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More "Prig" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... And pretty little boys and girls. Around, Across, along, the gardens' shrubby maze, They walk, they sit, they stand. What crowds press on, Eager to mount the stairs, eager to catch First vacant bench or chair in long room plac'd. Here prig with prig holds conference polite, And indiscriminate the gaudy beau And sloven mix. Here he, who all the week Took bearded mortals by the nose, or sat Weaving dead hairs, and whistling wretched strain, And eke the sturdy youth, whose trade ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... sentinel in the corridor which runs behind the apartments in question, where there is a staircase, which was at that time an inner one, and enabled the King and Queen to communicate freely. This post, which was very onerous, because it was to be kept four and twenty hours, was often claimed by Saint Prig, an actor belonging to the Theatre Francais. He took it upon himself sometimes to contrive brief interviews between the King and Queen in this corridor. He left them at a distance, and gave them warning if he heard the slightest noise. M. Collot, commandant of battalion of the National Guard, who ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... sun. That they were men of the finest type only the sentimentalist can declare. But they kept to the life of daylight. They are England's hope. Clumsily they carry forward the torch of the sun, until such time as the nation sees fit to take it up. Half clodhopper, half board-school prig, they can still throw back to a nobler stock, ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... it for other folks," replied Sam. "You took your medicine yourself very well, if I am a good judge, especially when you so lovingly displayed your osculatory skill on the sweet lips of peerless Rachel, whom that young prig of a Hudson Bay ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... the laird gae kaim his wig, The sodger not to strut sae big, The lawyer not to be a prig; The fool he cried, Te-hee! I kenn'd that I could never fail! But she pinn'd the dishclout to his tail, And soused him frae the water-pail, And ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... Cecil as subtle, and pleased him. It put their visitor in the position of a prig. Somewhat mollified, he sat ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... you mean. I never thought that duffer could dance. He was a great sap at school, and a hideous little prig, giving himself such airs! But if you think ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... "suggestion." I begin to suspect Hospitality's fudge, Meaning—mutually ruined digestion! He is such a bore, and his wife is so fat, And as fond of her bed as a dormouse. My girls say—in confidence—she is a cat; I'm sure he's a prig and a poor-mouse. I fancied he'd "influence," which he might use For DICK, our third son, who's a duffer. It doesn't come off, and I really refuse In DICK's interests longer to suffer. PAYN's right, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... previous ones; the hero is now in Italy, now in England, and there is much more attempt than either in Pamela or Clarissa to give the impression of a sphere in which a man of the world may move. Grandison is, however, a slightly ludicrous hero. His perfections are those of a prig and an egoist, and he passes like the sun itself over his parterre of adoring worshippers. The ladies who are devoted to Sir Charles Grandison are, indeed, very numerous, but the reader's interest centres in three of them—the mild and estimable ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... tears to your eyes—indeed, they are there now, shining and swimming; and a bead has slipped from the lash and fallen on to the flag. If I had time, and was not in mortal dread of some prating prig of a servant passing, I would know what all this means. Well, to-night I excuse you; but understand that so long as my visitors stay, I expect you to appear in the drawing-room every evening; it is my wish; don't neglect it. Now go, and send Sophie for Adele. Good-night, my—" He stopped, ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... quantity of lace on his coat, which was due, it seems, to a sentiment of filial reverence; and he could not fix his hour for dinner without an eye to the reformation of society. In short, he was a prig of the first water; self-conscious to the last degree; and so crammed with little moral aphorisms that they drop out of his mouth whenever he opens his lips. And then his religion is in admirable keeping. It is intimately connected with the excellence of his deportment; ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... the relief held out to me. To sit in the company of that condescending prig, to bore him and to be bored by him, was a doleful grievance I did not wish to inflict upon myself, and I eagerly answered that the day had been a long and hard one, and that I would be glad ...
— A Bicycle of Cathay • Frank R. Stockton
... these pounces, When I prig your pigs or pullen; Your culvers take Or mateless make Your chanticleer and sullen; When I want provant with Humphrey I sup, And when benighted, To repose in Paul's, With waking ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... of like instincts and of like experience. He was of all moralists the least solitary; he had spent his life as a soldier among soldiers, among those who did their best, in the midst of hardships, to live a life of pleasure without reflection. He was no prig, but he had formed the habit of giving fatherly counsel which was much beyond his years. He observes that "the advice of old men is like winter sunshine that gives out light without warmth," but that the words of a wise and genial young man may radiate heat and glow. ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... the fellows, and have turned out by no means the dullest in life; whereas, many a youth who could turn off Latin hexameters by the yard, and construe Greek quite glibly, is no better than a feeble prig now, with not a pennyworth more brains than were in his head ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... the most complete prig in the 'Varsity," Dennison declared, "and as long as a college has a lot of men like him in it nothing else matters. We don't ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... "Of course you'll have some! If I think fit to eat it, you may. Don't play the blameless prig, for ...
— Jack of Both Sides - The Story of a School War • Florence Coombe
... positively that the weather was clearing up. Even Mademoiselle Fifi seemed unable to keep still. He rose and sat down again. His harsh and clear eye was looking for something to break; suddenly, glaring at the lady with the mustache, the young prig drew his revolver: "You shall not witness it, you!" said he, and, without leaving his seat, he aimed. Two bullets fired in rapid succession put out the ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... myself for a governess, that I should make a point of honor of such things, little pragmatical prig that you are; nor are you, that I know of. You will always have plenty of money. 'Rich as a Jew' is a proverb, you ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... till at last I was with all due civility informed that my signature was no longer worth a farthing; and when I came to inquire into the cause of this phenomenon, I could nowise understand what my Lord Delacour's lawyer said to me: he was a prig, and I had not patience either to listen to him or to look at him. I sent for an old uncle of mine, who used to manage all my money matters before I was married: I put the uncle and the lawyer into a room, together with their ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... "Prig it! You go to the devil. Come on, mate, let's have another drink," and Bill began to ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... me if you don't like it, and do not set me down as a prig, though I am going to tell you your faults as I read them in your own words. You are proud and ambitious, and the cramped lines in which you are forced to live seem to strangle you. You have suffered, and have not learned the lesson of suffering—humility. ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... in one of the Albion's boats, rocking up and down in that soothing swell which freshens the harbour's mouth, Weston made me tell him all about the lion and the silver chain, and he called me a prig for saying so often that I did not believe in it now. I remember he said, "In this sleepy, damp, delightful Dartmouth, who but a prig could deny the truth of ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... good friends after a fashion. He was a bit of a snob but not much of a prig. She had the feeling about him that if he could be weaned away from the family he might stand for something fine in the way of character. But he was an adept at straddling fences, so that he was never fully on one side or the other, no matter which ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... rule, Clara's son and elder daughter annoyed him. Mortimer Hyslop was a calculating prig; Grace was finicking and bound by ridiculous rules. She was pale and inanimate; there was no blood in her. But Cartwright was fond of the younger girl. Barbara was frankly flesh and blood; he liked her flashes of temper ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... formalism of logic as once taught at the University of Copenhagen. But it is much more than that. Holberg gives us a memorable series of genre paintings of Danish life of his day, and at the same time presents a situation of universal interest. Erasmus is a prig who has adopted some new ideas, not so much from righteous conviction as from the feeling that they will give him intellectual caste. His revolutionary theories raise an uproar in the village. Each apostle of the old order opposes ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... and Prince won't stand it. He told Arch he was a prig and a parson, and Arch told him he wasn't a gentleman. My boots! weren't they both mad, though! I thought for a minute they'd pitch into one another and have it out. Wish they had, and not gone stalking round stiff and glum ever since. Mac and I settle our rows with a bat or so over the head, ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... quite disproves the oft-found myth that a dash of Mephisto in a young man is a valuable adjunct. John Jay was neither precocious nor bad. It is further a refreshing fact to find that he was no prig, simply a good, healthy youngster who took to his books kindly and gained ground—made head upon the whole ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... chair. Ethel met the Captain with only a half-concealed eagerness. This was not the first time that a consciously trivial word of hers had been crushed out of life by Weldon's serious dignity. She was never quite able to understand his mood upon such occasions. The man was no prig. At times, he was as merry as a boy. At other times, he showed an inflexible seriousness which left her with the vague feeling of being somehow or other in the wrong. The result was a mood of pique, rather than of antagonism. Up to that time, Ethel Dent had known only unreserved ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... all round," replied Ingleborough laughing. "No; I don't like him. I never do like a fellow who is an unnatural sort of a prig. He can't help being fat and pink and smooth, but he can help his smiling, sneaky manner. I do like a fellow to be manly. Hang him! Put him in petticoats, with long hair and a bonnet, he'd look like somebody's cook. But if I had an ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... a nice boy, not a bit of a prig. But he's not what you can call a success; and I fancy the Marlows won't want to exhibit him. Still, I shall have him to dinner and get some ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... moist-eyed, mottle-cheeked, puffy, convivial sub, who is knowing on the condition of ale, and is too friendly with Saccone's sherry. The convivial sub, I am happy to say, is dying out. Then there is the prig, who is "going in" for his profession. I call him a prig, because when people are going in for anything they should have the good sense not to blow about it. To hear Mr. Shells and his prattle about Hamley and Brialmont and Jomini, kriegspiel and the new drill, ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... hired attendant on the poor in sickness. The hospitals of London were, in many respects, noble Institutions; in others, very defective. I think it not the least among the instances of their mismanagement, that Mrs Betsey Prig was a fair specimen of a Hospital Nurse; and that the Hospitals, with their means and funds, should have left it to private humanity and enterprise, to enter on an attempt to improve that class of persons—since, greatly improved through the agency ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... Grogoff. That shocked him terribly. He confessed as much to me. She had always been so happy and easy about life. Nothing was serious to her. I remember once telling her she ought to take the war more deeply. I was a bit of a prig about it, I suppose. At any rate she thought me one.... And then to go off to ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... they are comforts,"[136]—a maxim laid down By the bard, what d'ye call him, that wore the black gown; And faith I agree with th' old prig to a hair; For a big-bellied bottle's ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... has all the fuss of preparation for childbirth—the accumulations of wrappings, the obstetric furniture, the nods and winks of the midwife and the gossips, authentic ancestors of Mrs Sarah Gamp and Mrs Elizabeth Prig—why, the haste to fetch the midwife at the crisis might almost be the foundation upon which Dickens built the visit of Seth Pecksniff, Esq., ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... start that the biographer labors under the disadvantage of having to counteract the errors and absurdities which the Reverend Mason L. Weems made current in the Life he published the year after Washington died. No one, not even Washington himself, could live down the reputation of a goody-goody prig with which the officious Scotch divine smothered him. The cherry-tree story has had few rivals in publicity and has probably done more than anything else to implant an instinctive contempt of its hero in the hearts of four generations of readers. "Why couldn't George Washington ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... reply. "Nasty, consequential little prig! And who is he, I should like to know? Panjandrums are not to be mentioned in the same breath as Dodos—we are a much more ancient family than they are, and, besides, we ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... Jess has said, "'at it was a trial to Jamie to tak her ony gait, an' I often used to say to her 'at I wondered at her want o' pride in priggin' wi' him. Ay, but if she could juist get a promise wrung oot o' him, she didna care hoo muckle she had to prig. Syne they quarrelled, an' ane or baith o' them grat (cried) afore they made it up. I mind when Jamie went to the fishin' Leeby was aye terrible keen to get wi' him, but ye see he wouldna be seen gaen through the toon wi' her. 'If ye let me gang,' she said to him, 'I'll no seek to ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... sense for want o' affection laird. The lad is a conceited prig. He's set up wi' himsel' about something he is going to do. Let him hae the money. I would show him you can gie as grandly as he can ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... leisure and relaxation, only the silly and the weak-minded woman, the fast and slangy girl, the intrigante and the "shady"—to borrow the language of the society she seeks—the hero of irresolution, the prig, the vulgar, and the vicious; to serve us only with the foibles of the fashionable, the low tone of the gay, the gilded riffraff of our social state; to drag us forever along the dizzy, half-fractured precipice of the seventh commandment; to bring us into relations ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... gone splendidly, there was a cent. per cent. profit; she was to come with him and buy the necklace at once. May loved necklaces and liked him for being so eager to give her one. And she did not wish to appear in the light of a prig (that had probably been his impression of her) again so soon. But had he not the evening before, as they talked over their prospects, told her that he owed Dick Benyon a thousand pounds or more, and was in arrears with the instalments by which the debt was to be liquidated? ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... spight of this new Abjuration, Did banter the lawful King of this great Nation: Who call'd God's anointed a foolish old Prig, Was both a base and unmannerly Whigg: But since he is Dead No more shall be said, For he in Repentance has laid down his Head; So I wish each Lady, who in mournful Tone is, In Charity Grieve for the ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... what's right, I mean to see it done, And for the rest good-tempered chaff and fun Are my pet "principles"—till fools grow rash From toleration, then they feel the lash. I am a sage, and not a prig or pump, Therefore I never canvas, spout or stump, I'm Liberal—as the sunlight—of all Good, Which to Conserve I strive—that's understood, But Tory nincompoop, or rowdy Rad, The thrall of bigotry, the fool of fad I hate alike. There's the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 9, 1892 • Various
... take it like that. From your point of view you were quite right to call me a blackguard. And, mind you, there are plenty of people in the world who aren't blackguards. There's my brother, for instance. He's a bit of a prig—in fact, he's as priggish as he well can be—but he's never done anything but run straight. I don't suppose he could go ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... shouldn't call her that," she said; "but she isn't very mischievous, and she's as honest as the day is long. She positively abhors deceit. And, somehow, Alicia, all the things that you think are fun, are the sort of things she doesn't stand for. That's all. Doll isn't a prig,—is she, Bernice?" ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... to him quickly again, and this time he kissed her lips. "Let's forget it," he said softly. "I have only got to-day and to-morrow, I don't want to remember what a self-satisfied prig I was." ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... whole, it is so good that most men who, like myself, are doing poietic work, and who would be just as well off without obedience, find a satisfaction in adhesion. At first, in the militant days, it was a trifle hard and uncompromising; it had rather too strong an appeal to the moral prig and harshly righteous man, but it has undergone, and still undergoes, revision and expansion, and every year it becomes a little better adapted to the need of a general rule of life that all men may try to follow. ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... its value, to be sure. It gave you a sense of being privileged by his friendship. . . . Or, no; that's too priggish for my meaning. Foe wasn't a bit of a prig. It was only because he had, on his record already, so much brains that the ordinary man who met him in my rooms was disposed to wonder how he could be so good a fellow. Get into your minds, please, that he was a good fellow, and that no one doubted it; of the sort that listens ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... is poking fun at me," he thought; "and he and his father and that prig deserve—but what is ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... telegram which, reaching me after weary days and in the absence of any answer to my laconic dispatch to him at Bombay, was evidently intended as a reply to both communications. Those few words were in familiar French, the French of the day, which Covick often made use of to show he wasn't a prig. It had for some persons the opposite effect, but his message may fairly be paraphrased. "Have patience; I want to see, as it breaks on you, the face you'll make!" "Tellement envie de voir ta tete!"—that was what I had to sit ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... mother's presence in the house. She knew the history of every other woman who had ever lived here since the place was built in the seventeenth century by an Alexander Hillard, an ancestor of Grandma's. A forbidding old prig he must have been, judging from the portrait over the dining-room mantelpiece, a worthy forbear of Ann Hillard, who had married Barrie's grandfather, John MacDonald of Dhrum. Barrie often said to herself that she did not ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... "you aren't going to be such a goose as to back out of joining the skating club just because—well, because Mary Brewster's such a prig? She isn't the whole membership, not by a good deal, and the rest of us count on your coming. Why, you'll be a tremendous acquisition. And the first meet is to-morrow. ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... into Corfu," answered Paddy, taking a turn with a dignified air on the deck. "I should like, to see what that prig Spry will say to ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... to Martinique that he had been diligently unfaithful to the poor "uneducated" little Creole girl who really thought she loved him. From all accounts, and I have read many, Alexandre Beauharnais was an ill-conditioned cruel prig. This excellent son with "fine and noble qualities" had not been long at Martinique before he associated himself with a lady of questionable virtue, who was much older than he. This person's dislike to Josephine caused her to pour into his ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... the memoir-writers of the eighteenth century. Whenever you think you have a chance of finding him in good authentic State papers, he gives you the slip; and if his existence were not vouched for by Horace Walpole, I should incline to deem of him as Betsy Prig ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... "Promise me, swear it, that until you are thirty you'll never do anything your instincts and your intelligence don't assure you is right,—really right without any sophistry. Of course I mean in regard to men. I don't want you to make yourself into a prig—but ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... side, thank Heaven, even to war; but Mr. THURSTON had a great chance of doing serious good and he has only half used it. I am certain (though he may call me a prig for saying it) that if he had set himself to serve his country's cause through the great influence which the theatre commands, he could have done better work than this; and he ought to have ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... last thing likely to have entered Fred's expectation was that he should see his brother-in-law Lydgate—of whom he had never quite dropped the old opinion that he was a prig, and tremendously conscious of his superiority—looking excited and betting, just as he himself might have done. Fred felt a shock greater than he could quite account for by the vague knowledge ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... the squirrel Had a quarrel, And the former called the latter "Little Prig"; Bun replied, "You are doubtless very big; But all sorts of things and weather Must be taken in together, To make up a year And a sphere, And I think it no disgrace To occupy my place. If I'm not so large as you, You are not so small as I, And not half so spry. I'll not deny ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... call me a blackguard and a scoundrel, do you?" hissed Saurin, who was quite beside himself with rage; and certainly Crawley's speech was the reverse of soothing. "You stuck-up, hypocritical, canting, conceited prig, I should like to ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... taken a disgust to it. At such schools as he had been able to frequent, he had gained the character of a boy rather insusceptible of ordinary teaching; and his letters (they are rare throughout his life) show him to us as something very like a juvenile prig. According to his own account, he "thought for at least eight years" without being able to pen a line, or at least a page; and the worst accusation that can truly be brought against him is that, by his own confession, ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... down at her, his hands in his pockets. His face was twisted in a humorous disgust. Mary laughed gently. "It is possible to—to keep the rules without being a prig, you know, though I believe ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... are the owners of all those showy scarfs and white neckcloths?—Ask little Tom Prig, who is there in all his glory, knows everybody, has a story about every one; and, as he trips home to his lodgings in Jermyn Street, with his gibus-hat and his little glazed pumps, thinks he is the fashionablest young fellow in town, and that he really has ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... got to find out, for Sally May and Catherine look perfectly wretched—as if Sally May would; but some of them believe it. How Genevieve can act! She just hoodwinked Miss Watson completely; looked like a good little prig who'd done everything she ought to do—and she was thoroughly enjoying herself. I guess she'll go on the stage when she leaves school—it would be interesting to have people applauding. I believe she was glad I was there to see her do it—and I believe—she was glad the girls ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... for example, to have her "run" with the McComases and others of that type or to have her dawdle over glasses, tall, broad, or short, in places of general democratic assemblage; and he told her so. I believe it was about here that she began to find him something of a prig and a doctrinaire; and she was not incapable, under provocation, of mentioning her impressions. It was about here, I suspect, that he told her something of Johnny McComas and his origins—at least he once or ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... party strife, And all the hot activities of life; But most the Politician He mocks—for 'meanness.' How the prig would gasp If shown the slime-trail of that wriggling asp In his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... I hardly know; but this I know. Ever since my prig of a brother has come home from Oxford with his affected smile and flattering ways, Ruth has had no ears or eyes for ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... is a man," Julia interrupted, "and I would not undertake to say a man would not do anything—on occasions—or a woman either, for the matter of that. There is a beast in most men, and an archangel in lots, and a snob, and a prig, and a dormant hero, and an embryo poet. There are great possibilities in men; you have to watch and see which is coming out top and back that, and then half the time you are wrong. Of course, at father's age, possibilities are getting ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... prig, Prendick, a silly ass! You're always fearing and fancying. We're on the edge of things. I'm bound to cut my throat to-morrow. I'm going to have a damned Bank Holiday to-night." He turned and went out into the moonlight. "M'ling!" he cried; "M'ling, ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... divorced from morality. Its frank disregard of ethical considerations startled Miss Balfour without shocking her. She liked his candor, even though it condemned him. It was really very nice of him to take her impudence so well. He certainly wasn't a prig, anyway. ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... shrewdly. More than once she had felt that Terry was on the verge of becoming a complacent prig. So she countered with ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... would not have lacked so many words that do duty as native-born or naturalized citizens in large sections of the United States, and among these words is the one that stands at the head of the present chapter. I know that some disdainful prig will assure me that it is but a corruption of the French "charivari," and so it is; but then "charivari" is a corruption of the low Latin "charivarium" and that is a corruption of something else, and, indeed, almost every word is a corruption ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... to the sad admission upon our part that Payson, Jr., was a prig. And in the very middle of his son's priggishness Payson, Sr., up and died, and Tutt and Mr. Tutt were called ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... for aw've nowt they can tak, Unless it's thease tatters' at hing o' mi back; An' if they prig them, they'lt get suck'd do yo see, They'll be noa use to them, for they're little to me, Aw live, an' aw'm ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... larceny, shoplifting. thievishness, rapacity, kleptomania, Alsatia^, den of Cacus, den of thieves. blackmail, extortion, shakedown, Black Hand [U.S.]. [person who commits theft] thief &c 792. V. steal, thieve, rob, mug, purloin, pilfer, filch, prig, bag, nim^, crib, cabbage, palm; abstract; appropriate, plagiarize. convey away, carry off, abduct, kidnap, crimp; make off with, walk off with, run off with; run away with; spirit away, seize &c (lay violent hands on) 789. plunder, pillage, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... ever known was the Count de la Fere, whom we at the Hotel de Troisville, in old Paris, called "Athos." He was not merely sans peur et sans reproche as Bayard, but was positive in his virtues. He fought for his friends without even asking the cause of the fray. Yet, what a prig he seemed to be at first, with his eternal gentle melancholy, his irreproachable courtesy, unvarying kindness and complete unselfishness. ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... them. My uncle generally has his dinner parties on Saturday, or goes out; and aunt gives me ten shillings and sends me to the play; that's better fun than a dinner party." Here the lad blushed again. "I used," said he, "when I was younger, to stand on the stairs and prig things out of the dishes when they came out from dinner, but I'm past that now. Maria (that's my cousin) used to take the sweet things and give 'em to the governess. Fancy! she used to put lumps of sugar into her pocket and eat them in the schoolroom! Uncle Hobson don't live in such ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... one's time to the great end of living (as distinguished from vegetating) without briefly referring 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 ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... it gives us a pleasing sense of superior delicacy and humor. But it is none the less mean and ridiculous. Instead of condemnation, the world needs to bestir itself to remove the stupid and cruel creatures that make evil conduct necessary; for can anyone, not a prig, say that the small part of the human race that does well does so because it is naturally better than the large part ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... said Lund. "And yo're a damned prig! You'd like to bust me in the jaw, but you know I'm stronger. You've got some guts, Rainey, but yo're hidebound. You ain't got ha'f the git-up-an'-go to ye that she has. She's a woman, I tell you, an' she's to be won. If you want her, why don't you stand up an' try to git her 'stead of ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... whole heart when anything amused him. Vivian used to look at him in wonder sometimes, and think that Percival was more like a great overgrown boy than a man of eight-and-twenty. On the other hand, Percival said that Vivian was a prig. ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... scarcely perceptible greeting passed between him and Sorell. All Falloden's irritable self-consciousness rushed back upon him as he recognised the St. Cyprian tutor. He was not going to stay and cry peccavi any more in the presence of a bloodless prig, for whom Oxford was the world. But it was bitter to him all the same to leave him in possession of the garden and ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... anything. I'm not remarkable for my bonhomie. They think I'm a prig—which I am. It doesn't amuse me to talk about beer and women or listen to a gramophone or grouse about my last meal. But I'm quite content, thank you. Sometimes I get a seat in a corner of a Y.M.C.A. hut, and I've a book or two. My chief affliction is the padre. ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... the ordinary man, to ask if you will like the saint. But as the ordinary man you do like him. You revel in him. If you dislike him it is not because you are a nice ordinary man, but because you are (if you will excuse me) a sophisticated prig of a Fleet Street editor. That is just the funny part of it. The human race has always admired the Catholic virtues, however little it can practise them; and oddly enough it has admired most those of them that the modern world most sharply disputes. You complain of Catholicism for ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... Dickens' own expression, "sent them all stark staring raving mad across the water;" we must frequent the boarding establishment for single gentlemen kept by lean Mrs. Todgers, and sit with Sarah Gamp and Betsy Prig as they hideously discuss their avocations, or quarrel over the shadowy Mrs. Harris; we must follow Jonas Chuzzlewit on his errand of murder, and note how even his felon nature is appalled by the blackness and horror of his guilt, and how the ghastly terror of it haunts and cows him. A great ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... so you would infer that you and I are alike? What does the old prig mean? I'll banter him, and laugh at him, and leave him. [Aside.] I fancy you have a wrong ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... for their recognition. He knew a great deal about art, and all four enjoyed the morning immensely. It was fine to go round recognising old favourites and finding new beauties, especially while so many people fumbled helplessly with Baedeker. Nor was he a bit of a prig, Miss Winchelsea said, and indeed she detested prigs. He had a distinct undertone of humour, and was funny, for example, without being vulgar, at the expense of the quaint work of Beato Angelico. He had a grave seriousness beneath it all, and was quick to seize the moral lessons of the pictures. ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... must be put to his credit. If he had been a prig he would either have turned up his nose at his patron's morals or condoned them with a sense of self-sacrifice and forbearance. He didn't do either. He just took Jocelyn for what he was worth, realising ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... though sand-blind by nature, and bigoted by Education, one of the truly great men of England, and "her men are of men the chief," alike in the dominions of the understanding, the reason, the passions, and the imagination. No prig shall ever persuade me that Rasselas is not a noble performance—in design and execution. Never were the expenses of a mother's funeral more gloriously defrayed by son, than the funeral of Samuel Johnson's mother by the price of Rasselas, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... all, I'm grumbling and complaining like an old prig! Perhaps I am one. I know Dick Burden thinks so. We'll let it go at that. I don't need to explain to you a matter which outwardly is insignificant, and is significant to me only for reasons which the past will account for to ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... you hear it's a waluable dog—now is it feasible as I should go for to prig a dog wot was a ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. When asked at dinner what dish he preferred, he answered, 'the nearest.'" So many negative superiorities begin to smack a little of the prig. From his later works he was in the habit of cutting out the humorous passages, under the impression that they were beneath the dignity of his moral muse; and there we see the prig stand public and confessed. It was "much easier," ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... chapter, which she always managed to find time for, even when she did not get up as early as on this occasion. For her age, and perhaps because of her mother's death, which still seemed recent to Janice, she was rather serious-minded. Yet she was no prig, and she loved fun and was as alert for good times as any girl of her age ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... Afterwards the recommendation rang mockingly in her ears. She felt herself sterile, written out already. As for writing again on the same lines, she wondered what Raphael would think if he knew of the profits she had reaped by bespattering his people. But there! Raphael was a prig like the rest. It was no use worrying about his opinions. Affluence had come to her—that was the one important and exhilarating fact. Besides, had not the hypocrites really enjoyed her book? A new wave of emotion swept over her—again she felt strong enough to ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Moses!" may be in itself quite harmless, and innocuous to friendship, if it is pronounced in the right, friendly tone. Unfortunately Mr. Alpha used it with a sarcastic inflection, implying that he regarded Mr. Omega as a prig, a fussy old person, a miser, a spoilsport, and, indeed, something less than ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... the night so long, Eric! But—thank you! I was beginning to think you were a prig, but I believe you're a saint!" The wistfulness left her eyes, and she smiled mischievously. "In moments of emotion how all our habits and practices break down! 'My dear child,' 'My dear child,' 'D'you think I can't see?' 'My dear child,' 'Tired, ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... Englishman in Paris, represents in the character of the pedantic prig named Classick, the sort of university tutor who was sometimes substituted for the ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... time the boys were all in school. "There is not one prig in the whole lot," said the headmaster sadly. "I wish there was, but only those boys come here who are notoriously too good to become current coin in the world unless they are hardened with an alloy of vice. I should have liked to show you our gambling, book-making, and speculation ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... Cooper calling to Silk and asking if he were coming with him. The prudent Silk felt that to stay was to signify his approval of Mike's conduct in the case of the indiscreet countess. To leave with Cooper was to write himself down a prig, expose himself to the sarcasm of several past masters in the art of gibing, and to make in addition several powerful enemies. But the instinct not to compromise himself in any issue did not desert him, and rushing after Cooper he attempted the peace-maker. ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... his father. Miss Lentaigne was greatly delighted with him. So was Priscilla, who winked three times at her father when neither Frank nor her aunt was looking at her. Sir Lucius was uneasy. He feared that his nephew was likely to turn out a prig, a kind of boy which he ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... of his excellent reprover; yet burning with impatience to obliterate all remembrance of his error, by some brave action which should prove that he was not unworthy the clemency and confidence which his appearance had excited. He told Monthault what had passed. "The old Prig worded it bravely," said he, "but in one respect he is better than most of your precise moralists. Come turn out the pieces—share and share alike you know; and just now they are quite convenient, as there is not a single doit in my purse." Eustace hesitated, knowing that its ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... endeavouring to avoid vulgar terms he too frequently dignifies trifles, and clothes common thoughts in a splendid dress that would be rich enough for the noblest ideas. In short we are too often reminded of that great man, Mr. Prig, the auctioneer, whose manner was so inimitably fine that he had as much to say on a ribbon as on a Raphael." It seems as if Gibbon had taken the stilted tone of the old French tragedy for his model, rather than the crisp and nervous prose of the best French writers. We are constantly offended ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... North Italians; sometimes one comes upon a young Italian who wants to learn German, but not often. Priggism, or whatever the substantive is, is as essentially a Teutonic vice as holiness is a Semitic characteristic; and if an Italian happens to be a prig, he will, like Tacitus, invariably show a hankering after German institutions. The idea, however, that the Italians were ever a finer people than they are now, will not pass muster with ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... old prig of a Hilary, don't worry. It's all going to come straight. When the novel of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries is published I guess you'll be proud of ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... good-naturedly, 'I am not going to be preached to. The chief thing that made me take to you was, that you were not a prig, with all your extreme devotedness. And I will not enter into religious discussions. I might disturb your faith, and I don't want to do that. Keep your religion to yourself, and live it out, child, if you want to impress others. I am sick of cant and ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre
... East"—he said. His boast was, first, that he was an Oxford Man of rare and shining parts, which may or may not have been true—I did not know enough to check his statements—and, secondly, that he "had his hand on the pulse of native life"—which was a fact. As an Oxford Man, he struck me as a prig: he was always throwing his education about. As a Mohammedan faquir—as McIntosh Jellaludin—he was all that I wanted for my own ends. He smoked several pounds of my tobacco, and taught me several ounces of things ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... meet you here and there... When Shakespeare's played you hold a chair, And some defunct, moth-eaten star Enchants the mental prig you are... A radical comes down and shocks The atheistic orthodox? You're representing Common Sense, Mouth open, in the audience. And, sometimes, even chapel lures That conscious tolerance of yours, That broad and beaming view of truth (Including Kant and General Booth...) And so from shock ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... still in need of a friend, and take the consequences. He was not so irresistible, he told himself, as to be necessarily dangerous to the peace of mind of all the women of his acquaintance. He had acted the part of a prig and he was well punished ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... expressed themselves in this way, "That they would much rather have paid their money to Stone, if he had given me a good thrashing, than to have me punished by legal proceedings." And one of them, a parson prig, had the insolence and the folly to tell me, that they would get a better man for me next time, for that they were determined to bring down one of the prize-fighters to give me a drubbing. This fellow was then, and still is, an insufferable cockscomb, and I remember very ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... censure all the motley train, Whether with ale irriguous, or champaign? Whether they tread the vale of prose, or climb, And whet their appetites on cliffs of rhyme; The college sloven, or embroider'd spark; The purple prelate, or the parish clerk; The quiet quidnunc, or demanding prig; The plaintiff tory, or defendant whig; Rich, poor, male, female, young, old, gay, or sad; Whether extremely witty, or quite mad; Profoundly dull, or shallowly polite; Men that read well, or men that ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... and the first sound and sight of the sea—the author's childhood at Uphill Parsonage—his reminiscences of the clock of Wells Cathedral—and some real villatic sketches—a portrait of a Workhouse Girl—some caustic remarks on prosing and prig parsons, commentators, and puritanical excrescences of sects—to some unaffected lines on the village school children of Castle-Combe, and their annual festival. This is so charming a picture of rural joy, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 350, January 3, 1829 • Various
... apprentice or journeyman, who understands his duties and the tricks of his trade, will never be found capering in the hunting field. He will feel that his proper place is behind the counter; and while his master is away enjoying the pleasures of the chase, he can prig as much "pewter" from the till as will take both himself and his lass to Sadler's Wells theatre, or any other place she may ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... of his favorite newspaper in favor of free trade and Mr. Cleveland. History? The Wall Street man rarely knows in what year Columbus discovered America, and would be in straits wild enough to horrify that talented arch-prig, Mr. Andrew Lang, if you mentioned either Cortes or Pizarro. Fiction? He admired Robinson Crusoe when a boy, and since then he has read a few translated volumes of Dumas the elder. Poetry? He doesn't like it "for a cent"; but he once did come across something (by Tennyson ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... all his wonderful achievements this youth would be top-heavy and a most insufferable prig. The fact was, he was a fine, rollicking, healthy young man much given to pranks, and withal ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... of flirting, and as it must probably have been impossible to flirt with Montagu, she indulged herself in that agreeable pastime with more than one other—to the great annoyance of that pompous prig of an admirer of hers. The following letter, dated September 5, 1709, written to Anne Wortley for her brother's perusal, was clearly an endeavour to sooth ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... wish to be thought a prig or one who made a pretence of great industry, and, although Miss Morgan's voice was without expression, he believed that irony lay hidden somewhere ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... critical sense, the sense for ideal values. It is the better part of what men know as wisdom. Some of us are wise in this way naturally and by genius; some of us never become so. But to have spent one's youth at college, in contact with the choice and rare and precious, and yet still to be a blind prig or vulgarian, unable to scent out human excellence or to divine it amid its accidents, to know it only when ticketed and labelled and forced on us by others, this indeed should be accounted the very calamity and shipwreck ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... don't pretend that the Cardinal was a saint; I am sure he was not a prig. For all his works of supererogation, his life was a life of pomp and luxury, compared to the proper saint's life. He wore no hair shirt; I doubt if he knew the taste of the Discipline. He had his weaknesses, his foibles—even, if you will, his vices. I have intimated ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... pure joy to them both. In them they went back to the early world. They did not make the hard and self-conscious imaginative effort of the prig to hurl themselves into an historic past. They just let the land and its memories take them. As, sitting on the warm ground among the wild myrtle bushes, they looked across the emerald green unruffled waters to Salamis, that very long isle with its calm gray and orange hills and its ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... him. "Be quiet, you prig! I won't be dictated to by you. Look here, Dick!" His voice changed abruptly. "I'm not ordering. I'm asking. That boy is a mill-stone round your neck. Let him go! He'll be happy enough. I'll see to that. Give him up like a dear chap! Then you'll be free—free ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... bear up bravely with your Brute my lads, Higgen hath prig'd the prancers in his dayes, And sold good penny-worths; we will have a course, The Spirit ...
— Beggars Bush - From the Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10) • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... pretty things to her—that pleases her more than anything: and make yourself useful, if you get the chance. She's not half a bad little woman; and if you help me, Linda, I shall get in with her yet in spite of her conceited prig of a husband." ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... scraps of reality can startle us into more solid imagination of events, so can even errors and exaggerations if they are on the right side. It does some good to call Alfred a prig, Charles I a Puritan, and John a jolly good fellow; if this makes us feel that they were people whom we might have liked or disliked. I do not myself think that John was a nice gentleman; but for all that the popular picture of him is all wrong. Whether he had any generous qualities ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... rather?—Romeo's passionate epistles and Juliet's passionate answers, during that period of enforced separation; when the latter had not begun to cool down, and was still able to speak of Gwen's father—undeveloped then in that capacity—as a tedious, middle-aged prig whom her ridiculous aunt wanted to force upon her? Was it a sufficient set-off against all this fiery correspondence that she had burned one preposterous—and red-hot—effusion, and started seriously on cooling, because a friend ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... were at the cock again, which both began and ended the book. He stood and crowed so proudly and never slept. He was a regular prig, but when Sister was diligent he put a one-ore piece among the leaves. But the hens laid eggs, and it was evident that they were the same as the flowers; for when you were kind to them and treated them as if they belonged ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... "But, pay dear sir, be reasonable." ... Reasonable! I nearly choked. If I could have stood once more on my useless legs, I should have swung my left arm round and clouted him on the side of the head. Reasonable indeed! This well-fed, able-bodied, young Oxford prig to tell me, an honourable English officer and gentleman, to be reasonable, when the British Empire, in peril of its existence, was calling on all its manhood to defend it in arms! I ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... ruined. She died of a broken heart, and Lovelace, borne down by remorse, was killed in a duel by a cousin of Clarissa. Sir Charles Grandison, 1753, was Richardson's portrait of an ideal fine gentleman, whose stately doings fill eight volumes, but who seems to the modern reader a bore and a prig. All of these novels were written in the form of letters passing between the characters, a method which fitted Richardson's subjective cast of mind. He knew little of life, but he identified himself intensely with his principal ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... wrote, "has been so overlaid with myths and traditions, and so distorted by misleading criticisms, that ... he has been wellnigh lost. We have the religious and statuesque myth, we have the Weems myth (which turns Washington into a faultless prig), and the ludicrous myth of the writer of paragraphs. We have the stately hero of Sparks, and Everett, and Marshall, and Irving, with all his great deeds as general and President duly recorded and set down in polished and eloquent sentences; and we know him to be very great and wise and pure, ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... Marsh had repeated this good story. It had impressed them at the time, but they did not tell it to others in an impressive way, and the girls, who had not seen Prissie, but had only heard the tale, spoke of her to one another as an "insufferable little prig." ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... exercised any influence upon their practice, they would have learned long ago that ill-gotten goods never prosper, and that they who make booty of other men's wits, are not excepted from the general condemnation of wrong-doers. Some day, perhaps, they will consent to profit by what they prig, and thus, like the fat knight, turn their diseases to commodity—the national disease of appropriation to the commodity of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... be just a big sister to you, of course. Ever so superior, I guess, and a good bit of a prig. And all this time over there in France with nothing but my letters and that silly picture of me in the khaki frame, I suppose you have been thinking of me, well,—as a sort of nice angel. I'm not either, really. I don't ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... we must take success, like disaster, quietly.' He said it gently, as when he played with the children. It was mostly put on, of course, this false grandiloquence of the prig. His eyes already twinkled more ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... addition to being an egotist and the very incarnation of selfishness, was a prig of the first water. He had been reared altogether in convention. Home life and Eton and Christchurch had taught him many things, wise as well as foolish; but had tended to fix his conviction that affairs of the heart should proceed ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... such a colour in the world's paint-box as grey. "It's bad to tell lies. It's bad to steal. It's bad to put your tongue out. It's good to be kind to poor people. It's good to say 'No' when you want more pudding but mustn't have it." Barbara was no prig. She did not care the least little thing about these things, nor did she ever mention them, but let a question of conduct arise, then was Barbara's way plain and clear. She did not always take it, but there it was. With Mary, how very different! She had, I am afraid, no sense of right and wrong at ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... modest virgin—to seek a gentleman in this personal fashion. Modesty in a young girl has a comfortable satisfying charm, recognized easily by all humanity; but he must be a sorry knave or a worse prig who is not deliciously thrilled when Modesty puts her charming little foot just over the threshold ...
