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More "Pompous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to the pleasures of the evening. The Turk was calmed, and the frightened company came slowly streaming back. Everything was explained and Brant became a greater hero than ever before. Yet it is hardly likely that the pompous follower of Islam ever forgot the lively scene which his ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... The pompous cortege of the Cardinal halted at the beginning of the camp. All the armed troops were drawn up in the finest order; and amid the sound of cannon and the music of each regiment the litter traversed a long line of cavalry ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... hearty oath would relieve you, don't mind me," said Henry. His chin was squarer than usual, and his eyes were harder. "You can see what happened, can't you? Aunt Mirabelle railroaded him through—and the pompous old fool looks the part—and she let him promise money she expects to get in August. And I'll bet it hurt him just as much to promise it as it ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... was that," Terence said. "We were arrested by the Maire of Granville, and had to tie him and one of his officials up. He was a pompous little man; and no doubt, when he got free, went down to the port and persuaded the captain of the lugger to put out, at once, to endeavour to find us. I expect he told him that we were prisoners of importance, either English spies or ...
— Under Wellington's Command - A Tale of the Peninsular War • G. A. Henty
... the Empress was at the pier when the three Bryces made their appearance on the day of the departure. They were taken out to the yacht at once, where Mr. Abercrombie Brendon was already ensconced. He was a pompous, red-faced little man, with a great deal of stomach and a great deal of manner. He was in high good humour with the weather and the world in general. He greeted Isabelle by singing, a line from a light opera success of his ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... an enigmatical description of a pair of stocks and whipping-post. It is so pompous and sublime that we are surprised so noble a structure could be raised from so ludicrous a subject. We perceive wit and humour in the strongest light in every part of the description."—Note by ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... to perform the ceremony, nor any duke to give away the bride. No long array of liveried servants with favours in their buttons and in their hats—no pompous paragraph in the morning papers to describe the beauties of the high-bred bride and the dresses of her aristocratic bridesmaids—but two hearts were united as well as two hands, and Heaven smiled ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... admirers; but, with the exception of a few pages of sublime beauty, I have never altogether liked the love scenes at the end of Siegfried and at the beginning of Goetterdaemmerung. I find their style rather pompous and declamatory; and their almost excessive refinement makes them border upon dulness. The form of the duet, too, seems cut and dried, and there are signs of weariness in it. The heaviness of the last pages of Siegfried recalls Die Meistersinger, which is also of that period. It is no longer ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... rhythm; but that beauty must be for one alone. It cannot, like music, be shared with others. The best of friends may, as rivals, become the bitterest foes. Fernando did not like the Englishman, for, with all his blandness, he thought he could observe a pompous air and self-consciousness of superiority, disgusting to sensible persons. This might have been prejudice or the result of imagination, yet he realized that he was in the presence of an ambitious rival, who would go to any length to ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... and desperately in earnest about anything which he undertook. Blessed or cursed with a solemnity that never was enlivened by a gleam of humor, a ray of fancy, or a flash of eloquence, Grenville regarded the House of Commons with the cold ferocity of a tyrannical and pompous schoolmaster. A style of speech that would have made a discourse upon Greek poetry seem arid and a dissertation upon Italian painting colorless—if it were possible to conceive Grenville as wasting time or thought on such trifles—added no grace to the exposition of a fiscal measure or charm to ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... detained in the public prisons to trying each other. This investigation is likely to be like all other Senatorial investigations—amusing but not useful. Query. Why does the Senate still stick to this pompous word, 'Investigation?' One does not blindfold one's self in ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... changed suddenly. From the impatient, slightly pompous official, conscious of her position, she became obsequious and even affectionate. Possibly she remembered that the girl was to become the wife of the most powerful man in Moscow, whose word was amply sufficient to send even Gregory ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... how to wait for us. Even the classic Salute waits like some great lady on the threshold of her saloon. She is more ample and serene, more seated at her door, than all the copyists have told us, with her domes and scrolls, her scolloped buttresses and statues forming a pompous crown, and her wide steps disposed on the ground like the train of a robe. This fine air of the woman of the world is carried out by the well-bred assurance with which she looks in the direction of her old- fashioned Byzantine neighbour; and the juxtaposition of ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... left, he smiled in such a pompous, self-satisfied way at the hurrah and scramble which ensued, that it was well worth my journey there just to see this exhibition of ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... Francis had accepted the hospitality of the bishop's palace in Rieti. Thomas of Celano enlarges with delight upon the marks of devotion lavished on Francis by this prince of the Church. Unhappily all this is written in that pompous and confused style of which diplomats and ecclesiastics appear to ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... see," thought Ramses, "if they can frighten my Greeks and Asiatics, who, fortunately, are so wild that they do not know pompous faces." ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... the Albans, returned to Rome in triumph, their advent to the city being marked by the first of those pompous processions which in after-years became known as Roman Triumphs, and were celebrated with the utmost splendor and costliness ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Island. He had come to the frontier to teach it the error of its ways and bring a message of sweetness and light to the unwashed barbarians of the Rockies. He was not popular. This was due, perhaps, to an unfortunate manner. The pompous little ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... morals of Aesop are interwoven with his fables that distinguishes him, and gives him the preference over all other mythologists. His 'Mountain delivered of a Mouse,' produces the moral of his fable in ridicule of pompous pretenders; and his Crow, when she drops her cheese, lets fall, as it were by accident, the strongest admonition against the power of flattery. There is no need of a separate sentence to explain it; no possibility of impressing it deeper, by that load we too often see of accumulated ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... forget yours," said the other, and extended once more his ungainly arms in an unnatural gesture. Then of a sudden there came out of him a spout of wild and yet pompous phrases. "It is as well that you should know the worst and the best. I am a man who knows no limit; I am the most callous of criminals, the most unrepentant of sinners. There is no man in my dominions so vile as I. But my dominions stretch from the olives of Italy to the fir-woods of ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... the transformation from the hunting to the agricultural mode of life was accompanied by changes in belief and worship quite as radical. These have been carefully studied by Cushing, Stevenson and Fewkes. The pompous ceremonials of the civilized tribes of Mexico and the Cordilleras in South America, when analysed, reveal only a higher grade of the prevailing idea. Im Thurn says of the Carib: "All objects, animate and inanimate, seem exactly of the same nature, except that they differ ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... perhaps the advice of his domestic genius, appeared under his altered circumstances. He was neither arrogant nor offensively polite, nor pompous in any way, and the duchess was not patronizing. Monsieur and Madame de Chessel gratefully accepted the invitation to dinner on the following Thursday. I pleased the duchess, and by her glance I knew she was examining a man of ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... exquisite Colonel and his ladies would visit the little capital of Williamsburg; so, at his door, stands ready his "lordly coach and six with liveried outriders in waiting." Again, the great gates are thrown open to guests arriving on horseback and in chariots and chairs. Pompous, beruffled dignitaries vie with gay gallants in obeisances and compliments to the ladies, and in assisting them to alight without harm to brocades and laces and rich cloaks and wide-hooped petticoats. And, yet again, all is a-bustle here with scarlet-coated horsemen and baying ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... a sigh and—sat down. He was no longer on familiar ground. Then Fra Diavolo proceeded to verify mademoiselle's judgment of him. Sombrero in hand and with a pompous courtliness, he repeated his natural supposition that the senorita was on her way to the City (meaning the City of Mexico), and perhaps to the court of His Glorious Majesty, Maximiliano. He offered himself, ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... and they ate together in the kitchen. It did not seem so gruesome with Lite there, and she told him some funny things that had happened in her work, and mimicked Robert Grant Burns with an accuracy of manner and tone that would have astonished that pompous person a good deal and flattered him not at all. She almost recovered her spirits under the stimulus of Lite's presence, and she quite forgot that he had threatened her ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... Assembly against the publication of pompous proclamations, and classed the demonstration of the night of August 4th as a theoretical display of liberty wholly without practical value. He was opposed to mob-law, and in no sense was he dazzled by the fall of the Bastille. He pleaded in favor of the royal ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... schoolmaster was the general scribe of the parish, to whom all who wanted letters or petitions written, uniformly applied—and these were glorious opportunities for the pompous display of pedantry; the remuneration usually consisted of a bottle ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... inflict myself on her. It would be no kindness to her or to me." He left her and began to pace back and forth agitatedly, in the pompous, hopping little strut. "You are wrong—you must be wrong. It is impossible. It would be terrible, tragic even though they are both good. And it would be my fault. I brought them together, thinking she would help make things cheerful for him. . . . ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... looks," ["Bennet's grave looks were a pretence" is a line in one of the best political poems of that age,] his mirth made his presence always welcome in the royal closet. While Buckingham, in the antechamber, was mimicking the pompous Castilian strut of the Secretary, for the diversion of Mistress Stuart, this stately Don was ridiculing Clarendon's sober counsels to the King within, till his Majesty cried with laughter, and the Chancellor with vexation. There perhaps never was a man whose ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... I say, to the Music of that grand last Scene in Fidelio: Sullivan & Co. supplying the introductory Recitative; beginning dreamily, and increasing, crescendo, up to where the Poet begins to 'feel the truth and Stir of Day'; till Beethoven's pompous March should begin, and the Chorus, with 'Arthur is come, etc.'; the chief Voices raising the words aloft (as they do in Fidelio), and the Chorus thundering in upon them. It is very grand in Fidelio: and I am persuaded might ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... I cannot recollect anything more sudden and startling than the first appearance of Thorneycroft Huxtable, M.A., Ph.D., etc. His card, which seemed too small to carry the weight of his academic distinctions, preceded him by a few seconds, and then he entered himself—so large, so pompous, and so dignified that he was the very embodiment of self-possession and solidity. And yet his first action when the door had closed behind him was to stagger against the table, whence he slipped down upon the ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... bestowing on him; and his father said, with a canting hypocritical air, which I hate, that Heaven's will must be done; that he would not have his children disobedient or corrupted for the sake of a bishopric, and wrote me a pompous and solemn letter, charged with Latin quotations, taking farewell of me and my house. 'I do so with regret,' added the old gentleman, 'for I have received so many kindnesses from the Hackton family that it goes to my heart to be disunited ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fill the swelling sails. Neptune, with thy trident long, Trident three-fork'd, trident strong: And ye Nereids fair and gay, Fairer than the rose in May, Nereids living in deep caves, Gently wash'd with gentle waves; Nereids, Neptune, lull asleep Ruffling storms, and ruffled deep; All around, in pompous state, On this richer Argo wait: Argo, bring my golden fleece, Argo, bring him to his Greece. Will Cadenus longer stay? Come, Cadenus, come away; Come with all the haste of love, Come unto thy turtle-dove. The ripen'd cherry on the tree Hangs, and only hangs for ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... humbly recommend my soul to the extensive mercy of that Eternal, Supreme, Intelligent Being who gave it me; most earnestly at the same time deprecating his justice. Satiated with the pompous follies of this life, of which I have had an uncommon share, I would have no posthumous ones displayed at my funeral, and therefore desire to be buried in the next burying-place to the place where I shall die, and limit the whole expense of ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... To that father,—the pompous head of the great firm of Dombey and Son—girls never showed a sufficient justification for their existence, and this one of his own was an object of supreme indifference to him; while upon the tiny boy, his heir and future partner in the firm, ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... she was in fashion's crowd, on parade in a show place—and such a show place! Jewellers' windows gleamed along the path with remarkable frequency. Florist shops, furriers, haberdashers, confectioners—all followed in rapid succession. The street was full of coaches. Pompous doormen in immense coats, shiny brass belts and buttons, waited in front of expensive salesrooms. Coachmen in tan boots, white tights, and blue jackets waited obsequiously for the mistresses of carriages who were ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... always spoke in a precise sort of pompous kind of way—"an exceedingly disturbing thing has happened. As you know, I dispatched the manuscript of my book to Messrs. Riggs and Ballinger, the publishers, yesterday afternoon. It should have reached them by the ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... Cats to carry him in his litter: a Fox on seeing him borne along in this pompous manner, said: "I advise you to be on your guard against treachery, for if you were to examine the countenances of those creatures, you would pronounce that they are carrying a booty, not a burden." As soon as the savage brotherhood[16] ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... artist teaches far more by his mere background and properties, his landscape, his costume, his idiom and technique—all the part of his work, in short, of which he is probably entirely unconscious, than by the elaborate and pompous moral dicta which he fondly imagines to be his opinions. The real distinction between the ethics of high art and the ethics of manufactured and didactic art lies in the simple fact that the bad fable has a moral, while ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... neighborhood was scarcely necessary they were both well aware, for there were few conspiracies against the king's authority and no plots against the king's life, and if Louis of France had chosen to go unattended his pompous, melancholy person would have been ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... more to Ballard's mind as he calculated the fleeting minutes than this peaceful, pompous farce. "Draw your bill, gentlemen," he said. "I would not ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... Davies was a man of good understanding and talents, with the advantage of a liberal education. Though somewhat pompous, he was an entertaining companion; and his literary performances have no inconsiderable share of merit. He was a friendly and very hospitable man. Both he and his wife (who has been celebrated for her beauty), though upon the ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... Christmas eve. In the old oak hall Preparations were made for the Christmas ball. Gay garlands were hung from ceiling and wall; The Yule log was laid, the tables arrayed, And the Lady Lorraine and her whole cavalcade, From the pompous old steward to the scullery-maid, Were all in a fluster, Excitement and bluster, And everything ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... awful rage, Val," said Denham, when he came to me after a thorough search had seemed to prove that the prisoner had eluded the vigilance of the sentries. "He swears that some one must have been acting in collusion with the pompous blackguard, and that he means to have the whole of our Irish boys before him and cross-examine ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... Ascott, I'd rather starve in a garret, break stones in the high road, or buy a broom and sweep a crossing, than I'd be dependent on this man, this pompous, purse-proud, illiterate fool!" ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... more patrons than ever Homer wanted. He would have thought himself happy to have met the same favour at Athens that has been shown me by its learned rival, the University of Oxford. And I can hardly envy him those pompous honours he received after death, when I reflect on the enjoyment of so many agreeable obligations, and easy friendships, which make the satisfaction of life. This distinction is the more to be acknowledged, as it ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... doctors are indeed pompous, self-sufficient, affectedly solemn, venal and unfeeling with ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... bottom of the valley flows an immense river, into which the various streams issuing from the mountains fall from all parts. In memory of their native land, the French formerly called this the river St. Louis. The Indians, in their pompous language, have named it the Father of Waters, ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... door of the railway carriage until the last minute; she sent all manner of absurd messages, to the Great Horatio; she told Christine to be sure, to give him her love; she kept up a running fire of chaff and banter till the train started away, and a pompous guard told her to "Stand back, there!" and presently the last glimpse of Christine's pale little face and Jimmy's worried eyes had been swallowed up in the darkness ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... exclaimed the colored man in pompous tones, as he opened the door for the officer, clad in khaki, whom Tom had ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... know, brother, what I have told you; and that does not effect many cures. All the excellency of their art consists in pompous gibberish, in a specious babbling, which gives you words instead of reasons, and promises instead ...
— The Imaginary Invalid - Le Malade Imaginaire • Moliere
... in its flippant or pompous, becomes terrible in its malignant, expression. Thus, the headstrong young men who pushed the French Revolution of 1789 into the excesses of the Reign of Terror were well-intentioned reformers, driven into crime by the fanaticism of mental conceit. This is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... in the mud, the wounded swept away by the current or buried alive in the quagmires. The air resounded with German, Spanish, Italian, and Flemish voices. Torches illuminated the great arquebuses, the pompous plumes, the strange, blanched faces. The battles seemed to be fantastic funerals. They were, in fact, the funerals of the great Spanish monarchy, which was slowly drowned in Dutch waters, smothered with mud and curses. One who is weak enough to feel ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... eyed the blooming Miss Rose Wynn, whose five feet five of feminine humanity, clad in bright red delaine, quite overshadowed the delicate figure beside him. But he obeyed the elder woman's command meekly, nevertheless, and went forward, asking in a pompous tone: ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... imperative as it is detestable. For the rest, at Tours there is a certain Rue Royale which has pretensions to the monumental; it was constructed a hundred years ago, and the houses, all alike, have on a moderate scale a pompous eighteenth-century look. It connects the Palais de Justice, the most important secular building in the town, with the long bridge which spans the Loire—the spacious, solid bridge pronounced by Balzac, in "Le Cure de Tours," "one of the ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... next thing most important to mention, Metaphysics will claim your attention! There see that you can clearly explain What fits not into the human brain: For that which will not go into the head, A pompous word will stand you in stead. But, this half-year, at least, observe From regularity never to swerve. You'll have five lectures every day; Be in at the stroke of the bell I pray! And well prepared in every part; Study each paragraph by heart, So that you scarce may ...
