hills and plains, and, with them, sobriety and elevation. He has come among a supple, glib-tongued tribe, who live for show, servile to public opinion. Life is dragged down to a fracas of pitiful cares and disasters. You say the gods ought to respect a life whose objects are their own; but in cities they have betrayed you to a cloud of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... firmamental glory, Renewest in the heart of the sad human All faiths, guard thou the innocent spirit Into whose unknowing hands this noontide Thou pourest treasure, yet scarce recognised, That unashamed before man's glib wisdom, Unabashed beneath the wrath of chance, She accept in simplicity of homage The hidden holiness, the created emblem To be in her, until death shall take her, The source and secret ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... It was a gusty March day when the Falkners went out with the architect to consider the lot, and spent an afternoon trying to decide how to secure the most sun. Falkner, weary of the whole matter, listened to the glib young architect. Another windy day in April they returned to the lot to look at the excavation. The contracts were not yet signed. Lumber had gone soaring, and there was a strike in the brick business, the kind of brick ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... you had a long tongue, but you do not seem very glib this minute," Captain Swope went on. "You've taken a reef in ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... workers' revolt, is not to play the schoolmaster to this event, but to study its peculiar character. For this a certain amount of scientific insight and some goodwill is necessary, whereas for the other operation a glib phraseology, saturated in ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... extent in Kimberley, but most of all in Johannesburg. You are soon able to recognise his points and identify him at a distance. He is a little too neatly dressed and his watch-chain is a little too much of a certainty. His manner is excessively glib and fluent, yet he has a trick of furtively glancing round while he talks, as if fearful of being overheard. For the same reason he speaks in low tones. He must often be discussing indifferent topics, but he always looks as if he were hatching ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... By that most glib and specious explanation Cynthia was convinced. True, she added a question touching the amazing condition of the grooms, in reply to which Joseph afforded her a part of ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... regarding it, and Jack began to pump my memory mercilessly for what it might retain of his driving lessons. Luckily, I had forgotten nothing, and I was able to demonstrate my knowledge by pointing to the various parts of the machine with each glib reference ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... influential classes—were delighted with their method. What could be better than to see sons growing up, good Catholics in all external observances, devoted to the order of society and Mother Church, and at the same time showy Latinists, furnished with a cyclopaedia of current knowledge, glib at speechifying, ingenious in the construction of an epigram or compliment? If some of the more sensible sort grumbled that Jesuit learning was shallow, and Jesuit morality of base alloy, the reply, like that of an Italian draper ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Zeke," anxiously, "it's my responsibility. I recommended you. I want you should say 'em off as glib as Fanshaw did. Now then, which ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... to say that the advance of civilization must necessarily mean the total disappearance of all wild animals. This is one of those glib fallacies which flows only too readily from unthinking lips. Civilization in its full sense—not the advent of a few scattered pioneers—of course, implies their restriction, especially as regards purely grass-feeding species, within certain definite bounds, ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... says he, "with a man who was a poet; he could neither read nor write; but he was a poet by nature, having a muse wonderfully glib at making triplets and quartets. He was nicknamed Tum Tai of the Moor. He made an englyn for me to put in a book in which I was inserting all the verses ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... hung over the assembly must have stirred a fear that something terrible had happened, which would be increased by Peter's question. It was a merciful opportunity given her to separate herself from the sin and the punishment; but her lie was glib, and indicated determination to stick to the fraud. That moment was heavy with her fate, and she knew it not; but she knew that she had the opportunity of telling the truth, and she did not take it. She had to make the hard choice which we have sometimes to make, to be true ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... from those of the surface,) are to be sternly tallied with the poets themselves, and tried by them and their lives. Who wants a glorification of courage and manly defiance from a coward or a sneak?—a ballad of benevolence or chastity from some rhyming hunks, or lascivious, glib roue? ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... so sure she was going to talk about the American child. She was not sure of anything, except that the household looked most irregular, and that Peter Byrne was trying to cover a difficult situation with much conversation. He was almost glib, was Peter. The tea was ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... but it's true! You preach to me no more, You, once so glib with holy words! I am Astonished!. . . (With burlesque fury): Stay, I will surprise you too! Hark! I permit you. . . (He pretends to be seeking for something to tease her with, and to have found it): . . .It is something new!— To—pray for me, ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... launched in a recital glib on his lips, regained the dominance of manner which the attitude of his subordinates had momentarily imperiled. Increased composure brought with it a certain hauteur, and he paused again—perhaps to gratify the actor's instinct in him rather than observe the effect of his words. But the break ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... man turned in his chair to summon a waiter, and exposed his profile. Kirkwood was in no wise amazed to recognize Calendar—a badly frightened Calendar now, however, and hardly to be identified with the sleek, glib fellow who had interviewed Kirkwood in the afternoon. His flabby cheeks were ashen and trembling, and upon the back of his chair the fat white fingers were drumming incessantly an inaudible tattoo of ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... years later he did not conceal his conviction that Prince Bismarck would be worsted in his conflict with Rome on the Education Laws, and the event proved his forecast to be perfectly correct. This is an example of the dangers which beset a too glib and superficial treatment of political events which were conducted in secret, and with every circumstance ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... over dere. By chance, have you got any 'bacco? Make me more glib if I can chew and spit; then I 'members more and better de things ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... the deadlocks that come from the hard and fast use of terms, they establish mutual charity as an intellectual necessity. The common way of speech and thought which the old system of logic has simply systematized, is too glib and too presumptuous of certainty. We must needs use language, but we must use it always with the thought in our minds of its unreal exactness, its actual habitual deflection from fact. All propositions are approximations to an ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... out dead failures owing to the total incapacity of the Irish Parliamentary party. And we are asked to entrust the future of the country to these men, whose only qualifications are a faculty for glib talk and an unreasonable ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... find English equivalents for terms which were used for a century or two past in every-day Japanese speech. Those who know most about these facts, are most modest in attempting with English words to do justice to Japanese thought; while those who know the least seem to be most glib, fluent and voluminous in showing to their own satisfaction, that there is little difference between the ethics of Chinese Asia and those ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... disavowed their eulogies, and the bulk of the public, who cannot be decided by anything but the event, looked upon it as the source of all our woes." The counsels of Abbe de Bernis had for some time past been pacific; from a court-abbe, elegant and glib, he had become, on the 25th of June, minister of foreign affairs. But Madame de Pompadour remained faithful to the empress. In the month of January, 1758, Count Clermont was appointed general-in-chief of the army of Germany. In disregard ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... of sympathy. There are some natures that are gifted with a blessed power to bring consolation to men. It is not that they are glib of tongue or facile of speech, but somehow the very pressure of their hand is grateful to the saddened heart. The simple and kindly action, of which we think nothing, may tell powerfully on others, and unclose fountains of feeling deep down in ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... ledge just below the falls, where they are seventy-five feet high. There was a little projecting rock on which she could just sit,—a horrible place. Below it was a dreadful eddy, in which nothing could live. He helped her down to it, and she was in mortal terror, as such glib-tongued women generally are when there is the least danger. Then the man ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... coming to that right away, commissioner," protested the accused lieutenant with a sort of glib nervous agility; yet for all of his promising, he paused for a little bit before he continued. And this pause, brief enough as it was, gave the listening La Farge time to discover, with a small inward jar of surprise, that somehow, some way, he was beginning to lose some of his ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... congealed glasse, When he, more glib, to hell be lowe would passe. Vpon a charriot of five wheeles he rydes, The which an arme strong driuer ...
— The Choise of Valentines - Or the Merie Ballad of Nash His Dildo • Thomas Nash
... walking on ahead, knew nothing of the love scenes just behind them. They talked of many things, of the moonlight and the river and the scent of the flowers, but all the time Hugh felt diffident and tongue-tied. He had not the glib tongue of Gavan Blake, and he felt little at ease talking common-places. Mary Grant thought he must be worried over something, and, with her usual directness, went to ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... is, then, rational because attacked along irrational grounds; the Church is also reasonable because she has not been swayed by the attraction of heresy nor listened to the glib fallacies of those who always want to make her something more or ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... clonus was present on the left side. Babinski phenomenon was absent. While the reflexes were being tested he volunteered the information that his left patellar reflex was very much stronger than the right. He was a very glib talker and spoke fluently in five foreign languages. He gave his name as E. J. B., Count de C., the son of the chamberlain to the Austrian Emperor and of a famous Austrian countess. In the official papers which accompanied him to the hospital the above name was followed by several aliases. He talked ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... to fix his attention upon these statistics; he began moodily to twist a button of his jacket and to concentrate a new-born and obscure but lasting hatred upon the court-house. Miss Raypole's glib voice continued to press upon his ears; but, by keeping his eyes fixed upon the twisting button he had accomplished a kind of self-hypnosis, or mental anaesthesia, and was but dimly aware of what ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... Paris. After the dinners there was gambling. I always lost to the Major. He lost to others but I was careful never to win from him. He fell into the way of dropping around at my quarters. Like most of his set, the Major was a heavy drinker. When his face would become very hushed and his tongue very glib, I would try to draw things out of him, but I never could get anything worth while. The slightest suspicious question made him close up as ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... the Italians, until quite later years, can have lived in the spirit of their ancient worthies, or reverenced the most illustrious among these, we may argue from the fact that they should have endured so far to degrade the name of one among their noblest, that every glib and loquacious hireling who shows strangers about their picture- galleries, palaces, and ruins, is called 'cicerone,' or a Cicero! It is unfortunate that terms like these, having once sprung up, are not again, or are not easily again, got rid of. They remain, testifying ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... to his craft nowadays, not because he has taste for literature, but because he has an incurable faculty for scribbling. He has no culture, and he soon loses the power of taking pains, if he ever possessed it. But he can talk with glib superficiality and imposing confidence about every conceivable subject, from a play or a picture to a sermon or a metaphysical essay. It is the utter indifference to subject-matter, joined with the vulgar unscrupulousness ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... times of absolutely detesting Rose. Sally was never jealous, but Martie burned with a fierce young jealousy of all life: of Rose, with her dainty frocks and her rich friends, her curly hair and her violin; of Florence Frost's riding horse; of Ida Parker's glib French; of her own brother, Leonard Monroe, with his male independence; of the bare-armed women who leaped on the big, flat-backed horses in the circus; of the very Portuguese children who rode home asleep of a summer afternoon, in fragrant loads ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... conferred upon me by the Defence of the Realm Acts, I arrest you for espionage... Matthews rolled off in glib, official gabble the formula of arrest ending with the usual caution that anything the prisoner might say might be used against her at her trial. Then ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... means,' he began, listening vaguely to the glib patter that seemed to come from another mouth. 'Your father, my dear young lady, I venture to think is now really on the road to recovery. Dr Simon makes excellent progress. But, of course—two heads, we know, are so ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... in trouble, but provided with a programme of glib excuses and prepared at a moment's notice to call witnesses (false), always escape punishment. Some do not care if punished or not and who boast that they had full value for their "two days C.B." Heaume had a cute dodge of replying to an officer's angry expostulation that he (Heaume) had already ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... Maimon produced an inarticulate whine that would do either for a plea or a curse. When he begged alone, all the glib formulae he had learnt from the Schnorrer dried up on his tongue. But his silence pleaded more pitifully than his speech. For he was barefooted and almost naked. Yet amid all these untoward conditions his mind kept up its interminable twisting and turning of the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... cheerful tongue was running on at this rate, and as she left the living-room for the kitchen at the rear both Lady Gray and Helena were laughing, partly at their own awkwardness at the tasks assigned them as well as at her glib remarks. ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... the soldier in his scarlet, and here the undertaker's mute in streaming hat-band and worn cotton gloves; here the musty scholar fumbling his faded leaves, and here the scented actor dangling his showy seals. Here the glib politician crying his legislative panaceas, and here the peripatetic Cheap-Jack holding aloft his quack cures for human ills. Here the sleek capitalist and there the sinewy laborer; here the man of science and here the shoe-back; here the poet and here the water-rate ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body. O, these encounterers, so glib of tongue, That give accosting welcome ere it comes, And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts To every ticklish reader! set them down For sluttish spoils of opportunity And ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... mother listened with intelligent interest: commenting on what he said in her quiet way, as she found opportunity—we say this advisedly, for opportunities were not so frequent as one might suppose. March had always been possessed of a glib tongue, and he seemed, as Bounce remarked, to have oiled the hinges since his return ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... meant to be specially nice and kind to Hilda after his evening's pleasure, but he felt it impossible now to keep the glib, sarcastic words back. ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... day of tiny waists hers could have been spanned by Ben Westerveld's two hands. He discovered that later. Just now he thought he had never seen anything so fairylike and dainty, though he did not put it that way. Ben was not glib of thought ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... had a long conversation with him," continued the earl, "in the book-room, and I think I have convinced him that it is for your mutual happiness"—he paused, for he couldn't condescend to tell a lie; but in his glib, speechifying manner, he was nearly falling into one—"mutual happiness" was such an appropriate prudential phrase that he could not resist the temptation; but he corrected himself—"at least, I think I have convinced him that it is impossible that he should any longer look upon ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... he demanded. "What do you or I know of Lorrimore? I'm thinking yon Lorrimore was far too glib of his tongue—and maybe I was too ready myself and talked beyond reason to strangers. I don't know ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... individualism of their time. And just as historical facts require readjustment by posterity, so our critical estimate of intellectual and aesthetic evolution requires strict revision. We must not accept the glib statement of the historian, especially of the contemporary historian, that at certain periods intellectual activity and artistic expression were decaying or did not exist. If a convention in one field of intellectual activity is said by the historian or chronicler to be approaching termination ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles. The countryman finds the town a chop-house, a barber's shop. He has lost the lines of grandeur of the horizon, hills and plains, and, with them, sobriety and elevation. He has come among a supple, glib-tongued tribe, who live for show, servile to public opinion. Life is dragged down to a fracas of pitiful cares and disasters. You say the gods ought to respect a life whose objects are their own; but in cities they have betrayed you to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... general appearance and manner had completely taken her breath away. Also, she was annoyed that Lady Gertrude Muenster was there to-day. Lady Gertrude was one of her great cards. She was a clever, glib, battered-looking, elderly woman, who, since her husband had once been at the Embassy in Vienna, had assumed a slight foreign accent; it was meant to be Austrian but sounded Scotch. Lady Gertrude looked rather muffled and seemed to have ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... attended the movies, where Amory was fascinated by the glib comments of a man in front of him, as well as by the wild yelling ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... lot flourish to some extent in Kimberley, but most of all in Johannesburg. You are soon able to recognise his points and identify him at a distance. He is a little too neatly dressed and his watch-chain is a little too much of a certainty. His manner is excessively glib and fluent, yet he has a trick of furtively glancing round while he talks, as if fearful of being overheard. For the same reason he speaks in low tones. He must often be discussing indifferent topics, but he always looks as if he were hatching ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... chuckle over the frailties and infamies, a guilty knowledge of which he had dragged from many an unwilling sinner! To oust him, when installed, was a plain impossibility, for this wringer of hearts was only too glib in the surrender of another's scandal; and as he accepted the last scurrility with Christian resignation, his unfortunate employer could but strengthen his vocabulary and patiently endure the presence of this ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... indefensible. I think the excesses of the French Revolution are dreadful enough in themselves, but much more so as an index to the slow centuries of misery against which they were a mad protest. And then the wisdom of the poor! It is amusing to read the glib newspaper man writing about the ignorance of the masses. They don't know the date of Magna Charta, or whom John of Gaunt married; but put a practical up-to-date problem before them, and see how unerringly they take the right side. Didn't they put the Reform Bill through ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... lodging-houses—then, at right angles to these, a street of shops; the cheese-monger's very small, the chemist's very smart, the pastry-cook's very dowdy, and the green-grocer's very dark, I was still looking out at the view thus presented, when I was suddenly apostrophized by a glib, disputatious voice ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... the pie's tongue, glib, glib, glib, chatter, chatter, chatter. She related to them the whole story of the griffin and his daughter, and a great deal more besides, that the griffin had ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... about it, Skinner thought, like golf. The conceit occurred to him that it would be a good scheme to get up a booklet full of glib automobile, golf, and bridge chatter, to be committed to memory, and mark it, "How to Bluff One's Way into Society." It might ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge
... could be better than to see sons growing up, good Catholics in all external observances, devoted to the order of society and Mother Church, and at the same time showy Latinists, furnished with a cyclopaedia of current knowledge, glib at speechifying, ingenious in the construction of an epigram or compliment? If some of the more sensible sort grumbled that Jesuit learning was shallow, and Jesuit morality of base alloy, the reply, like that of an Italian draper selling palpable shoddy for broadcloth, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... which, as I have said, tend to complicate the Herzegovinian-Montenegrin question, private machinations have recently been the most successful, and consequently the most injurious to order and the general weal. The energy of some of the foreign employes has been truly astounding, while their glib tongues and manoeuvring minds have worked metamorphoses worthy of Robin or the Wizard of the North. This distortion of facts was somewhat naively described by a ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... harper and the senachie, and by no means contemptible in the quality of a second-sighted person or seer. While making this exposition, Major Dalgetty stammered and hesitated in a way so unlike the usual glib forwardness of his manner, that he could not have failed to have given suspicion to Allan M'Aulay, had not that person's whole attention been engaged in steadily perusing the features of the person thus ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... on in 'mazement at this young generation. They is happy all right. Times not hard for them glib and well as they seems. Times have changed a sight since I was born in this world and still changing. Sometimes it seems like they are all right. Ag'in times is tough on old folks like me. This is all in the Bible—about the times ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... to rid the community of him. We all know that from the porch of Snyder's store he has been preaching doctrines that are not only revolutionary but, if the ladies will pardon me, I will call damnable. What good is it for us to have Mr. Pound in the pulpit for one day of the week, and this glib-tongued man contradicting him for seven. Yet no statute forbids him to do this. What can you suggest, ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... for a man—not worth the powder to blow you up. You hadn't the sand to fight for the money entrusted to you, nor the nerve to face me after you had lost it. Get out of here. Vamos! Don't ever let me hear yore smooth, glib tongue again." ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... I had allowed myself to heed the glib tongue of a hotel-runner before I left the rice-steamer, and he had commandeered my bag and taken it to the Oriente Hotel, of which I knew nothing except that it was in the walled city and across the river from the ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... Alas! this reasoning was based upon the nature and capacity of the instruments, without taking into account the human element, always the most important factor. And what has really come about is this: that cavilers, calumniators, and crooks—all gentlemen glib of tongue, who know better than any one else how to turn voice and pen to account—have taken the utmost advantage of these extended means for circulating thought, with the result that the men of our times have the greatest difficulty in the world to know the truth about their ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... years of the work of the Fabian Society through their influence, one dominant question has prevailed. Assuming the truth of the two main generalizations of Socialism, taking that statement of intention for granted, how is the thing to be done? They put aside the glib assurances of the revolutionary Socialists that everything would be all right when the People came to their own; and so earned for themselves the undying resentment of all those who believe the world is to be effectually mended by a liberal use of chest notes and red flags. They insisted ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... he fully hoped and intended to do to-day." At this all eyes sped to the Bishop, who stood certainly in a drooping attitude at the chaplain's side, his episcopal hands behind his back. "Something happened," the glib spokesman continued with stern eyes, "something that you do not often hear of in these days. His lordship was accosted, beset, and, like the poor man in the Scriptures, despitefully entreated, not many miles beyond your own boundary, by a pair ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... to it—your Worship knows it; but then 'twas peak and pert with him—a' was a man again, marry, in the turn of his heel.—A' died, your Worship, just about one, at the crow of the cock.—I thought how it was with him; for a' talk'd as quick, aye, marry, as glib as your Worship; and a' smiled, and look'd at his own nose, and call'd "Sweet Ann Page." I ask'd him if a' would eat—so a' bad us commend him to his Cousin Robert (a' never call'd your Worship so before) and bade us get hot meat, for a' would ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... as fraught with infinite possibilities of moral harm, the more so because of the rather mawkish sentimentality with which it is decked out; for if any scoundrel is really the instrument of God's will, why should he be blamed for his scoundrelism? And we observe how yet once more, by a glib and vapid phrase—"I believe in the {62} infinitude of wisdom and love; there is nothing else"—the fact of evil has been triumphantly got rid of. In words, that is to say, but not in reality; for in reality there ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... lives—the one the youth eager to dip into experience, the other a fugitive from a many-sided past that still shadowed and menaced him. He listened with only half an ear as the Chicagoan expounded some glib and ancient principle about the fairy tale being even ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... greeting in the faces of flowers, Blowest in the firmamental glory, Renewest in the heart of the sad human All faiths, guard thou the innocent spirit Into whose unknowing hands this noontide Thou pourest treasure, yet scarce recognised, That unashamed before man's glib wisdom, Unabashed beneath the wrath of chance, She accept in simplicity of homage The hidden holiness, the created emblem To be in her, until death shall take her, The source and secret ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... married for the last two years. This Mr. Lien has lately obtained by purchase the rank of sub-prefect. He too takes little pleasure in books, but as far as worldly affairs go, he is so versatile and glib of tongue, that he has recently taken up his quarters with his uncle Mr. Cheng, to whom he gives a helping hand in the management of domestic matters. Who would have thought it, however, ever since his marriage with his worthy wife, not a single person, whether ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... her, but she never turned her head. He stood glowering, grinding his teeth together, his glib tongue finding for once no way to better his sorry case. He was the picture of trickery rewarded; I could not repress a grin at him. Marking which, he burst out at me, vehemently, yet in a low tone, for Mayenne had not closed ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... something in the ear of the landlord, a burly man, who stood with his coat off and shirt sleeves rolled up. Drinks were now quickly compounded for each man, who seized his glass as the Captain, who was glib of tongue, commenced a speech in compliment of me. It surprised me not a little, that he made me the hero of more political conquests than were written down in our history since the declaration of independence; but as he vouched for the truth of every one of them, with an oath to every sentence, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... have dignified their submission as "respect for the popular verdict." They even quoted from the Latin language the sentiment that "the voice of the people is the voice of God." And this hideous blasphemy was as glib upon the lips of those who, without change of mind, were defeated at the polls year after year as upon those of ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... upon her! There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body. O! these encounterers so glib of tongue That give a coasting welcome ere it comes, And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts To every tickling reader! Set them down For sluttish spoils of opportunity, And ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... talk at random, talk nonsense &c 497; be hoarse with talking. Adj. loquacious, talkative, garrulous, linguacious^, multiloquous^; largiloquent^; chattering &c v.; chatty &c (sociable) 892; declamatory &c 582; open-mouthed. fluent, voluble, glib, flippant; long tongued, long winded &c (diffuse) 573. Adv. trippingly on the tongue; glibly &c adj.; off the reel. Phr. the tongue running fast, the tongue running loose, the tongue running on wheels; all talk and no cider; foul whisperings are abroad [Macbeth]; what a spendthrift ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... like a trumpet, broke off suddenly. The angry fire died out of his blue eyes, and he bowed his head humbly. "I ask yer pardon, Minister!" he said, quietly, after a pause. "I humbly ask yer pardon. I had forgotten the Lord, ye see, for all I was talkin' about Him so glib. I was takin' my view, and forgettin' that the Lord had His. He takes things by and large, and nat'rally He takes 'em larger than mortal man kin do. Amen! so be it!" He took off his battered hat, and stood motionless for a few moments, with bent head: nor was his the only ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... But no glib flow of figures fell from him. His eyebrows suddenly contracted, his body stiffened itself. Then for the next quarter of an hour nothing sounded in the quiet room but his turning of the creakling pages. Once or twice he glanced round swiftly over his ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... replaced by a glib Martinique negro, with an incongruous British accent and a tendency to be surly, whom Anthony detested. The passing of the old man had approximately the same effect on him that the kitten story had had on Gloria. He was reminded of the cruelty of all ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... thoughts in that little brown head, on its first look at life! Whatever the reason, he plainly concluded not to take the risk that day, for he disappeared again behind a door that no reporter, however glib or plausible, could pass. Sometimes he vanished with a suddenness that was not natural. Did his heart fail him, or, perchance, his footing give way? For whether he clung to the walls, or made stepping-stones of his brothers and sisters (as do many of his betters, ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... "Red Shield" there was usually at least one Rabbi. One of the sons of Anselm Moses must be a Rabbi. The parents of little Mayer Anselm set him apart for the synagogue—he was so clever at reciting prayers and so glib with responses. Then he had an eczema for management, and took charge of all the games when the children played Hebrew I-Spy through the hallways and dark corners of the big, rambling ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... glib speaker with astounded eyes. "Do you suppose a woman killed your brother?" he ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... doing before I began to pray, or what I am going to do as soon as I get through. I do not believe anybody else in the world is like me in this respect. Then when I feel differently, and can make a nice, glib prayer, with floods of tears running down my cheeks, I get all puffed up, and think how much pleased God must be to see me so fervent in spirit. I go down-stairs in this frame, and begin to scold Susan for misplacing my music, till all of a sudden I catch myself doing it, and stop ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... was the glib promise. "I'm sorry I said you were a grasshopper. You look more like ...