— Jeff Briggs's Love Story • Bret Harte
... distinguished authors for presentation copies of their books, in order to furnish the shelves of the library, I am driven to the painful conclusion that I must have been a terrible person in the days of my youth, and something of a prig to boot. Apropos of the begging for books as free gifts from authors, I had one or two amusing experiences. Among those whom I importuned in this impertinent way were Charles Kingsley, and the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Longley. Kingsley replied to my request ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... to Yussuf for inadvertently returning the Salaam aleykoum (Peace be with thee), which he said to Omar, and which I, as an unbeliever, could not accept. He coloured crimson, touched my hand and kissed his own, quite distressed lest the distinction might wound me. When I think of a young parsonic prig at home I shudder at the difference. But Yussuf is superstitious; he told me how someone down the river cured his cattle with water poured over a Mushaf (a copy of the Koran), and has hinted at writing out a chapter for me to wear as a hegab (an amulet for my health). He ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... got out of the room as quickly as he could, inwardly denouncing his friend Tom Towers as a prig and a humbug. "I know he wrote those articles," said Bold to himself. "I know he got his information from me. He was ready enough to take my word for gospel when it suited his own views, and to set Mr Harding up before the public as an impostor on no other testimony than my chance conversation; ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... Had a quarrel, And the former called the latter "Little Prig"; Bun replied: "You are doubtless very big; But all sorts of things and weather Must be taken in together To make up a year And a sphere. And I think it no disgrace To occupy my place. If I'm not so large as you, You are not so small as I, And not half so spry. I'll not deny you make A very ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... when the winds blew him to the Mandarins. Oh, how blessed were the winds! And, moreover, Sir Rowley found that his son-in-law was well spoken of at the clubs by those who had known him during his university career, as a man popular as well as wise, not a book-worm, or a dry philosopher, or a prig. He could talk on all subjects, was very generous, a man sure to be honoured and respected; and then such a handsome, manly fellow, with short brown hair, a nose divinely chiselled, an Apollo's mouth, six feet high, with shoulders and legs and arms in proportion,—a pearl ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... "Jervis" in that household. Perhaps Mrs. Robey alone of them all knew how much they would miss him. He was such a thoroughly good fellow, he was so useful to her husband in keeping order among the wilder spirits, and that without having about him a touch of the prig! ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... and loud above it sounded the voice of Speug, who, though he had never received a prize in his life, and never would, rejoiced when a decent fellow like Dunc Robertson, the wicket-keeper of the eleven and the half-back of the fifteen, showed that he had a head as well as hands. When a prig got too many prizes there was an eloquent silence in the hall, till at last a loud, accurate and suggestive "Ma-a-a-a!" from Speug relieved the feelings of the delighted school, and the unpopular prize-winner left the platform amid the chorus of the farmyard—cows, ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... fantastic figure of King Corny in Ormond, perhaps the best thing she ever did. But she had in her father a literary adviser, not of the negative but of the positive order, and there never was a more fully developed prig than Richard Edgeworth. His view of literature was purely utilitarian; to convey practical lessons was the business of all superior persons, more particularly of an Edgeworth. In Castle Rackrent his suggestions and comments are happily relegated ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... that was romping with one of the largest girls; this was so unusual that it excited no little comment among the other lads." It is also handed down that in boyhood this great soldier, though never a prig, had no fights, and was often summoned to the playground as a peacemaker, his arbitration in ...
— George Washington's Rules of Civility - Traced to their Sources and Restored by Moncure D. Conway • Moncure D. Conway
... She was sure that if she closed her eyes she should see Madame Bonanni vividly before her, and hear her talking to Logotheti, and smell the heavy air of the big room. She felt that she could not call Lushington a prig. ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... have been a horrid little prig in those days," said Evadne, smiling. "But, auntie, there can be no peace without plenty. And I think I would rather be a sensible realist than a foolish idealist. You mean that you think me too much of a utilitarian, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... a light side, thank Heaven, even to war; but Mr. THURSTON had a great chance of doing serious good and he has only half used it. I am certain (though he may call me a prig for saying it) that if he had set himself to serve his country's cause through the great influence which the theatre commands, he could have done better work than this; and he ought ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... musical world, such as Mario and Grisi and Rachel; blue-stockings like Lady Eastlake and Madame Mohl; Mademoiselle de Montijo, who captivated an Emperor, and Lola Montez, who ruled a kingdom. No advantages of social education will convert a fool or a bore or a prig or a churl into an agreeable member of society; but, where Nature has bestowed a bright intelligence and a genial disposition, her gifts are cultivated to perfection by such surroundings as Frederick Leveson enjoyed in early life. And so it came about that ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... in a disagreeable tone, "and I don't intend to say so either. She may or she may not have given them to me. I'll never tell. She's a snippy, conceited, little prig, and a little punishment for her ...
— Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School • Jessie Graham Flower
... Reverend Ronald Macdonald, and the most disagreeable, condescending, ill-tempered prig I ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the pages into the breast of his jelab, and sat brooding over the paling fire for a while; then, by an abrupt transition, he said—"A fatal inclination for instructing the young was, perhaps, my undoing. I believe that I am a prig to the very fibres of me. If I had kept my didactics for my own sex, all might have gone well: I have never doubted but that I had things to teach my generation which it would be the happier of knowing. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... here—you see? And you must be as nice as you can. Say pretty things to her—that pleases her more than anything: and make yourself useful, if you get the chance. She's not half a bad little woman; and if you help me, Linda, I shall get in with her yet in spite of her conceited prig of a husband." ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... forebode something in the Admiralty—a comfortable post, carrying no fame with it, but moderately lucrative. In wilder flights my fancy has hovered over the Pipe Office (Addison, sir, was a fine writer; though a bit of a prig, between you and me)." ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... reasonable." ... Reasonable! I nearly choked. If I could have stood once more on my useless legs, I should have swung my left arm round and clouted him on the side of the head. Reasonable indeed! This well-fed, able-bodied, young Oxford prig to tell me, an honourable English officer and gentleman, to be reasonable, when the British Empire, in peril of its existence, was calling on all its manhood to defend it in arms! I ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... who before drank beer; What's now the cause? we know the case is clear; Look in Prig's purse, the chev'ril there tells you Prig money wants, either ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... a man before you are a prig," she said, "and that is something to be thankful for in these degenerate days. Why, there is the child herself! Come ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... the duke and the coster to do? Neither of them has any effective choice in the matter: their children must either go to the schools that are, or to no school at all. And as the duke thinks with reason that his son will be a lout or a milksop or a prig if he does not go to school, and the coster knows that his son will become an illiterate hooligan if he is left to the streets, there is no real alternative for either of them. Child life must be socially organized: no parent, rich or poor, can ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... personal name, as Foot, Leg, Crookshanks, Heaviside, Sidebottom, Longbottom, Ramsbottom, Winterbottom; or a long name, as Blanchenhagen, or Blanchenhausen; or a short name, as Crib, Crisp, Crips, Tag, Trot, Tub, Phips, Padge, Papps, or Prig, or Wig, or Pip, or Trip; Trip had been something, but Ho—-. (Walks about in great agitation—recovering his ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... of 21 I was perfectly satisfied with my own society, something of a prig, fond of books and reading, etc. I was and ever have been absolutely insensible to the influence of the other sex. I am not a woman hater, and take intellectual pleasure in the society of certain ladies, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of adventure by sea is regarded by every true-hearted boy as the very best story of all. The yarn—that's the thing! If the sea is a northern sea, full of ice and swept by big gales, if the adventures are real, if the hero is not a prig, if the tale concerns itself with heroic deeds and moves like a full-rigged ship with all sail spread to a rousing breeze, the boy will say "Bully!" and read the story again. "The Adventures of Billy Topsail" is a book to be chummy ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... little tags, compared with the pith and marrow of the man himself? Parson Twemlow was no prig, no pedant, and no popinjay, but a sensible, upright, honorable man, whose chief defect was a quick temper. In parish affairs he loved to show his independence of the Hall, and having a stronger will than Admiral ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... two o'clock and I had had quite enough of L'Abbaye. I had not enjoyed myself—had not expected to, so far as that went. I hope I am not a prig, and, whatever I am or am not, priggishness had no part in my feelings then. Under ordinary circumstances I should not have enjoyed myself in a place like that. Mine is not the temperament—I shouldn't ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... "You're a solemn prig, Prendick, a silly ass! You're always fearing and fancying. We're on the edge of things. I'm bound to cut my throat to-morrow. I'm going to have a damned Bank Holiday to-night." He turned and went out into the moonlight. "M'ling!" ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... four-and-twenty years ago, a fair representation of the hired attendant on the poor in sickness. The hospitals of London were, in many respects, noble Institutions; in others, very defective. I think it not the least among the instances of their mismanagement, that Mrs Betsey Prig was a fair specimen of a Hospital Nurse; and that the Hospitals, with their means and funds, should have left it to private humanity and enterprise, to enter on an attempt to improve that class of persons—since, greatly improved through the ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... ends in a fog, as if the author did not know what to do with his characters. It has the amateurish fault of halting the narrative to talk with the reader; and it moralizes to such an extent that the heroine (who is pictured as of almost angelic virtue) eventually becomes a prig and a preacher,—two things that a woman must never be. Nevertheless, the romance has a host of enthusiastic readers, and to criticize it adversely is to bring a storm about one's ears.] In The Blithedale Romance (1852) ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... of the world—who suggested that she should take him to Monte Carlo. He had the idea that what Edward needed, in order to fit him for the society of Leonora, was a touch of irresponsibility. For Edward, at that date, had much the aspect of a prig. I mean that, if he played polo and was an excellent dancer he did the one for the sake of keeping himself fit and the other because it was a social duty to show himself at dances, and, when there, to dance well. He did nothing for fun except what he considered to be his work ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... well myself," said Rosemary, laughing a little—but at Mr. Perry, not at Adam, as Faith clearly understood. "I never did like him. I went to school with him—he was a Glen boy, you know—and he was a most detestable little prig even then. Oh, how we girls used to hate holding his fat, clammy hands in the ring-around games. But we must remember, dear, that he didn't know that Adam had been a pet of yours. He thought he WAS just a common rooster. We must be just, even ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... infer that you and I are alike? What does the old prig mean? I'll banter him, and laugh at him, and leave him. [Aside.] I fancy you have a wrong notion ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... and got out of the room as quickly as he could, inwardly denouncing his friend Tom Towers as a prig and a humbug. "I know he wrote those articles," said Bold to himself. "I know he got his information from me. He was ready enough to take my word for gospel when it suited his own views, and to set Mr Harding up before the public as an impostor on no other testimony than my chance conversation; ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... rosebud of a girl going to marry Eustace Medlicott—insufferable, conceited prig, I remember him at Oxford," the cousin was musing to himself. "Lord Carford is an old stick-in-the-mud, or he would have prevented that. She is his own niece, and one can see by her frock that the poor child never even ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... endeavouring to accomplish this task, nothing but the want of means shall make me desist.'[183] He had a right to make that boast, and his ardour in the cause was as unimpeachable as honourable. It explains why Cobbett has still a sympathetic side. He was a mass of rough human nature; no prig or bundle of abstract formulae, like Paine and his Radical successors. Logic with him is not in excess, but in defect. His doctrines are hopelessly inconsistent, except so far as they represent his stubborn prejudices. Any view will serve his purpose which ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... occasionally a few bars of The Buccaneer's Bride, but evidently occupied with something in his mind. At length he said: "Marmion, I said suburban innocence and original sin, but you've a grip on the law of square and compass too. I'll say that for you, old chap—and I hope you don't think I'm a miserable prig." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... frankly worked out, for insulting and robbing a girl whom Gorman knew personally was quite a different matter. Miss Daisy Donovan is a bright-faced, clear-eyed, romantic-souled girl. She had finished her course of study in one of the universities of the Middle-west without becoming a cultivated prig. In spite of the fact that history, economics, emasculated philosophy and a kind of intellectual complexion cream called literature had been smeared all over her by earnest professors, she had never learned to take herself, life or ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... linen cupboards. It has all the fuss of preparation for childbirth—the accumulations of wrappings, the obstetric furniture, the nods and winks of the midwife and the gossips, authentic ancestors of Mrs Sarah Gamp and Mrs Elizabeth Prig—why, the haste to fetch the midwife at the crisis might almost be the foundation upon which Dickens built the visit of Seth Pecksniff, Esq., to Kingsgate Street, ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... crowned with orange-flowers, who was revolving in the window, and displaying her smile to passers-by, between two argand lamps; but in reality, he was taking an observation of the shop, in order to discover whether he could not "prig" from the shop-front a cake of soap, which he would then proceed to sell for a sou to a "hair-dresser" in the suburbs. He had often managed to breakfast off of such a roll. He called his species of work, for which he possessed special ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... did seem so hard to him that because he had been forced to carry a lady home from hunting in a post chaise, that he should be driven to such straits as this? The girl was evidently prepared to make a fight of it. There would be the Duke and the Duchess and that prig Mistletoe, and that idle ass Lord Augustus, and that venomous old woman her mother, all at him. He almost doubted whether a shooting excursion in Central Africa or a visit to the Pampas would not be the best ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... that pass through the hands of the publishers can be said to present a true picture of their subject. Either the writer holds up the object of his literary effort as a person so blameless as to suggest the idea that he is an impossible prig, or else every piece of malevolent gossip is construed into a positive fact, his shortcomings magnified until they lose all touch of resemblance, while every word and action capable of misrepresentation is construed in the manner most detrimental to his reputation. In one word, he is either ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... man obviously thought me a tiresome prig. He had no romantic illusions about the business; he had not been a Feldscher during twenty years for nothing and knew that a wound was a wound; when a man was dead ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... men know as wisdom. Some of us are wise in this way naturally and by genius; some of us never become so. But to have spent one's youth at college, in contact with the choice and rare and precious, and yet still to be a blind prig or vulgarian, unable to scent out human excellence or to divine it amid its accidents, to know it only when ticketed and labelled and forced on us by others, this indeed should be accounted the very calamity and shipwreck of ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... Captain Quinn. 'Don't take it like that. From your point of view you were quite right to call me a blackguard. And, mind you, there are plenty of people in the world who aren't blackguards. There's my brother, for instance. He's a bit of a prig—in fact, he's as priggish as he well can be—but he's never done anything but run straight. I don't suppose he could ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... either with the great vulgar or the small, and his hesitations about marrying her do not arise from any doubt (while he is still ignorant on the subject) of her social worthiness to be his wife. He is a prig doubtless, but he is a prig of a very peculiar character—a sort of passionate prig, or, to put it in another way, one of Baudelaire's "Enfants de la lune," who, not content with always pining after the place where he is not and the love that he has not, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... only 'ope, my NAN, is in the Noodles, There's still some left in London I'll be bound. To lurk a crib, prig wipes, sneak ladies' poodles, Gits 'arder every day; we're watched all round. Many a programme wot looks vastly pooty, Mucked by the mugs, leads on to wus and wus. But if they do light up the dim, cramped, sooty. Gog-ruled old Town—wot's to ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 21, 1891 • Various
... such a prig, Jerry," put in Mignon, impatiently. "It isn't half so wicked to play a joke on those stupid sophomores as it is to ask one's mother for money for a fountain pen, and then use the money for candy and ...
— Marjorie Dean High School Freshman • Pauline Lester
... yet his character can be very clearly deduced from the many literary fragments he has left, and that is found to be the character of a pusillanimous and ill-bred usurer, wholly lacking in foresight, in generous enterprise, and chivalrous enthusiasm—in matters of the Faith a prig or a doubter, in matters of adventure a poltroon, in matters of Science an ignorant Parrot, and in Letters a wretchedly bad rhymester, with a vice for alliteration; a wilful liar (as, for instance, 'The ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... not blame me if you don't like it, and do not set me down as a prig, though I am going to tell you your faults as I read them in your own words. You are proud and ambitious, and the cramped lines in which you are forced to live seem to strangle you. You have suffered, and have not learned the lesson of suffering—humility. You have set ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... afraid Mary is something of a little prig," said Miss Ada to her brother when the little girls had gone ...
