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Cumbrous   Listen
adjective
Cumbrous  adj.  
1.
Rendering action or motion difficult or toilsome; serving to obstruct or hinder; burdensome; clogging. "He sunk beneath the cumbrous weight." "That cumbrousand unwieldy style which disfigures English composition so extensively."
2.
Giving trouble; vexatious. (Obs.) "A clud of cumbrous gnats."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Cumbrous" Quotes from Famous Books



... problem for the whole community by placing an order, at a fabulous figure, for a self-binder from the United States. It was a cumbrous, wooden-frame contrivance, guiltless of the roller bearings, floating aprons, open elevators, amid sheaf carriers of a later day, but it served the purpose, and with its aid the harvest of the little settlement was safely placed in sheaf. The farmers ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead

... or, Urn Burial, 1658, a discourse upon rites of burial and incremation, suggested by some Roman funeral urns, dug up in Norfolk. Browne's style, though too highly Latinized, is a good example of Commonwealth prose, that stately, cumbrous, brocaded prose, which had something of the flow and measure of verse, rather than the quicker, colloquial movement of modern writing. Browne stood aloof from the disputes of his time, and in his very subjects there is a calm and meditative remoteness from the daily interests of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... glory of the reign of the Antonines was that society had attained in it, though very imperfectly, and for the most part by cumbrous effort of law, many of those ends to which Christianity went straight, with the sufficiency, the success, of a direct and appropriate instinct. Pagan Rome, too, had its touching charity-sermons on occasions of great public distress; its charity-children ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater

... into commission, and ruled England through ministers of its own choice. While agreeing in this essential feature, the settlement of 1264 did not merely reproduce the constitution of 1258. It was simpler than its forerunner, since there was no longer any need of the cumbrous temporary machinery for the revision of the whole system of government, nor for the numerous committees and commissions to which previously so many functions had been assigned. The main tasks before the new rulers were not constitution-making but administration and defence. ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout

... at the top end, and the bottom ones from the bottom end, both being operated by one rock shaft from the center. This movement when properly adjusted gives an easy clearance and the easiest cut yet obtained. It adds no extra weight to the sash, and avoids the cumbrous rock shaft and its attendant joints, usually weighing from three hundred to five hundred pounds, which have been found so objectionable in many other movements. The feed is continuous, and is made variable from to 1 inch to each stroke, controllable ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various

... thing is to make a success a good name is indispensable. The potato has been handicapped for centuries by its ridiculous name, which is almost as cumbrous as "cauliflower" and even more unsightly to the eye. It is futile to talk of a "tuber" since that means a hump or bump or truffle. No, if you are to get people to eat potato-cakes you must devise a more dignified and attractive ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various

... 20th of March, Napoleon had been at Compiegne, denouncing the cumbrous machinery of etiquette which was retarding the happy moment when he should at last see his new wife and enfold her in his arms. He had had the castle repaired and richly furnished, that it might be ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand

... he did not venture to resist. Their steps were slow into the open space which, seeming as an introduction to, at the same time separated the various chambers of the dwelling, and terminated in the large and cumbrous stairway which conducted to the lower story, and to which their course was now directed. The passage was of some length, but with cautious tread they proceeded in safety and without noise to the head of the stairway, when the maiden, who still preserved the lead, ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms

... as the giant of the Peak would step upon, that he might not be wetshod. The expense of the works now carrying on will amount to forty thousand pounds. A heavy quadrangle of stables is part of the plan, is very cumbrous, and standing higher than the house, is ready to overwhelm it. The principal front of the house is beautiful, and executed with the neatness of wrought plate; the inside is most sumptuous, but did not please me; the heathen ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole

... lady illustrators—the phrase is cumbrous, but we have no other—Miss A. B. Woodward stands apart, not only by the vigour of her work, but by its amazing humour, a quality which is certainly infrequent in the work of her sister-artists. The books she has illustrated are not very many, but all show this quality. "Banbury Cross," in ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White

... is yet in its rudest form. The gold is buried in solid rock, and requires heavy crushing-mills and cumbrous machinery, which must be built and transported at immense expense by capitalists. It is a question with such capitalists how certain is the promise of returns. The uncertainty of mining, as shown by the results of ventures in Colorado, has naturally deterred them. Under the old process ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various