— Marjorie Dean High School Freshman • Pauline Lester
... empty; telling obscene jokes and stories, in a deep bass voice. He sang a good song, too—particularly of that class which required the absence of ladies—and of gentlemen. Hug (Mr. Toady Hug) was also a barrister; a glib little Jewish-looking fellow, creeping into considerable criminal practice. He was a sneaking backbiter, and had a blood-hound scent after an attorney. See him, for instance, at this moment, in close and eager conversation with Mr. Flaw, who, rely upon it, ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... turkey, head of owl, Wings a-droop like a rained-on fowl, Feathered and ruffled in every part, Skipper Ireson stood in the cart. Scores of women, old and young, Strong of muscle, and glib of tongue, Pushed and pulled up the rocky lane, Shouting and singing the shrill refrain: "Here's Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt, Torr'd an' futherr'd an' corr'd in a corrt ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... observer, and several hundred rounds of ammunition. The job was an offensive patrol—that is to say, we were to hunt trouble around a given area behind the Boche lines. A great deal of the credit for our "mastery of the air"—that glib phrase of the question-asking politician—during the Somme Push of 1916, belongs to those who organised and those who led these fighting expeditions over enemy country. Thanks to them, our aircraft were able to carry out reconnaissance, artillery observation, and photography with a minimum of ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... (especially if bound to look at them), even when they are fallen phantasmal, and to make persons of them again, we will give this Piece; sorry that it is the last we have of that fine hand. How welcome, in the murky puddle of Dryasdust, is any glimpse by a lively glib Wilhelmina, which we can discern to be human! Hear what Wilhelmina says (in ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... in these days, by reason of her increasing references to Claims, and the All-Mind, and to the fact that the pain in a neglected tooth was only a manifestation of cowardly unbelief. The doctor scented mischief in the glib phrases. He held his peace heroically, though, albeit now and then he longed to shake his babbling patient as ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... are a glib comforter. Tell me," he added, "from this height we should surely be able ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... to the English mind.... It isn't that we are simply backward in these things, we are antagonistic. The British mind has never really tolerated electricity; at least, not that sort of electricity that runs through wires. Too slippery and glib for it. Associates it with Italians and fluency generally, with Volta, Galvani, Marconi and so on. The proper British electricity is that high-grade useless long-sparking stuff you get by turning round a glass machine; stuff we used to call frictional electricity. Keep it in Leyden jars.... At ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... to incur the mine-owner's enmity—at least, nothing to call for cold-blooded murder in reprisal. Yet the man was acting very curiously. Much of the time he scarcely appeared to hear what Miss Brewster was saying to him. Moreover, he had lied. Lidgerwood recalled his glib explanation at the meeting beside the displaced rail. Flemister claimed to have had the news of the disaster by 'phone: where had he been when the 'phone message found him? Not at his mine, Lidgerwood decided, since he could not have walked from the Wire-Silver to the wreck in an hour. It was ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... ostrich feathers. The daughter is pale and interesting, and interprets Beethoven, and paints the old mill; while a skilled person, hired at a high price, rules in the dairy. The son rides a-hunting, and is glib on the odds. The 'offices'—such it is the fashion to call the places in which work was formerly done—are carefully kept in the background. The violets and snowdrops and crocuses are rooted up, all the sweet and tender old flowers ruthlessly ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... lads of seventeen talk glibly and learnedly of women and of love, while in the presence of women they are dumb or talk to them like a book—and what do they talk about? The circle is the hot-bed of glib fluency; in the circle they spy on one another like so many police officials.... Oh, circle! thou'rt not a circle, but an enchanted ring, which has been the ruin of many ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... into plans. It was a gusty March day when the Falkners went out with the architect to consider the lot, and spent an afternoon trying to decide how to secure the most sun. Falkner, weary of the whole matter, listened to the glib young architect. Another windy day in April they returned to the lot to look at the excavation. The contracts were not yet signed. Lumber had gone soaring, and there was a strike in the brick business, the kind of brick they had chosen being unobtainable, while hardware ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... at every step; we are to follow Christ's example. Be humble, it is said, as Christ was humble. Theology indeed would prescribe annihilation rather than humiliation. Man in presence of the Infinite is absolutely nothing. Science, according to a glib commonplace of popular writers, agrees with theology in prescribing humility. But that very ambiguous word has a totally different meaning in the two cases. Science bids us recognize the inevitable limitation of our powers, ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... Lord my God, that glib-tongu'd Aiken, My very heart and saul are quakin', To think how we stood groanin', shakin', And swat wi' dread, While he wi' hingin' lips and snakin', Held ...
— English Satires • Various
... underfoot was glib and treacherous. Min lost her foothold and fell directly under the horse's hoofs as they came heavily down. The animal, freed from her detaining hand, sprang forward, dragging the laden sleigh ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the whole day passed. During dinner Aratoff chatted a great deal with Platosha, questioned her about old times, which, by the way, she recalled and transmitted badly, as she was not possessed of a very glib tongue, and had noticed hardly anything in the course of her life save her Yashka. She merely rejoiced that he was so good-natured and affectionate that day!—Toward evening Aratoff quieted down to such a degree that he played several games of ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... no remark as to Gerald's lie to her. Indeed, Chirac had heard it. She knew Gerald for a glib liar to others, but she was naively surprised ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... turned to his sergeant with a triumphant expression. "Just what I thought. Anybody that can't give a better account of himself than that had better be locked up. Spies—aha! Another of you came ashore a while ago—a glib-tongued, story-telling gentleman who fooled us into letting him off, but we've got you safe and sound and here you'll stay! Sergeant, ...
— The Wonderful Bed • Gertrude Knevels
... the gift of gab might air his views and be reasonably sure of an audience. In the evening there was always a crowd. Street fakirs plied their traffic under sputtering gas torches, dispensing, along with a ready flow of glib chatter, marvellous ointments, cure-alls, soap, suspenders, cheap safety razors, anything that would coax stray dimes and ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... away his card because it has four-and-twenty points of the compass? and yet those are very near as many and as difficult as the orders in the whole circumference of your commonwealth. Consider, how have we been tossed with every wind of doctrine, lost by the glib tongues of your demagogues and grandees in our own havens? A company of fiddlers that have disturbed your rest for your groat; L2,000 to one, L3,000 a year to another, has been nothing. And for what? Is there one ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... return. O'er fair free hills and valleys I can converse and carry on ad lib.; On active tennis-courts (between the rallies) I can be confident, and none more glib; But not in drawing-rooms my bright star dallies— I'm not that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... dawned upon him that this was his true vocation. To renounce pleasure and discipline the mind; to live a life of self-denial, submitting himself humbly to the inspiration of the great masters. . . . To be serene, like this old man; to avoid that facile, glib, composite note—those monkey-tricks of cleverness. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Swanson, who stood listening to his glib tongue in amused wonder, and invited him to test the medicine. Nothing loth, the giant took ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... lot of others he knows, An' he don't seem to care what his neighbors may say, as heedlessly forward he goes. He don't stop to think if it's wrong or it's right; with his speech he is careless or glib, Till the minute the nurse lets him into the room to see what's asleep in ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest
... niece by marriage, is described after all, as may be remembered by the readers of the Carol, to to have been intrinsically "a mere nothing; you might learn to whistle it in two minutes." Say that in twenty minutes, or, at the outside, in half-an-hour, any ordinarily glib talker might have rattled through these comic recollections of Mr. Magsman, yet, when rattled through by Dickens, the laughter awakened seems now in the retrospect to have been altogether out of proportion. In itself ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... father, "quiet that glib tongue of thine, and hear the truth. There are savages on the lake shore already, and no man can say how near to us they may be at this very moment, or when we may hear more ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... short-story contributors, but the love of man and woman which the stories in general exploited, struck him of Indian ideals as shifty and pestilential. The woman of fiction was equipped with everything to make her as common as man. She was glib, pert, mundane, her mind a chatter-mill; a creature of fur, paint, hair, and absurdly young. The clink of coins was her most favorable accompaniment; and her giving of self was a sort of disrobing formality. ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... of Bursley, this enlightened and beautiful town which I am now visiting for the first time,' he began in a hard, metallic voice, employing again with the glib accuracy of a machine the exact phrases which he had been using all day, 'look at me—look well at me. How old do you think I am? How old do I seem? Twenty, my dear, do you say?' and he turned with practised insolence to a pot-girl in a red shawl who could not have uttered an audible ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... paved with good intentions" is no longer a glib phrase to me; it is a conviction born of seeing some of the suffering of this country. The doctor has just been ashore to see a woman with a five-days old baby. No attempt whatever had been made to get ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... ruler of his obedient province of Virginia; and in The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck Rudolph Musgrave, that quaint figure whittled out of chivalry and dressed up in amiable heroics, is plainly contrasted with the glib rogue of genius John Charteris, who, elsewhere in Mr. Cabell's books generally the chorus, here enters the plot and exhibits a sorry gallantry in action. Poictesme, these novels indicate, is not the only country Mr. Cabell knows; he knows also how to feel at home, when ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... our lady of Furness," said the merry taunter, with many interruptions from laughter and want of breath; "thy heels are as glib as thy tongue: for which—oh, oh! I am breathed—blown—dispossessed of my birthright, free quaffing o' the air. Ha, ha! I cannot laugh. Oh! what a mouth didst thou make at old blacksleeves. Gaping so, I wonder he mistook not thy muzzle for ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... most glib and specious explanation Cynthia was convinced. True, she added a question touching the amazing condition of the grooms, in reply to which Joseph afforded her a part of ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... election business and by the importance we have bestowed on lawyers, pleaders, writers, and the like, who have, up to now, been in abject submission to them. They say little, but after all they are the most important fagots in the great bundle of communities, and all the glib bunkum in the world would not pay for their estrangement. They have ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... lad was more self-conscious, had a more glib way of expressing his convictions, but even he hid his purpose in the war under a covering of irony and cynical jests. It was the spirit of the old city and the pride of it which helped him to suffer, and in his daydreams was the clanging of 'buses from Charing Cross to the Bank, ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... awaiting opportunity for investment. He burns the midnight oil in deep studies. The two men wander over the growing avenues of the Babel of the West. Every allurement of luxury, every scheme of vice, all the arts of painted siren, glib knave, and lurking sharper are here; where the game is, there the hunter follows. Rapidly arriving steamers pour in hundreds. The camp followers of the Mexican war have streamed over to San Francisco. The notable ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... understand at last." His eyes had dropped and he did not raise them again to his companion. "I'm sorry, very sorry, that I asked you; sorry most of all that—" He halted diffidently, his great hands hanging loose at his side, his broad shoulders drooping wearily. He was not glib of speech, at best, and this second blow was hard to bear. A full half minute he stood so, hesitant, searching for words; then heavily, clumsily, he turned, started for the door. "I really must ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... him over the whole thing from bottom to top. Through it all, he kept up the glib patter of a showman; the ironic intent of it becoming more and more ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... husbands, and talked in the same large ways about policy, and the duties and responsibilities of the rich. They were swayed by the same ethic that dominated their husbands—the ethic of their class; and they uttered glib phrases that their ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... plucked off the boughs, and trimmed it at his pleasure. In the meantime his mare pissed to ease her belly, but it was in such abundance that it did overflow the country seven leagues, and all the piss of that urinal flood ran glib away towards the ford of Vede, wherewith the water was so swollen that all the forces the enemy had there were with great horror drowned, except some who had taken the way on the left hand towards the hills. Gargantua, being come to the place of the ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... in bed, sitting up in a dressing sack, and turning the pages of a weekly publication that dealt in news of local high life. Its chief item, to-day, was the announcement of a dance she was to give shortly—at the club, as usual—and she had just finished for the second time the commentator's glib and unctuous phrasing. ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... his presentiments were not agreeable. It seemed like the fluctuations of a dream—as if the action begun by that loud bloated stranger were being carried on by this pale-eyed sickly looking piece of respectability, whose subdued tone and glib formality of speech were at this moment almost as repulsive to him as their remembered contrast. He answered, with a ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... brudder war mighty diffrent. He war down in de lower kentry wen de war war ober. He war mighty smart, an' had a good head-piece, an' a orful glib tongue. He set up store an' sole whisky, an' made a lot ob money. Den he wanted ter go to de legislatur. Now what should he do but make out he'd got 'ligion, an' war called to preach. He had no more 'ligion dan my ole dorg. But he had ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... commercial relations with the Makololo. I then requested my companions to give a true account of what they had seen. The wonderful things lost nothing in the telling, the climax always being that they had finished the whole world, and had turned only when there was no more land. One glib old gentleman asked, "Then you reached Ma Robert (Mrs. L.)?" They were obliged to confess that she lived a little beyond the world. The presents were received with expressions of great satisfaction and delight; and on Sunday, when Sekeletu ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... to Swanson, who stood listening to his glib tongue in amused wonder, and invited him to test the medicine. Nothing loth, the giant ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... tell more upon the hearts and consciences of slaveholders, than if I was attacking them in America; for almost every paper that I now receive from the United States, comes teeming with statements about this fugitive Negro, calling him a "glib-tongued scoundrel," and saying that he is running out against the institutions and people of America. I deny the charge that I am saying a word against the institutions of America,{327} or the people, as such. What ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... clothes-man under his dingy tiara; here the soldier in his scarlet, and here the undertaker's mute in streaming hat-band and worn cotton gloves; here the musty scholar fumbling his faded leaves, and here the scented actor dangling his showy seals. Here the glib politician crying his legislative panaceas, and here the peripatetic Cheap-Jack holding aloft his quack cures for human ills. Here the sleek capitalist and there the sinewy laborer; here the man of science and here the shoe-back; here the poet and here the ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... came to a question of courage he had the habit of stretching facts to the very limit. Even in this case, he said that he started out with the idea of shooting the rapids, and if we hadn't flustered him so, he would not have bumped into the bank and turned about so many times. Dutchy was a very glib talker. He nearly persuaded us that it was all done intentionally, and his thrilling account of the wild dash between the rocks and through the shower of spray stirred us up so that we all had ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond
... tinge of Slavic blood, were a tough, sturdy race, not specially graceful in social manners, but with unusual keenness of understanding and clearness of judgment. Those who lived in the capital had been glib of tongue and ready to scoff from time immemorial: all were capable of great exertions; industrious, persistent, and ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... ordered him to leave." And at the close "I was no longer alone with my friend as a neutral eye-witness. The British Admiral Sinclair appeared, causing much perturbation to the Italian officers, who though some of them had just taken part in the shambles, were already glib with excuses. 'The British Admiral wants to know' was enough to bring the Italian officer running and bowing, with 'I beg of you....' 'We are willing to explain all....' American naval officers of the destroyer Talbot were also among this ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... Tsze-lu said, 'There are (there) common people and officers; there are the altars of the spirits of the land and grain. Why must one read books before he can be considered to have learned?' 4. The Master said, 'It is on this account that I hate your glib-tongued people.' CHAP. XXV. 1. Tsze-lu, Tsang Hsi, Zan Yu, and Kung-hsi Hwa were sitting by the Master. 2. He said to them, 'Though I am a day or so older than you, do not think ...
— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge
... the influence of sympathy. There are some natures that are gifted with a blessed power to bring consolation to men. It is not that they are glib of tongue or facile of speech, but somehow the very pressure of their hand is grateful to the saddened heart. The simple and kindly action, of which we think nothing, may tell powerfully on others, and unclose fountains of feeling ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... my G-d, that glib-tongu'd Aiken, My very heart and saul are quakin' To think how we stood groanin', shakin', And swat wi' dread, While Auld wi' hinging lip gaed snakin', ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... intricacies of law, and took to the abhorred office stool so as to learn the better the workings of its slow machinery. He tells us he only obtained the mastery of his pen by toiling faithfully, but inborn in him was the art of talking. Even as a petti-coated child, we read he gesticulated to aid his glib tongue. W. E. Henley (whose acquaintance Louis made about 1875, and who helped Stevenson with his chary praise and frank criticism) says of his friend, "He radiates talk. He will discourse with you of morals, music, marbles, men, manners, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... opinions. Some years later he did not conceal his conviction that Prince Bismarck would be worsted in his conflict with Rome on the Education Laws, and the event proved his forecast to be perfectly correct. This is an example of the dangers which beset a too glib and superficial treatment of political events which were conducted in secret, and with every circumstance ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... said Marcus, as the shepherd concluded his glib recital. "Couldst thou identify these knaves, if ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... and treacherous chieftains desired Lewis to tell the Governor of Virginia that "they had taken up the Hatchet against all Nations that were Enemies to the English"; but Lewis, an astute student of Indian Psychology, rightly surmised that all their glib professions of friendship and assistance were "only to put a gloss on their knavery." So it proved; for instead of the four hundred warriors promised under the treaty for service in Virginia, the Cherokees sent only seven warriors, accompanied ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... rounds, with the volume slipped into the pocket of his ragged coat; and although he would sometimes keep it quite a while, yet it came always back again at last, not much the worse for its travels into beggardom. And in this way, doubtless, his knowledge grew and his glib, random criticism took a wider range. But my library was not the first he had drawn upon: at our first encounter, he was already brimful of Shelley and the atheistical "Queen Mab," and "Keats—John Keats, sir." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at last able to speak a word on the torrent of glib language momentarily pausing; "but we are going away to fulfill ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... me begun to titter and snicker at anybody's havin' the power, and I sez, eyein' 'em sternly, "Do you know what you're laughin' at, young men? You talk about it real glib, but have you any idee of the greatness and overwhelmin' might of the Force you're speakin' of? That Power wuz at Pentecost in cloven tongues of flame, and strange voices and words that no man could utter. Saul laughed at the Power but it struck him ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... one would suppose, the easiest thing in the world for the glib-tongued Hiram to reply to such an interrogatory; but there was something awful in that gaze—not severe, nor stern, nor condemnatory, but awful in its earnest, truthful, not to ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... did the usually glib Henri vouchsafe in answer,—but clutching his sister's fingers in his own dirty, horny palm, he trotted meekly beside her out of the house and across the Square into the silence and darkness of Notre Dame. Their mother watched their little plump figures ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... speak, but also actions of yours to point to. Let it be seen that you have gone forth in a manner that is worthy of Athens, and are already in action. Words without the reality must always appear a vain and empty thing, and above all when they come from Athens; for the more we seem to excel in the glib use of such language, the more it is distrusted by every one. {13} The change, then, which is pointed out to them must be great, the conversion striking. They must see you paying your contributions, marching to war, doing everything ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... much success. The old-fashioned notions about the Golden Rule he was speedily well rid of; for when his indiscreet frankness to customers was observed, the rod taught him the folly of untimely truth-telling, if not the propriety of smoothing the way to a bargain by a glib falsehood. With such training, he grew up an expert salesman; and before he was of age, after various changes in business, he became the confidential clerk in a large wholesale house. Owing to unexpected ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... and with a singularly ingenious faculty for putting everything on his client's side in the best light, and his adversary's in the worst. He could "tear a witness to pieces," and turn him inside out. His junior, Skimpin, was glib, ready-armed at all points, and singularly adroit in "making a hare" of any witness who fell into his hands, teste Winkle. He had all the professional devices for dealing with a witness's answers, ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... He thought that like his own people they would be over-confident, urging each other on to great deeds by loud words and a hundred boasts. But the Russians lack self-confidence, are timid rather than over-bold, dreamy rather than fiery. Only their women are glib of speech. He thought that they would begin very brilliantly and end with a compromise, heart-breaking at ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... My taxi-man must have been paid and dismissed by that thin-faced young man, yet how cleverly the woman had evaded my question, and how glib her explanation of her servant going into ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... lighting outfit I have here, is perfectly hateful to the English mind.... It isn't that we are simply backward in these things, we are antagonistic. The British mind has never really tolerated electricity; at least, not that sort of electricity that runs through wires. Too slippery and glib for it. Associates it with Italians and fluency generally, with Volta, Galvani, Marconi and so on. The proper British electricity is that high-grade useless long-sparking stuff you get by turning round a glass machine; stuff we used to call frictional electricity. Keep it in ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... of this Executive Council," Cross intervened. "You're a bit too glib with your tongue ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the empty fireplace when we arrived, he smoking his evening pipe of Oronooko, and she working at her embroidery. The moment that I opened the door the man whom I had brought stepped briskly in, and bowing to the old people began to make glib excuses for the lateness of his visit, and to explain the manner in which we had picked him up. I could not help smiling at the utter amazement expressed upon my mother's face as she gazed at him, for the loss of his jack-boots ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the three actual sword makers, and had been president of the guild until he gave place to Roland. He was the oldest of the company; an ambitious man, a glib talker, with great influence among his fellows, and a natural leader of them. What he said generally represented ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... away they went up and down the room, and across and about, with an energy which showed that what Griselda lacked in her tongue she made up with her feet. Lord Dumbello, in the meantime, stood by, observant, thinking to himself that Lord Lufton was a glib-tongued, empty-headed ass, and reflecting that if his rival were to break the tendons of his leg in one of those rapid evolutions, or suddenly come by any other dreadful misfortune, such as the loss of all his property, absolute ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... Fabian Society through their influence, one dominant question has prevailed. Assuming the truth of the two main generalizations of Socialism, taking that statement of intention for granted, how is the thing to be done? They put aside the glib assurances of the revolutionary Socialists that everything would be all right when the People came to their own; and so earned for themselves the undying resentment of all those who believe the world is to be effectually mended by a liberal use of chest notes and red flags. They insisted that the ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... degrees of power, and the least are interesting, but they must not be confounded. There is the glib tongue and cool self-possession of the salesman in a large shop, which, as is well known, overpower the prudence and resolution of housekeepers of both sexes. There is a petty lawyer's fluency, which is sufficiently impressive to him who is devoid of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... battle in Jutland, she yielded herself up unasked to be the conqueror's spoil and bride. Thus all vows of woman are loosed by change of fortune and melted by the shifting of time; the faith of their soul rests on a slippery foothold, and is weakened by casual chances; glib in promises, and as sluggish in performance, all manner of lustful promptings enslave it, and it bounds away with panting and precipitate desire, forgetful of old things in the ever hot pursuit after something fresh. So ended Amleth. Had fortune been as kind to him as nature, he would have equalled ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... School. But the female friend who happens to be staying with her, is fond of excitement; my father expects her to accept the invitations which he is obliged to decline; so she gives up her own tastes and inclinations as usual, and goes into hot rooms among crowds of fine people, hearing the same glib compliments, and the same polite inquiries, night after night, until, patient as she is, she heartily wishes that her fashionable friends all lived in some opposite quarter of the globe, the ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... he, "with a man who was a poet; he could neither read nor write; but he was a poet by nature, having a muse wonderfully glib at making triplets and quartets. He was nicknamed Tum Tai of the Moor. He made an englyn for me to put in a book in which I was inserting all the verses ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... from drawing-room discussion as one conceals from sight the kitchen and outhouses; one dealt with them only when necessity compelled, and never in small-talk; and here had I been, so to speak, small-talking them in that glib, modern, irresponsible cadence with which our brazen age rings and clatters like the beating of triangles and gongs. Not triangles and gongs, but rather strings and flutes, had been the music to which Kings Port society ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... of me into the duties of my office wiped away my last lingering sense of double, or, at least, doubtful, dealing. He told me nothing that was not calculated to mislead me. And he was so glib and so frank and so sympathetic that, had I not known the whole machine from the inside, I ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... Ossoli, that the especial danger of this time is intellectual sciolism, vagueness, sentimental eclecticism—and feeling, too, as Socrates of old believed, that intellectual vagueness and shallowness, however glib, and grand, and eloquent it may seem, is inevitably the parent of a moral vagueness and shallowness, which may leave our age as it left the later Greeks, without an absolute standard of right or of truth, ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... civil war, of a fight for independence, were heard throughout Norway. Meetings were held more or less secretly, and at each of them was some one with well-filled pockets and glib tongue, to enlarge on the country's wrongs, and promise assistance from an outside irresistible power as soon as they showed that they meant to strike for freedom. No one openly named the power. That was not necessary; it was everywhere felt and understood. Men who were ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... greatly interested in all its activities, and prepared to be proud of its achievements, but she possessed none of the instincts of a wire-puller. So long as the class offices were creditably filled she cared not who held them, and comparing her ignorance of parliamentary procedure with the glib self-confidence of Jean, Eleanor and their friends, she even felt grateful to them for rescuing the class from the pitfalls that ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... and talked about the dinner on the train, which had been so poor; about London, about dances. She was really very nervous, and chattered from fear. Morel sat all the time smoking his thick twist tobacco, watching her, and listening to her glib London speech, as he puffed. Mrs. Morel, dressed up in her best black silk blouse, answered quietly and rather briefly. The three children sat round in silence and admiration. Miss Western was the princess. Everything of the best was got out for her: the best cups, the best spoons, the best ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... also, Pierre almost shrank from the unknown sorrow of this man beside him, who was about to disclose the story of his life. The solitary places do not make men glib of tongue; rather, spare of words. They whose tragedy lies in the capacity to suffer greatly, being given the woe of imagination, bring forth inner history as a mother gasps life into ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... probably, adorned the fronts, and the customers, who made their purchases from the sidewalk, must have everywhere formed noisy and very animated groups. The native of the south gesticulates a great deal, likes to chaffer, discusses with vehemence, and speaks loudly and quickly with a glib tongue and a sonorous voice. Just take a look at him in the lower quarters of Naples, which, in more than one point of view, recall the narrow streets ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... instinctive dislike of Kathryn was gathering point and focus, in these days, by reason of her increasing references to Claims, and the All-Mind, and to the fact that the pain in a neglected tooth was only a manifestation of cowardly unbelief. The doctor scented mischief in the glib phrases. He held his peace heroically, though, albeit now and then he longed to shake his babbling patient as ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... head is full of what I was doing before I began to pray, or what I am going to do as soon as I get through. I do not