— Three Little Cousins • Amy E. Blanchard
... the grocer, in the shop. A conceited young prig, not yet out of the quarrelsome age. He makes boy-love to Priscilla Tomboy and Miss La Blond; but says he will "tell papa" if ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... of a packet-boat, and the first sound and sight of the sea—the author's childhood at Uphill Parsonage—his reminiscences of the clock of Wells Cathedral—and some real villatic sketches—a portrait of a Workhouse Girl—some caustic remarks on prosing and prig parsons, commentators, and puritanical excrescences of sects—to some unaffected lines on the village school children of Castle-Combe, and their annual festival. This is so charming a picture of rural joy, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 350, January 3, 1829 • Various
... the British Museum. But the James of these letters is the James of "Catriona." The scenes with the advocates of James of the Glens, at Inveraray, read as if they had been recorded in shorthand, at the moment. David himself is, of course, the Lowland prig he is meant to be, but Catriona, at last, was a moving heroine, though Stevenson, justly, preferred to her the beautiful Miss Grant, and entirely overcame the difficulty of making us realise her beauty. The Princess, in "Prince Otto," is a fair shadow, compared ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her hands toward him seemed to beg for pity. "Jack! I can't help it. Maybe I'm a little prig, but ... mustn't we guide our lives by ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... happiness is not won by seeking for it. Make up your minds on this point, that there are certain things only to be got by not aiming directly at them. Aim, for example, at being influential, and you become a prig; aim at walking and posing gracefully, and you become an affected and ludicrous object; aim even at breathing quite regularly, and ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... many words that do duty as native-born or naturalized citizens in large sections of the United States, and among these words is the one that stands at the head of the present chapter. I know that some disdainful prig will assure me that it is but a corruption of the French "charivari," and so it is; but then "charivari" is a corruption of the low Latin "charivarium" and that is a corruption of something else, and, indeed, almost every word is a corruption of some other word. So that there ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... things; and at the age of twenty-four he was—to those who knew him best, and especially to those who liked him least—that shining, glorified, inspired, and yet sophisticated product of modern university culture, an academic prig. The word is not of necessity a term of reproach. Perhaps we are all prigs at some season in our lives, if we happen to have any inherent power of doing great things. There are lovable prigs, who grow into ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... he was in an agony of dread lest his father would see what Therese was up to. She had begun kissing him good-night, and now more and more warmth crept into the embrace until he found himself trying to avoid it. He was no prig, and Therese was attractive, yet the distaste he felt for the situation neutralised her power to lure him. Moreover, she showed him a side which convinced him of what he had hitherto suspected—that Therese had all the instincts of a cocotte. ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... him names? You seem to think that curing a cancer in one's mind is rather an effeminate thing to do, Louis—rather a priggish thing. I suppose if you get cured of drinking you'll say you never did it for fear of being called a prig?" ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... pigskin? Surely a male biped need not dwell In a prejudiced pedantic prig's skin, Not to like that prospect passing well. CARLYLE, who scoffed at Man, had deemed it caddish To picture Woman as "a mere ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various
... replied Ingleborough laughing. "No; I don't like him. I never do like a fellow who is an unnatural sort of a prig. He can't help being fat and pink and smooth, but he can help his smiling, sneaky manner. I do like a fellow to be manly. Hang him! Put him in petticoats, with long hair and a bonnet, he'd look like somebody's cook. But if I had an establishment and he was mine, I should be afraid he'd put something ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... threw up the seminary, returned to Cleeve Court, and announced with tears to his mother (his father had died two years before) that he could not be a priest. She told him, stonily, that he had disappointed her dearest hopes and broken her heart. His brother—the Squire now, and a prig from his cradle—took him out for a long walk, argued with him as with a fractious child, and, without attending to his answers, finally gave him up as a bad job. So an ensigncy was procured, and John a Cleeve ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to be lectured and preached to besides. Good heavens! In his lofty manner, I suppose, that people talk of. Prig—odious, insufferable prig! So I have mistaken George, have I? My own husband! And insulted her—her! And she is actually downstairs, writing to me, in ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... were pure joy to them both. In them they went back to the early world. They did not make the hard and self-conscious imaginative effort of the prig to hurl themselves into an historic past. They just let the land and its memories take them. As, sitting on the warm ground among the wild myrtle bushes, they looked across the emerald green unruffled waters to Salamis, that very long isle with its calm gray and orange ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... soulless, so very indifferent to all things in heaven above or in the earth beneath, I could have pitied them greatly for the obligation they were under to trail after those rough lads everywhere and at all times; even as it was, I felt disposed to scout myself as a privileged prig when I turned to ascend to my chamber, sure to find there, if not enjoyment, at least liberty; but this evening (as had often happened before) I was to be still ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... interest with government in his behalf, stating how much he had suffered in the cause of the ministry. Swift immediately carried his letter to Lord Bolingbroke, then Secretary of State, who railed much at Sacheverell, calling him a busy intermeddling fellow; a prig and an incendiary, who had set the kingdom in a flame which could not be extinguished, and therefore deserved censure instead of reward. Although Swift had not a much better opinion of the Doctor than Lord Bolingbroke, he replied, "True, my Lord; but let me tell you a story. ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... talking about?" stared Rhoda. "I said nothing about France; I was telling you not to be a prig and a ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... a muffin-maker in Milk Alley. Daniel Dowlas, when he was raised from the chandler's shop in Gosport to the peerage, employed the doctor "to larn him to talk English;" and subsequently made him tutor to his son Dick, with a salary of [pounds]300 a year. Dr. Pangloss was a literary prig of ponderous pomposity. He talked of a "locomotive morning," of one's "sponsorial and patronymic appellations," and so on; was especially fond of quotations, to all of which he assigned the author, as "Lend me your ears. Shakespeare. Hem!" or "Verbum sat. Horace. Hem!" He also ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... They were not spared a sneer now and then. They were laughed at, or railed at, as "unco gude," or as "prood, upsettin' creatures, with their meetings, and classes, and library books," and the names which in the Scotch of that time and place stood for "prig" and "prude," were freely bestowed upon them. But, all the same, it could not be denied that they were not "living to themselves," that they were doing their duty in all the relations of life, and of some of them it was said that "they might ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... end of the time with hot irons he returned. "The Quitter Sublime" on my bosom he burned. As he seared me he hissed: "You are wearing away. The good angels tell me you leave them today. You want to come down from the nails in the door. The victor must hang there three hundred years more. If any prig-saint would outvote all mankind He must use an immortally resolute mind. Think what the saints of Benares endure, Through infinite birthpangs their courage is sure. Self-tortured, self-ruled, they build their powers high, Until they are gods, overmaster the sky." Then he ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... had taken them up. Indeed, Mrs. Saxham was a relative—was it a cousin? No—now it all came back! Adopted daughter, that was it, of an aunt—no, a step-sister of Lord Castleclare, that ineffable little prig of twenty-two, who as a Peer and Privy Councillor of Ireland, and a Lord-in-Waiting to boot, was nevertheless a personage to be ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... his bright eyes gleamed. "Go and shake him, and tell him to give up this dirty building business—make him give it up, buy him out of it, put plenty of money into his pockets and send him off to amuse himself! You and Corona have made a prig of him, and business is making an oyster of him, and he will be a hopeless idiot before you realise it! Stir him, shake him, make him move! I hate your furniture-man—who is always in the right place and always ready to ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... laughed Cripps, mimicking the boy's tones. "When I calls up at the school I'll let them all know what a nice young prig he is, coming down and drinking at my public-house and then turning round on me. Never fear! I'll let them know, my beauties! I'll have a talk with your Doctor and open his eyes for ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... author hated a formal sentence as much as he disliked stately and insipid society. Unlike Thomas Carlyle, in avoiding the faults of rhetorical culture, he did not become a literary barbarian. In refusing to comb his hair like a prig, he did not go to the extreme of making himself horridly uncomely. His sentences are unsurpassed for neatness, are as graceful as they are quaint and clear. The writings of Sydney Smith rarely attain the perfect grace which uniformly distinguishes Elia; yet he never attempts ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... to her by the butler. Indeed, Miss Bunion having considered Mr. Pendennis for a minute, who gave himself rather grand airs, and who was attired in an extremely fashionable style, with his very best chains, shirt studs, and cambric fronts, he was set down, and not without reason, as a prig by the poetess; who thought it was much better to attend to her dinner than to take any notice of him. She told him as much in after days with her usual candour. "I took you for one of the little Mayfair dandies," she said to Pen. "You looked as solemn as a little ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... searched for him in vain. These writing men and women, by the way, are as true blue and as thoroughbred as any other class. I can never forget Maurice Hewlett's brave behaviour when he thought that his flying corps son had been killed by the Germans or drowned at sea. He's no prig, but a real man. And the women are ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... again he would befriend her, if she were still in need of a friend, and take the consequences. He was not so irresistible, he told himself, as to be necessarily dangerous to the peace of mind of all the women of his acquaintance. He had acted the part of a prig and he ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... use of such paws?" she railed at her. "They don't ply a needle, and they don't touch any thread! All you're good for is to prig things to stuff that mouth of yours with! The skin of your phiz is shallow and those paws of yours are light! But with the shame you bring upon yourself before the world, isn't it right that I should prick you, and ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... there had been a sincerity in his handshake that somehow had seemed to rob the apology of its satisfaction. And when McCorquodale had proffered a broken cigar Kendrick had accepted it with an uneasy feeling that he had made somewhat of a fool of himself; for Phil was no prig and he found that McCorquodale was a pretty good sort with a certain whimsicality that was not to ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... they kept to the life of daylight. They are England's hope. Clumsily they carry forward the torch of the sun, until such time as the nation sees fit to take it up. Half clodhopper, half board-school prig, they can still throw back to a ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... the Lung' Arno Corsos, throw himself, half-fainting, into a chair, overpowered by the atmosphere of evil passions, as he used to say, in that sensual and unintellectual crowd." Some people, on reading a passage like this, will rush to the conclusion that Shelley was a prig. But the prig is a man easily wounded by blows to his self-esteem, not by the miseries and imperfections of humanity. Shelley, no doubt, was more convinced of his own rightness than any other man of the ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... between the evil doing and you—that he cannot be chums with both. Chums should have strict honour between themselves, and always be ready to stand up for one another. A good chum prevents one becoming a prig, and there is nothing short of actual vice which is so hateful in a boy as priggishness. There is as much difference between a prig and a right- minded boy as between chalk and cheese. A right-minded boy goes on his way trying to do right and live honestly and purely, ...
— Boys - their Work and Influence • Anonymous
... man," replied he, "we will see what can be done. Order and subordination are very good things; but people should know how much to require. As you tell the story, I cannot see that you are greatly to blame. Marlow is a coxcombical prig, that is the truth on't; and if a man will expose himself, why, he must even take what follows. I do hate a Frenchified fop with all my soul: and I cannot say that I am much pleased with my neighbour Underwood for taking the part of such a rascal. Hawkins, I think, is your name? You may call on ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... and was able to carry himself before Sir Hugh and his wife with quite as much ease as he could do in the rectory. Once or twice he had dined at the great house; but Lady Clavering had declared him to be a bore, and Sir Hugh had called him "that most offensive of all animals, a clerical prig." It had therefore been decided that he was not to be asked to the great house any more. It may be as well to state here, as elsewhere, that Mr. Clavering very rarely went to his nephew's table. On certain occasions he did do so, so that there might be no recognized quarrel between him and Sir ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... among his fellow students. It is true that, as a schoolboy, a certain pompousness in the style of his letters home suggested to the more clear- sighted among his relatives the possibility that young Thomas might grow up into a prig; but, after all, what else could be expected from a child who, at the age of three, had been presented by his father, as a reward for proficiency in his studies, with the twenty-four volumes ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... Shall we not censure all the motley train, Whether with ale irriguous, or champaign? Whether they tread the vale of prose, or climb, And whet their appetites on cliffs of rhyme; The college sloven, or embroider'd spark; The purple prelate, or the parish clerk; The quiet quidnunc, or demanding prig; The plaintiff tory, or defendant whig; Rich, poor, male, female, young, old, gay, or sad; Whether extremely witty, or quite mad; Profoundly dull, or shallowly polite; Men that read well, or men that only write; Whether peers, porters, tailors, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... Of one glass! Ringfield—you're a fool, a prig, and a baby. Besides, the spirit is all burnt out by this time, evaporated, flown thence. Come—I'll set you the example. Drink first and ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... Hard as the little man was to the world against which he had fought his way to his present position of distinction, to his niece he was soft-hearted as a mother. "There, there!" he exclaimed hastily. "We'll give the boy a chance. No mother, eh? And a confounded prig for a father! No wonder the boy goes all wrong!" Then with a sudden vehemence he cried, striking one hand into the other, "No, by—! that is, we will certainly give the lad the benefit of the doubt. Cheer up, lassie! You've ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... dear, plump little prig who adores the woman, and wears with as much gravity as her religious opinions—only eight, Jack!—a venerable horsehair atrocity which she calls her Bustle. I have just burned it, and the child is asleep in my bed ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... according to our modern point of view. We have a healthy distrust of ascetics, whose anxiety over their soul's condition we properly regard as a form of egotism; and we know how easily the unco' guid become prigs. Fogazzaro's hero is neither an egotist of the ordinary cloister variety, nor a prig. That our sympathy goes out to Jeanne and not to him shows that we instinctively resent the sacrifice of the deepest human cravings to sacerdotal prescriptions. The highest ideal of holiness which medievals could ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... trouble; Arch preaches, and Prince won't stand it. He told Arch he was a prig and a parson, and Arch told him he wasn't a gentleman. My boots! weren't they both mad, though! I thought for a minute they'd pitch into one another and have it out. Wish they had, and not gone stalking round stiff and glum ever since. Mac and I settle our rows with ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... man," he wrote, "has been so overlaid with myths and traditions, and so distorted by misleading criticisms, that ... he has been wellnigh lost. We have the religious and statuesque myth, we have the Weems myth (which turns Washington into a faultless prig), and the ludicrous myth of the writer of paragraphs. We have the stately hero of Sparks, and Everett, and Marshall, and Irving, with all his great deeds as general and President duly recorded and set down in polished and eloquent sentences; and ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... He must come to her, and she would go to the boy's mother. What an order to give a boy with muscles and fists and Nature strong within him! But, save for the telling, it had been obeyed, although it is hard to feel one's self an unwilling coward, a prig, and the laughingstock of one's fellows. But when, on the day after his unjust punishment, and while still stung by the sense of wrong, one of the petty schoolboy tyrants began to taunt him, he turned upon the young scamp and thrashed him soundly. His tormentor was not more hurt than surprised. ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... just a big sister to you, of course. Ever so superior, I guess, and a good bit of a prig. And all this time over there in France with nothing but my letters and that silly picture of me in the khaki frame, I suppose you have been thinking of me, well,—as a sort of nice angel. I'm not either, really. I don't want to ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... offended in him for long, and his cheerful conversation and beautiful, upright life are a living witness to his religious faith, known and read of all men. Angry, sneering, and selfish folk come to regard him with an affection akin to holy awe. But he is not in the least a prig or a stuffed curiosity. He is essentially a reasonable, kind-hearted man, who goes about doing good. Every one confides in him, all go to him for advice and solace. He is a multitudinous blessing, with masculine virility and shrewd insight, along with the sensitiveness and tenderness ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... not see either. He had accepted Harris' hospitality, had eaten freely of the good things Harris had provided, and the boys would vote him a prig if he left them for his bed as soon as the feast was finished. It would seem that he was afraid of being discovered absent from his room—as if he did not dare to ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... men enough to say pleasant things to me, and that what I want is a friend who won't be afraid to say disagreeable ones when I need them? Sometimes I have fancied you might be that friend—I don't know why, except that you are neither a prig nor a bounder, and that I shouldn't have to pretend with you or be on my guard against you." Her voice had dropped to a note of seriousness, and she sat gazing up at him with the troubled ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... was a nice boy, not a bit of a prig. But he's not what you can call a success; and I fancy the Marlows won't want to exhibit him. Still, I shall have him to dinner and get some nice girls to ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... returned the whittler, brushing the litter from his lap. "Now I've no doubt that prig of a doctor, who they say is shining up to Alice, will be disappointed when he finds just how much she's worth. Let me see. What is his name? Lives up there," and with his jackknife Mr. Liston ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... he, you've 'scaped from transportation All upon the briny main; So never give way to no temptation, And don't get drunk nor prig again! ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... excellent reprover; yet burning with impatience to obliterate all remembrance of his error, by some brave action which should prove that he was not unworthy the clemency and confidence which his appearance had excited. He told Monthault what had passed. "The old Prig worded it bravely," said he, "but in one respect he is better than most of your precise moralists. Come turn out the pieces—share and share alike you know; and just now they are quite convenient, as there is not a single doit ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... is, that too many people take a fancy to it, and the competition is in consequence excessive. Every ignoramus of a fellow who finds that he hasn't brains in sufficient quantity to make his way as a walking advertiser, or an eye-sore prig, or a salt-and-batter man, thinks, of course, that he'll answer very well as a dabbler of mud. But there never was entertained a more erroneous idea than that it requires no brains to mud-dabble. Especially, there is nothing to be made in this way without method. I did only a retail business ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... fellow with a touch of the prig in him. He was a Catholic with a Puritan temperament and a Gallic imagination. The idolatry of Toinette had, as a matter of fact, spoiled him a little; it was so much that he weakly questioned the reality of it, as if it were too good to be true. All the time he was in ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... Sir Jamie Graham—prig; What was thy delighted musing? Now accepting, now refusing, Till on the Admiralty pitch'd, Still would that thought his speech prolong; To gain the place for which he long had itch'd, He call'd on Bobby still through all the song; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... my mind and showing me the path I ought to walk in. How would you like me if I turned out a first-class prig?" ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... recesses of his trunk or his lunch basket, or his gun-case, and goes at the work of weekly redemption with a will. And, what is more, he is listened to, and for the time being—though on week days he is styled a bore by the old and a prig by the young—he becomes temporarily invested with a dignity not his own, with an authority he could not claim on any other day. It is the dignity of a people who with all their faults have the courage of their opinions, and it is the authority that they have been taught from ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... Peter, firmly, "you just dry up. If you're not careful, you'll turn into a beastly little Sunday-school prig, so I tell you." ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... for the Abolition of Ancestors, Miss Ranken. We have to make up all lost ground, and we can't help it. I'm sorry almost that I take it all so seriously. I feel so very much like a middle-aged prig. Perhaps, Miss Dearsley, we may grow more cheerful when your uncle and I (and you) are fairly at work and clear of brooding. At present I seem to exude lectures ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... my arrival at Jenny Man's I saw an alert young fellow that cocked his hat upon a friend of his, who entered just at the same time with myself, and accosted him after the following manner: "Well, Jack, the old prig is dead at last. Sharp's the word. Now or never, boy. Up to the walls of Paris, directly;" with several other deep ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... is absolutely unknown among the North Italians; sometimes one comes upon a young Italian who wants to learn German, but not often. Priggism, or whatever the substantive is, is as essentially a Teutonic vice as holiness is a Semitic characteristic; and if an Italian happens to be a prig, he will, like Tacitus, invariably show a hankering after German institutions. The idea, however, that the Italians were ever a finer people than they are now, will not pass muster ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... leads up to the sad admission upon our part that Payson, Jr., was a prig. And in the very middle of his son's priggishness Payson, Sr., up and died, and Tutt and Mr. Tutt were called upon to ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... never have been done by Dryden. Gray, Johnson, Richardson, Fielding, are all highly esteemed by the great body of intelligent and well informed men. But Gray could see no merit in "Rasselas," and Johnson could see no merit in "The Bard." Fielding thought Richardson a solemn prig, and Richardson perpetually expressed contempt and disgust ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... Max, the ne'er-do-weel, the extravagant one, who drank little and did the listening. Dudley had cast off altogether the gravity and taciturnity which sometimes got him looked upon as a bit of a prig, and chatted and told his friend stories, with a tone and manner of irresponsible gayety ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... to the Bumble Bee Inn for tea. You needn't be a prig about it! Lots of really nice people go, and what's the harm?" She picked up her gloves and trailed to the door. "I suppose you'll ask who I was with next, and I sha'n't tell you, my dear. I'm bored to death doing the same old proper thing ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... managed to find time for, even when she did not get up as early as on this occasion. For her age, and perhaps because of her mother's death, which still seemed recent to Janice, she was rather serious-minded. Yet she was no prig, and she loved fun and was as alert for good times as any girl ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... "Ah! a prig I dare say—like some of his uncles before him," said Mr. Boyce, irritably. "But he was civil to you, ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Marion when the thought came to him. He had not bought a Christmas present for a girl, except flowers, since the first year he was at college. He had sent Delight one that year, a half-dozen little leather-bound books of poetry. What a precious young prig he must have been! He knew now that girls only pretended to care for books. They wanted jewelry, and they got past the family with it by pretending it was not real, or that they had bought it out of their allowances. ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... your vership, you hear it's a waluable dog—now is it feasible as I should go for to prig a dog wot ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... barbaric and generally vulgar survivals—which they extract from shop and safe, and sell in Amsterdam, distributing the proceeds to various deserving charitable agencies. In this particular crowded hour of life the leader of the group, a fanatical prig with hypnotic eyes, abducts the beautiful Lady Fenton, with ten thousand pounds' worth of stuff upon her, from one of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... Julia interrupted, "and I would not undertake to say a man would not do anything—on occasions—or a woman either, for the matter of that. There is a beast in most men, and an archangel in lots, and a snob, and a prig, and a dormant hero, and an embryo poet. There are great possibilities in men; you have to watch and see which is coming out top and back that, and then half the time you are wrong. Of course, at father's age, possibilities are getting over; one or two things have come top ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... "Dreadful young prig that young Wentworth," said Mr Wodehouse, "but comes of a great family, you know, and gets greatly taken notice of—to be sure he does, child. I suppose it's for his family's sake: I can't see into people's hearts. It may be higher motives, to be sure, and all that. He's gone off in a huff about ...