— Faust • Goethe
... expostulated with him like a prophet priest in full panoply of saintly virtue. And Lockyer was passing good at that exalted gesture. He was a Websterian figure, with the venality of the great Daniel in all its pompous dignity modernized—and correspondingly expanded. He abounded in those idealist sonorosities that are the stock-in-trade of all solemn old-fashioned frauds. The young man listened with his wonted attentive courtesy until the dolorous appeal disguised as fatherly counsel came ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... obtained. As it was, the only result was his parading about with him everywhere, from town to town, for months after his return, the lictors with laurelled fasces, which betokened that a triumph was claimed—a pompous incumbrance, which became, as he confessed, a grand subject for evil-disposed jesters, and ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... the two principal actors in the day's doings the affair was an unmitigated annoyance, and even their own great and true happiness could not lighten the excessive fatigue of the pompous ceremony and of the still more pompous reception which followed it. To describe that day would be to make out a catalogue of gorgeous equipages, gorgeous costumes, gorgeous decorations. Many pages would not suffice to enumerate the cardinals, the dignitaries, ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... end of what relates to Mr. Doyle, it would be proper to acquaint the public that the vanity of his wife extended so far as to make a pompous funeral for him at St. Sepulchre's church, whereat she, as chief mourner assisted, and was led by a gentleman whom the world suspected to be ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... small and dark, but blandly roguish; his mouth was wide and damp, and had in it a small selection of sample teeth, as it were; he wore a blue checked homespun dress garnished down the back with big horn buttons, sparsely set on; he clasped his chubby hands upon a somewhat pompous stomach; he sidled first to the right, then to the left, in doubt as to which of the ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... "A pompous butler is installed. I discovered all this when I went to call, and conscientiously told her I was going to St. Thomas with the Winthrops. He is elderly, of course, as all the middle-aged and young butlers are in khaki; and wonderful to relate, there is also ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... report of the attack on the Marmion "bloods" made by Radowitz at the dinner of the college debating society about a fortnight earlier. It was witty and damaging in the highest degree, and each man as he read it had vowed vengeance. Falloden had been especially mocked in it. Some pompous tricks of manner peculiar to Falloden in his insolent moods, had been worked into a pseudo-scientific examination of the qualities proper to a "blood," with the happiest effect. Falloden grew white as he read it. Perhaps on the morrow it would be in Constance Bledlow's hands. ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... colours, and chance-wise Doth daub, befouling walls and canvases, Is not a painter; but, unhelped by these, He who in art is masterful and wise. Cowls and the tonsure do not make a friar; Nor make a king wide realms and pompous wars; But he who is all Jesus, Pallas, Mars, Though he be slave or base-born, wears the tiar. Man is not born crowned like the natural king Of beasts, for beasts by this investiture Have need to know the head they must obey; Wherefore a commonwealth fits men, ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... for a time, but was a sort of pompous tomtit, with a short breath and a large aquiline opinion of himself. He was one of the arrogant old pie-plants whose growth was fostered by the beetle-bellied administration at home. He went back on board the City of Rome one ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... embassy, he could slip away from it to pursue his own inquiries in a private manner whenever he pleased, leaving the embassadors themselves and those of their train who enjoyed such scenes to go through all the public receptions and other pompous formalities which would have been so tiresome ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott
... them. "Dem wa' Massa South Ca'lina gwan to whip de 'Nited States wid Massa Goberna' order 'em last year, an 'e jus' come. Good masse gwan' to fight fo' we wid 'em." The poor old man seemed to take a great interest in the pieces of ordnance as they passed along, and to have inherited all the pompous ideas of his master. The negroes about Charleston have a natural inclination for military tactics, and hundreds of ragged urchins, as well as old daddies and mammies, may be seen following the fife and drum on ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... be wary of criticism. That Milton's poetry has little human interest, no humor, and plenty of faults, may be granted. His Paradise Lost especially is overcrowded with mere learning or pedantry in one place and with pompous commonplaces in another. But such faults appear trivial, unworthy of mention in the presence of a poem that is as a storehouse from which the authors and statesmen of three hundred years have drawn their choicest images and expressions. It stands forever as our ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... being remembered from the Stella that to-day is mine alone. For it is to this fictitious person that the people whom my Stella loved, as she did not love me, now bring their flowers; and it was to this person they erected their pompous monument,—nay, more, it was for this atrocious woman they ordered the very coffin in which my Stella lay when I last saw her. ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... depends,' rejoined Jack, blowing out his cheeks, and looking as pompous as possible—'that depends a good deal upon how he's been used in ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... faintest hint of the sentimentalist about him; his is never the softness of the lover, but rather the careful prudence of the utilitarian. Yet he unstintedly admires Katherine; this is somehow felt to be so by his rather pompous implication that he would hardly be taking all this trouble about the woman were she not the makings of a royal mate, fit even for his sky-wide vision ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... the Blind The Blind Man's Problem Dreams How to Help On Getting Away from Yourself Travel Work Farewells! The "Butters" Age that Dyes Women in Love Pompous Pride in Literary "Lions" Seaside Piers Visitors The Unimpassioned English Relations Polite Conversation Awful Warnings It's oh, to be out of England—now that Spring is here Bad-tempered People Polite Masks ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... communion, were rendered more imposing by the attendance of the civil and military authorities, and most persons of rank and wealth in the vicinity. Nor did they degenerate into mere processions and pompous forms, if the narrative is to be trusted. The missionaries appear on every occasion to have availed themselves of the excitation of the moment, in calling forth such feelings as must be approved by Christians of every country and persuasion, and which, among Frenchmen, may ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... now of much service; while the sprightly wit of his young wife attracted Josephine, as it has all readers of her piquant but rather spiteful memoirs. In her pages we catch a glimpse of the life of that singular Court; the attempts at aping the inimitable manners of the ancien regime; the pompous nullity of the second and third Consuls; the tawdry magnificence of the costumes; the studied avoidance of any word that implied even a modicum of learning or a distant acquaintance with politics; the nervous preoccupation ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... childishly important, it seemed to her that it would be easy to make them look ridiculous, and she often found herself framing replies for the Opposition. But of course there was a wide gulf between the pompous gentlemen who lolled and smoked their black cigars in the mahogany chairs on the redcarpeted floor of the House, and the bright-eyed little girl who sat on the edge of her seat in the gallery and looked ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... gesture marks his gait, No pompous tone his word; No studied attitude is seen, No palling nonsense heard; He'll suit his bearing to the hour, Laugh, listen, learn, or teach. With joyous freedom in his mirth, And candor in his ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... than usual on her sweet, sad face. "She's thinking of her wretched, ill-doing son," quoth the gossips, one to another. But who comes in now, with an air as if the whole church belonged to him? An imposing, pompous man, stern and grim, in a new flaxen wig, and a white rose in his buttonhole. It is Mr. Justice Hare, and he leads in one, whom folks jump upon seats ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... was not travelling like a nabob; and it would have been impossible to take more baggage. How could any one, with large provisions and a pompous retinue move in the midst of mountains covered with forests literally along untouched by human feet, and forced, in order to get through them, at every instant to swim across torrents, and having no other ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... made A grand parade, With marching train-band, guild, and trade: The burgomaster in robes arrayed, Gold chain, and mace, and gay cockade, Great keys carried, and flags displayed, Pompous marshal and spruce young aide, Carriage and foot and cavalcade; While big drums thundered and trumpets brayed, And all the bands of the canton played; The fountain spouted lemonade, Children drank of the bright cascade; Spectators ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... overcome by exposure, died at the Polish village of Zarnowiec on the 24th of December 1812. In 1807 he had published in a sumptuous volume the Columbiad, an enlarged edition of his Vision of Columbus, more pompous even than the original; but, though it added to his reputation in some quarters, on the whole it was not well received, and it has subsequently been much ridiculed. The poem for which he is now best known is his mock heroic ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... were, although singular in the extreme, remarkably charitable and considerate of the necessities of their neighbours, and their loss has been greatly felt. They seemed vain and pompous, but accomplished and intellectual, and were a strange compound of wisdom ...
— The "Ladies of Llangollen" • John Hicklin
... neckcloth, and button-hole, and an occasional hearty and kindly joke, a power of executing and setting agoing a good laugh, are stock in our trade not to be despised. The merry heart does good like a medicine. Your pompous man, and your selfish man, don't laugh much, or care for laughter; it discomposes the fixed grandeur of the one, and has little room in the heart of the other, who is literally self-contained. My Edinburgh ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... believe, had been the price paid cheerfully at one time for a complete set of Hearne. At Laxton, also, it was that first I saw the total array of works edited by Dr. Birch. It was a complete armilustrium, a recognitio, or mustering, as it were, not of pompous Praetorian cohorts, or unique guardsmen, but of the yeomanry, the militia, or what, under the old form of expression, you might regard as the trained bands of our literature—the fund from which ultimately, or in the last resort, students look for the materials of our vast ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... shouted in a very pompous voice, and three unhappy young men filed through the half-opened door into the solemn ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... answered in the negative, as undoubtedly they must, what becomes of the imaginary paradise of blessings and privileges to which baptism is to introduce the millions of our infants? Why should the holy Lord God, our Saviour, be represented as mocking his church by promises of mysterious, pompous nothings?" pp. 65-69. ...