believe anybody else in the world is like me in this respect. Then when I feel differently, and can make a nice, glib prayer, with floods of tears running down my cheeks, I get all puffed up, and think how much pleased God must be to see me so fervent in spirit. I go down-stairs in this frame, and begin to scold ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... partly Scotch, by nature he was entirely Irish. He possessed a glib tongue of the latter order and his habit was to address every one he met, be he Indian, Highland Scot, or French Canadian, in the dialect which the person was supposed to favour. So he roared out in his magnificent ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... he did mean, I guess it wuz anodyne, I keep a bottle to home for nerves. But 'tennyrate in a few minutes he wuz talkin' quite glib about home and the children and I felt richly repaid for all my trouble. And with such little agreeable talk and eppisodin' did I try to diversify the weariness ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... fiendish accompaniment to the devils' chorus—the gossip of the station as detailed by Tessa ran with glib mockery through her brain. Ah, they only suspected. But she knew—she knew! The door of that secret chamber had opened wide to her at last, and perforce she ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... was a young fellow who wanted more than evil weather and a dreich, black night to depress him. A fine, upstanding lad he was, with a glib English tongue that readily sold his wares, and which, along with a handsome, merry face, helped him with ease into the good graces of those whom he familiarly knew as "the lasses." Dandy Jim had had many a flirtation, but now he ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... from the amorous entanglement with Mr. Clemm and tried to say something. She could think of nothing which befitted the occasion; all her glib eloquence was temporarily asphyxiated. Mr. Clemm stammered and looked about for some hole in which to conceal himself. He, too, seemed far different from the pugnacious, self-confident dictator who reigned supreme on the ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... what a sinister delight did he chuckle over the frailties and infamies, a guilty knowledge of which he had dragged from many an unwilling sinner! To oust him, when installed, was a plain impossibility, for this wringer of hearts was only too glib in the surrender of another's scandal; and as he accepted the last scurrility with Christian resignation, his unfortunate employer could but strengthen his vocabulary and patiently endure the presence of ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... face, with its brownish-red cheeks, protuberant ears and horizontal slit of a mouth, was overcast with gravity. His bald forehead was seamed with the wrinkles of responsibility. He drew Annixter into one of the empty stalls and began an elaborate explanation, glib, voluble, interminable, going over again in detail what he had reported ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... all, as may be remembered by the readers of the Carol, to to have been intrinsically "a mere nothing; you might learn to whistle it in two minutes." Say that in twenty minutes, or, at the outside, in half-an-hour, any ordinarily glib talker might have rattled through these comic recollections of Mr. Magsman, yet, when rattled through by Dickens, the laughter awakened seems now in the retrospect to have been altogether out of proportion. In itself the subject ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... come, let us talk thus together no longer like children, standing in mid onset of war. For there are revilings in plenty for both of us to utter—a hundred-thwarted ship would not suffice for the load of them. Glib is the tongue of man, and many words are therein of every kind, and wide is the range of his speech hither and thither. Whatsoever word thou speak, such wilt thou hear in answer. But what need that ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... outbreak, such as the Silesian workers' revolt, is not to play the schoolmaster to this event, but to study its peculiar character. For this a certain amount of scientific insight and some goodwill is necessary, whereas for the other operation a glib phraseology, saturated in shallow egoism, ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... very low to an Italian lady, and for the moment wished herself in Beacon Street. It was a great trouble to her that she could not pluck up courage to speak a word in Italian. "I know more about it than some that are glib enough," she would say to her niece Livy, "but these Tuscans are so particular ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... a peg above Dulcie in station, and a vast deal before her in the world's estimation. She was indeed "a fortune;" and you err egregiously if you suppose a fortune was not properly valued a hundred years ago. Men went mad for fair faces and glib tongues, but solidly and sensibly married fortunes, according to all the old news-prints. But Clarissa was also a beauty, far more of a regular beauty than Dulcie, with one of those inconceivably dazzling ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... goodness they'd take the snottynosed twins and their babby home to the mischief out of that so that was why she just gave a gentle hint about its being late. And when Cissy came up Edy asked her the time and Miss Cissy, as glib as you like, said it was half past kissing time, time to kiss again. But Edy wanted to know because they were told to ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... whether it is not already too late: I am sure it will be, if I am to stay for an answer to this; but I hope you will have thought on it before you receive this. I am so much recovered as to have been abroad. I cannot say my arm is glib yet; but, if I waited for the total departure of' the rheumatism, I might stay at home till the national debt is paid. My fair writing is a proof of my lameness: I labour as if I were engraving; and drop no words, as I do ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... name," said the glib Tam; "we were brought up in the same village, the village of Glascae, and tramped off to the same college at six every morning when the bummer went. There'd we sit, me ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... sir," said the man in glib babu English. "I am seeking Captain King sahib, for whom my brother is veree anxious to be servant. Can you kindlee tell me, sir, where I could ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... only too conscious of the grey-blueness of her fine eyes, and the modish cut of her clothes. She had a knack which seemed to Laura both desirable and unattainable: that of appearing to be engrossed in glib chat with her companion, while in reality she did not hear a word Laura said, and ogled everyone who passed, out of the tail of ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... these?" he asked, with biting scorn. "Tell the Duke and Lord Cheisford where I found them! Let us hear your glib young tongue telling the ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... I debated twelve days, at Burksville, with Presiding Elder Frogge. He was the great champion of Methodism in Southern Kentucky. He had had a great many debates, and, while he was very ready and glib in his line of debating, I soon discovered that his scholarship and reading were both very limited, exceedingly so; and I intentionally widened the range of controversy more than was my wont, to see what he would do—and he was completely lost. His forte in debating is wit and ridicule, by which ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... go. 'Mr. Willett,' I said, 'they found your son's camera on the trail. Your butler exhibits it to the police and reporters and tells them a glib story. He told it to me, also. But what I want to know is, why nobody has thought ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... up their noses at them. Little girls run about selling cups of water for a few small fishes to the half-exhausted wordy combatants. To me it was an amusing scene. I could not understand the words that flowed off their glib tongues, but the gestures were ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... golden. In a day of tiny waists hers could have been spanned by Ben Westerveld's two hands. He discovered that later. Just now he thought he had never seen anything so fairylike and dainty, though he did not put it that way. Ben was not glib of thought ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... to howl, but he certainly could not talk, and it was hard for him to follow such a glib speaker as the president. However, the fact remained that he had distinguished himself, and brought honour to the Fifth Form in general by taking seven wickets; and for this reason his comrades would have been content had he merely ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... her! There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body. O! these encounterers so glib of tongue That give a coasting welcome ere it comes, And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts To every tickling reader! Set them down For sluttish spoils of opportunity, And daughters of ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... you do not love," impetuously returned the other with glib, persistent vehemence. "I would marry the Sheik, I would prize his flocks, his riches; but I love—I ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... was a common thing to hear the Second Army spoken of as a whole Army of cowards and "defeatists." Many foreign critics, with minds blankly ignorant of nearly all the facts, seemed to think that the whole business could be accounted for by a few glib phrases about German and Socialist propaganda, or the supposed lack of fighting qualities in the Italian race. Yet it was this same Second Army, which in those now distant days in August had conquered the Bainsizza Plateau, amid the acclamations of all the Allied world. Whole Armies do not change ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... poor apology for a man—not worth the powder to blow you up. You hadn't the sand to fight for the money entrusted to you, nor the nerve to face me after you had lost it. Get out of here. Vamos! Don't ever let me hear yore smooth, glib tongue again." ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... manner the whole day passed. During dinner Aratoff chatted a great deal with Platosha, questioned her about old times, which, by the way, she recalled and transmitted badly, as she was not possessed of a very glib tongue, and had noticed hardly anything in the course of her life save her Yashka. She merely rejoiced that he was so good-natured and affectionate that day!—Toward evening Aratoff quieted down to such a degree that he ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Lady Helen fain would say Her word, but in his restless way Sir Barbour nipped that word; The other three were dumb perforce— Except Sir Barbour's glib discourse, No human sound ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... several hundred rounds of ammunition. The job was an offensive patrol—that is to say, we were to hunt trouble around a given area behind the Boche lines. A great deal of the credit for our "mastery of the air"—that glib phrase of the question-asking politician—during the Somme Push of 1916, belongs to those who organised and those who led these fighting expeditions over enemy country. Thanks to them, our aircraft were able to carry out reconnaissance, ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... that strikes us in connection with this glib project is the enormous difficulty of carrying it into execution. It is easy, we all know, to call spirits from the vasty deep, but exceedingly difficult to induce them to obey the summons. It is easy, and to feminine ingenuity rather pleasant than otherwise, to devise sumptuary ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... great diplomacy, nor did Gonzaga employ much. He bluntly told Cappoccio that he and his comrades had allowed Messer Francesco's glib tongue to befool them that morning, and that the assurances Francesco had given them were not worthy of ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... it was old liquor, sixty years at least. But I gad, it strikes me that you are pretty glib to-night. You must have ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... replied with glib gusto, "is engaged at present and begs to be excused. But," she added in words which were obviously her own, "you can put your junk in the closet over there with the rest ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... things that a crowd says when they've got hold of a feller that they see they can plague. Well, some things they said WAS funny,—yes, and mighty witty too, I ain't denying that,—but all the same it warn't fair nor brave, all them people pitching on one, and they so glib and sharp, and him without any gift of talk to answer back with. But, good land! what did he want to sass back for? You see, it couldn't do him no good, and it was just nuts for them. They HAD him, you know. But that was his way. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... with this parting kiss, Which joins two souls, remember this: Though thou be'st young, kind, soft, and fair And may'st draw thousands with a hair; Yet let these glib temptations be Furies to others, friends to me. Look upon all, and though on fire Thou set their hearts, let chaste desire Steer thee to me, and think, me gone, In having all, that thou hast none. Nor so immured would I have Thee live, as dead and in thy grave; But walk abroad, yet wisely ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... Though gentleman-like enough, he was insignificant in person, and he had little to say for himself. Probably it would have struck his critics as little short of profane to make the comparison, otherwise there is a great example that might have stood him and all men not giants and glib of tongue in good stead. It is written of an apostle, and he not the least of the apostles, that he might have been termed in bodily presence mean, and in speech contemptible. But boys and girls ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... given a piece of Greek Testament to translate, for mercy's sake do not be too glib. Dinna translate a thing until you are sure it is there. They have an unholy habit of leaving out a couple of verses some place in the middle, and you're just the one to tumble head-first into the ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... says nothing. It is curious. The whole world and all its marvelous distractions seem to have resolved themselves into the curt sentence, "It rains." And somehow the great financier's faculty for the glib manipulation of platitudes which has earned him a reputation as a powerful economist seems for the moment to have abandoned him. His eyes remind one of a boy standing on tiptoe and staring over a fence at ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... for suspecting him. He is too glib with his Princeton. Himmel! Did you ever hear a man talk so fast and so much and use such words? I can speak as good English as any man my age, but there were words, dozens of them, that ...