— The Rector • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... were relics of her mother's presence in the house. She knew the history of every other woman who had ever lived here since the place was built in the seventeenth century by an Alexander Hillard, an ancestor of Grandma's. A forbidding old prig he must have been, judging from the portrait over the dining-room mantelpiece, a worthy forbear of Ann Hillard, who had married Barrie's grandfather, John MacDonald of Dhrum. Barrie often said to herself that she did not feel related to Grandma. She wanted to be ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... professor, with a starched shirt and spectacles, would, if a stock of ideals were all alone by itself enough to render a life significant, be the most absolutely and deeply significant of men. Tolstoi would be completely blind in despising him for a prig, a pedant and a parody; and all our new insight into the divinity of muscular labor would be altogether off ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... at will," and, though he never made deliberate and affected efforts to get out of ruts, kept out of them without the least trouble. He was as little of a "poser" or of a "rotter" as he was of a prig, and there was not a drop of bad blood in his veins. If these things could not make a good letter-writer nothing could; and there is little doubt that he will hold his place as such as long as English literature lasts. It is a great pleasure to me to give, as I hope to do, ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... neighbours. So her trade flourished, and she lived a life of comfort, of plenty even, until the Civil War threw her out of work. When an unnatural conflict set the whole country at loggerheads, what occasion was there for the honest prig? And it is not surprising that, like all the gentlemen adventurers of the age, Moll remained most stubbornly loyal to the King's cause. She made the conduit in Fleet Street run with wine when Charles came to London ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... preceded him at Cambridge. No man ever went up from whom more was expected in every way. The dons awaited a sucking member for the University, the undergraduates were prepared to welcome a new Alcibiades. He was neither: neither a prig nor a profligate; but a quiet, gentlemanlike, yet spirited young man, gracious to all, but intimate only with his old friends, and giving always an impression in his general tone that his soul was not absorbed in ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... her shrewdly. More than once she had felt that Terry was on the verge of becoming a complacent prig. So she countered ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... through a neglect of this fact, but otherwise reading should "come by nature." When I look through the list of The Best Hundred Books, I cannot help saying to myself, "Here are the most admirable and varied materials for the formation of a prig."'[13] ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... a prig," said Sir Francis, as they seated themselves opposite to one another. "But then his wife is a prig too, and I do not see why they ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... This was manifestly a prig of the first water, and there was no use arguing with him. I thought I had best meet him on his own ground, so I said, "Your clients, sir, are happy in having so resolute a guardian of their confidence. I am ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... "Programmes," I. My wit's too wide To a wire-puller's "platform" to be tied. I know what's right, I mean to see it done, And for the rest good-tempered chaff and fun Are my pet "principles"—till fools grow rash From toleration, then they feel the lash. I am a sage, and not a prig or pump, Therefore I never canvas, spout or stump, I'm Liberal—as the sunlight—of all Good, Which to Conserve I strive—that's understood, But Tory nincompoop, or rowdy Rad, The thrall of bigotry, the fool of fad I hate alike. There's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 9, 1892 • Various
... cleverest pupil in the school, his tasks always faultlessly prepared, and his power of taking in what he was taught wonderfully great, though, fortunately for himself, his extreme good humour and merry nature made it impossible for his companions to dislike him or set him down as a prig. ...
— Grandmother Dear - A Book for Boys and Girls • Mrs. Molesworth
... judgment failed so entirely, that he had no ground for believing himself one of the elect. Had he succeeded in persuading himself that he was, there is no saying to what lengths of indifference about others the chosen prig might ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... men who talked about improving themselves. He spurned the Young Men's Mutual Improvement Society (which had succeeded the Debating Society—defunct through over-indulgence in early rising). Nevertheless in his heart he was far more enamoured of the idea of improvement than the worst prig of them all. He could never for long escape from the dominance of the idea. He might violently push it away, arguing that it could lead to nothing and was futile and tedious; back it would come! It had ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... be a reaction,' said Mr. Underwood; 'but the crack voice of a country choir is not often in that condition, as I know too well. I was the veriest young prig ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... She died of a broken heart, and Lovelace, borne down by remorse, was killed in a duel by a cousin of Clarissa. Sir Charles Grandison, 1753, was Richardson's portrait of an ideal fine gentleman, whose stately doings fill eight volumes, but who seems to the modern reader a bore and a prig. All of these novels were written in the form of letters passing between the characters, a method which fitted Richardson's subjective cast of mind. He knew little of life, but he identified himself intensely with his principal character and produced a strong effect by minute, accumulated ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... what a good prig you would have made! You are as sharp as a gimlet. Surely you were brought up ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of nature to you; and you are surprised that a rough, rattling, honest fellow, accustomed to speak truth all his life, and especially when he found it at the bottom of a flask, cannot be so perfect a prig as thyself—Zooks! there is no equality betwixt us—A trained diver might as well, because he can retain his breath for ten minutes without inconvenience, upbraid a poor devil for being like to burst ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... spent his ingenuity and breath in half-an-hour's "prigging." The advantages to be obtained at Messrs. Campbell's establishment soon became known, and although it required a great effort to induce thrifty housewives to desist from attempting to cheapen and "prig" down their goods, Messrs. Campbell ultimately succeeded in putting a stop to the practice, so far at least as their own establishment was concerned. Since then, their example has been followed by all the other respectable ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... tears. On inquiring her name and what business her husband followed, she replied that her name was Mrs. Pickle, (she having dropped Primrose for sufficient cause,) and that of her husband, Mr. Stephen Pickle, of the young American Banking House of Pickle, Prig, & Flutter, doing business near Wall Street. We returned to the parlor, and when the valise bearing my name, which I took good care to keep in sight, was sent up stairs, and I had told her how the accident to her portrait was caused, she blushed and was so ready to unbosom her ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... being a prig to treat a thing as important that isn't important at all. I wanted you to come to a music-hall with ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... If Franklin's son was not driven to evil courses by the perusal of that monstrous Autobiography, he must have been a man almost as astounding as his father. Now Franklin could only have written his "immortal classic" from one of three motives: (1) Sheer conceit. He was a prig, but he was not conceited. (2) A desire that others should profit by his mistakes. He never made any mistakes. Now and again he emphasizes some trifling error, but that is "only his fun." (3) A desire that others ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... "He was a muff as a boy—a prig with a prig's memory under all his shallow, showy surface. I'm frank with you; I never could take my cousin either respectfully or seriously, but I've known him to take his own anger so seriously that years after he has visited it upon those who had really wronged him. And he is equipped for retaliation ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... of seven, nine, or eleven years of age should write such solemn little effusions amid the surroundings and influences of the present day, he would probably be set down justly enough as either an offensive young prig or a prematurely developed hypocrite. But the precocious Adams had only a little of the prig and nothing of the hypocrite in his nature. Being the outcome of many generations of simple, devout, intelligent Puritan ancestors, living in a community which loved virtue and sought knowledge, ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... during that period of enforced separation; when the latter had not begun to cool down, and was still able to speak of Gwen's father—undeveloped then in that capacity—as a tedious, middle-aged prig whom her ridiculous aunt wanted to force upon her? Was it a sufficient set-off against all this fiery correspondence that she had burned one preposterous—and red-hot—effusion, and started seriously on cooling, because ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... in Paris, represents in the character of the pedantic prig named Classick, the sort of university tutor who was sometimes substituted for the parson, ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... rare and shining parts, which may or may not have been true—I did not know enough to check his statements—and, secondly, that he "had his hand on the pulse of native life"—which was a fact. As an Oxford Man, he struck me as a prig: he was always throwing his education about. As a Mohammedan faquir—as McIntosh Jellaludin—he was all that I wanted for my own ends. He smoked several pounds of my tobacco, and taught me several ounces of things worth knowing; but he would never accept any gifts, ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... Ruth abruptly, "you aren't going to be such a goose as to back out of joining the skating club just because—well, because Mary Brewster's such a prig? She isn't the whole membership, not by a good deal, and the rest of us count on your coming. Why, you'll be a tremendous acquisition. And the first meet is to-morrow. ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... retorted Edith, with spirit. "Who knows if it wasn't the only really happy thing in her life? The snobs and prigs all scold her and preach sermons at her—they did it in her lifetime: they do it now——" "Oh come, I'm neither a snob nor a prig," put in Celia, looking up in her turn, and tempering with a smile the energy of her tone—"I don't blame her for her Bothwell; I don't criticize her. I never was even able to mind about her killing Darnley. You see I take an extremely liberal view. One might almost call it broad. But if I ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... off what he considers his own good qualities; a certain slow, methodical plodding and a good memory, which are natural gifts, but which he boasts of as if they were acquired virtues. He binds his music because he is a pedant and a prig, and can't help it; a bad fellow to get on with. Now, mein bester, ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... giving a view-halloo. Then there is the moist-eyed, mottle-cheeked, puffy, convivial sub, who is knowing on the condition of ale, and is too friendly with Saccone's sherry. The convivial sub, I am happy to say, is dying out. Then there is the prig, who is "going in" for his profession. I call him a prig, because when people are going in for anything they should have the good sense not to blow about it. To hear Mr. Shells and his prattle about Hamley and Brialmont and Jomini, kriegspiel ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... a blackguard and a scoundrel, do you?" hissed Saurin, who was quite beside himself with rage; and certainly Crawley's speech was the reverse of soothing. "You stuck-up, hypocritical, canting, conceited prig, I should like to break your ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... speak out like a man?" Forsythe demanded with a burst of rage, striking the table with his fist. "What do you mean by your damned impudence? So you dare to question my conduct to Lois Howe, do you?—you confounded prig!" ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... of her hands toward him seemed to beg for pity. "Jack! I can't help it. Maybe I'm a little prig, but ... mustn't we guide our lives by principle and not ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... bade the laird gae kaim his wig, The sodger not to strut sae big, The lawyer not to be a prig; The fool he cried, Te-hee! I kenn'd that I could never fail! But she pinn'd the dishclout to his tail, And soused him frae the water-pail, And kept ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Mr. Leonard Tavernake," she exclaimed, "if you were not so crudely, so adorably, so miraculously truthful, what a prig, prig, prig, you would be! The cutlets at last, thank goodness! Your cross-examination is over. I ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... self," he replied, touching the thin stem of his glass with his pale, fine-pointed fingers. "Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others. One's own life—that is the important thing. As for the lives of one's neighbours, if one wishes to be a prig or a Puritan, one can flaunt one's moral views about them, but they are not one's concern. Besides, Individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... climbing the staircase, partly the result of that audacious impulse that had led her—a modest virgin—to seek a gentleman in this personal fashion. Modesty in a young girl has a comfortable satisfying charm, recognized easily by all humanity; but he must be a sorry knave or a worse prig who is not deliciously thrilled when Modesty puts her charming little foot just over the threshold ...
— Jeff Briggs's Love Story • Bret Harte
... man—you're a sublime fellow; but you're a prig, a conceited noodle with it all, Joe! You need not to think that because you've picked up a little knowledge of practical mathematics, and because you have found some scantling of the elements of chemistry at the bottom of a dyeing ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... you'd like to. I want to get Pollyanna away, quite away from Beldingsville for a while. I'd like to keep her sweet and unspoiled, if I can. And she shall not get silly notions into her head if I can help myself. Why, Thomas Chilton, do we want that child made an insufferable little prig?" ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... Graham—prig; What was thy delighted musing? Now accepting, now refusing, Till on the Admiralty pitch'd, Still would that thought his speech prolong; To gain the place for which he long had itch'd, He call'd on Bobby still through all the song; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... the injunction of the mother he loved. When other men spoke lightly of women in his presence he showed disapproval, if their character was attacked he championed their cause, if confronted with proofs, he flatly refused to consider them. Yet he was neither a prig nor a prude. He enjoyed a joke as well as any one, but at the same time he did not let his mind run in only one channel, as some men do. He pitied rather than blamed the wretched females who frequented ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... the speech of soldiers. Yet he not merely kept his own lips" clean, but he shrank, as from a blow, from every coarse or indecent speech in others. He did not go around correcting people. He was too sensible for that. He was not a prig or a prude. But he knew, as we know, that vile speech is hateful to God; and, as so many of us do not do, he ...
— For Greater Things: The story of Saint Stanislaus Kostka • William T. Kane, S.J.
... Street, High Holborn, wore, metaphorically speaking, a robe of state. It was swept and garnished for the reception of a visitor. That visitor was Betsey Prig; Mrs Prig, of Bartlemy's; or as some said Barklemy's, or as some said Bardlemy's; for by all these endearing and familiar appellations, had the hospital of Saint Bartholomew become a household word among the ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... able to frequent, he had gained the character of a boy rather insusceptible of ordinary teaching; and his letters (they are rare throughout his life) show him to us as something very like a juvenile prig. According to his own account, he "thought for at least eight years" without being able to pen a line, or at least a page; and the worst accusation that can truly be brought against him is that, by his own confession, ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... never have him caught at all," said Carroway, to his wife, when his year of precaption had expired, "than for any of those fellows to nab him; especially that prig last sent down." ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... of manners has fallen into disrepute. Sir Charles Grandison is a comical rather than a courtly figure to this generation; and the man whose manners may be described as Grandisonian is usually called a pompous and grandiloquent old prig. Certainly the elaborately dressed gentleman speaking to a lady only with polished courtesy of phrase, and avoiding in her presence all coarse words and acts, handing her in the minuet with inexpressible grace and deference, and showing an exquisite homage in every motion, was a very different ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... looks for Perseus, who doesn't come; the sea, always the sea without a moment's weakness; in brief, not the stuff of which friends are made! When the knight appears and kills her monster, he loses his halo for Andromede, who cherishes her monstrous guardian. Perseus, a prig disgusted by the fickleness of the Young Person, flees, and the death of the monster brings to life a lovely youth—put under the spell of malignant powers—who promptly weds his ward. In Lohengrin, Son of Parsifal, the whole machinery of the Wagner opera is transposed to the key of lunar ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... disagreeable, the vicious, the unwholesome; to give us for our companions, in our hours of leisure and relaxation, only the silly and the weak-minded woman, the fast and slangy girl, the intrigante and the "shady"—to borrow the language of the society she seeks—the hero of irresolution, the prig, the vulgar, and the vicious; to serve us only with the foibles of the fashionable, the low tone of the gay, the gilded riffraff of our social state; to drag us forever along the dizzy, half-fractured precipice of the seventh commandment; to bring us into relations only with the sordid and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Sunday-schools, I did not see him. The Model Boy of my time—we never had but the one—was perfect: perfect in manners, perfect in dress, perfect in conduct, perfect in filial piety, perfect in exterior godliness; but at bottom he was a prig; and as for the contents of his skull, they could have changed place with the contents of a pie and nobody would have been the worse off for it but the pie. This fellow's reproachlessness was a standing reproach to every lad in the village. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... are a man before you are a prig," she said, "and that is something to be thankful for in these degenerate days. Why, there is the child herself! ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... have been called a prig by those who did not know him well. He had a trick of starting subjects suddenly, and he very often made his friends very uncomfortable by the precipitate introduction, without any warning, of remarks upon serious matters. Once even, shocking to say, he quite unexpectedly ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... at his side. In all this there is no passion, and scarcely anything that can be called preference. The hero intrigues just as he wears a wig; because, if he did not, he would be a queer fellow, a city prig, perhaps a Puritan. All the agreeable qualities are always given to the gallant. All the contempt and aversion are the portion of the unfortunate husband. Take Dryden for example; and compare Woodall with Brainsick, or Lorenzo with ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... preaches, and Prince won't stand it. He told Arch he was a prig and a parson, and Arch told him he wasn't a gentleman. My boots! weren't they both mad, though! I thought for a minute they'd pitch into one another and have it out. Wish they had, and not gone stalking round ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... author did not know what to do with his characters. It has the amateurish fault of halting the narrative to talk with the reader; and it moralizes to such an extent that the heroine (who is pictured as of almost angelic virtue) eventually becomes a prig and a preacher,—two things that a woman must never be. Nevertheless, the romance has a host of enthusiastic readers, and to criticize it adversely is to bring a storm about one's ears.] In The Blithedale ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... of Elizabeth King, an English aristocrat spending some of his wealth in lessening the misery and vice of London, was 'not the orthodox philanthropist, the half-feminine, half-neuter specialist with a hobby, the foot-rule reformer, the prig with a mission to set the world right; his benevolence was simply the natural expression of a sense of sympathy and brotherhood between him and his fellows, and the spirit which produced that was ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... "platform" to be tied. I know what's right, I mean to see it done, And for the rest good-tempered chaff and fun Are my pet "principles"—till fools grow rash From toleration, then they feel the lash. I am a sage, and not a prig or pump, Therefore I never canvas, spout or stump, I'm Liberal—as the sunlight—of all Good, Which to Conserve I strive—that's understood, But Tory nincompoop, or rowdy Rad, The thrall of bigotry, the fool of fad I hate alike. There's the straight ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 9, 1892 • Various
... have gone into languages as I do now. But I might have learnt a good deal, I think. A thoroughly good preparatory school is, I dare say, very difficult to find. I would make a great point, I think, to send a boy to a good one; not to cram him or make a prig of him, but simply to give him the advantage which will make his whole career in life different from what it will be if his opening days pass by unimproved. Cool of me, Jem, to write all this; but I think of ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... shall make me desist.'[183] He had a right to make that boast, and his ardour in the cause was as unimpeachable as honourable. It explains why Cobbett has still a sympathetic side. He was a mass of rough human nature; no prig or bundle of abstract formulae, like Paine and his Radical successors. Logic with him is not in excess, but in defect. His doctrines are hopelessly inconsistent, except so far as they represent his stubborn prejudices. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... that unless I put an end to their misery they would. Accordingly, I promptly gave Garth his quietus. The truth is, I was tired of him myself. With all his qualities and virtues, he could not help being a prig. He found some friends, however, and still shows signs of vitality. I wrote no other novel for nearly two years, but contributed some sketches of English life to Appletons' Journal, and produced a couple of ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... his success, and his evident satisfaction with his lot, the man was neither a prig nor a teetotaller. He had probably seen too much of the world to be either. Yet he had, he said, been too busy all his life to spend much time in public-houses, as we drank a pint of ale together in the inn which stood at the end of ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... but his vanity is. You see, Mr. Heigham, it is this way. My brother may be a very great man and a pillar of the State, and all that sort of thing. I don't say he isn't; but from personal experience I know that he is an awful prig, and thinks that all women are machines constructed to advance the comfort of your noble sex. Well, he has come down a peg or two, that's all, and he don't like it. Good- bye; ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... to expect of the American boy is that he shall turn out to be a good American man. Now the chances are strong that he won't be much of a man unless he is a good deal of a boy. He must not be a coward or a weakling, a bully, a shirk, or a prig. He must work hard and play hard. He must be clean-minded and clean lived, and able to hold his own against all comers. It is only on these conditions that he will grow into the kind of American man of whom ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... for a great distance, before I began to experience that uncomfortable reaction which sometimes arises from splitting in two, as it were, standing off at a distance and looking oneself in the face. I realized that I had been something of a prig and considerable of a Pharisee. My late discomfort was not caused by the fact that a young girl had cheapened herself, but by the fact that a man had demeaned himself and in a manner involved me, inasmuch as I had been led ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... do, Clarence," she said, with a pretty wrinkling of her own brows, which was her nearest approach to thoughtfulness. "You know you never really liked her, only you thought her ways were grander and more proper than mine, and you know you were always a little bit of a snob and a prig too—dear boy. And Mrs. Peyton was—bless my soul!—a Benham and a planter's daughter, and I—I was only a picked-up orphan! That's where Jim is better than you—now sit still, goosey!—even if I don't like him as much. Oh, I know what you're always thinking, you're ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... shoplifting. thievishness, rapacity, kleptomania, Alsatia^, den of Cacus, den of thieves. blackmail, extortion, shakedown, Black Hand [U.S.]. [person who commits theft] thief &c 792. V. steal, thieve, rob, mug, purloin, pilfer, filch, prig, bag, nim^, crib, cabbage, palm; abstract; appropriate, plagiarize. convey away, carry off, abduct, kidnap, crimp; make off with, walk off with, run off with; run away with; spirit away, seize &c (lay violent hands on) 789. plunder, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... follow White and Willis out of Bateman's lodgings. It was a Saint's day, and they had no lectures; they walked arm-in-arm along Broad Street, evidently very intimate, and Willis found his voice: "I can't bear that Freeborn," said he, "he's such a prig; and I like him the less because I am obliged to ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... which leads up to the sad admission upon our part that Payson, Jr., was a prig. And in the very middle of his son's priggishness Payson, Sr., up and died, and Tutt and Mr. Tutt were called upon to ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... said, and Petrarque continued making sonnets to her, never minding that a bit. Now do you believe it, Mamma? A man to stay in love for twenty years with a woman who kept on having eleven children all the image of the husband as good as gold! I don't! Petrarque was probably some tiresome prig like all poets, and thought her a suitable peg to ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... if he ever found the young creature again he would befriend her, if she were still in need of a friend, and take the consequences. He was not so irresistible, he told himself, as to be necessarily dangerous to the peace of mind of all the women of his acquaintance. He had acted the part of a prig and he ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... her chin in the air. "Indeed! well, I am not, I would have you know, Miss Phronsie," and she played with the silk cord of her satin wrapper. "I hate a child that is made a prig!" she added explosively ...