... rever'd abroad: Princes and lords are but the breath of kings, "An honest man's the noblest work of GOD;"[53] And certes, in fair virtue's heav'nly road, The cottage leaves the palace far behind; What is a lordship's pomp? a cumbrous load, Disguising oft the wretch of human kind, Studied in arts of ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... statesman. Macaulay was overflowing as usual, and Lord Mahon and Milman are full of learning and accomplishments. The classical scholarship of these men is very perfect and sometimes one catches a glimpse of awfully deep abysses of learning. But then it is ONLY a glimpse, for their learning has no cumbrous and dull pedantry about it. They are all men of society and men of the world, who keep up with it everywhere. There is many a pleasant story and many a good joke, and everything discussed but politics, which, as Sir Robert and Macaulay belong to ...
— Letters from England 1846-1849 • Elizabeth Davis Bancroft (Mrs. George Bancroft)

... followed was very short. In a single round Montagu had utterly thrashed, and stricken to the earth, and forced to beg for mercy, his cumbrous and brutal opponent. He seemed to tower above him with a magnificent superiority, and there was a self-controlled passion about him which gave tremendous energy to every blow. Brigson was utterly dashed, confounded, and cowed, and took without a word the parting kick of ineffable ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar

... unambiguous statement. Some have not scrupled to argue that it covers the entire cost of the war; for, they point out, the entire cost of the war has to be met by taxation, and such taxation is "damaging to the civilian population." They admit that the phrase is cumbrous, and that it would have been simpler to have said "all loss and expenditure of whatever description"; and they allow that the apparent emphasis of damage to the persons and property of civilians is unfortunate; but errors of draftsmanship should not, in their opinion, shut ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes

... riding-habit, with a broad-brimmed white beaver hat, such as may be seen in Sir Joshua Reynolds' paintings. She rode a sleek white pony, and was followed by a footman in rich livery, mounted on an over-fed hunter. At a little distance in the rear came an ancient cumbrous chariot, drawn by two very corpulent horses, driven by as corpulent a coachman, beside whom sat a page dressed in a fanciful green livery. Inside of the chariot was a starched prim personage, with a look somewhat ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving

... might be more possible through the back; and on the way he came face to face with the wrathful visages of his son and daughter, whom Mad Bell was carrying in the disregardful manner that betides a cumbrous load snatched up in a mortal hurry. She had escaped by ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane

... went into Mr Antony Henderson's office in Corn Street, where poor Jack Henderson sat on his low stool, with his long legs bent up under the watchmaker's counter, pulling to pieces a large watch in a pinchbeck case, and thinking more of Bryda than the wheels of that cumbrous ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall

... pursued scientific inquiry beyond legitimate limits. But apart from this, there is little resemblance. Godwin chose the supernatural, because it chanced to be popular, and laboriously built up a cumbrous edifice, completing it by a sheer effort of will-power. His daughter, with an imagination naturally more attuned to the gruesome and fantastic, writes, when once she has wound her way into the heart of the ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead

... preserved, I would rigidly adhere to it, if it were only for antiquity's sake; but, surely, it would be far more rational for judges to wear false beards, because formerly Bacon and Coke did not shave their chins, than it is for a magistrate to appear on the bench with a cumbrous, hot, and inconvenient cloud of powdered flax, or whatever may be the material on his poll, because our ancestors, a century or two since, were so silly as to violate nature ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper

... pass the bill of fare, were incidents and circumstances that made her melancholy. She looked upon the Stock Exchange coming down to dinner as she would on an invasion of the Visigoths, and endured the stiff observations or the cumbrous liveliness of the merchants and bank directors with gloomy grace. Something less material might be anticipated from the members of Parliament. But whether they thought it would please the genius of the place, or whether Adrian selected his friends ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli

... communistic and commercial democracy. But when they engaged in aggressive wars, and sought to enslave sister-cities like Pisa and Lucca, it was soon found that their simple trading constitution would not serve. They had to piece it out with subordinate machinery, cumbrous, difficult to manage, ill-adapted to the original structure. Each limb of this subordinate machinery, moreover, was a point d'appui for insidious and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... this country maintain to any great extent large retinues of servants. Even with ample fortunes, they are forbidden by the general character of society here, which makes them cumbrous and difficult to manage. Every mistress of a family knows that her cares increase with every additional servant. Two keep the peace with each other and their employer; three begin a possible discord, which possibility increases with four, and becomes certain with five or six. Trained housekeepers, ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe

... movements of those little wings. It is computed that some of those insects open and close their wings no less than two hundred times in a second. It is amazing. And is it not suggestive of the capacity of motion with which this body may easily be endowed when the cumbrous flesh is changed into the immortal, ethereal body? Since those tiny insects are so wonderfully endowed for their little life here, so aimless as it might seem, what glorious capacities may not be in reserve for ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio

... great vat was commandeered for a bathing-place; the village school was turned, every evening, into a recreation room; and a communicants' class was started. Not for the first time I longed for a brief, clear statement of our Church's faith. The cumbrous complicated Catechisms and Confessions are magnificent monuments, but they are worse than useless under such conditions. A Credo which could be written on a blackboard and pointed to as the Church ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan

... favourite rural inn the muse burned brightly within him, and, from his remote retreat among the hills which look down on the infant Severn, he poured out his soul in poetry, which ranks high in Celtic literature. Welsh verse always suffers in translation into the more cumbrous English, but there are many who have known the charm even of an Anglicised version of "Myvanwy Vychan," and when he died, in 1887, he was acclaimed by such an authority as the Rev. H. Elvet Lewis, to be "one of the best lyrical poets of Wales," who had "rendered excellent service ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine

... at the proche parent; not on account of the parentage but marvelling at his air of ease in that cumbrous body and in such tight clothes, too. But presently the same lady informed me further: "He has come ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... light from among the vast masses of original documents he has examined are his property, and can be published by none others but himself. The legislation, whose aid is invoked in the name of justice by literary men, speaks, however, very differently. It says: "This work is very cumbrous. To establish his views this man has gone into great detail. If translated, his book will scarcely sell to such extent as to pay the labor. The facts are common property. Out of this book you can make one that will be much more readable, and that will sell, for it will not be of more than one ...
— Letters on International Copyright; Second Edition • Henry C. Carey

... Cathedral during this period, and the church was made once more what it was before it was devastated by the Puritans." All must admire the enthusiasm and devotion which brought this restoration to a successful issue, although to the taste of the present day it would all appear cumbrous and heavy. ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting

... stake to which the rotting painter is attached, whilst the former, with a last desperate effort, sends the crazy craft into the middle of the stream. As he rolls in over the gunwale a heavy splash is heard, and some cumbrous body scurries from the slimy bank into the water, whilst at the same moment the foremost hound, a magnificent creature, as big and as lithe as a panther, springs boldly after the receding boat. He almost ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood

... instead of downward. The Cartesians long rejected the Newtonian doctrine of the gravitation of all bodies toward one another, on the faith of a general proposition, the reverse of which seemed to them to be inconceivable—the proposition that a body can not act where it is not. All the cumbrous machinery of imaginary vortices, assumed without the smallest particle of evidence, appeared to these philosophers a more rational mode of explaining the heavenly motions, than one which involved what seemed to them so ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... favour. They had, so far, successfully defended the American coast, and when they had increased the number of their vessels, they would have been relied upon to continue that defence. Even if a British armada had set out to cross the Atlantic, its movements must have been slow and cumbrous, and the swift and sudden strokes with which the Syndicate waged war could have been given by night and by day over thousands of ...
— The Great War Syndicate • Frank Stockton

... the spot, which immediately gave out the soft notes as before. Africaner ordered an immediate exhumation, when the source of the mystery proved to be the pianoforte of the missionary's wife, which, being too cumbrous an article to take away, had been buried there, with the hope of being one day able to recover it. Never having seen such an instrument before, Africaner had it dissected for the sake of the brass wires; and thus the ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat

... the meaning of the whole complicated system of Old Testament revelation? Is not that the meaning of the altars, and priests, and sacrifices, and the old cumbrous apparatus of the Mosaic law? Was it not all a picture-book in which the infant eyes of the race might see in a material form deep spiritual realities? Was not that the meaning and explanation of our Lord's parabolic teaching? He veils spiritual truth ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... virtue go always together is an opinion so pleasing that I can forgive him who resolves to think it true. The third stanza sounds big with "Delphi," and "AEgean," and "Ilissus," and "Meander," and "hallowed fountains," and "solemn sound;" but in all Gray's odes there is a kind of cumbrous splendour which we wish away. His position is at last false. In the time of Dante and Petrarch, from whom we derive our first school of poetry, Italy was overrun by "tyrant power" and "coward vice;" nor was our state much better when we first borrowed ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson

... and cuirasses, reflecting back the blaze of the setting sun, like so many burnished mirrors. Then came Cromwell's own carriage, drawn by four strong black horses;—they had need of strength, dragging, as they did, a weight of plated iron, of which the cumbrous machine was composed. The windows were remarkably narrow, and formed of the thickest glass, within which was a layer of horn, that, if it were shattered by any rude assault, would prevent the fragments from flying to the inside. Behind this carriage rode four mounted ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall

... was obliged to travel in India by the old cumbrous methods of going on foot or on horseback, in palanquins or unwieldy coaches; now fast steamboats ply on the Indus and the Ganges, and a great railway, with branch lines joining the main line at many points on its route, traverses the peninsula from Bombay to Calcutta in three ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne

... but a single occupant. Huddled in a chair on the further side of the long table was Mrs. Archer. Both hands rested on the polished oak, and clutched in her small, wrinkled hands was a heavy, cumbrous revolver, pointed directly at the door. Her white, strained face, stamped with an expression of hopeless tragedy, looked ten years older than when Buck had last seen it. As she recognized him she dropped the gun and ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames

... be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs. We are, and must be, one and all, burdened with faults in this world: but the time will soon come when, I trust, we shall put them off in putting off our corruptible bodies; when debasement and sin will fall from us with this cumbrous frame of flesh, and only the spark of the spirit will remain,—the impalpable principle of light and thought, pure as when it left the Creator to inspire the creature: whence it came it will return; perhaps again ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... all Nature's aid will not help you against the mixed craft and strength of such a warrior. The day will come when neither Manny nor even Chandos could sweep you from your saddle; but now, even had you some less cumbrous armor, your chance were small. Your downfall is near; but as you see the famous black chevrons on a golden ground your gallant heart which never knew fear is only filled with joy and amazement at the honor done you. Your downfall ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle

... of Wampum From the neck of Mishe-Mokwa, From the Great Bear of the mountains, From the terror of the nations, As he lay asleep and cumbrous On the summit of the mountains, Like a rock with mosses on it, Spotted brown and gray ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow

... mighty power of the gale. For an appreciable instant her engines stopped. The mass of water that swayed the junk like a cork lifted the great ship high by the stern. The propeller began to revolve in air—for the third officer had corrected his signal to "full speed ahead" again—and the cumbrous Chinese vessel struck the Sirdar a terrible blow in the counter, smashing off the screw close to the thrust-block and wrenching the ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy

... turn them up." She promptly did so, and fastened the edges round her waist. She also discarded the long, cumbrous domino, and I ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough

... forgotten his early training either, for when he came to the "turn," his head and tail came up, his eye brightened, and, with a playful movement of his huge body, and without the least hint from the deacon, he swung himself and the cumbrous old sleigh into line, and began to straighten himself for the ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray

... earlier letters I spoke with anxiety of the still unsettled question—Will the house-wives and mothers of the nation realise—in time—our food necessities? Will their thrift-work in the homes complete the munition-work of women in the factories? Or must we submit to the ration-system, with all its cumbrous inequalities, and its hosts of officials; because the will and intelligence of our people, which have risen so remarkably to the other tasks of this war, are not equal to the task of checking ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... porcelain. When all is ready, the body, attired in a common yellow robe (during life the robes are of silk, satin, or velvet, or cotton, according to the priest's rank), is placed on the car; women then seize the ropes attached to the front of the cumbrous vehicle, and men those behind. After a prolonged struggle, supposed to typify the conflict between good and evil spirits, the women gain the day, and the car proceeds on its way to the funeral pile, upon which the ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey

... scoff, and I stopped, if not altogether to pray, at least to think very seriously of the value of the instrumentality thus brought to bear on such intractable material as the Kensal New Town population. The more cumbrous, even if more perfect or polished, machinery of the Established Church has notoriously failed for a long time to affect such raw material; and if it is beginning to succeed it is really by "taking a ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... is no doubt of the value, or of the unflagging energy, of the naval support given. Sir William Howe alludes to it frequently, both in general and specifically; while the Admiral sums up his always guarded and often cumbrous expressions of opinion in these words: "It is incumbent upon me to represent to your Lordships, and I cannot too pointedly express, the unabating perseverance and alacrity with which the several classes of officers and seamen have supported a long attendance and unusual ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan

... thee, to see that Mr. Haward did by thee all that he swore he would do. But at first there were cares of state, and now for five years I have lived at Germanna, half way to thy mountains, where echoes from the world seldom reach me. Permit me, my dear." With a somewhat cumbrous gallantry, the innocent gentleman, who had just come to town and knew not the gossip thereof, bent and kissed her upon ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston

... have suggested that the doctrine taught by Generelli, Desmarest and Hutton, and later by Scrope and Lyell, for which Whewell proposed the somewhat cumbrous term 'Uniformitarianism,' but which was perhaps better designated by Grove in 1866 as 'Continuity[14],' was distinct from, and subsidiary to, Evolution—and this view could claim for a time the support of a ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd

... of the dome two hundred and ten feet. When completed, the building will be surmounted by a large dome, giving a general resemblance to the main portion of the Capitol at Washington. The dome, viewed from the rear, appears something heavy and cumbrous for the general character of the structure which it crowns; but a front view, from Chambers street, when the eye, in its upward sweep, takes in the broad flight of steps, the grand columns, and the general robustness of the main entrance, dissipates this idea, and attaches ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... Such cumbrous terminology is too forbidding to use. It serves only to mark that the middle stage differs logically from the third as much as it does from the first. In practice it comes to this. If we are going to use concentration in its natural sense, we must regard ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett

... of gathering a royal army in Samoa is cumbrous and dilatory in the extreme. There is here none of the expedition of the fiery cross and the bale-fire; but every step is diplomatic. Each village, with a great expense of eloquence, has to be wiled with promises and spurred by threats, and the greater chieftains make ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... very cumbrous and elaborate one. It provided for no less than four assemblies, one to propose the laws, one to consider them, one to vote upon them, and one to decide on their constitutionality. But Bonaparte saw to it that as First Consul he himself had practically all the ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson

... at hand to help one; and the cheap reproductions of the writings of the earlier centuries, erring, as they do, on the side of indulgence, place it in the power of individuals of modest means to have at their elbows a representative assemblage, not necessarily a cumbrous one, of the literature from Chaucer to the present day, so that they may form a comparative estimate of the intellectual activity and wealth of successive ages, while, at the same time, the Greek and Latin authors are procurable ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt

... into the Billy Ruffun, and the Anse des Cousins into the Nancy Cozens. In the same way, I have known an illiterate Englishman speak of Aix-la-Chapelle as Hexley Chapel. To the name, thus distorted, our forefathers of course added the generic word for a Roman town, and so made the cumbrous title of Eoforwic-ceaster, which is the almost universal form in the earlier parts of the English Chronicle. This was too much of a mouthful even for the hardy Anglo-Saxon, so we soon find a disposition to shorten ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... not calculating that it should find the task so easy of performance, had fallen at the same time—its cumbrous body losing balance by the impetus which it had thrown into the effort. In short, of the four objects that formed the tableau—rock and tree, quadruped and man—not one was standing any longer in its place—for ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid

... parents of the bride and the other visitors saw a train of the most grotesque figures move toward the upper corridor. Roderick led the way as the scarlet old woman, and was followed by humpbacks, bulging paunches, cumbrous wigs, Scaramouches, Punches, shrivelled Pantaloons, curtsying women embankt by enormous hoops, and overcanopied with a yard of horsehair, powder, and pomatum, and by every disgusting shape that can be imagined, as if a nightmair had been unrolling her stores. They jumpt, and twirled, and tottered, ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck

... contains a number of simple arithmetical examples and several geometrical problems. The workings out of these prove that the Egyptian spared himself no trouble in making his calculations, and that he worked out both his arithmetical examples and problems in the most cumbrous and laborious way possible. He never studied mathematics in order to make progress in his knowledge of the science, but simply for purely practical everyday work; as long as his knowledge enabled ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge

... followed her for more than a minute or two when she suddenly turned and entered Ann Holland's little shop. Well, he could not take her by surprise better in any other house in Upton. Perhaps it might even be better than at Bolton Villa, amid its cumbrous surroundings; he always thought of his aunt's house with a sort of shudder. If Sophy had fortunately fixed upon this quiet house for paying the good old maid a kindly visit, there was not another place except their ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton

... there ever blessed, The world's late wonder, and the heaven's new ioy. Live ever there, and leave me here distressed With mortall cares and cumbrous worlds anoy; But where thou dost that happiness enioy, Bid me, O bid me quicklie come to thee, That happie there I maie thee ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales

... wheel the table to the fire; she also took off her cloak and hat and smoothed her hair in the glass. She put the toast by the fire in order to keep it warm. She wanted everything to be comfortable and home-like for her lover. She then poked the fire into a blaze and moved a cumbrous arm chair to a corner of the tea table. When Perigal came in, ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte

... rebellious boy, and Clara disliked that mood in him, because he was rather rough and cumbrous in his humour, cracked gusty and rather stupid jokes, ate voraciously, and drank ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan

... breed conviction. If they gave them entrance and cherished them, they would soon find how full of primary truth they were, and how well they would serve them, as they had served him. With all this heavy artillery, somewhat slow and cumbrous, on great questions, he had no want, when he was speaking off-hand, of quick, snell remark, often witty and full of spirit, and often too unexpected, like lightning—flashing, smiting, and gone. In Church Courts ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... weather, and much encumbered with lading; but all things being in readiness, on the 3rd of June we took to the water, and, a photograph of the scene having been taken, shoved off from the Landing. The boats were furnished with long, cumbrous sweeps, yet not a whit too heavy, since numbers of them snapped with the vigorous strokes of the rowers during the trip. A small sweep, passed through a ring at the stern, served as a rudder, by far the ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair

... walking in the garden where the peaches were, and I sometimes had a nearer observation of them in the study or the parlour. She appeared to me to take great care of the Doctor, and to like him very much, though I never thought her vitally interested in the Dictionary: some cumbrous fragments of which work the Doctor always carried in his pockets, and in the lining of his hat, and generally seemed to be expounding to her ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... this day they remain before Malaga, intercepting all ships that pass that way, and absolutely prohibiting all trade into those parts of Spain." The other squadron was doing the same thing outside the straits, and the Spanish fleet was both too small in number and too cumbrous in build to attack them successfully. Yet "if this year they safely return to Algiers, especially if they should take any of the fleet, it is much to be feared that the King of Spain's forces by sea will not be sufficient to restrain them hereafter, so much ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole

... to what Land, yet firm believes: I see him, but thou canst not, with what Faith He leaves his Gods, his Friends, and native Soile Ur of Chaldaea, passing now the Ford 130 To Haran, after him a cumbrous Train Of Herds and Flocks, and numerous servitude; Not wandring poor, but trusting all his wealth With God, who call'd him, in a land unknown. Canaan he now attains, I see his Tents Pitcht about Sechem, and the neighbouring Plaine Of Moreb; there by promise he receaves Gift to ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton

... are quietly grazing, each herd watched by its trio of alert, though often apparently dozing, guards. One troop is made up entirely of black horses, another of sorrels,—two are of bays. Another herd is grazing close to the stream,—the mules of the wagon-train, and the white tops of these cumbrous vehicles are dotting the left bank of the winding water for two or three hundred yards. Cook-fires are smouldering in little pits dug in the yielding soil, but the cooking is over for the present; the men have had ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King

... have been a sight never to have been forgotten could we have gazed then on that city of the sea, have watched the cumbrous barks, so unlike our light-winged merchant ships, or our swift steamers, which sailed heavily up and down the blue Adriatic, till they came in sight of the famous city, the resort of all nations, ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous

... and cumbrous. High-backed chairs curiously carved, and wrought in needlework; a massive clothes-press of dark oak, well polished, and inlaid with landscapes of various tinted woods; a bed of state, ample and lofty, ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving

... upon a wooden frame supported by four pairs of wheels, which had been constructed for its reception. A barrel of water, placed on another frame upon wheels, was attached to it as a tender. After a great deal of labour, the cumbrous machine was got upon the road. At first it would not move an inch. Its maker, Tommy Waters, became impatient, and at length enraged, and taking hold of the lever of the safety valve, declared in his desperation, that "either she or he should go." ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles

... hated all the red tape in that huge network of institutions by which New York City provides "relief." She never dropped a case of hers into that cumbrous relief machine and then let it slip out of her sight. She did the hard thing, she followed it up. She had learned, as I had in my work, to "get on the inside" of this secretive city, to go to the gods behind it all and so have her cases shoved. One day when one of them, a woman, was in a hospital ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole

... Lost.—The demand for a new edition of this cumbrous piece of blank verse, proves what we have often said, that the want, in CROMWELLS time, of a literary journal of the character of the Nation has had a permanent effect upon literature. Had we been in existence ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various