— The Baptist Magazine, Vol. 27, January, 1835 • Various
... emerge. We have a way of dividing time into ancient and modern; and think the one forever past, the other forever to endure. It is quite silly. There are plenty of places now where it is 753 B.C.; and no doubt there were plenty then where it was pompous 1919.—Can anyone tell me, by the bye, what year it happens to be ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... village to inquire. The headman, evidently one of a former Casembe school, came to us full of wrath. "What right had we to come that way, seeing the usual path was to our left?" He mouthed some sentences in the pompous Lunda style, but would not show us the path; so we left him, and after going through a forest of large trees, 4-1/2 hours south, took advantage of some huts on the Kifurwa River, ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... hesitates to confront the unknown. The stairs were there before him; he began to descend, his right hand held forth, his eyes fastened in horror upon it. Then, as he heard the distant hum of voices below, once more pompous and erect he swung down the last broad treads between ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... I am a very ill-used young body. Now I don't think so. Grandfather was rich, but he must have had a bad heart, or he never could have cast off poor mamma; had he adopted me, I should never have been so happy as I am now, uncle is kind to me in his pompous, patronizing way, and dear Florence loves me like a sister, and so I am happy. I am my own mistress here, and not anybody's humble servant, I sometimes find myself singing as the birds do, ...
— Our American Cousin • Tom Taylor
... motion, and how it produces it. The idea of "increase and complication of the inorganic, merely mechanical motion," with which Haeckel throws a bridge from the living to the lifeless or from the organic to the inorganic, does not yet give us that proof; it seems rather to be one of those pompous phrases with which people hide their ignorance and make the uncritical multitude believe that the explanation is found: a manipulation against which, among others, Wigand, in his great work, repeatedly protests, as also does the Duke of Argyll in his lecture on "Anthropomorphism ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... impress their audience that they know far more about the subject than the lecturer. But worst of all is the chairman who knows absolutely nothing about the subject or about yourself. I remember one evening some pompous chairman getting up and saying: "I have great pleasure this evening in introducing to you Mr. Furniss. I know you have all heard of Mr. Furniss, and anyone connected as I am with engineering must look upon one of his great achievements with delight. ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... volumes which bear the imprint of A. K. Newman, and Dean and Mundy, are "A, Apple Pie," "Aldiborontiphoskyphorniostikos," "The House that Jack Built," "The Parent's Offering for a Good Child" (a very pompous and irritating series of dialogues), and others that are even more directly educational. In all these the engravings are in fairly correct outline, coloured with four to six washes of showy crimson lake, ultramarine, pale green, ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... were ringing, and mourning garments and mourning hats were everywhere. In stately mansions and in dreary attics real tears of sorrow were shed. The good princess was dead. In the palace, in a grand apartment all draped in black, lay her silent, wasted body, on a pompous funeral bier. Throngs of the loftiest and the noblest of the land passed slowly by, in solemn procession, to pay their last respects to the humble princess and the true-hearted woman who had gone to her reward. Rough peasants and the poor of the ...
— The Golden House • Mrs. Woods Baker
... never spoke a word but when his master unlocked his mouth. Porthos boasted of the strength of Mousqueton, who was big enough to thrash four men of ordinary size. Aramis, confiding in the address of Bazin, made a pompous eulogium on his candidate. Finally, d'Artagnan had entire faith in the bravery of Planchet, and reminded them of the manner in which he had conducted himself in ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... hear Queen Mab say he was going to spend his holidays in London? Uncle James is rather a pompous old fellow, but we shan't have to go there except for lunch; and father said we ought to call on them while we're here; besides, it'll be jolly on the river. You know them, ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... a cry for naturalism in other arts—we have Millet instead of Claude; we have Zola instead of Georges Sand; we have Dumas fils instead of Corneille; we have Mercie instead of Canova; but in music we have precisely the reverse, and we have the elephantine creations, the elaborate and pompous combinations of Baireuth, and the Tone school, instead of the old sweet strains of melody that went straight and clear to the ear and the heart of man. Sometimes my enemies write in their journals that I sing as if ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... headed eastward out over the elongated gulf. Looking back, John saw the sandhills by the sea glistening in the bright sunlight like mounds of gold-dust. Every leaf and stem in the scrub stood out in black and silver filigree; and euphorbias and adeniums, gouty and pompous above the lower growths, seemed like fantasies of gray on a Japanese screen covered with cerulean velvet. It was their last sight of Persia, and one ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... was distinguished by the arrival of illustrious visitors. The Duchess of Savoy, with an escort of eighteen lovely maids of honor, made her pompous entry on the 4th, and took up her quarters in the Palazzo Pepoli. On the 6th came the Duke of Ferrara, for whom Charles had procured a safe-conduct from the Pope. During the Emperor's stay at Bologna, Alfonso d'Este had been assiduous in paying him and his Court small ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... also maintained costly and pompous establishments, apart from the Inns of Court. Sir Thomas More's house stood in the country, flanked by a garden and farm, in the cultivation of which ground the Chancellor found one of his chief sources of amusement. In Aldgate, Lord Chancellor Audley built his town mansion, on the site of ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... who was not at all the pompous, conceited man that the girls at Lakeview Hall had come to think him, looked after Cora for a moment in surprise, then turned smilingly back to the two girls and asked Linda to ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr
... upon. They even extended their operations throughout the department and along its borders. Each shareholder of course subscribed to the paper. The judicial advertisements were divided between the "Bee-hive" and the "Courrier." The first issue of the latter contained a pompous eulogy on Rogron. He was presented to the community as the Laffitte of Provins. The public mind having thus received an impetus in this new direction, it was manifest, of course, that the coming elections would be contested. Madame ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... "The most pompous monument of Egyptian greatness, and one of the most bulky works of manual industry," said Imlac, "are the Pyramids: fabrics raised before the time of history, and of which the earliest narratives afford us only uncertain traditions. Of these the greatest is still standing, ...
— Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia • Samuel Johnson
... could have avoided it. It seems to be one of the privileges of the people's guardians, in your free country, to arrest and imprison anyone on a mere suspicion of crime. Here is a case in which someone has sadly blundered, and I imagine it is the pompous gentleman who claims to know pearls and does not," with a nod toward Le ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... heard at the door, Austin flew to open it, and admitted Mr. Pitt, the governor, a tall pompous personage, who, in his turn, ushered in four other individuals. The first of these, whom he addressed as Mr. Gay, was a stout, good-looking, good-humoured man, about thirty-six, with a dark complexion, an oval face, fine black eyes, full of fire and sensibility, and ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... eyes a-dance, "yonder cometh a pompous prior that was, not very long since, nought but massy monk that did upon a time (though by dint of some small persuasion) bestow on me a goodly ass. My lord, I was bred a monk, so do I know, by divers signs and portents, he cometh here to ban ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... in rude country carts—"carrette"—as far as Brescello, where the Po was navigable, and they were able to continue their journey by water to Pavia. Here Messer Galeazzo Visconti was awaiting them with a fleet of boats and three bucentaurs, by which pompous name the rude barges in which these high-born personages travelled were glorified. The many discomforts and the actual cold and hunger which the Este ladies endured during the five days which they spent on board these vessels are graphically described ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... wished, oh how Rose wished, that she too could write to her husband and say "Come." The Wilkins menage, however pompous Mellersh might be, and he had seemed to Rose pompous, was on a healthier, more natural footing than hers. Lotty could write to Mellersh and would get an answer. She couldn't write to Frederick, for only too well did she ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... of gossip, and that every action of the dauphiness is there distorted into crime. [Footnote: "Memoires de Madame de Campan." vol. i., p. 65.] If my lord cardinal has nothing else to tell me it was scarcely worth his while to come to the palace in so pompous a manner, with such a ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... conflict of ideals has been shown, all through the drama, by the contrast of the pompous heartlessness of the king's court and the natural purity of the forest hermitage. The drama opens with a hunting scene, where the king is in pursuit of an antelope. The cruelty of the chase appears like a menace symbolising the spirit of ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... her, amused, yet bewildered, through the wide archway into the more brilliantly lighted drawing-room. It was a magnificent apartment, containing a half dozen people. The one nearest the entrance was a man of middle age, exceedingly pompous and dignified, who immediately arose to his feet, expectantly. Miss Coolidge cordially extended ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... the highest satisfaction, as Mr Bradshaw often said both to her and to the Bensons; indeed, she rather winced under his pompous approbation. But his favourite recreation was patronising; and when Ruth saw how quietly and meekly Mr Benson submitted to gifts and praise, when an honest word of affection, or a tacit, implied acknowledgment of equality, would have been worth everything said and done, ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... service to their adopted kingdom, which was just emerging from barbarism. They enriched the libraries by the books which they had rescued from the barbarism of the Turks, and contributed much to the eclat of the court of Moscow by the introduction of the pompous ceremonies of the Grecian court. Indeed, from this date Moscow was often called a second Constantinople. The capital was rapidly embellished with palaces and churches, constructed in the highest style of Grecian and Italian architecture. ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... instruction may well come afterwards," said he, "since we shall travel together as far as Khartoum, and it will be a joy to me to see you grow in wisdom and in virtue as we go." He walked over to the fire, and stooping down, with the pompous slowness of a stout man, he returned with two half-charred sticks, which he laid crosswise upon the ground. The Dervishes came clustering over to see the new converts admitted into the fold. They stood round in the dim light, tall and fantastic, with ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... deduced the perimeter and surface of the circle, as well as the surface and volume of the sphere. He showed that the surface and volume of the last- named equal two-thirds of the surface and volume of the circumscribing cylinder. Disdaining all pompous inscription, the learned Syracusan honoured himself with his theorem as his sole epitaph. The geometrical figure proclaimed the individual's name as plainly as ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... a great faith in his eyes, the men solemnly marched to St. Ethelburga Church, off Bishopsgate Street, London, to partake of Holy Communion and ask God's aid. Back to the muddy water front, opposite the Tower, a hearty God-speed from the gentlemen of the Muscovy Company, pompous in self-importance and lace ruffles—and the little crew steps into a ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... trident long, Trident three-fork'd, trident strong: And ye Nereids fair and gay, Fairer than the rose in May, Nereids living in deep caves, Gently wash'd with gentle waves; Nereids, Neptune, lull asleep Ruffling storms, and ruffled deep; All around, in pompous state, On this richer Argo wait: Argo, bring my golden fleece, Argo, bring him to his Greece. Will Cadenus longer stay? Come, Cadenus, come away; Come with all the haste of love, Come unto thy turtle-dove. The ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... grew beside a running brook: An Alder, one, of unassuming mien: His mate, a Poplar, who, with lofty look, Wore, with a rustling flirt, his robe of green. With pompous front the Poplar mounted high, And curried converse with each swelling breeze; While Alder seemed content to live and die A lowly ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... caught sight of Capito. Approaching me, but a few paces from me, was one of the most detestable bores in Rome, a man whom I sedulously avoided, Faltonius Bambilio. His father, the Pontifex of Vesta, was an offensively and absurdly unctuous and pompous man. His son, who had already held several minor offices in the City Government, had been one of the quaestors the year before, and so was now a senator. But he was, as he always had been, as he remained, a booby. I do not believe ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... Baloardo Grazian, is a pedant, a philosopher, grammarian, rhetorician, astronomer, cabalist, a savant of the first water, boasting of his degree from Bologna, trailing the gown of that august university. Pompous in phrase and person, his speech is crammed with lawyer's jargon and quibbles, with distorted Latin and ridiculous metaphors. He is dressed in black with bands and a huge shovel hat. He wears a black vizard ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... long as a Peruvian lama's. ''Tis Sir Isaac,' said I to myself; and behind Sir Isaac I saw Chapman, so to call him, carrying a basket with pedlar's wares, and, to my surprise, Old Jessop, who is a formal man, with a great deal of reserve and dignity, pompous indeed (but don't let that go further), talking to Chapman quite affably, and actually buying something out of the basket. Presently Chapman went away, and was soon lost to sight. Jessop comes into the Reading-Room. 'I saw you,' said I, 'talking to an old fellow with ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... seriously combats the belief in purgatory as unscriptural. But it is the mass that bears the brunt of attack. The Host figures under the designation, current in the literature of the sixteenth century,[264] of Le Dieu de Pate, or Le Dieu de Farine. The pompous and complicated ceremonial, with its repetitions devoid of meaning for the illiterate spectator, is, on the whole, the favorite object of satire. In strict accordance with the spirit of the rough controversy of the times, little mercy ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... his pompous way, leaned back in his chair, his thumbs in his armholes, his manner that of a most ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... Roman aristocrat had turned his thumb down to a lot of barbarian captives because he had a fit of indigestion, and the next day, when his digestion was better, he had scattered coins among barbarian children; that Napoleon, who had also gone over the pass road, was a pompous, fat little man, who did not always wipe his upper lip clean of snuff when he was on a campaign; that the baron's youngest daughter had lost her eyesight from a bodkin thrust for telling her sister, who had her father's temper, that she was ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... can, and sometimes does, silence his subordinate by the tacit might of his superior dignity. He says: "I do not think there is much in all that. Many errors were committed at the time you refer to which we need not now discuss." A pompous man easily sweeps away the suggestions of those beneath him. But though a minister may so deal with his subordinate, he cannot so deal with his king. The social force of admitted superiority by which he overturned ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... wiping her eyes, and putting on her spectacles, endeavoured, as fast as the dew which collected on her glasses would permit, to get at the meaning of the needful part of the epistle; while her husband, with pompous elevation, read an extract from ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... and when he called a parliament, he sent not to the primate, as to the other peers, a summons to attend it. Stratford was not discouraged at this mark of neglect or anger: he appeared before the gates, arrayed in his pontifical robes, holding the crosier in his hand and accompanied by a pompous train of priests and prelates; and he required admittance as the first and highest peer in the realm. During two days the king rejected his application: but sensible, either that this affair might be attended with dangerous ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... his brother Edward, whose children he had set aside, and whom by the comparison of this act of piety, he hoped to depreciate(53) in the eyes of the people? The very example had been pointed out to him by Henry the Fifth, who bestowed a pompous funeral on Richard the Second, murdered by order ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... ex-Mayor. On one of the occasions it happened that the ladies were from home, but Mr. Mumbray, on the point of going out, begged Glazzard to come and have a word with him in his sanctum. After much roundabout talk, characteristically pompous, he put the question whether Mr. Glazzard, as a friend of Mr. Denzil Quarrier, would "take it ill" if he, Mr. Mumbray, accepted an invitation to come forward as the candidate ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... form granted or denied according to the general principles of policy adopted in different states, or the degree of influence which some few persons who have adopted it may happen to have at court. What may be the value of certain pompous titles with which many of the advocates of Homoeopathy are honored, it might be disrespectful to question. But in the mean time the judicious inquirer may ponder over an extract which I translate from a paper relating to a personage well known to the community as Williams ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... mind. The fine star-dust and nebulous blur in Orion, "the portentous year of Mizar and Alcor," must come down and be dealt with in your household thought. What if you shall come to discern that the play and playground of all this pompous history are radiations from yourself, and that the sun borrows his beams? What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... to moralize, and her moralizing degenerates unfortunately often into commonplace platitudes. She is even at times disagreeably pompous and authoritative, and preaches rather than argues. This was due partly to a then prevailing tendency in literature. Every writer—essayist, poet, and novelist—preached in those days. Mary frequently ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... which would have been too much even for the infernal powers. As they