— Five Little Peppers Midway • Margaret Sidney
... Bride, but evidently occupied with something in his mind. At length he said: "Marmion, I said suburban innocence and original sin, but you've a grip on the law of square and compass too. I'll say that for you, old chap—and I hope you don't think I'm a miserable prig." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of merriment among the city wags, each of whom cracked a joke at his expense. Now it was not that those waggish spirits said of his placard things exceedingly annoying to his sensitive feelings, but that every prig made him the butt of his borrowed wit. One quizzed him with want of gallantry,—another told him what the ladies said of his oss,—a third pitied him, but hoped he might get back his property; and then, Tom Span, the dandy lawyer, laconically told him ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... prize in triumph into Corfu," answered Paddy, taking a turn with a dignified air on the deck. "I should like, to see what that prig Spry will say ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... thievishness, rapacity, kleptomania, Alsatia[obs3], den of Cacus, den of thieves. blackmail, extortion, shakedown, Black Hand [U.S.]. [person who commits theft] thief &c. 792. V. steal, thieve, rob, mug, purloin, pilfer, filch, prig, bag, nim|, crib, cabbage, palm; abstract; appropriate, plagiarize. convey away, carry off, abduct, kidnap, crimp; make off with, walk off with, run off with; run away with; spirit away, seize &c. (lay ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... come away," laughed Cripps, mimicking the boy's tones. "When I calls up at the school I'll let them all know what a nice young prig he is, coming down and drinking at my public-house and then turning round on me. Never fear! I'll let them know, my beauties! I'll have a talk with your Doctor and open his eyes for him. ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... but who were inferior to him, growled in their conversations. "Four-flusher, prig! He wasn't satisfied with making so much money and now he's playing the sport among the aristocracy, to pick up more portraits, to get all he can ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the worst phase of it. She was sure that if she closed her eyes she should see Madame Bonanni vividly before her, and hear her talking to Logotheti, and smell the heavy air of the big room. She felt that she could not call Lushington a prig. ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... rose before her—all passed almost in a flash of time—as she stood with her hand on the medieval-looking latch of the gate, and she saw herself in them all as a proud, unmaidenly, pharisaical prig, in love with a man who was not in ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... to acquire applause, Try various arts to get a doubtful cause; Or, as a dancing master in a jigg, With various steps instructs the dancing prig; Or as a doctor writes you different bills; Or as a quack prescribes you different pills; Or as a fiddler plays more tunes than one; Or as a baker bakes more bread than brown; Or as a tumbler tumbles up and down; So does our author, ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... water, who before drank beer; What's now the cause? we know the case is clear; Look in Prig's purse, the chev'ril there tells you Prig money wants, either ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... beings, and the air they breathe is real air. The critic may wince and make faces over lapses from taste, and protest against a literary style which cannot be defended from any point of view; yet there is Mary in flesh and blood, and there is Caskoden, a veritable prig of a good fellow—there, indeed, are all the dramatis personae, not merely true to life, but ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... recognition. He knew a great deal about art, and all four enjoyed the morning immensely. It was fine to go round recognising old favourites and finding new beauties, especially while so many people fumbled helplessly with Baedeker. Nor was he a bit of a prig, Miss Winchelsea said, and indeed she detested prigs. He had a distinct undertone of humour, and was funny, for example, without being vulgar, at the expense of the quaint work of Beato Angelico. He had a grave seriousness beneath it all, and was quick ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... plenty of people to sneer at the teetotaler; people who make money out of drink naturally do so; people who drink themselves naturally do so; the unmarried girl may do so, thinking that the teetotaler is a prig and not quite a man. But there is one great class of the community, the most important of all, which does not sneer at teetotalers, and that is the wives. They know better, nay, they know best, and their verdict stands and will remain ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... you'll never do anything your instincts and your intelligence don't assure you is right,—really right without any sophistry. Of course I mean in regard to men. I don't want you to make yourself into a prig—but I ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... with lowering brows. "I hate school," she said vehemently. "I hate the teachers, and I hate Miss Thompson most of all. Every one of those teachers are common, low-bred and impertinent. As for your Miss Thompson, she is a self-satisfied prig." ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower
... example, to have her "run" with the McComases and others of that type or to have her dawdle over glasses, tall, broad, or short, in places of general democratic assemblage; and he told her so. I believe it was about here that she began to find him something of a prig and a doctrinaire; and she was not incapable, under provocation, of mentioning her impressions. It was about here, I suspect, that he told her something of Johnny McComas and his origins—at least he once or twice spoke of Johnny with a certain sharp scorn to ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... the little man was to the world against which he had fought his way to his present position of distinction, to his niece he was soft-hearted as a mother. "There, there!" he exclaimed hastily. "We'll give the boy a chance. No mother, eh? And a confounded prig for a father! No wonder the boy goes all wrong!" Then with a sudden vehemence he cried, striking one hand into the other, "No, by—! that is, we will certainly give the lad the benefit of the doubt. Cheer up, lassie! You've no need ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... be—as an approximate human ideal, one cannot help feeling that in spite of his humorous anarchism and subjective zest for life, Sanine has in him something sententious and tiresome. He is, so to speak, an immoral prig; nor do his vivacious spirits compensate us for the lack of delicacy and irony in him. On the other hand there is something direct, downright and "honest" about his clear-thinking, and his shameless eroticism which wins our liking and affection, if not our admiration. Artzibasheff ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... that follow all you youngsters. Listen, boy. Brenton is a mixture of genius, and prig, and ignorant young hermit; or, rather, he has the elements all inside him, ready to be mixed. You'll ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... seminary, returned to Cleeve Court, and announced with tears to his mother (his father had died two years before) that he could not be a priest. She told him, stonily, that he had disappointed her dearest hopes and broken her heart. His brother—the Squire now, and a prig from his cradle—took him out for a long walk, argued with him as with a fractious child, and, without attending to his answers, finally gave him up as a bad job. So an ensigncy was procured, and John a Cleeve shipped from Cork to Halifax, to fight the French in America. At Cork he had met and ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... themselves differently before Beatrice: every man who met her seemed to try and show her the best in him, or at least to suppress any thought or act which might displease her. It was not that she was a prig, or an angel, but she herself was so fine and sincere, and treated all with such an impersonal and yet gracious manner that it became contagious, and everybody who met her imitated the model she unconsciously furnished. I was very much struck with this ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... a sneer now and then. They were laughed at, or railed at, as "unco gude," or as "prood, upsettin' creatures, with their meetings, and classes, and library books," and the names which in the Scotch of that time and place stood for "prig" and "prude," were freely bestowed upon them. But, all the same, it could not be denied that they were not "living to themselves," that they were doing their duty in all the relations of life, and of some of them it was said that "they might be heard o' yet" in wider ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... the whittler, brushing the litter from his lap. "Now I've no doubt that prig of a doctor, who they say is shining up to Alice, will be disappointed when he finds just how much she's worth. Let me see. What is his name? Lives up there," and with his jackknife Mr. Liston ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... Edith, with spirit. "Who knows if it wasn't the only really happy thing in her life? The snobs and prigs all scold her and preach sermons at her—they did it in her lifetime: they do it now——" "Oh come, I'm neither a snob nor a prig," put in Celia, looking up in her turn, and tempering with a smile the energy of her tone—"I don't blame her for her Bothwell; I don't criticize her. I never was even able to mind about her killing Darnley. ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... not altogether the most delightful of companions to such as were older than himself; his undeniable cleverness and the stores of knowledge he had already acquired needed somewhat more of the restraint of tact than his character at that time supplied. People occasionally called him a prig; now and then he received what the vernacular of youth terms 'a sitting upon.' The saving feature of his condition was that he allowed himself to be sat upon gracefully; a snub well administered to him was sure of its full artistic, and did not fail in its moral, effect: ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... description of the sinking of a packet-boat, and the first sound and sight of the sea—the author's childhood at Uphill Parsonage—his reminiscences of the clock of Wells Cathedral—and some real villatic sketches—a portrait of a Workhouse Girl—some caustic remarks on prosing and prig parsons, commentators, and puritanical excrescences of sects—to some unaffected lines on the village school children of Castle-Combe, and their annual festival. This is so charming a picture of rural joy, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 350, January 3, 1829 • Various
... "I say so. That prig of a barrister, Sir Thomas Underwood, has already made overtures to me to do something for that young scoundrel in London. He is a scoundrel, for he is spending money that is not his own. And he is ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... fair representation of the hired attendant on the poor in sickness. The hospitals of London were, in many respects, noble Institutions; in others, very defective. I think it not the least among the instances of their mismanagement, that Mrs Betsey Prig was a fair specimen of a Hospital Nurse; and that the Hospitals, with their means and funds, should have left it to private humanity and enterprise, to enter on an attempt to improve that class of persons—since, greatly improved through ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... corridor which runs behind the apartments in question, where there is a staircase, which was at that time an inner one, and enabled the King and Queen to communicate freely. This post, which was very onerous, because it was to be kept four and twenty hours, was often claimed by Saint Prig, an actor belonging to the Theatre Francais. He took it upon himself sometimes to contrive brief interviews between the King and Queen in this corridor. He left them at a distance, and gave them warning if he heard the slightest noise. M. Collot, commandant of battalion of the National ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... with approbation of his excellent reprover; yet burning with impatience to obliterate all remembrance of his error, by some brave action which should prove that he was not unworthy the clemency and confidence which his appearance had excited. He told Monthault what had passed. "The old Prig worded it bravely," said he, "but in one respect he is better than most of your precise moralists. Come turn out the pieces—share and share alike you know; and just now they are quite convenient, as there is not a single doit in my purse." Eustace hesitated, ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... sense or imagination. They don't know enough to be afraid. But the man who tramples down a great fear wins his courage by earning it." She laughed a little, to make light of her own enthusiasm. "Oh, I know I'm preaching like a little prig. But it's the truth, just ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... that because he had been forced to carry a lady home from hunting in a post chaise, that he should be driven to such straits as this? The girl was evidently prepared to make a fight of it. There would be the Duke and the Duchess and that prig Mistletoe, and that idle ass Lord Augustus, and that venomous old woman her mother, all at him. He almost doubted whether a shooting excursion in Central Africa or a visit to the Pampas would not be the best thing for him. But still, though he should resolve to pass ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... critics, burlesqued by his friend, he changed his style (Mr. Fitzpatrick tells us) and became more sober—and not so entertaining. He actually published a criticism of Beyle, of Stendhal, that psychological prig, the darling of culture and of M. Paul Bourget. Harry Lorrequer on Stendhal!—it beggars belief. He nearly fought a duel with the gentleman who is said to have suggested Mr. Pecksniff to Dickens! Yet they call his early novels improbable. Nothing could be less plausible than a combat ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... fickle fool, who seemingly has had but one sensible idea in his life. He has believed his wife to be mad, and, considering that she married him, his faith in the matter rested upon evidence of an entirely convincing nature. The Rector Kroll is a prig and a bore of the first water. When he discovers Rebecca's perfidy, he suggests that she may have inherited her proneness for treachery from her father—and, to her distressed astonishment, he gives the name of a gentleman, not hitherto recognised by her as a parent! The ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 14, 1891. • Various
... squirrel Had a quarrel, And the former called the latter "Little Prig"; Bun replied: "You are doubtless very big; But all sorts of things and weather Must be taken in together To make up a year And a sphere. And I think it no disgrace To occupy my place. If I'm not so large as you, You are not so small as I, And not ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... "A prig—granted," said Richard; "but, I think a man of the world. That's where my point comes in. We politicians doubtless seem to you" (he grasped somehow that Helen was the representative of the arts) "a gross commonplace set of people; ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... circles to which it is still congenial, and where it will be preserved. But it has been challenged and (what is perhaps more insidious) it has been discovered. No one need be browbeaten any longer into accepting it. No one need be afraid, for instance, that his fate is sealed because some young prig may call him a dualist; the pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him. We need not be afraid of being less profound, for being direct and sincere. The intellectual world may be traversed in many directions; the whole has not been surveyed; there ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... simple, he and she, And swell, and blood, and prig; And some had carts, and some a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... calm down," predicted Selina. "She hates to be crossed. Personally, I don't admire her. She poses too much. She's either a prig or a hypocrite. A little of both, I guess. When Marian raged about my asking her to act as judge she said she knew for a fact that Dorothy's father had lost all his money and that Dorothy was hanging on to Jane Allen and this French girl, I never can remember her name, because they took her ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... something of a little prig," said Miss Ada to her brother when the little girls had gone ...
— Three Little Cousins • Amy E. Blanchard
... of all our amusement?" he said, as he came near. "You bring Cynthia here in your tiresome, condescending way, you live among us like an almighty prig, smiling gravely at our fun, and then you go off when it is convenient to yourself; and then, when you want a little recreation, you come and sit here in a corner and hug your darling, when you have never given her a thought of late. You know ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to the age of 21 I was perfectly satisfied with my own society, something of a prig, fond of books and reading, etc. I was and ever have been absolutely insensible to the influence of the other sex. I am not a woman hater, and take intellectual pleasure in the society of certain ladies, but they are nearly all much older ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Maudie; don't alarm yourself! She's the best specimen of the genus prig that I've ever come across in the course of my life. She ought to have a Form all to herself, instead of being plumped into the Fifth. I see dangerous possibilities in Maudie. Do you realize what she did this morning? Learnt the whole of that wretched poem instead of only the twenty ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... and the squirrel Had a quarrel, And the former called the latter "Little Prig." Bun replied: "You are doubtless very big; But all sorts of things and weather Must be taken in together To make up a year And a sphere; And I think it no disgrace To occupy my place. If I'm not so large ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... herself] Yes, Frank: there has been a change: but I don't think it a change for the worse. Yesterday I was a little prig. ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... this new Abjuration, Did banter the lawful King of this great Nation: Who call'd God's anointed a foolish old Prig, Was both a base and unmannerly Whigg: But since he is Dead No more shall be said, For he in Repentance has laid down his Head; So I wish each Lady, who in mournful Tone is, In Charity Grieve for the Death ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... that there was such a colour in the world's paint-box as grey. "It's bad to tell lies. It's bad to steal. It's bad to put your tongue out. It's good to be kind to poor people. It's good to say 'No' when you want more pudding but mustn't have it." Barbara was no prig. She did not care the least little thing about these things, nor did she ever mention them, but let a question of conduct arise, then was Barbara's way plain and clear. She did not always take it, ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... healthy distrust of ascetics, whose anxiety over their soul's condition we properly regard as a form of egotism; and we know how easily the unco' guid become prigs. Fogazzaro's hero is neither an egotist of the ordinary cloister variety, nor a prig. That our sympathy goes out to Jeanne and not to him shows that we instinctively resent the sacrifice of the deepest human cravings to sacerdotal prescriptions. The highest ideal of holiness which medievals could ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... to ask your permission to do so, Miss Eleanor,' he said slightly embarrassed, 'and I was prig enough to think you would allow it, but when you told me of your engagement I did not dare. After you left I had a dread that something might happen, and I could not rest satisfied until I had made up my mind to come on and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... of Jay quite disproves the oft-found myth that a dash of Mephisto in a young man is a valuable adjunct. John Jay was neither precocious nor bad. It is further a refreshing fact to find that he was no prig, simply a good, healthy youngster who took to his books kindly and gained ground—made head upon ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... sketch indeed, but abundantly suggestive. Poor Fido—the "dog that got to be utterly sick of conventionality," and came to such bitter grief in his search for "life poignant and intense!" He might read a lesson to many a two-legged prig, were the bipedal nincompoop ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 20, 1892 • Various
... one of those," he said, "who, as a child, were wise, but as a young woman with a little knowledge, become—a prig. What harm is my money likely to do you? I may be the Devil himself, but my gold is not tainted. For the rest, granted that I am at war with the world, I do not number children amongst ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Hugh and his wife with quite as much ease as he could do in the rectory. Once or twice he had dined at the great house; but Lady Clavering had declared him to be a bore, and Sir Hugh had called him "that most offensive of all animals, a clerical prig." It had therefore been decided that he was not to be asked to the great house any more. It may be as well to state here, as elsewhere, that Mr. Clavering very rarely went to his nephew's table. On certain occasions he did do so, so that there might be no recognized quarrel between him and Sir ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... known many gentlemanly youths go to college, and return anything but what they went. Young Mr. Platitude did not go to college a gentleman, but neither did he return one; he went to college an ass, and returned a prig; to his original folly was superadded a vast quantity of conceit. He told his father that he had adopted high principles, and was determined to discountenance everything low and mean; advised him to eschew ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... life than James Tapster. How he had scorned the gambler, the spendthrift, the adulterer—in a word, all those whose actions bring about their own inevitable punishment! He had always been self-respecting and conscientious—not a prig, mind you, but inclined rather to the serious than to the flippant side of life; and, so inclining, he had found contentment and ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... Whether with ale irriguous, or champaign? Whether they tread the vale of prose, or climb, And whet their appetites on cliffs of rhyme; The college sloven, or embroider'd spark; The purple prelate, or the parish clerk; The quiet quidnunc, or demanding prig; The plaintiff tory, or defendant whig; Rich, poor, male, female, young, old, gay, or sad; Whether extremely witty, or quite mad; Profoundly dull, or shallowly polite; Men that read well, or men that only write; Whether peers, porters, tailors, tune the reeds, And ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... "A detestable prig!" you say, reader?—That is just what Mr. and Mrs. Sclater thought him that night, but they never quarrelled again before him. In truth, they were not given to quarrelling. Many couples who love each other more, quarrel more, and ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... fam'd for a reel or a jig, Tom Sheridan there surpasses Tom Bigg.— For lam'd in one thigh, he is obliged to go zig- Zag, like a crab—for no dancer is Bigg. Those who think him a coxcomb, or call him a prig, How little they know of the mind of my Bigg! Tho' he ne'er can be mine, Hope will catch a twig— Two Deaths—and I yet may become Mrs. Bigg. Oh give me, with him, but a cottage and pig, And content I would live on Beans, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... fear thieves, for aw've nowt they can tak, Unless it's thease tatters' at hing o' mi back; An' if they prig them, they'lt get suck'd do yo see, They'll be noa use to them, for they're little to me, Aw live, an' aw'm ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... led that kind of life. Even in his student days when I first knew him, I do not remember an occasion upon which the principal of a New England high-school would have criticised his conduct. And yet I never heard anyone call him a prig; and, so far as I know, no one was ever so stupid as to think him one. He was a quiet, good-looking, well-dressed boy, and he matured into a somewhat reserved, well-poised man, of impressive distinction in appearance and manner. He has always been well tended and cared for by women; ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... (if it is a staircase?) on the wrapper. But my trouble was that I could never discern in the sweet girl-graduate any development of character from the pretentious futility of her earliest appearance. Perhaps I am prejudiced. Undeniably Miss McLEOD can draw a certain type of prig with a horrible facility. But the antiquated modernity of her scheme, flooded as it is with the New Dawn of, say, a decade ago, and its bland disregard of everything that has happened since, ended by violently irritating me. Others may have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 23, 1919 • Various
... of taking in what he was taught wonderfully great, though, fortunately for himself, his extreme good humour and merry nature made it impossible for his companions to dislike him or set him down as a prig. ...