— The Boy Scouts in Front of Warsaw • Colonel George Durston
... You preach to me no more, You, once so glib with holy words! I am Astonished!. . . (With burlesque fury): Stay, I will surprise you too! Hark! I permit you. . . (He pretends to be seeking for something to tease her with, and to have found it): . . .It is something new!— To—pray for me, ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... understanding. They clear up the deadlocks that come from the hard and fast use of terms, they establish mutual charity as an intellectual necessity. The common way of speech and thought which the old system of logic has simply systematized, is too glib and too presumptuous of certainty. We must needs use language, but we must use it always with the thought in our minds of its unreal exactness, its actual habitual deflection from fact. All propositions ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... not more than the glib commonplaces of a man who had found Christianity convenient, but not exactly sufficient. In another place he says: "The wisest course evidently is to combine a portion of the philosophy of the tombstone with a portion of the philosophy of the publican and something more, to enjoy one's pint ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... on ahead, knew nothing of the love scenes just behind them. They talked of many things, of the moonlight and the river and the scent of the flowers, but all the time Hugh felt diffident and tongue-tied. He had not the glib tongue of Gavan Blake, and he felt little at ease talking common-places. Mary Grant thought he must be worried over something, and, with her usual ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... graphic as in musical art. There is often no literary meaning whatever in some of the best examples of both. Harmony, tone, color and technique pure and simple are the full compass of the intention. What this may suggest to the individual he is welcome to, but the glib dictum of certain preachers on art as to hidden intentions would indicate that they had effected an agreement, with the full confidence of the silent partner to exploit him. Beware of the gilt edged footnote, or the art that depends upon it. A writer of ordinary imagination ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... succeeded at the task that except when he was among associates and relapsed into the argot of the breed, he used language fit for a college professor—fit for some college professors anyway. At thirty he was a glib, spry person with a fancy for gay housings. At forty-five, when he reached the top of his swing, he had the looks, the vocabulary and the presence of an educated and ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... do all these things," Phineas Cross interrupted, "because he speaks for us, our duly elected representative. Sit thee down, Fenn. If you wanted the job, well, you haven't got it, and that's all there is about it, and though you're as glib with your tongue as any here, and though you've as many at your back, perchance, as I have, I tell you I'd never have voted for you if there hadn't been another man here. So put that in your ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... his private affairs. What would one give to know the thoughts in that little brown head, on its first look at life! Whatever the reason, he plainly concluded not to take the risk that day, for he disappeared again behind a door that no reporter, however glib or plausible, could pass. Sometimes he vanished with a suddenness that was not natural. Did his heart fail him, or, perchance, his footing give way? For whether he clung to the walls, or made stepping-stones of his brothers and sisters (as do many of his betters, ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... you don't know what a glib young chatterbox he is; and, if he has his way, he is to be our errand-boy! Yesterday he challenged Eros—tripped up his heels somehow, and had him on his back in a twinkling; before the applause was over, he had taken the opportunity of a congratulatory ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... He was very sure that his request to be let alone would not be heeded. Hartwell, the Eastern manager of the company, was a shallow, empty-headed man, insufferably conceited. He held the position, partly through a controlling interest in the shares, but more through the nimble use of a glib tongue that so man[oe]uvred his corporal's guard of information that it appeared an able-bodied regiment of knowledge covering ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... in any favorable disposition to be amused. The Count's glib cynicism had revealed a new aspect of his nature from which we both recoiled. But it was impossible to resist the comical distress of so very large a man at the loss of so very small a mouse. We laughed in spite of ourselves; ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... Salustri lay back at ease in his chair, his classic head reclining on the velvet cushions, and recited in low and measured tones one of his own poems, caring little or nothing whether his neighbors attended to him or not. The glib tongue of the Marchese Gualdro ran on smoothly and incessantly, though he frequently lost the thread of his anecdotes and became involved in a maze of contradictory assertions. The rather large nose of the Chevalier Mancini ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... The money-making lot flourish to some extent in Kimberley, but most of all in Johannesburg. You are soon able to recognise his points and identify him at a distance. He is a little too neatly dressed and his watch-chain is a little too much of a certainty. His manner is excessively glib and fluent, yet he has a trick of furtively glancing round while he talks, as if fearful of being overheard. For the same reason he speaks in low tones. He must often be discussing indifferent topics, but he always looks as if he were hatching a swindle. There is also a curious look ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... silent talks much folly; a glib tongue, unless it be bridled, will often talk a man ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... be specially nice and kind to Hilda after his evening's pleasure, but he felt it impossible now to keep the glib, sarcastic ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... This glib speech quite banished any lingering suspicion that Jerry or Hamp may have felt. They were highly elated by the news, and they helped to pack up with alacrity. In a short time the little party ...
— The Camp in the Snow - Besiedged by Danger • William Murray Graydon
... the translator of Lucan's "Pharsalia," was at one time an Under-Secretary of State. Rowe's dramatic work is not yet absolutely forgotten by the world. We still hear of the "gallant gay Lothario," although many of those who are glib with the words do not know that they come from the "Fair Penitent," and would not care even if ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... tongue, glib, glib, glib, chatter, chatter, chatter. She related to them the whole story of the griffin and his daughter, and a great deal more besides, that the griffin had ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not restrain a joyful exclamation. "So that was it!" he cried. "You were at the McIntyre house, and gave the poison to Turnbull there—and not in the court room—four hours before he died. You'll swing for that crime, my buck, in spite of your glib ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... lady of Furness," said the merry taunter, with many interruptions from laughter and want of breath; "thy heels are as glib as thy tongue: for which—oh, oh! I am breathed—blown—dispossessed of my birthright, free quaffing o' the air. Ha, ha! I cannot laugh. Oh! what a mouth didst thou make at old blacksleeves. Gaping so, I wonder he mistook ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... black stubble of his thin gunpowder eye-brows, that looked like a scorched after-math from a last week's shaving. His coat collar behind in perfect unison, both of colour and lustre, with the coarse yet glib cordage, which I suppose he called his hair, and which with a bend inward at the nape of the neck,—the only approach to flexure in his whole figure,—slunk in behind his waistcoat; while the countenance lank, dark, very hard, and with strong perpendicular furrows, gave me a dim notion of ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... always, at thy desk, thrown wide, Thy most betreasured books ranged neighborly— The rarest rhymes of every land and sea And curious tongue—thine old face glorified,— Thou haltest thy glib quill, and, laughing-eyed, Givest hale welcome even unto me, Profaning thus thine attic's sanctity, To briefly visit, yet to still abide Enthralled there of thy sorcery of wit, And thy songs' most exceeding dear conceits. O lips, cleft to the ripe ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... trouble, but provided with a programme of glib excuses and prepared at a moment's notice to call witnesses (false), always escape punishment. Some do not care if punished or not and who boast that they had full value for their "two days C.B." Heaume had a cute dodge of replying to an officer's angry expostulation ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... is, of course, that his achievement consists precisely in making patent the impenetrable mystery of her, and of the tangled complex of striving and aspiration of which she is so helplessly a part. It is in this sense that "Sister Carrie" is a profound work. It is not a book of glib explanations, of ready formulae; it is, above all ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... example. Be humble, it is said, as Christ was humble. Theology indeed would prescribe annihilation rather than humiliation. Man in presence of the Infinite is absolutely nothing. Science, according to a glib commonplace of popular writers, agrees with theology in prescribing humility. But that very ambiguous word has a totally different meaning in the two cases. Science bids us recognize the inevitable limitation of our powers, and the feebleness ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... the Whartons out from the city, and Lorelei's first glimpse of Fennellcourt was such that she forgot her vague dislike of Hayman himself. Bert, who had met her and Bob for luncheon, had turned out to be, instead of a polished man of the world, a glib youth with an artificial laugh and a pair of sober, heavy-lidded eyes. Lorelei's shyness at meeting him had quickly disappeared when she found that he knew more theatrical people than she and that he was quite ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... daughter, whom he never married, Hakon had a son Harald Slettmali (smooth-talker, or glib of speech), and two daughters, Ingibiorg and Margret. Ingibiorg afterwards married Olaf Bitling, king of the Sudreys; and Ragnvald Gudrodson, the great Viking, was of her line, and, as we shall see, in 1200 or thereabouts, had the Caithness earldom ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... which I'm to paste up in this room; and I want to have it in German and Swedish as well as Russian, that every one who comes in may be able to read it. Perhaps one of you would kindly lend me a hand with the job, for I'm not very glib at ...
— Harper's Young People, August 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... motley company of the riff-raff and raggabash of the island,—young and elderly, silent and glib—rough as a pigskin, and smooth as their sleeves at the elbow; with just one feature common to the whole pack of pick-thanks, and that was a ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... sophisticated to entertain aught but the most contemptuous disbelief in her pretensions of special foresight and mysterious endowment. They did not fear her discrimination, and told their story, through an interpreter, with a glib disregard of any uncanny perspicacity on her part. She was one of the many Indians of the reservation who speak no English. Her cabin was far from Quallatown, and indeed at a considerable distance from any other dwelling. With her and her few associates, the ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Frenchman to come and dine with you in London, and see what a genial and charming person he can be—what a quick bosom friend, and with what a glib and silver tongue to praise the warmth ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... flowers, Blowest in the firmamental glory, Renewest in the heart of the sad human All faiths, guard thou the innocent spirit Into whose unknowing hands this noontide Thou pourest treasure, yet scarce recognised, That unashamed before man's glib wisdom, Unabashed beneath the wrath of chance, She accept in simplicity of homage The hidden holiness, the created emblem To be in her, until death shall take her, The source and secret of ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... the gods; while the Athenian insisted that Theseus was far superior, for his fortune had been in every way supremely blessed, whereas Hercules had at one time been forced to act as a servant. And he gained his point, for he was a very glib fellow, like all Athenians; so that the Theban, who was no match for him in talking, cried at last in some disgust, "All right, have your way; I only hope that, when our heroes are angry with ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... upon her! There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body. O, these encounterers, so glib of tongue, That give accosting welcome ere it comes, And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts To every ticklish reader! set them down For sluttish spoils of opportunity ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... To tell the sad truth, they were just as strong as ever. The man was somehow prejudiced: he found Monk's story entirely too glib, and knew a mean sense of gratification when the cure ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... thumb-marked and dirtied with brick chips and the soil of the trenches, and showed stage by stage how the drama unrolled. It was no good. Poor me! nobody quite understood. Some thought possibly that I was a glib liar; others did not even trouble to think anything. How much they understood! They had not the background, the atmosphere, the long weeks which were necessary to teach even us ourselves. They had not tasted the poison and did not yet suspect its existence. So I gradually desisted. ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... age of 37,—my ideal of love is a powerful, strongly built man, of my own age or rather younger—preferably of the working class. Though having solid sense and character, he need not be specially intellectual. If endowed in the latter way, he must not be too glib or refined. Anything effeminate in a man, or anything of the cheap intellectual style, repels me ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... violence as only men bear with a woman in a temper. With the letting in of the fresh air, fresh energy in the prosecution manifested itself. The witnesses were being subjected to inquisitorial torture; their answers were still glib, but the faces were studies of the passions held in the leash of self-control. Not twenty minutes had ticked their beat of time when once more the jury, to a man, showed signs of shivering. Half a dozen gravely took out their pocket-handkerchiefs, and as gravely ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... people and officers; there are the altars of the spirits of the land and grain. Why must one read books before he can be considered to have learned?' 4. The Master said, 'It is on this account that I hate your glib-tongued people.' CHAP. XXV. 1. Tsze-lu, Tsang Hsi, Zan Yu, and Kung-hsi Hwa were sitting by the Master. 2. He said to them, 'Though I am a day or so older than you, do not ...
— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge
... of respect for Edwin was now more securely based upon impartial intelligence than before; it owed less to her weakness for seeing the best in people. As for Edwin, he was saying to himself: "I wish to the devil I could talk to her without spluttering! Why can't I be natural? Why can't I be glib? Some chaps could." And Edwin could be, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... myself, though mortal, once was nursed By fairy gossips, friendly at my birth, And in my childish ear glib Mab rehearsed Her breezy travels round our planet's girth, Telling me wonders of the moon and earth; My gramarye at her grave lap I conn'd, Where Puck hath been convened to make me mirth; I have ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... good intentions" is no longer a glib phrase to me; it is a conviction born of seeing some of the suffering of this country. The doctor has just been ashore to see a woman with a five-days old baby. No attempt whatever had been made to get her or her bed clean or comfortable. She had developed a violent ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... a butcher, scratching his head, and in a humble voice, "craving your pardon and the king's, this Master Robin sojourned a short time in this hamlet, and was a kind neighbour, and mighty glib of the tongue. Don't ye mind, neighbours," he added rapidly, eager to change the conversation, "how he made us leave off when we were just about burning Adam Warner, the old nigromancer, in his den yonder? Who else could have done that? But an' we had ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... all, or else my head is full of what I was doing before I began to pray, or what I am going to do as soon as I get through. I do not believe anybody else in the world is like me in this respect. Then when I feel differently, and can make a nice, glib prayer, with floods of tears running down my cheeks, I get all puffed up, and think how much pleased God must be to see me so fervent in spirit. I go down-stairs in this frame, and begin to scold Susan for misplacing my music, ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... filled with a perverse envy of all the confused and stammering heroes of history. Is Washington faltering out a few broken and ungrammatical sentences, in reply to the vote of thanks of the Virginia legislature, less manly than the glib tongue in the court-room or in the club that can hit the mark every time? The test of a wit or of a scholar is one thing; the test of a man, I take it, is quite another. In this and some other respects ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... step; we are to follow Christ's example. Be humble, it is said, as Christ was humble. Theology indeed would prescribe annihilation rather than humiliation. Man in presence of the Infinite is absolutely nothing. Science, according to a glib commonplace of popular writers, agrees with theology in prescribing humility. But that very ambiguous word has a totally different meaning in the two cases. Science bids us recognize the inevitable limitation of our powers, and the feebleness of any individual as compared with ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... story pretty glib by this time; I had reeled it off with increasing particulars to the Westchester Park station-master, and the head man at the stables, and General Filbert, and I was so letter-perfect that I had a vision of the whole thing, especially of my talking with the general while I ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... could be won for the plot, a proposal to compromise the whole matter amicably might serve to beguile him to the chateau of his friend at Ebernburg till his safe-conduct should expire, and then the liars could throw off the mask and dispose of him with credit in the eyes of Rome. The glib and wily Glapio led in the attempt. Von Sickingen and Bucer were entrapped by his bland hypocrisy, and lent themselves to the execution of the specious proposition. But when they came to Luther with it, he turned his back, saying, "If the emperor's confessor has anything ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... Agrippina. She would go, she said, and take with her to the camp the noble boy who was now of full age to undertake those imperial duties which a usurper was exercising in virtue of crimes which she was now prepared to confess. Then let the mutilated Burrus and the glib-tongued Seneca see whether they could be a match for the son of Claudius and the daughter of Germanicus. Such language, uttered with violent gestures and furious imprecations, might well excite the alarm of the ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... goatherd really a son of the man, or a serpent-tongued liar, a chosen master of craft whose seeming guilelessness had helped to delude us? It had been a crude first idea on his part to suggest the admission as refugees of a swarm of armed men, but, when this had failed, there had been glib readiness with the other and more subtle plan that had so nearly succeeded. And as I reflected on these things, I marked the young hypocrite for ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... knows how far down into their depths of misery and degradation the sweetness of that delicacy descends. It haunts the drunkard's dreams, and breathes a breath of purity into the bosom of the abandoned. That is the power of a noble innocence, a respect for our fellow creatures—glib phrases, but how little understood and acted on! With my father it was quite natural.... He was a hot hater, though, I can tell you. He hated hypocrisy, he hated lying, and he hated presumption and pretentiousness. ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... tread the shore of France—of sunny Provence—the last unvisited realm we have to roam through before returning home. It is with a feeling of more than common relief that we see around us the lively faces and hear the glib tongues of the French. It is like an earnest that the "roughing" we have undergone among Bohemian boors and Italian savages is well nigh finished, and that, henceforth, we shall find civilized sympathy and politeness, if nothing more, to make the way smoother. Perhaps the three woful ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... wig and gown, and here the old Jew clothes-man under his dingy tiara; here the soldier in his scarlet, and here the undertaker's mute in streaming hat-band and worn cotton gloves; here the musty scholar fumbling his faded leaves, and here the scented actor dangling his showy seals. Here the glib politician crying his legislative panaceas, and here the peripatetic Cheap-Jack holding aloft his quack cures for human ills. Here the sleek capitalist and there the sinewy laborer; here the man of science and here the shoe-back; here the poet and here the water-rate collector; ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... were held in the literary and scientific society of Edinburgh, says: 'I think the epithet most in vogue concerning it was "commonplace."' He adds, however, that one of the most eminent of that society was of a different opinion, who, when some glib youth chanced to echo in his hearing the consolatory tenet of local mediocrity, answered quietly, "I have the misfortune to think differently from you—in my humble opinion Walter Scott's sense is a still more ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... religion is, then, rational because attacked along irrational grounds; the Church is also reasonable because she has not been swayed by the attraction of heresy nor listened to the glib fallacies of those who always want to make her something more or ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... plans. It was a gusty March day when the Falkners went out with the architect to consider the lot, and spent an afternoon trying to decide how to secure the most sun. Falkner, weary of the whole matter, listened to the glib young architect. Another windy day in April they returned to the lot to look at the excavation. The contracts were not yet signed. Lumber had gone soaring, and there was a strike in the brick business, ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... China. There is so much craft, so much diplomacy, so much subtle legerdemain that, if he chooses, the Chinese may give you no end of trouble to inform yourself on the simplest subject. The Chinese, like so many cavillers and calumniators, all glib of tongue, who know better than any nation on earth how to turn voice and pen to account, have taken the utmost advantage of extended means of circulating thought, with the result that an Englishman such as myself, even were I a deep scholar of their language, would ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... unconvincing—the glib reply was too ready—too like the studied answer to an anticipated question. She regarded him searchingly, but the simple directness of his gaze caused her own eyes to falter, and she turned into the house with a deep breath that ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... marriage of the scheming Yankee, James Early, into the then wealthy and powerful family of Lavillotte, old-timers of Louisiana soil, was considered the opposite of an honor by them, with the exception of the young girl, educated in the north, who had been fascinated by his fine looks and glib tongue. Therefore, when Joyce was born, an edict was issued by its leading members—two patriarchal uncles who held control of the property—that she should be cut off from her maternal rights in the family estate unless allowed to take the family name. Now, the loss of ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... to receive applause, the silence and constraint that hung over the assembly must have stirred a fear that something terrible had happened, which would be increased by Peter's question. It was a merciful opportunity given her to separate herself from the sin and the punishment; but her lie was glib, and indicated determination to stick to the fraud. That moment was heavy with her fate, and she knew it not; but she knew that she had the opportunity of telling the truth, and she did not take it. She had to make the hard choice which we have sometimes to make, to be true to some sinful bargain ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... horse. The youth who knew the dictionary and newspaper by heart had a black horse, and he who knew all about the corporation laws received a milk-white steed. Then they rubbed the corners of their mouths with fish-oil, so that they might become very smooth and glib. All the servants stood below in the courtyard, and looked on while they mounted their horses; and just by chance the third son came up. For the proprietor had really three sons, though nobody counted the third with his brothers, ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... carabinieri, who ordered him to leave." And at the close "I was no longer alone with my friend as a neutral eye-witness. The British Admiral Sinclair appeared, causing much perturbation to the Italian officers, who though some of them had just taken part in the shambles, were already glib with excuses. 'The British Admiral wants to know' was enough to bring the Italian officer running and bowing, with 'I beg of you....' 'We are willing to explain all....' American naval officers of the destroyer Talbot were also among this post-mortem crowd. In a French motor ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... Mr. Gamely said with a side glance at Pepsy. He was not going to have her witness his discomfiture at the hands of this glib little stranger. Moreover, a slur at his personal splendor was a very grave matter and not to ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... all about engines and fighting. It would help, he was certain, to be shanghaied. But no matter how wistfully, no matter how late at night he timorously forced himself to loiter among unwashed English stokers on West Street, he couldn't get himself molested except by glib persons wishing ten cents "for a ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... its achievements, but she possessed none of the instincts of a wire-puller. So long as the class offices were creditably filled she cared not who held them, and comparing her ignorance of parliamentary procedure with the glib self-confidence of Jean, Eleanor and their friends, she even felt grateful to them for rescuing the class from the pitfalls ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... the house had retired to rest, with what a sinister delight did he chuckle over the frailties and infamies, a guilty knowledge of which he had dragged from many an unwilling sinner! To oust him, when installed, was a plain impossibility, for this wringer of hearts was only too glib in the surrender of another's scandal; and as he accepted the last scurrility with Christian resignation, his unfortunate employer could but strengthen his vocabulary and patiently endure the presence of this ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... the one sees and what the other sees are in the same place. Since the shape and colour are not quite the same for the two men, this raises a difficulty, hastily solved, or rather covered up, by declaring what each sees to be purely "subjective"—though it would puzzle those who use this glib word to say what they mean by it. The truth seems to be that space—and time also—is much more complicated than it would appear to be from the finished structure of physics, and that the one all-embracing three-dimensional space is a logical construction, obtained by means ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... a young fellow who wanted more than evil weather and a dreich, black night to depress him. A fine, upstanding lad he was, with a glib English tongue that readily sold his wares, and which, along with a handsome, merry face, helped him with ease into the good graces of those whom he familiarly knew as "the lasses." Dandy Jim had had many a flirtation, but now he felt that his roving days were nearly past. He was ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... believed that the best and highest of their own idols had better means and skill of measurement: I can never forget the pregnant expression of one of the ablest of that school and party—Lord Cockburn—who, when some glib youth chanced to echo in his hearing the consolatory tenet of local mediocrity, answered quietly: "I have the misfortune to think differently from you—in my humble opinion, Walter Scott's sense is a still more wonderful thing than ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... easily, in perfect repose of manner, the half smile still sketching her lips. She said just nothing at all in response to his glib excuses; but when he had quite finished she laid her hand in his arm. Mrs. Morrell, her colour high, continued to stare straight ahead, immobile except for the tapping of one foot. To Keith's request to be excused she vouchsafed a stiff half ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... reason of her increasing references to Claims, and the All-Mind, and to the fact that the pain in a neglected tooth was only a manifestation of cowardly unbelief. The doctor scented mischief in the glib phrases. He held his peace heroically, though, albeit now and then he longed to shake his babbling patient as the terrier shakes ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... surprised by her glib enunciation of the difficult sentence she had quoted. "Why are we ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... result of sufficiently good sense, but in some such disorganized mass as if they had thrown it up rather than spoken it. It seemed to me that this was almost as much by choice as necessity. An Englishman, ambitious of public favor, should not be too smooth. If an orator is glib, his countrymen distrust him. They dislike smartness. The stronger and heavier his thoughts, the better, provided there be an element of commonplace running through them; and any rough, yet never vulgar force ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... pervert who, with a glib tongue, protests that his conscience drove him from the Church, that his enslaved intelligence needed deliverance, search him and you will find a skeleton in his closet; and if you do not find it, ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... and sees Cadmus and Teiresias in masque. Like the exaggerated diabolical figures in some of the religious plays and imageries of the Middle Age, he is an impersonation of stupid impiety, one of those whom the gods willing to [67] destroy first infatuate. Alternating between glib unwisdom and coarse mockery, between violence and a pretence of moral austerity, he understands only the sorriest motives; thinks the whole thing feigned, and fancies the stranger, so effeminate, so attractive of women with ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... seem to think lecturing a very simple occupation, requiring only a glib tongue, and a good pair of lungs. Several years ago, I received a letter from a young man in which he wrote: "I heard you lecture last week. I would like to become a lecturer myself. I have no experience and very little education, ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... questions in a flurry, though he had been glib enough. He had had no fear that his father would appreciate that he was getting half-truths, or, rather, truths prepared skillfully for paternal consumption; his flurry had come from a sense that he was himself not doing quite the manly, the courageous thing. ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... companion, and lightly assured her that I was as mad as a dingo dog. From the moment after the phrase's utterance to that of the slapping of my knee, it had been altogether absent from my mind. Now it haunts me. It reiterates itself after the manner of a glib phrase. I am glad I am not in a railway carriage; the cranks would amuse the wheels with it all night long. As it is, the surf tries to thunder it out on the shingle just a few yards away from my ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... hearts and consciences of slaveholders, than if I was attacking them in America; for almost every paper that I now receive from the United States, comes teeming with statements about this fugitive Negro, calling him a "glib-tongued scoundrel," and saying that he is running out against the institutions and people of America. I deny the charge that I am saying a word against the institutions of America,{327} or the people, as such. What I have to say is against slavery and slaveholders. I feel at liberty to speak ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... But come, let us talk thus together no longer like children, standing in mid onset of war. For there are revilings in plenty for both of us to utter—a hundred-thwarted ship would not suffice for the load of them. Glib is the tongue of man, and many words are therein of every kind, and wide is the range of his speech hither and thither. Whatsoever word thou speak, such wilt thou hear in answer. But what need that we should bandy strife and ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... public, who cannot be decided by anything but the event, looked upon it as the source of all our woes." The counsels of Abbe de Bernis had for some time past been pacific; from a court-abbe, elegant and glib, he had become, on the 25th of June, minister of foreign affairs. But Madame de Pompadour remained faithful to the empress. In the month of January, 1758, Count Clermont was appointed general-in-chief of the army of Germany. In disregard of the convention ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... at the beginning of each encounter with this unusual gentleman rover. It was no longer fear. What was it? Was it the face of him, too strong and vital for a woman's, too handsome for a man's? Was it his dark, fiery eye which was always reversing what his glib tongue said? Some hidden magnetism? Alone, the thought of him was recurrent, no matter how resolutely she cast it forth. Even now she could not honestly say whether she was here to ask questions of Cunningham or of herself. Perhaps it was because he was the unknown, whereas ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... learned many things since those days," Rochester declared. "You have acquired the knack of glib speech. You have become a past master in the arts which go to the ensnaring of over-imaginative women. You have mixed with quack spiritualists and self-styled professors of what they term occultism. Go and practise your arts where you will, but remember ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... with pilot, observer, and several hundred rounds of ammunition. The job was an offensive patrol—that is to say, we were to hunt trouble around a given area behind the Boche lines. A great deal of the credit for our "mastery of the air"—that glib phrase of the question-asking politician—during the Somme Push of 1916, belongs to those who organised and those who led these fighting expeditions over enemy country. Thanks to them, our aircraft were able to carry out reconnaissance, artillery observation, ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... at a trotting pace,[FN140] never stopping till he drew near the whelp. When I saw him, O my sister, I fell down for excess of fear; but the young lion rose and walked forward to meet the carpenter and when he came up to him, the man smiled in his face and said to him, with a glib tongue and in courtly terms, 'O King who defendeth from harm and lord of the long arm, Allah prosper thine evening and thine endeavouring and increase thy valiancy and strengthen thee! Protect me from that which hath distressed ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... comes of your prating, husband! you presum'd On your ambling wit, and must use your glib tongue, Though you are beaten ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... flourish to some extent in Kimberley, but most of all in Johannesburg. You are soon able to recognise his points and identify him at a distance. He is a little too neatly dressed and his watch-chain is a little too much of a certainty. His manner is excessively glib and fluent, yet he has a trick of furtively glancing round while he talks, as if fearful of being overheard. For the same reason he speaks in low tones. He must often be discussing indifferent topics, but he always looks as if he were hatching a swindle. ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... they attended the movies, where Amory was fascinated by the glib comments of a man in front of him, as well as by the wild ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... ruined me. Now, therefore, let them use me as they please. I give up this body to them to be beaten, to be hungered, to be troubled with thirst, to be squalid, to shiver with cold, to flay into a leathern bottle, if I shall escape clear from my debts, and appear to men to be bold, glib of tongue, audacious, impudent, shameless, a fabricator of falsehoods, inventive of words, a practiced knave in lawsuits, a law-tablet, a thorough rattle, a fox, a sharper, a slippery knave, a dissembler, a slippery fellow, ...