greatly exaggerated what had passed, perhaps, with a view of excusing themselves, the steward wrote to the duke, who was then at Pisa, an account still more pompous and more replete with the marvelous than that which the workmen ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... gathers all the conceivable treasures of earth, jewels and gold and dignities, and scenes of sensuous delights, and everything that holds to the visible and the temporal, and piles them into one scale, and then He puts into the other the one name, God; and the pompous nothings fly up and are nought, and have no weight at all. Is that not true? Does it need any demonstration, any ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Jesuit priest, says of it in his letters to the bishop of St. Louis, in 1841: The first rock which we saw, and which truly deserves the name, was the famous rock Independence. At first I was led to believe that it had received this pompous name from its isolated situation and the solidity of its basis; but I was afterward told that it was called so because the first travellers who thought of giving it a name arrived at it on the very day when the people of the ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... man of good understanding and talents, with the advantage of a liberal education. Tho somewhat pompous, he was an entertaining companion; and his literary performances have no inconsiderable share of merit. He was a friendly and very hospitable man. Both he and his wife (who has been celebrated for her beauty), tho upon the stage for many years, maintained a uniform decency of character; ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... slowly, "in the first years of my mission I had a fellow curate, a good many years younger than myself. I consequently looked down on him, especially as he was slightly pompous in his manner and too much addicted to Latin and French quotations. In fact, he looked quite a hollow fellow, and apparently a selfish and self-contented one. I changed my opinion later on. He was particularly fond of horses, though ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... attired in a dress spotlessly clean, a bright red bandanna tied around her head, was more pompous and dictatorial than ever. Her helpers had been increased for the event, and she issued her commands with a force which would have done credit to a skipper on a quarter-deck. Often she scolded those around her, but her anger was more apparent than real, and while she smote ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... Mr. Pryor's windows from a second onslaught—and Mr. Arnold pronounced an incongruous benediction, at least he felt it was incongruous, for he could not at once banish from his memory the sight of gigantic Norman Douglas shaking the fat, pompous little Whiskers-on-the-moon as a huge mastiff might shake an overgrown puppy. And he knew that the same picture was in everybody's mind. Altogether the union prayer-meeting could hardly be called an unqualified success. But it was remembered in Glen St. Mary when scores of orthodox and undisturbed ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... once, in deeds of warfare his acts had gone beyond his promises; the day had come when he was about to promise more than he could perform. Liberal phrases no longer concealed from the nation the yoke which crushed it. The pompous declarations against the English leopard, hurled forth at the opening of the session of the Corps Legislatif, in December, 1809, did not hasten the end of the war in Spain. The emperor did not set out as he had solemnly announced. He called Marshal Massena, ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... brought me here; your eyes that smiled into mine—and drove home the colonel's request that I and my sister should accompany you. God! I was weak then! You smile, senora; you think you have succeeded—you and your pompous colonel and your clever governor! You think you have compromised me, and perjured ME, because of this. You are wrong! You think I dare not speak to this puppet of a baron, and that I have no proofs. ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... in light, and one in darkness drest, (For contraries oppos'd still shine the best.) When a cold Page half breaks the Writer's heart, By this it warms, and brightens into Art. When Rhet'ric glitters with too pompous pride, By this, like Circe, 'tis un-deify'd. So Berecynthia, while her off-spring vye In homage to the Mother of the sky, (Deck'd in rich robes, of trees, and plants, and flow'rs, And crown'd illustrious with an hundred tow'rs) O'er all Parnassus ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... story, as no doubt you know it: the current version, I mean. She had been poor and fond of enjoyment, and she had married that pompous stick Philip Trant because she needed a home, and perhaps also because she wanted a little luxury. Queer how we sneer at women for wanting the thing that gives them ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... were refreshing themselves with a little water, we were beset by the agents of the different hotels, and restaurateurs of Versailles, who presented us with little cards, announcing in a very pompous manner the superiority of ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... to that. He found a thin garrison, a pompous bailiff, wordy and precise, headboroughs without heads, and a panic-stricken horde of shopkeepers with things to lose, who spent the day in crying "Danger," and the night in drinking beer. Outside, somewhere, was an enemy who might be a rascal, but was certainly a man. Professional honour ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... press her hand to his lips. Even the anticipation of future happiness could not prevent him from envying the good fortune of Iskander, who was allowed to converse with her without restraint; and bitterly, on their return to the khan, did he execrate the pompous eunuch for all the torture which he occasioned him by his silly conversation, and the petty tyranny of office with which Kaflis always repressed his attempts to converse ...
— The Rise of Iskander • Benjamin Disraeli
... us up to the broad back of the pompous old baronet, whose white whiskers shone silver in the fitful lamplight. My brain was utterly bewildered. ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... Miss Rose Wynn, whose five feet five of feminine humanity, clad in bright red delaine, quite overshadowed the delicate figure beside him. But he obeyed the elder woman's command meekly, nevertheless, and went forward, asking in a pompous tone: ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... lad meeting an elderly amateur violinist of the pompous class who not only was kind enough to pay the most embarrassing attention to my solos but further favoured me with his conversation and advice. "Now," said he, "you must get a steel bow; tell your father about it; absolutely necessary. You see this stick of a thing you are playing ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... they equipped themselves to meet the Indians,—yellow hunting-shirts, handkerchiefs tied about their heads, and rifles on the shoulder; the militia were on foot, and the light horse of the counties were in military dress. Conspicuous about the field, "haughty and pompous," as Gallatin described him in the legislature, was David Bradford, who had assumed the office of major-general. Brackenridge draws a lifelike picture of him as, mounted on a superb horse in splendid trappings, arrayed in full uniform, with ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... to certain dangers which lie in wait for the sincere aspirant towards life. The first is the terrible danger of becoming that most odious and least supportable of persons—a prig. Now a prig is a pert fellow who gives himself airs of superior wisdom. A prig is a pompous fool who has gone out for a ceremonial walk, and without knowing it has lost an important part of his attire, namely, his sense of humour. A prig is a tedious individual who, having made a discovery, is so impressed by his discovery that he is capable ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... were eager to foster trade and cultivate good will, for it brought them pompous trappings as well as useful goods. "Grandy King George" of Old Calabar, for example, asked of his friend Captain Lace a mirror six feet square, an arm chair "for my salf to sat in," a gold mounted cane, a red and a blue coat with gold lace, a case of razors, pewter ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... ridiculous, pompous wind-bag! What do you suppose I care about being unmasked by you?—Go to work! Leave off this silly drivelling!—Do something! Get ahead! I don't need to sponge on any one ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... though pompous, were a kindly pair: and Mrs. Grantham, entering the library where Mr. Wesley and his daughter awaited her, and observing that the girl seemed frightened or depressed (she could not determine which), rang the bell at once and sent a maid ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... will not be deemed too pompous for the preface to a story in which true love is crossed by a soldier's sense of honour. The theme is a variant on a great commonplace: and, following my habit, I let the incidents and characters have their own way without the author's ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... occasion by his son, afterwards to rise to distinction in the army. He employed himself, however, more as a savant than an artist—in examining and copying the Greek and Latin inscriptions in the Vatican. The President of the Roman Academy introduced the painter to the School of Art, and was rather pompous about the works of his students. Ramsay's national pride was piqued. 'I will show you,' he said, 'how we draw in England.' He wrote to his Scotch assistant, Davie Martin, to pack up some drawings and journey at once to Rome. On his arrival, Ramsay arranged his drawings, and then invited the President ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... spirit and temper. The alliterative verse, wherever it is found, declares itself as belonging to an elaborate poetical tradition. The alliterative line is rhetorically capable of a great amount of emphasis; it lends itself as readily as the "drumming decasyllabon" of the Elizabethan style to pompous declamation. Parallelism of phrases, the favourite rhetorical device, especially with the old English poets, is incompatible with tenuity of style; while the weight of the verse, as a rule, prevents the richness ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... where the best soda was served, filled many other civic needs than those of supplying sundaes and prescriptions. It also served as a town information bureau, and just now, while the girls were waiting for their order, a very pompous woman in the spickest, spannest white duck outfit, was asking questions ...
— The Girl Scouts at Sea Crest - The Wig Wag Rescue • Lillian Garis
... dreamiest, sweetest way. I sat down on an old stone, and looked away to the desolate salt-marshes and still, shining surface of the etang; and, as I did so, reflected that this was a queer little out-of-the-world corner to have been chosen, in the great dominions of either monarch, for that pompous interview which took place, in 1538, between Francis I. and Charles V. It was also not easy to perceive how Louis IX., when in 1248 and 1270 he started for the Holy Land, set his army afloat ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... is formed from the verb "dignify"? Ans. Dignified.—Give a stronger word. Ans. Majestic.—Give a word which denotes the same thing carried to excess and becoming ridiculous. Ans. Pompous. ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... saluting Sikhs at the pompous Kaiserish entrance gate, and got out on to front steps that brought to mind one of those glittering hotels at German cure-resorts—bad art, bad taste, bad amusements and a ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... extravagant and hyperbolical, and every censure exaggerated and excessive. In a favourite, every frailty is heightened into a perfection, and in a foe degraded into a crime. The dramatic poets, especially the most tender and romantic, are quoted in almost every line, and every pompous or pathetic thought is forced to give up its natural and obvious meaning, and with all the violence of misapplication, is compelled to suit some circumstance of imaginary woe of the fair transcriber. Alicia is not too mad for her heroics, nor Monimia too ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... match, had proclaimed them king and queen, allowing his majesty to retain the title for his life, which they had fixed for the term of six months; and ordering, in respect of his royal birth, that the prince should immediately lie in state and have a pompous funeral. ...