— Grandmother Dear - A Book for Boys and Girls • Mrs. Molesworth
... set down Bennington de Laney as a prig or a snob because he did not at once decide for his heart as against his aristocratic instincts. Not only all his early education, but the life lessons of many generations of ancestors had taught him to set a fictitious value on social ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... Lord Granville Gower have no store of sweetness to yield. They are the wooden letters of a wooden young man. He may have been a beautiful young man, and an estimable young man; but he was insensitive, dull, and a prig. The best things he ever did in his days were to be belettered by Lady Bessborough and married, finally, to her witty and ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... with delight" before a figure by Michael Angelo. I wonder whether he would feel disposed to cry out before a real Michael Angelo, if the critics had decided that it was not genuine, or before a reputed Michael Angelo which was really by someone else. But I suppose that a prig with more money than brains was much the same sixty or seventy years ago ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... depressed that a few more words would bring tears to your eyes—indeed, they are there now, shining and swimming; and a bead has slipped from the lash and fallen on to the flag. If I had time, and was not in mortal dread of some prating prig of a servant passing, I would know what all this means. Well, to-night I excuse you; but understand that so long as my visitors stay, I expect you to appear in the drawing-room every evening; it is my wish; don't neglect it. Now ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... start a Society for the Abolition of Ancestors, Miss Ranken. We have to make up all lost ground, and we can't help it. I'm sorry almost that I take it all so seriously. I feel so very much like a middle-aged prig. Perhaps, Miss Dearsley, we may grow more cheerful when your uncle and I (and you) are fairly at work and clear of brooding. At present I seem to exude lectures ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... Both men felt uncomfortable. Led by some sudden, ungovernable impulse, they had both gone further than their slight acquaintance justified. Olva was convinced that he had made a fool of himself, that he had talked like a prig. Lawrence was groping hopelessly amongst a forest of dark thought for some little sensible thing that he might say. He found nothing and so relapsed, with false, ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... girls. Around, Across, along, the gardens' shrubby maze, They walk, they sit, they stand. What crowds press on, Eager to mount the stairs, eager to catch First vacant bench or chair in long room plac'd. Here prig with prig holds conference polite, And indiscriminate the gaudy beau And sloven mix. Here he, who all the week Took bearded mortals by the nose, or sat Weaving dead hairs, and whistling wretched strain, And eke the sturdy youth, whose ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... Crookshanks, Heaviside, Sidebottom, Longbottom, Ramsbottom, Winterbottom; or a long name, as Blanchenhagen, or Blanchenhausen; or a short name, as Crib, Crisp, Crips, Tag, Trot, Tub, Phips, Padge, Papps, or Prig, or Wig, or Pip, or Trip; Trip had been something, but Ho—-. (Walks about in great agitation—recovering his ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... interrupted Augustus,—"honest to your party; what more would you have from either prig or politician?" ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... DEAN: In case the letter sent yesterday passes you on the way, I add a line to say that if ever I said a mean thing about Loring when we were in the corps, I take it back. I thought him a prig when we wore the gray. He rather 'held us under' anyhow, being a class ahead, you know, but the way he has panned out here and wiped up Wyoming with the only men I ever knew that tried to wrong you is simply wonderful. He's nabbed three ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... not bad. Nevertheless,—thinking as the world around us does about hunting,—a clergyman in my position would be wrong to hunt often. But a man who can feel horror at such a thing as this is a prig in religion. If, as is more likely, a man affects horror, he is a hypocrite. I believe that most clergymen will agree with me in that; but there is no clergyman in the diocese of whose agreement I feel more ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... with all his wonderful achievements this youth would be top-heavy and a most insufferable prig. The fact was, he was a fine, rollicking, healthy young man much given to pranks, and withal generous ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... and cruel disappointment, so there was something like indignation mingling with the sorrow gnawing at the hearts of the old couple as they watched by their fever-stricken darling. Farmer Green, too, shared the feeling, and numerous at first were his mental animadversions against that "prig of a Holbrook." But when Maddy grew so bad as not to know him or his wife, he laid aside his prejudices, and suggested to Grandpa Markham that Dr. Holbrook be ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... aphorism reminds us of the beautiful goodness that floats over his face, a light from Paradise. But why from Paradise? Paradise is an ugly ecclesiastical invention, and angels are an ugly Hebrew invention. It is unpardonable to think of angels in Auteuil; an angel is a prig compared to the dear doctor, and an angel has wings. Well, so had this admirable chicken, a bird that was grown for the use of the table, produced like a vegetable. A dear bird that was never allowed to run about and weary itself as our helpless ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... clear flames had leapt out to him. She loved him. She, the beautiful, the wonderful, had not tried to conceal her love for him. She had shown him all—had shown all, poor darling! only to be snubbed by a prig, driven away by a boor, fled from by a fool. To the nethermost corner of his soul, he cursed himself for what he had done, and for all he had left undone. He would go to her on his knees. He would implore her to impose on him ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... duel by a cousin of Clarissa. Sir Charles Grandison, 1753, was Richardson's portrait of an ideal fine gentleman, whose stately doings fill eight volumes, but who seems to the modern reader a bore and a prig. All of these novels were written in the form of letters passing between the characters, a method which fitted Richardson's subjective cast of mind. He knew little of life, but he identified himself intensely with his principal character and produced ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... rare respectful, benighted passer-by. And one stood out finely in the local paper with one's unapproachable yearly harvest of certificates. Thus I was not only a genuinely keen student, but also a little of a prig and poseur in those days—and the latter kept the former at it, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... disapproval the gambols of his elder. Himself incorruptible, he was no doubt well pleased at heart that Banjo's misconduct should throw up in high relief his own immaculate conduct. Lollypop was in fact a bit of a prig. Had he been a boy he would have been head of his school, a Scholar of Balliol, and President of ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... torture her with grievous torture. 'Tis as though thou hast at present done nothing worthy of praise; so, if thou be indeed a sharper, return and save the girl from being beaten and questioned." Quoth he, ' Inshallah! I will save both girl and purse." Then the prig went back to the Shroff's house and found him punishing the girl because of the purse; so he knocked at the door and the man said, "Who is there?" Cried the thief, "I am the servant of thy neighbour in the Exchange;" whereupon he came out to him and said, "What is thy business?" The thief ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... drawn," as it is called. The story went, as told, I think, by Browning, who would begin: "I grew tired of Forster's always wiping his shoes on me." He was fond of telling his friend about "dear, sweet, charming Lady ——," &c. Forster, following the exact precedent of Mrs. Prig in the quarrel with her friend, would break into a scornful laugh, and, though he did not say "drat Lady ——," he insisted she was a foolish, empty-headed creature, and that Browning praised her because she had a title. This was taken seriously, and the Poet requested that no ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... unwholesome; to give us for our companions, in our hours of leisure and relaxation, only the silly and the weak-minded woman, the fast and slangy girl, the intrigante and the "shady"—to borrow the language of the society she seeks—the hero of irresolution, the prig, the vulgar, and the vicious; to serve us only with the foibles of the fashionable, the low tone of the gay, the gilded riffraff of our social state; to drag us forever along the dizzy, half-fractured precipice of the seventh commandment; to bring us into ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the boys were all in school. "There is not one prig in the whole lot," said the headmaster sadly. "I wish there was, but only those boys come here who are notoriously too good to become current coin in the world unless they are hardened with an alloy of vice. I ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... interesting kind from his father. Miss Lentaigne was greatly delighted with him. So was Priscilla, who winked three times at her father when neither Frank nor her aunt was looking at her. Sir Lucius was uneasy. He feared that his nephew was likely to turn out a prig, a kind of boy which he held in ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... touching description of the sinking of a packet-boat, and the first sound and sight of the sea—the author's childhood at Uphill Parsonage—his reminiscences of the clock of Wells Cathedral—and some real villatic sketches—a portrait of a Workhouse Girl—some caustic remarks on prosing and prig parsons, commentators, and puritanical excrescences of sects—to some unaffected lines on the village school children of Castle-Combe, and their annual festival. This is so charming a picture of rural joy, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 350, January 3, 1829 • Various
... husband followed, she replied that her name was Mrs. Pickle, (she having dropped Primrose for sufficient cause,) and that of her husband, Mr. Stephen Pickle, of the young American Banking House of Pickle, Prig, & Flutter, doing business near Wall Street. We returned to the parlor, and when the valise bearing my name, which I took good care to keep in sight, was sent up stairs, and I had told her how the accident to her portrait was caused, she blushed and was so ready to unbosom her griefs, that ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... the age of 21 I was perfectly satisfied with my own society, something of a prig, fond of books and reading, etc. I was and ever have been absolutely insensible to the influence of the other sex. I am not a woman hater, and take intellectual pleasure in the society of certain ladies, but they are nearly all ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... I don't. And they know it. They are already calling me a prig, and poking fun at me for not smoking and for not liking to have my hands patted and my cheeks pinched. Isn't it funny, Quin? At home I was always miserable because there were too many barriers; I wanted to tear them all down. Here, where there aren't any, I find myself building ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... Mademoiselle Fifi seemed unable to keep still. He rose and sat down again. His harsh and clear eye was looking for something to break; suddenly, glaring at the lady with the mustache, the young prig drew his revolver: "You shall not witness it, you!" said he, and, without leaving his seat, he aimed. Two bullets fired in rapid succession put out the eyes ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... hands toward him seemed to beg for pity. "Jack! I can't help it. Maybe I'm a little prig, but ... mustn't we guide our lives by principle and not ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... certainly have used them if it had been possible. For, as has been well said, "There is no copyright in platitudes." They are part of our goodly heritage. And though people like Mr. Gresley and my academic prig Wentworth have in one sense made a particular field of platitude their own, by exercising themselves continually upon it, nevertheless we cannot allow them to warn us off as trespassers, or permit them to annex or enclose common land, the property and ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... a young prig," said Mr Philip to himself, and as they were going home he said it to his ...
— The Inglises - How the Way Opened • Margaret Murray Robertson
... me to understand the unbridgeable gulf that lay between his intellect and mine. I think it was at this moment that I first began to change my opinion. I had been regarding him as an unbearable little prig, but it flashed across me as I watched him now, that his mind and my own might be so far differentiated that he was unable to convey his thoughts to me. "Was it possible," I wondered, "that he had been trying to talk down ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... been good friends after a fashion. He was a bit of a snob but not much of a prig. She had the feeling about him that if he could be weaned away from the family he might stand for something fine in the way of character. But he was an adept at straddling fences, so that he was never fully on one side or the other, no ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... those," he said, "who, as a child, were wise, but as a young woman with a little knowledge, become—a prig. What harm is my money likely to do you? I may be the Devil himself, but my gold is not tainted. For the rest, granted that I am at war with the world, I do not number ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... preparing myself for a governess, that I should make a point of honor of such things, little pragmatical prig that you are; nor are you, that I know of. You will always have plenty of money. 'Rich as a Jew' is a proverb, you know, all ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... written all these essays as a member of the public, as one who has to find a right attitude towards art so that the arts may flourish again. The critic is sure to be a charlatan or a prig, unless he is to himself not a pseudo-artist expounding the mysteries of art and telling artists how to practise them, but simply one of the public with a natural and human interest in art. But one of these essays is a defence of criticism, and I ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... anecdote preserved by Carlyle about the little Blenheim cocker who hated the "genus acrid-quack" and formed an immediate attachment to Sir Walter. Wordsworth was far from being an acrid quack, or even a solemn prig—another genus hated of dogs—but there was something a little unsympathetic in his personality. The dalesmen liked poor Hartley ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... One can always tell an engraving from a picture, an artificial flower from a real flower. To copy virtues one by one has somewhat the same effect as eradicating the vices one by one; the temporary result is an overbalanced and incongruous character. Some one defines a PRIG as "a creature that is over-fed for its size." One sometimes finds Christians of this species—over-fed on one side of their nature, but dismally thin and starved looking on the other. The result, for ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... are: so much depressed that a few more words would bring tears to your eyes—indeed, they are there now, shining and swimming; and a bead has slipped from the lash and fallen on to the flag. If I had time, and was not in mortal dread of some prating prig of a servant passing, I would know what all this means. Well, to-night I excuse you; but understand that so long as my visitors stay, I expect you to appear in the drawing-room every evening; it is my wish; don't neglect it. Now go, and send Sophie for Adele. Good-night, ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... whether Albert Grey be returned or not; Life of Prince Albert, whom he admires heartily, but who according to him (and John) did not understand the British Constitution. Called Stockmar a "mischievous old prig." Said "Liberty is never safe," that even in this country an unworthy sovereign might endanger her even now. John sent down to say he wished to see them. I took them to him for a few minutes—happily he was clear in his mind—and said to Mr. Gladstone, "I'm sorry ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... whether she caused him any real concern, too, until her flight to Grogoff. That shocked him terribly. He confessed as much to me. She had always been so happy and easy about life. Nothing was serious to her. I remember once telling her she ought to take the war more deeply. I was a bit of a prig about it, I suppose. At any rate she thought me one.... And then to go off ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... protested anxiously to the other side, which in turn raged against it and its cold plausibilities. The side which was all passion and romance and high chivalry lashed its enemy with contempt, and evil epithets of which the hardest to bear was "prig." For no man can endure being thought a ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... interesting part of that is the post-script. It will be just fine to have those dogs along. I suppose Mrs. Calvert sent them up from Baltimore to Deerhurst. But if I were you, Dolly Doodles, I wouldn't let that ignoramus preach to me like he does to you in that letter. He's a prig, that's what he is, and I hate a ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... British Museum. But the James of these letters is the James of "Catriona." The scenes with the advocates of James of the Glens, at Inveraray, read as if they had been recorded in shorthand, at the moment. David himself is, of course, the Lowland prig he is meant to be, but Catriona, at last, was a moving heroine, though Stevenson, justly, preferred to her the beautiful Miss Grant, and entirely overcame the difficulty of making us realise her beauty. The Princess, in "Prince Otto," ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... if he were giving a view-halloo. Then there is the moist-eyed, mottle-cheeked, puffy, convivial sub, who is knowing on the condition of ale, and is too friendly with Saccone's sherry. The convivial sub, I am happy to say, is dying out. Then there is the prig, who is "going in" for his profession. I call him a prig, because when people are going in for anything they should have the good sense not to blow about it. To hear Mr. Shells and his prattle about Hamley and Brialmont and Jomini, kriegspiel and the new drill, you would ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... there was no note of warning in that little vague complimentary speech, and she thought nothing at all about it. It is quite impossible for a man to talk all day without saying meaningless if not foolish things, unless he happens to be a very solemn prig who carefully considers his words and lays them down like dominoes; and Eden was not that. His naturalness was his great charm, and she judged his feelings from her own; his simple transparent kindliness was enough to account for all his ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... gambols of his elder. Himself incorruptible, he was no doubt well pleased at heart that Banjo's misconduct should throw up in high relief his own immaculate conduct. Lollypop was in fact a bit of a prig. Had he been a boy he would have been head of his school, a Scholar of Balliol, and President of the ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... Judge," he said, greatly embarrassed by the real affection he felt, "I don't want to seem like a prig and appear to be sitting in judgment upon a man of your experience and position especially since I have the honour to be your son, and have made a good deal of trouble by a not irreproachable existence. Since we have begun on the subject, however, I think I ought to tell ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... those purple depths the torches whose clear flames had leapt out to him. She loved him. She, the beautiful, the wonderful, had not tried to conceal her love for him. She had shown him all—had shown all, poor darling! only to be snubbed by a prig, driven away by a boor, fled from by a fool. To the nethermost corner of his soul, he cursed himself for what he had done, and for all he had left undone. He would go to her on his knees. He would implore her to impose on him insufferable penances. There was no penance, how bittersweet soever, ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... discomfiture with such delightful pantomime that the united class did him homage, and even Thomas John was shaken out of his equanimity; but then Duncan Robertson's father was colonel of a Highland regiment, and Duncan himself was a royal fighter, and had not in his Highland body the faintest trace of a prig, while Thomas John's face was a standing reproof of everything that was said and done outside of lesson time in ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... of reality can startle us into more solid imagination of events, so can even errors and exaggerations if they are on the right side. It does some good to call Alfred a prig, Charles I a Puritan, and John a jolly good fellow; if this makes us feel that they were people whom we might have liked or disliked. I do not myself think that John was a nice gentleman; but for ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... it, and the competition is in consequence excessive. Every ignoramus of a fellow who finds that he hasn't brains in sufficient quantity to make his way as a walking advertiser, or an eye-sore prig, or a salt-and-batter man, thinks, of course, that he'll answer very well as a dabbler of mud. But there never was entertained a more erroneous idea than that it requires no brains to mud-dabble. Especially, there is nothing to be made in this ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and good wines, given gratis and plenteously, at these houses, drew many to them at first, for the sake of the society. Among them I one evening chanced to see a clerical prig, who was incumbent of a parish adjoining that in which my mother lived. I was intoxicated with wine and pleasure, when I, on this occasion, entered a haunt of ruin and enterprising avarice in Pall Mall. I played high ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... in triumph into Corfu," answered Paddy, taking a turn with a dignified air on the deck. "I should like, to see what that prig Spry ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... Coningsby preceded him at Cambridge. No man ever went up from whom more was expected in every way. The dons awaited a sucking member for the University, the undergraduates were prepared to welcome a new Alcibiades. He was neither: neither a prig nor a profligate; but a quiet, gentlemanlike, yet spirited young man, gracious to all, but intimate only with his old friends, and giving always an impression in his general tone that his soul was not ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... a fair question to ask any man, for an affirmative makes a prig of him and a negative a mere politician. I will therefore generalize freely and tell you that a man who believes himself to be a statesman considers the nation first, as a matter of course. Howard, for instance, nearly killed himself at the end of ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... had scorned the gambler, the spendthrift, the adulterer—in a word, all those whose actions bring about their own inevitable punishment! He had always been self-respecting and conscientious—not a prig, mind you, but inclined rather to the serious than to the flippant side of life; and, so inclining, he had found ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... In the theatre, Charles Surface is applauded, and Joseph Surface is hissed. The novel-reader's affection goes out to Tom Jones, his hatred to Blifil. Joseph Surface and Blifil are scoundrels, it is true; but deduct the scoundrelism, let Joseph be but a stale proverb-monger and Blifil a conceited prig, and the issue remains the same. Good humour and generosity carry the day with the popular heart all the world over. Tom Jones and Charles Surface are not vagabonds to my taste. They were shabby fellows both, ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... readily yield what store of sweetness they possess, and that those in particular of Lord Granville Gower have no store of sweetness to yield. They are the wooden letters of a wooden young man. He may have been a beautiful young man, and an estimable young man; but he was insensitive, dull, and a prig. The best things he ever did in his days were to be belettered by Lady Bessborough and married, finally, to her ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... hated and despised the Tories in general; and after that interview on the marshy common in front of Silas's cottage, he hated the Hamleys and Roger especially, with a very choice and particular hatred. 'That prig,' as hereafter he always designated Roger—'he shall pay for it yet,' he said to himself by way of consolation, after the father and son had left him. 'What a lout it is!'—watching the receding figure. 'The old chap has twice as much spunk,' as the squire ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... or his lunch basket, or his gun-case, and goes at the work of weekly redemption with a will. And, what is more, he is listened to, and for the time being—though on week days he is styled a bore by the old and a prig by the young—he becomes temporarily invested with a dignity not his own, with an authority he could not claim on any other day. It is the dignity of a people who with all their faults have the courage of their opinions, and it is the authority that they have been ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... given him a conspicuous place among his fellow students. It is true that, as a schoolboy, a certain pompousness in the style of his letters home suggested to the more clear- sighted among his relatives the possibility that young Thomas might grow up into a prig; but, after all, what else could be expected from a child who, at the age of three, had been presented by his father, as a reward for proficiency in his studies, with the twenty-four volumes of Smollett's History ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... The Pastor is a feeble, fickle fool, who seemingly has had but one sensible idea in his life. He has believed his wife to be mad, and, considering that she married him, his faith in the matter rested upon evidence of an entirely convincing nature. The Rector Kroll is a prig and a bore of the first water. When he discovers Rebecca's perfidy, he suggests that she may have inherited her proneness for treachery from her father—and, to her distressed astonishment, he gives the name of a gentleman, not hitherto recognised by her as a parent! The best ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 14, 1891. • Various
... as told, I think, by Browning, who would begin: "I grew tired of Forster's always wiping his shoes on me." He was fond of telling his friend about "dear, sweet, charming Lady ——," &c. Forster, following the exact precedent of Mrs. Prig in the quarrel with her friend, would break into a scornful laugh, and, though he did not say "drat Lady ——," he insisted she was a foolish, empty-headed creature, and that Browning praised her because she had a title. ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... school, his tasks always faultlessly prepared, and his power of taking in what he was taught wonderfully great, though, fortunately for himself, his extreme good humour and merry nature made it impossible for his companions to dislike him or set him down as a prig. ...