— The Clouds • Aristophanes
... at home," she answered, with glib mendacity. And then she wondered why it was that Weldon's pallor turned from white to gray, as he ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... with her family in great gaiety on the lawn under the cedar. Her offspring were unusually sweet that day, they had new blue cotton sunbonnets, and Baby and Annette at least succeeded in being pretty. And Millicent, under the new Swiss governess, had acquired, it seemed quite suddenly, a glib colloquial French that somehow reconciled one to the extreme thinness and ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... sufficiently to address you as he fully hoped and intended to do to-day." At this all eyes sped to the Bishop, who stood certainly in a drooping attitude at the chaplain's side, his episcopal hands behind his back. "Something happened," the glib spokesman continued with stern eyes, "something that you do not often hear of in these days. His lordship was accosted, beset, and, like the poor man in the Scriptures, despitefully entreated, not many miles beyond your own boundary, by a ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... De [12], bold dame," cried the knight by the side of Edward, while a lurid flush passed over his cheek of bronze; "but thou art too glib of tongue for a subject, and pratest overmuch of Woden, the Paynim, for the ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to her, you see; he had been the one man she trusted. She had gloried in his fustian rhetoric, his glib artlessness, his airy scorn of money; and now all this proved mere pinchbeck. On a sudden, too, there woke in some bycorner of her heart a queasy realisation of how near she had come to loving ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... Marcus, as the shepherd concluded his glib recital. "Couldst thou identify these knaves, if once ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... gathering from their hiding-places. Discuss'd was many a notion. At last, it was resolved, on motion, To pacify the conquering banner, By sending homage in, and tribute. With both the homage and its manner They charged the monkey, as a glib brute; And, lest the chap should too much chatter, In black on white they wrote the matter. Nought but the tribute served to fash, As that must needs be paid in cash. A prince, who chanced a mine to own, At last, obliged them with a loan. The mule and ass, to bear the treasure, Their service tender'd, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... he did not run so far counter to the ideas of his patrons as to teach Cobbett's grammar at school, he always recommended it to me as the one by which alone I could learn to write good English. The learning of anything, especially of arithmetic and grammar, by the glib repetition of rules was a system that he held in contempt. With the public, ability to recite the rules of such subjects as those went farther than any actual demonstration of the power to cipher correctly or ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... Buren Sluysdael, died, you know—a year after they left Greyport. The widow was left all the money in trust for Johnny, except about twenty-five hundred a year which he was in receipt of as a separate income, even as a boy. Well, a glib-tongued parson, a fellow by the name of Belcher, got round the widow—she was a desperate fool—and, by Jove! made her marry him. He made ducks and drakes of not only her money, but Johnny's too, and had to skip to Spain to ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... commander of the ship, and startled anew by his expression of blank incredulity, the glib flow of words conned so often during the steadfast but dreadful hours spent in the lazarette ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... "hustling" was attempted; "roughs," who had come in late, occasionally tried to bully those who looked "soft" out of their ground. Being quite a youngster, I was, naturally, the kind of game these gentry were seeking. However, I sought and obtained help among my Kaffrarian friends, so when two glib tongued scoundrels endeavored to claim my burrow on the score of prior occupation, they were soon hunted off. Messrs. Tom Barry and George Ward were entrusted by the Landdrost with the survey. Ward, who had been in the Austrian Army, ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... shall I vnderstand you? Poet. I will vnboult to you. You see how all Conditions, how all Mindes, As well of glib and slipp'ry Creatures, as Of Graue and austere qualitie, tender downe Their seruices to Lord Timon: his large Fortune, Vpon his good and gracious Nature hanging, Subdues and properties to his loue ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... he had been at the best school in England, that is, the most expensive, and also at College, was almost totally illiterate, so we let the Church scheme follow that of the coach. At last, bethinking me that he was tolerably glib at the tongue, as most people are who are addicted to the turf, also a great master of slang, remembering also that he had a crabbed old uncle, who had some borough interest, I proposed that he should get into the House, promising in ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... river. Willie was in great glee, and when they arrived at the river, he wanted to go on the ice but his mother was afraid to venture. The river was frozen very hard, and the merry skaters seemed almost to fly, they went so fast over the glib ice. Now and then one of them would fall down, causing a burst of laughter from the others; but he would jump up and go it again. Skating is a pleasant and healthful exercise, but sometimes dangerous, for should the ice break many would probably be drowned. Little boys should be careful ...
— The Skating Party and Other Stories • Unknown
... a victory on such terms. Therefore he went to his wounded rival, tended and encouraged him, and in the end brought him to the contest in a litter, thereby gravely jeopardising his own chance of success. Richard, never at any time a glib jingler of rhymes, was in sorry case, for now that he had most need of his wits, his passion instead of sharpening them seemed to have removed them utterly. If he had but known it, he had a good friend in Queen Eleanor, who was determined that he should win, and ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... gloss on them. He labored assiduously to correct his grammar, and so well succeeded at the task that except when he was among associates and relapsed into the argot of the breed, he used language fit for a college professor—fit for some college professors anyway. At thirty he was a glib, spry person with a fancy for gay housings. At forty-five, when he reached the top of his swing, he had the looks, the vocabulary and the presence of an educated and a ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... offered at Chinningfold. Admiral Fakenham's butler refused at first to take a name to his master. Gower persisted, stating the business of his mission; and in spite of the very suspicious glib good English spoken by a man wearing such a hat and suit, the butler was ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... head of owl, Wings a-droop like a rained-on fowl, Feathered and ruffled in every part, Captain Ireson stood in the cart. Scores of women, old and young, Strong of muscle, and glib of tongue, Pushed and pulled up the rocky lane, Shouting and singing the shrill refrain: "Here's Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt, Torr'd an' futherr'd an' corr'd in a corrt By ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... are advantageous, and three which are injurious. Friendship with the upright; friendship with the sincere; and friendship with the man of observation: these are advantageous. Friendship with the man of specious airs; friendship with the insinuatingly soft; and friendship with the glib-tongued: these ...
— For Auld Lang Syne • Ray Woodward
... forebodings while Alfy's cheerful tongue was running on at this rate, and as she left the living-room for the kitchen at the rear both Lady Gray and Helena were laughing, partly at their own awkwardness at the tasks assigned them as well as at her glib remarks. ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... upon him that this was his true vocation. To renounce pleasure and discipline the mind; to live a life of self-denial, submitting himself humbly to the inspiration of the great masters. . . . To be serene, like this old man; to avoid that facile, glib, composite note—those monkey-tricks of cleverness. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Ed was partly Scotch, by nature he was entirely Irish. He possessed a glib tongue of the latter order and his habit was to address every one he met, be he Indian, Highland Scot, or French Canadian, in the dialect which the person was supposed to favour. So he roared out in his magnificent baritone, as he ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... bear, "but that was well turned. Now, sir, as you are getting a little glib, will you go still further and tell us how ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... concludes: "It is right, therefore, for one man to teach another. He that doeth so joyfully, upon him shall much be bestowed by God."[14] These last words, like the last phrases of my former quotation from him, may stand perhaps in the way of some, as nowadays they may easily sound glib or irreverent. But are we less convinced that only tasks done joyfully, as labours of love, deserve the reward of fuller and finer powers, and obtain it? When Duerer thought of God, he did not only think of a mythological personage resembling an old king; ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... rustling of silk and satin, and a waving of ostrich feathers. The daughter is pale and interesting, and interprets Beethoven, and paints the old mill; while a skilled person, hired at a high price, rules in the dairy. The son rides a-hunting, and is glib on the odds. The 'offices'—such it is the fashion to call the places in which work was formerly done—are carefully kept in the background. The violets and snowdrops and crocuses are rooted up, all the sweet and tender old flowers ruthlessly eradicated, to make way for a blazing parterre after ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... ran higher and higher, but there was no indication that Barouche's hopes were sure of fulfilment. His face became paler as the day wore on, and his hands freer with those of his late constituents. Yet he noticed that Carnac was still glib with his tongue and freer with his hands. Carnac seemed everywhere, on every corner, in every street, at every polling booth; he laid his trowel against every brick in the wall. Carnac was not as confident as he seemed, but he was nearing the end of the trail; and his feet were free and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Jack, some things I saw made an impression on me and I can't forget them. When I hear my glib young cousin who sits and surveys life from the shelter of his father's income—when I hear ...
— The Pot Boiler • Upton Sinclair
... had allowed myself to heed the glib tongue of a hotel-runner before I left the rice-steamer, and he had commandeered my bag and taken it to the Oriente Hotel, of which I knew nothing except that it was in the walled city and across the river from the cable ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... frightens me a little. Valerie has, you see, made a mess of it. She has, you see, spoiled her life, in that aspect of it. To mend it now, so completely, to start fresh at—how old is she?—at forty-six, it's just a little glib. Somehow one doesn't get off so easily as that. One can't start so happily at forty-six. Perhaps one ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the reason why, he was appalled at his own ignorance. Something was wrong somewhere; something which would have to be put right. And the trouble was that it did not seem a matter of great ease to put it right. He felt that the glib phrases about Capital and Labour pulling together, about better relations between employers and men, about standing shoulder to shoulder, failed to hit the point. They were rather like offering a ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... insignificant in person, and he had little to say for himself. Probably it would have struck his critics as little short of profane to make the comparison, otherwise there is a great example that might have stood him and all men not giants and glib of tongue in good stead. It is written of an apostle, and he not the least of the apostles, that he might have been termed in bodily presence mean, and in speech contemptible. But boys and girls are not wont ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... quite ordinary Frenchman to come and dine with you in London, and see what a genial and charming person he can be—what a quick bosom friend, and with what a glib and silver tongue to praise the warmth of your ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... said the glib Tam; "we were brought up in the same village, the village of Glascae, and tramped off to the same college at six every morning when the bummer went. There'd ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... Athenian insisted that Theseus was far superior, for his fortune had been in every way supremely blessed, whereas Hercules had at one time been forced to act as a servant. And he gained his point, for he was a very glib fellow, like all Athenians; so that the Theban, who was no match for him in talking, cried at last in some disgust, "All right, have your way; I only hope that, when our heroes are angry with us, Athens may suffer from the ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
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