— Hieroglyphic Tales • Horace Walpole
... an' he spen' powerful sight of his time out here wid me an' de horses. He wuz allers del'cut,—warn't able ter do nothin' in this yere climate,—but he bed sech a sperit! He wouldn't ever let folks know when he wuz a sufferin'. He use ter call me 'Pompous,'" and Pompey chuckled softly. "He say when I git inter my fur coat I look as gran' on de box as de Jedge do inside; an' one day he braided de horses' manes inter a hunderd tails an' tied 'em wid yaller ribbun, 'cause he said de crimps wuz in de fashun an' ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... so." Jerry's instant response in a pompous tone made Miss Towne laugh. Marjorie thought her pretty when she laughed. Her teeth were unusually white and even, and her face broke into ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... near the banks. The river being low at this season, we ran aground, in spite of all the care of our Scindian pilot and the Seedic leadsman, often enough to have wrecked a moderately-sized navy. The leadsman was a rather pompous individual, duly impressed with the importance of his position, in having charge of the deep-sea line, which was something short of two fathoms in length. He was stationed at the bows, and ever and anon proclaimed aloud the depth ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... pompous distributor of justice, addressing young Purcel, "how do you do? Take a seat—by the way, is it true that your father and my excellent friend, Dr. ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... exorcises the demon, and then anathematizes him, with all the eclat he possibly could: the bishops are assembled in the cathedral, the people repair thither in crowds; the circumstance is recounted in pompous terms; the evil spirit is threatened; the tapers are extinguished—all of them striking ceremonies: the woman is moved by them, and her imagination is restored to ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... however, be assumed that the sole aim of the bourgeoisie was that of making a haughty and pompous display. This is refuted by the testimony of the "Menagier de Paris," a curious anonymous work, the author of which must have been an educated ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... beside. Yet heap the other passions in the scale, And balance them 'gainst that which gold outweighs— Against this love—and you shall see how light The most supreme of them are in the poise! I speak by book and history; for love Slights my high fortunes. Under cloth of state The urchin cowers from pompous etiquette, Waiving his function at the scowl of power, And seeks the rustic cot to stretch his limbs In homely freedom. I fulfil a doom. We who are topmost on this heap of life Are nearer to heaven's hand than you below; And so are used, ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... relaxation, the young M.P. will be properly qualified for discussing those social questions which form the chief part of every aspirant's political baggage. Being gifted with a happy power of enunciating pompous platitudes with an air of profound conviction, and of spreading butter churned from the speeches of his leaders on the bread of political economy, he will be highly thought of at meetings of political leagues of either sex, or of both combined. It is necessary that he should catch the ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... mankind, who say that men Whose business 'tis to drive the tongue or pen Make the most clamorous fanfaronade O'er their most worthless work; and I'm afraid They're not entirely different from the hen. Lo! the drum-major in his coat of gold, His blazing breeches and high-towering cap— Imperiously pompous, grandly bold, Grim, resolute, an awe-inspiring chap! Who'd think this gorgeous creature's only virtue Is that in battle ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... was his choiceness and aptness in his use of adjectives. It is a style which now provokes merriment, and even had Alison been learned and impartial, and had he possessed a good method, his style for the present taste would have killed his book. Gibbon is sometimes called pompous, but place him by the side of Alison and what one may have previously called pompousness one ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... capacity as owner of the Sylph I had merely undertaken to furnish Major Stanleigh with passage to Muloa and back, but the events of the last three days had made me a party to the many conferences, and I was now on terms of something like intimacy with the rather stiff and pompous English gentleman. How far I was from sharing his real confidence I was to discover later when ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... motion, Of danger they abandoned the wild notion, Finding it easy for a Frog to jog On with a kind King Log. But in the fulness of the time, there came A would-be monarch—Legion his fit name; A Plebs-appointed Autocrat, Stork-throated, Goggle-eyed, Paul-Pry-coated; A poking, peering, pompous, petty creature, A Bumble-King, with beak for its chief feature. This new King Stork, With a fierce, fussy appetite for work; Not satisfied with fixing like a vice Authority on Town and Country Mice, Tried ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... say to you," cried Mr. King in his most pompous way, and with a stately wave of his hand, ...
— Five Little Peppers and their Friends • Margaret Sidney
... type of a second-rate personage on the lookout for something to turn up, and ready to do anything if so he might get on in the world, while keeping within the limitations of the possible and the forms of law. His pompous expression was an admirable indication of the time-serving eloquence to be expected of him. Chesnel's successor had discovered the young Count's hiding place to him, and he took great credit to himself for ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... detected. Great genius and force of character undoubtedly make their own career. But because Walter Scott was dull at school, is a parent to see with joy that his son is a dunce? Because Lord Chatham was of a towering conceit, must we infer that pompous vanity portends a comprehensive statesmanship that will fill the world with the splendor of its triumphs? Because Sir Robert Walpole gambled and swore and boozed at Houghton, are we to suppose that gross sensuality and coarse contempt of human ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... robustious T. W. RUSSELL, or the astute CAINE) and then, walking across the room to a well-remembered pigeon-hole, took thence an official-looking scroll, sat down, formally unfolded it, cleared his throat, and began with pompous complacency to read aloud its title, preamble, clauses, and provisions, compulsory regulations, and peremptory prohibitions to the apparently semi-asphyxiated ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 25, 1893 • Various
... early times of Christianity, there was any church wedding. Weddings were accomplished before witnesses independently of the church, or perhaps in the presence of a priest by the professiones." Then followed the pompous home bringing of the bride. Afterwards the spouses took part in the usual church service and the sacrament and gave oblations.[1345] Later special prayers for the newly wedded were introduced into the service. Later still special masses for the ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... cried the old domestic. "Has Master Zacharius ever listened to their fancies and pompous sayings? He might accept medicines for the watches, but ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... Lord Melbourne takes him not to have a very high opinion of the abilities of others in general, and he is not unlikely to depreciate Sir Robert Gordon to Lord Beauvale. Sir Robert Gordon is a man of integrity, but he is tiresome, long and pompous, which cannot be agreeable to the Prince, who has about him much of the French vivacity, and also much of their settled and regular ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... Well, what a character he was! As pompous and conceited a little fellow as ever you met with; and then, he was so bullied by his wife, he always came down to revenge it on the regiment. She was a fine, showy, vulgar woman, with a most cherishing affection for all the good things in this life, except her ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... while I acquaint her ladyship with your arrival," said the pompous person with the eyebrows, and went out noiselessly, ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... wonder how they could get anybody, either above or below that rank, to dine with them at all? It is, indeed, a marvel how such a host could find guests of any degree sufficiently wanting in self-respect to sit at his table and endure his pompous insolence—the insolence of an innately vulgar mind, which, unhappily, is sometimes to be met even in the ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... His assiduous application to his profession did not allow him to accompany us in learning to defend the happy land we were enjoying. Indeed, my life, the promise of our dear children does me more good than the purest of pure air." Observe how this pompous and formal statement is framed so as to please the mother. The writer does not say much about himself; but he knows that his wife is longing to hear of her darlings, and he tells her the news in his high-flown manner. He was not often apart from the lady whom he loved ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... Brown," to take his chances in the social world strictly on his own merits; assured that if he has any merit, other people will discover it without an ostentatious reminder of it in the shape of a pompous visiting-card. Of course this suggestion of democratic simplicity refers to the engraving of one's own card; other people address the man properly by his official or honorary title, with all due respect for the worth which the world recognizes—even though the wearer ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... the plate at the church I go to every Sunday," said Holmes, laughing, "and it would take a great sight more than a two-dollar wig and a pair of fifty-cent whiskers to conceal that pompous manner of his." ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... is another precept of the hypercritical mother. Why? Goodness only knows!