— Grandmother Dear - A Book for Boys and Girls • Mrs. Molesworth
... bit of a prig. A little bit of a cub. Just a little mite of a snob, too, maybe. But the right, solid, clean stuff underneath. And my son, thank God! ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... they tread the vale of prose, or climb, And whet their appetites on cliffs of rhyme; The college sloven, or embroider'd spark; The purple prelate, or the parish clerk; The quiet quidnunc, or demanding prig; The plaintiff tory, or defendant whig; Rich, poor, male, female, young, old, gay, or sad; Whether extremely witty, or quite mad; Profoundly dull, or shallowly polite; Men that read well, or men that only write; Whether peers, porters, tailors, tune the reeds, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... of preparation for childbirth—the accumulations of wrappings, the obstetric furniture, the nods and winks of the midwife and the gossips, authentic ancestors of Mrs Sarah Gamp and Mrs Elizabeth Prig—why, the haste to fetch the midwife at the crisis might almost be the foundation upon which Dickens built the visit of Seth Pecksniff, Esq., to Kingsgate Street, ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... nice as you can. Say pretty things to her—that pleases her more than anything: and make yourself useful, if you get the chance. She's not half a bad little woman; and if you help me, Linda, I shall get in with her yet in spite of her conceited prig of a husband." ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... dressed and read her morning Bible chapter, which she always managed to find time for, even when she did not get up as early as on this occasion. For her age, and perhaps because of her mother's death, which still seemed recent to Janice, she was rather serious-minded. Yet she was no prig, and she loved fun and was as alert for good times as any girl of her age ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... won't have it. It makes the chap at the top of the class a prig, and gives the poor chap at the bottom an inferiority complex. No, we want to encourage not competition but co-operation. Competition leads naturally to another world war, as competition between British and American ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... and the coster to do? Neither of them has any effective choice in the matter: their children must either go to the schools that are, or to no school at all. And as the duke thinks with reason that his son will be a lout or a milksop or a prig if he does not go to school, and the coster knows that his son will become an illiterate hooligan if he is left to the streets, there is no real alternative for either of them. Child life must be socially ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... would pitilessly suppress proclivities to gawster. I would ask power from Parliament to whip, when mild persuasion failed, the precocious prig, "neither man nor boy," who struts about on Sundays, scoffing at religion, and polluting the air with bad tobacco and worse talk; and I would authorise the police to supervise, and to send home at their discretion, those small giggling girls ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... did mean to ask your permission to do so, Miss Eleanor,' he said slightly embarrassed, 'and I was prig enough to think you would allow it, but when you told me of your engagement I did not dare. After you left I had a dread that something might happen, and I could not rest satisfied until I had made up my mind to come on and see that you had arrived safely. I thought you would forgive me, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... I answered. "Well, I hardly know; but this I know. Ever since my prig of a brother has come home from Oxford with his affected smile and flattering ways, Ruth has had no ears or eyes ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... and his cheerful conversation and beautiful, upright life are a living witness to his religious faith, known and read of all men. Angry, sneering, and selfish folk come to regard him with an affection akin to holy awe. But he is not in the least a prig or a stuffed curiosity. He is essentially a reasonable, kind-hearted man, who goes about doing good. Every one confides in him, all go to him for advice and solace. He is a multitudinous blessing, with masculine virility and shrewd insight, ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... follow all you youngsters. Listen, boy. Brenton is a mixture of genius, and prig, and ignorant young hermit; or, rather, he has the elements all inside him, ready to be mixed. You'll ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... bravely with your Brute my lads, Higgen hath prig'd the prancers in his dayes, And sold good penny-worths; we will have a course, The Spirit of Bottom, ...
— Beggars Bush - From the Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10) • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... by sea is regarded by every true-hearted boy as the very best story of all. The yarn—that's the thing! If the sea is a northern sea, full of ice and swept by big gales, if the adventures are real, if the hero is not a prig, if the tale concerns itself with heroic deeds and moves like a full-rigged ship with all sail spread to a rousing breeze, the boy will say "Bully!" and read the story again. "The Adventures of Billy Topsail" is a book to be chummy with. It is crowded with adventure, every page of it, from the ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... story in a whisper,—it was just as well. He went on to say he hardly ever saw her now that she was with Monsieur Didier, of the Credit Bourguignon. The financier had sent the artists to the right-about; he was a conceited, narrow-minded fellow, a dull, tiresome prig. ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... sweetly, as if a prig were a pleasant thing to be. "All right, let her go, then. Oh, Harry, look at that horse. They've sent us the knock-kneed old white ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... Major's uncle, Reverend Austin, he who come try to make Asiki Christian. He snap his fingers, put on small mask of Yellow God which he prig, Little Bonsa herself, that same face which sit in your office now," and he pointed to Sir Robert, "like one toad upon a stone. Priests think that god make herself into man, want holiday, take me out into forest to kill me and eat my life. So they let us go by and we go just as ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... him. "He isn't a prig. And he's had to fight some things that you of all men ought to understand. He's only been here a few months, but he told me that Judge Pike has been against him from the start. It seems that Mr. Ladew is too liberal in his views. And he told me that if it were not for Judge Pike's losing influence ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... feeling than another could have done; but he was driven to assert himself. "Nonsense, Rose, you know better," he said, in a voice of displeasure; but she pouted forth, "I don't know it. You believe every one against me, and you won't take my part against that nasty little spiteful prig!" ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Man of rare and shining parts, which may or may not have been true—I did not know enough to check his statements—and, secondly, that he "had his hand on the pulse of native life"—which was a fact. As an Oxford man, he struck me as a prig: he was always throwing his education about. As a Mahommedan faquir—as McIntosh Jellaludin—he was all that I wanted for my own ends. He smoked several pounds of my tobacco, and taught me several ounces of things ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... make adult failures. It would be interesting to learn just what proportion of solitary children there is on the roll of those who have become great in our world. One thinks of John Ruskin, a particularly fine specimen of the highly focussed single son. Prig perhaps he was, but this world has a certain need of such prigs. A correspondent (a schoolmistress of experience) who has collected statistics in her own neighbourhood, is strongly of opinion not only that solitary children are below the average, but that all elder children are ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... training that produces the prig. Football, cricket, and other athletic sports are not favourable to his growth; and he receives equally little encouragement from his companions. The important point about him is that he is not a natural product at all, but the outcome of an artificial ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... squirrel Had a quarrel, And the former called the latter 'Little Prig; Bun replied, 'You are doubtless very big; But all sorts of things and weather Must be taken in together, To make up a year And a sphere. And I think it no disgrace To occupy my place. If I'm not so large as you, You are not so small as ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... "bringing in Private J. Wilson, 19th Cavalry, who was wounded, under a heavy fire from the Indians, at the imminent risk of his own life," the sergeant had never received a harsh word or a rebuke that he did not know was merited. But the sullen fury that this young prig aroused in him was unbearable. He felt that his inherent subordination to discipline was ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... accept the southern estimate of the hut in which he was born as a "mansion." In much of this false estimate Irving was doubtless misled by the fables of Weems. But while he has given us a dignified portrait of Washington, it is as far as possible removed from that of the smileless prig which has begun to weary even the popular fancy. The man he paints is flesh and blood, presented, I believe, with substantial faithfulness to his character; with a recognition of the defects of his education and the deliberation of his mental operations; with at least a hint of that want of breadth ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... contrary, he was a moral prig," Haythorne blurted out, with apparently undue warmth. "He was a little scholastic shrimp without a drop of red ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... interesting. And one met her with her husband at all the best houses since the Castleclares had taken them up. Indeed, Mrs. Saxham was a relative—was it a cousin? No—now it all came back! Adopted daughter, that was it, of an aunt—no, a step-sister of Lord Castleclare, that ineffable little prig of twenty-two, who as a Peer and Privy Councillor of Ireland, and a Lord-in-Waiting to boot, was nevertheless a personage to ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... is not bad. Nevertheless,—thinking as the world around us does about hunting,—a clergyman in my position would be wrong to hunt often. But a man who can feel horror at such a thing as this is a prig in religion. If, as is more likely, a man affects horror, he is a hypocrite. I believe that most clergymen will agree with me in that; but there is no clergyman in the diocese of whose agreement I feel more ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... signs of a budge!— And it isn't for want of "suggestion." I begin to suspect Hospitality's fudge, Meaning—mutually ruined digestion! He is such a bore, and his wife is so fat, And as fond of her bed as a dormouse. My girls say—in confidence—she is a cat; I'm sure he's a prig and a poor-mouse. I fancied he'd "influence," which he might use For DICK, our third son, who's a duffer. It doesn't come off, and I really refuse In DICK's interests longer to suffer. PAYN's right, and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... right to expect of the American boy is that he shall turn out to be a good American man. Now the chances are strong that he won't be much of a man unless he is a good deal of a boy. He must not be a coward or a weakling, a bully, a shirk, or a prig. He must work hard and play hard. He must be clean-minded and clean lived, and able to hold his own against all comers. It is only on these conditions that he will grow into the kind of American man of whom ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... the proudest young prig that ever pulled a throttle. I always loved the work and—well, you know how the first five years of it absorbs you if you are cut out for it and like it and ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... Spirit of Democracy in our midst. Such a one is the hero of Miss MAUD DIVER'S latest novel, Strange Roads (CONSTABLE); but it is only fair to say that Derek Blunt (ne Blount), second son of the Earl of Avonleigh, is no prig, but, on the contrary, a very pleasant fellow. For a protagonist he obtrudes himself only moderately in a rather discursive story which involves a number of other people who do nothing in particular over a good many chapters. We are halfway through before Derek takes the plunge, and then we find, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... departure on the voyage to Martinique that he had been diligently unfaithful to the poor "uneducated" little Creole girl who really thought she loved him. From all accounts, and I have read many, Alexandre Beauharnais was an ill-conditioned cruel prig. This excellent son with "fine and noble qualities" had not been long at Martinique before he associated himself with a lady of questionable virtue, who was much older than he. This person's dislike to Josephine caused her to pour into his willing ears and receptive mind scandalous stories of ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... rocks and the mountains speak. Emerson has given us one where the Mountain and the Squirrel had a quarrel. The Mountain called the Squirrel "Little Prig." And then continues a clash of personalities more possible to illustrate than at first appears. Here we come to the second stage of the fairy-tale where the creature seems so unmanageable in his physical aspect that some actor ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... forward in this objectionable way, Lilith might have escaped singing altogether. Lilith also resented her having shown that she could do it—and this feeling was generally shared. It evidenced a want of good-fellowship, and made you very glad the little prig had afterwards come to grief: if you had abilities that others had not you concealed them, instead of parading them under ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... I Why do that?" replied Sanine. "Literature is a very great, and a very interesting thing. Real literature, such as I mean, is not polemical after the manner of some prig who, having nothing to do, endeavours to convince everybody that he is extremely intelligent. Literature reconstructs life, and penetrates even to the very life- blood of humanity, from generation to generation. To destroy literature would be to take ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... swear it, that until you are thirty you'll never do anything your instincts and your intelligence don't assure you is right,—really right without any sophistry. Of course I mean in regard to men. I don't want you to make yourself into a prig—but I am ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... The Marble Faun ends in a fog, as if the author did not know what to do with his characters. It has the amateurish fault of halting the narrative to talk with the reader; and it moralizes to such an extent that the heroine (who is pictured as of almost angelic virtue) eventually becomes a prig and a preacher,—two things that a woman must never be. Nevertheless, the romance has a host of enthusiastic readers, and to criticize it adversely is to bring a storm about one's ears.] In The Blithedale Romance (1852) Hawthorne deals with ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... boy, not a bit of a prig. But he's not what you can call a success; and I fancy the Marlows won't want to exhibit him. Still, I shall have him to dinner and get some nice ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... lawyers, to acquire applause, Try various arts to get a doubtful cause; Or, as a dancing master in a jigg, With various steps instructs the dancing prig; Or as a doctor writes you different bills; Or as a quack prescribes you different pills; Or as a fiddler plays more tunes than one; Or as a baker bakes more bread than brown; Or as a tumbler tumbles up and down; So ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... joy to them both. In them they went back to the early world. They did not make the hard and self-conscious imaginative effort of the prig to hurl themselves into an historic past. They just let the land and its memories take them. As, sitting on the warm ground among the wild myrtle bushes, they looked across the emerald green unruffled waters to Salamis, that very long isle with its calm gray and ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... favorite newspaper in favor of free trade and Mr. Cleveland. History? The Wall Street man rarely knows in what year Columbus discovered America, and would be in straits wild enough to horrify that talented arch-prig, Mr. Andrew Lang, if you mentioned either Cortes or Pizarro. Fiction? He admired Robinson Crusoe when a boy, and since then he has read a few translated volumes of Dumas the elder. Poetry? He doesn't like ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... harmless. . . . I had no idea how complex she is. . . . If you think you have the simple feminine on your hands—forget it, Boots!—for she's as evanescent as a helio-flash and as stunningly luminous as a searchlight. . . . And here I've been doing the benevolent prig, bestowing society upon her as a man doles out indigestible stuff to a kid, using a sort of guilty discrimination in ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... "Consummate little prig!" murmured Captain Ducie to himself as he refolded the letter and put it away. "I can fancy the smirk on his face as he penned that precious effusion, and how, when he had finished it, he would trot off ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... that do duty as native-born or naturalized citizens in large sections of the United States, and among these words is the one that stands at the head of the present chapter. I know that some disdainful prig will assure me that it is but a corruption of the French "charivari," and so it is; but then "charivari" is a corruption of the low Latin "charivarium" and that is a corruption of something else, and, indeed, almost every word is a corruption of some other word. So that there ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... "She's a prig; I can see that, Aunt Clara. I can tell by the way she walks and moves around. She hasn't any ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells
... don't like it for other folks," replied Sam. "You took your medicine yourself very well, if I am a good judge, especially when you so lovingly displayed your osculatory skill on the sweet lips of peerless Rachel, whom that young prig of a Hudson Bay Company's clerk is ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... as much ease as he could do in the rectory. Once or twice he had dined at the great house; but Lady Clavering had declared him to be a bore, and Sir Hugh had called him "that most offensive of all animals, a clerical prig." It had therefore been decided that he was not to be asked to the great house any more. It may be as well to state here, as elsewhere, that Mr. Clavering very rarely went to his nephew's table. On certain ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... you turning prig, Frieda Lange," advised Hannah. "And now don't ask me what a prig is, for I don't know in German, and there's no way here to find out. What else are you going to have for ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... prosperous merchant, as the prancing horses drew him away. "After all," he thought bitterly, "she might be happier with that rich prig than she could be with me." He stepped into the hall, and spoke to the servant. The man had his message ready. Miss Regina would see Mr. Goldenheart, if he would be so good as to wait in ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... what I intended," he said, "but I have failed. Nobody reads it. After all, what does it matter?" he went on after awhile. "If they like anything, one ought to be satisfied. After all, Esmond was a prig." Then he laughed and changed the subject, not caring to dwell on thoughts painful to him. The elbow-grease of thinking was always distasteful to him, and had no doubt been so when he conceived and carried ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
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