—for none but a pompous blockhead or a solemn prig will pretend that he never relaxes. But let ancient Plato, brimful as he was of philosophy, answer the question ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... the bookseller, pointing to a pompous monument, 'there lies Mr. Such-a-one. I have forgotten his name. A remarkably clever man; he was an attorney, and hardly ever lost a cause he undertook. Burns made many a lampoon upon him, and there they rest, as ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... miss Dick's coming of age, won't you? There are to be high doings. Mr. Hardcastle is too mysterious and pompous to live. One can't get any thing out of him but just 'My son Dick doesn't come of age but once' (as if we thought it was a yearly occurrence), 'and we don't celebrate it but once.' But I got hold of Dick privately and wheedled it out of him in less than ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... death. The points which he depicts in his satire are, their credulity in giving way to Peregrinus; their unintelligent belief in Christ and in immortality; their factiousness in aiding Peregrinus when in prison; their pompous vanity in martyrdom, and possibly their tendency to believe legends respecting a martyr's death. His satire is contempt, not anger, nor dread. It is the humour of a thorough sceptic, which discharged itself on all religions alike; and indicates one type of opposition ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... necessity that a story such as this should be episodical, lapsical, disconnected. Its inception lies in two countries, and of different people. And it is, in its beginnings, a story of contrasts. So one may be permitted again to say: At a time when pompous, ponderous, white-whiskered, black-suited old Dr. DeLancey was engaged in bringing to the daughter of Kathryn Blair a posthumous baby brother that, in the mystery of things, turned out after all to be a sister, a stranger chanced to be riding at dusk through the deep shades of the Bois du Nord, ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... suit Professor Henderson to have his plans upset in this fashion. Nor did he care to give a detailed description of his ship to officers of the war department. He had many valuable inventions that were not patented. So he determined to outwit the pompous ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... a fixed moral fibre must always be some moral idea. When a man lives up to a real, not a pompous, dignity some ideal must inform it. Memba Sasa's ideal ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... shrill chorus which emanated from the audience was decidedly antagonistic to grave deliberation, and the anxious curiosity of the woman superseding the self imposed role of the diplomatist, our envoy lost the pompous tone she had first adopted, and a volley of queries and replies was exchanged so rapidly, and with such appalling shrillness, that we onlookers ran a great risk of being either deafened, or driven out of our senses. At the first slackening of the wordy warfare, Dunmore put his questions, ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... Spaniards to his assistance, for the bravery of the Flemings afforded them ample employment beyond the Rhine; in vain did he call upon the Roman court and the whole church to come to his rescue. The offended Pope sported, in pompous processions and idle anathemas, with the embarrassments of Ferdinand, and instead of the desired subsidy he was ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... which the most remarkable were two mural crowns and eight civic. In addition to this, that he brought forward citizens saved from the enemy, amongst whom was mentioned Caius Servilius, when master of the horse, now absent. Then after he had recounted his exploits in war, in pompous language suitable to the dignity of the subject, equalling his actions by his eloquence, he bared his breast marked with scars received in battle: and now and then, directing his eyes to the Capitol, he called ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... appears to have meditated an expedition to Britain at the time of his pompous ovation at Puteoli, mentioned in c. xiii.; but if Julius Caesar could gain no permanent footing in this island, it was very improbable that a prince of Caligula's character would ever seriously attempt it, and we shall presently see that the whole ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... later, at 5:32, a slightly pompous and thoroughly outraged young salesman marched through the doors of the station house and over to the ...
— The Circuit Riders • R. C. FitzPatrick
... so the guarantees afforded by the Constitution for just legislation are nugatory; they are worth neither more nor less than the pompous securities for every kind of inalienable right which have adorned the most splendid and the most transitory among the Constitutions which have during a century been in turn created and destroyed in ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... pictures but they are not barbaric pictures; they are florid pictures in the last faded realism of the Renascence. There really is stiff and ungainly decoration, but it is not the harsh or ascetic decoration of a Spanish cloister; it is much more like the pompous yet frivolous decorations of a Parisian hotel. In short, in so far as the shrine has really been defaced it has not been defaced by the Dark Ages, but rather if anything by the Age of Reason. It is the ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... all the simple enthusiasm of my eighteen years, and had been sent to Carpentras, there to manage the primary school attached to the college. It was a strange school, upon my word, notwithstanding its pompous title of 'upper'; a sort of huge cellar oozing with the perpetual damp engendered by a well backing on it in the street outside. For light there was the open door, when the weather permitted, and a narrow prison-window, with iron bars and lozenge panes set in ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... Household managers like Agathe have a plain common-sense which enables them to perceive such political chicane: the poor woman saw the truth through the lines of her son's tale; for she had read, in the exile's interests, all the pompous editorials of the constitutional journals, and watched the management of the famous subscription, which produced barely one hundred and fifty thousand francs when it ought to have yielded five or six millions. The Liberal leaders soon found ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... poento; (tip) pinto. poison : veneno. poker : fajrinstigilo. pole : stango; (of car) timono; (geog.) poluso. polecat : putoro. police : police, (—"court") jugxejo. policy : politiko. polish : poluri. politics : politiko. pompous : pompa. poodle : pudelo. poor : malricxa, kompatinda. pope : papo. poplar : poplo. poppy : papavo. -"coloured", punca popular : populara. porcelain : porcelano. porcupine : histriko. porous : pora, truajxa. porpoise ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... the Church as much as her precepts. The descendants of Friar Tuck and the Vicar of Bray were here, as well as those who would have been Wycliffes and Latimers had the fires of Smithfield still been alight. Obsequious curates bowed down to pompous prebendaries; bluff rectors chatted on cordial terms with suave archdeacons; and in the fold of the Church there were no black sheep on this great occasion. The shepherds and pastors of the Beorminster flock were polite, entertaining, ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... statement, he took very great pains with it; indeed, internal evidence would be sufficient to establish this if we had no positive external testimony whatsoever. He came at a fortunate time, when the stately yet not pompous or over-elaborated model of the latest Georgian prose, raised from early Georgian "drabness" by the efforts of Johnson, Gibbon, and Burke, but not proceeding to the extremes of any of the three, was still the academic standard; ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... of the morning Dick, together with Davis, called at the office of his attorney. Thomas M. Fitt, a bustling little man with a rather pompous manner, welcomed his client effusively. He had been appointed local attorney in charge by Gordon's Denver lawyers, and he was very eager to make the most of such advertising as his connection with so prominent ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... could hope to pay them off. 'And I owe something to Morell as well as to Chevalier,' thought he, recalling the night when he had run up so large a debt. It was at a carousel at the gipsies arranged by some fellows from Petersburg: Sashka B—-, an aide-de-camp to the Tsar, Prince D—-, and that pompous old——. 'How is it those gentlemen are so self-satisfied?' thought he, 'and by what right do they form a clique to which they think others must be highly flattered to be admitted? Can it be because they are on the Emperor's staff? Why, it's awful ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... the summoned peers, a shining train, To where the palace glitters o'er the plain. The opening gate receives the pompous throng; Thence to the festive room they move along, Where tapers, rang'd in lofty rows, display An added splendour, and nocturnal day. There, till the close of night, the bowls go round, And the full board with luxury ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... Chinese are very singular, as well as very rich and pompous, forming grand and solemn processions, in which sometimes at least 500 persons of both sexes assist, the women being all cloathed in white. At these funerals they employ music to heighten the shew, together with coloured umbrellas and canopies, carrying their principal ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... are two pier tables, on one of which is a clock and on the other a crucifix between lofty candelabra with feet of gilded wood. The wall hangings, of red silk damask with a Louis XIV palm pattern, are topped by a pompous frieze, framing a ceiling decorated with allegorical figures and attributes, and it is only just in front of the throne that a Smyrna carpet covers the magnificent marble pavement. On the days of private audience, when the Pope remains in the little throne-room or at times in ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... little capital of Williamsburg; so, at his door, stands ready his "lordly coach and six with liveried outriders in waiting." Again, the great gates are thrown open to guests arriving on horseback and in chariots and chairs. Pompous, beruffled dignitaries vie with gay gallants in obeisances and compliments to the ladies, and in assisting them to alight without harm to brocades and laces and rich cloaks and wide-hooped petticoats. And, yet again, all is a-bustle here with scarlet-coated horsemen and baying ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... the pompous black pyramid at the Louvre is only a skeleton now; all the flags have been miraculously whisked away during the night, and the fine chandeliers which glittered down the Champs Elysees for full half a mile, have been consigned to their dens and darkness. Will they ever be reproduced for other ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the repeated prayer of his flock, the good Archbishop allowed the crystal coffin of St. Carlo Borromeo to be carried in solemn procession, upon the shoulders of Cardinals, from end to end of the city—on which occasion all Milan crowded into the streets, and clustered thick on either side of the pompous train of monks and incense-bearers, priests and acolytes. But soon there fell a deeper despair upon the inhabitants of the doomed city; for within two days after this solemn carrying of the saintly remains the death-rate had tripled and there was scarce a house ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... death of Mariamne and her sons, which were barbarous actions in the king, he tells falsehoods about the incontinence of Mariamne, and the treacherous designs of his sons upon him; and thus he proceeded in his whole work, making a pompous encomium upon what just actions he had done, but earnestly apologizing for his unjust ones. Indeed, a man, as I said, may have a great deal to say by way of excuse for Nicolaus; for he did not so properly ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
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