... singularly little mention of writing or education in ancient times, and it seems likely that written records were at first confined to castings or engravings upon metal, and carvings upon stone. In the days when the written character was cumbrous, there would be no great encouragement to use it for daily household purposes. It is a striking fact, not only that writings upon soft clay, afterwards baked, were not only non-existent in China, but have never once been mentioned or conceived of as being a possibility. This fact ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker

... live there ever blessed The world's late wonder, and the heaven's new joy; {98} Live ever there, and leave me here distressed With mortal cares and cumbrous world's annoy." ...
— Milton • John Bailey

... this indolent search after the enjoyment of the hour, Sterne cultivated a formidable species of literature in which he had so few competitors that, in after years, his indolence prompted him to plagiarise freely from sources which, surely, no human being would discover. He steeped himself in the cumbrous learning of those writers of the Renaissance in whom congested Latin is found tottering into colloquial French. He studied Rabelais perhaps more deeply than any other Englishman of his time, and certainly Beroalde de Verville, Bruscambille, and other absurdities of ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... equally, wars and the fear of them bring about the necessity for the concentration of power. So long as the community is exposed to sudden dangers, the possibility of quick decision is absolutely necessary to self-preservation. The cumbrous machinery of deliberative decisions by the people is impossible in a crisis, and therefore so long as crises are likely to occur, it is impossible to abolish the almost autocratic power of governments. In this case, as in most others, each of two correlative ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell

... only unimpaired, but purified. Dead and buried creeds have not carried down with them the essential morality they contained, which still exists, uncontaminated by the sloughs of superstition. And all that there is of justice, kindness and beauty embodied in our cumbrous forms will live perennially, when the forms themselves ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... they arrived at the stables of the elephants. These, like those of the horses and the oxen which drew the cumbrous war machines, were formed in the vast thickness of the walls, and were what are known in modern times as casemates. As Nessus had said, the Indian mahout and the other two Arabs were the only human occupants of the casemate. The elephant at once showed that ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty

... bodies of the citizens of all classes had been at work; some upon the cumbrous engines, others carrying water, others levelling houses, but all their endeavours seemed powerless to quell the raging flames. And it was notable when first the pipes in the streets were opened, no water could be found, whereon a messenger was ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy

... of one accustomed to have his will respected, relieved Paul of the bridle, and throwing the reins on the neck of the animal, he sprang upon his back, with the activity of a professor of the equestrian art. Nothing could be finer or firmer than the seat of the savage. The highly wrought and cumbrous saddle was evidently more for show than use. Indeed it impeded rather than aided the action of limbs, which disdained to seek assistance, or admit of restraint from so womanish inventions as stirrups. The horse, which immediately began to prance, ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper

... of his sons was William D., who was born in New Orleans in 1809, but was educated in the North and was appointed to the navy when fourteen years old. He was placed in command of a cumbrous ironclad constructed from a ferryboat at the beginning of the war and named the Essex, in honor of the famous cruiser with which his father played havoc with the shipping of Great Britain in the Pacific. In the attack on Fort Henry, in February, 1862, the Essex, ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis

... But Frenchmen of his class considered fifty the limit of an active life. It behooved him now to begin looking around; to prepare a fireside for himself. Michel was a good clerk to his employers. Cumbrous though his body might be, when he was in the woods he never shirked any hardship to secure a ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... method and style of the 'Convito' which in its cumbrous artificiality exhibits an early stage in the exposition of thought in literary form, but Dante's earnestness of purpose is apparent in many passages of manly simplicity, and inspires life into the dry bones of his formal scholasticism. The ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... troopers always had such things with them, being useful by night for various purposes; and hissing and sputtering in the falling snow flakes, their lurid and fitful glare was thrown on the close array of the Dutch dragoons, on their great cumbrous hats, on the steeple crowns of which, I have said, the snow was gathering in cones, and the pale features of the two prisoners, altogether imparting a wild, unearthly, and terrible effect to the scene about to be enacted on that wide ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... to the practical turn of mind characteristic of the present day; common sense urges that mechanical ingenuity, which has done so much in other directions, should be employed in making the acquisition of knowledge less cumbrous and less tedious; that as we travel by steam, so we should also read by steam, and be helped in our studies by the varied resources of modern invention. There lies on my table at this present moment ...
— Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods - The Rede Lecture Delivered June 13, 1894 • J. W. Clark

... within. The air rang with jeers at the portrait-painter who never got a likeness, the too facile composer whose body was to be burned on a pile of five-and-twenty chests all filled with his own scores, the bad grammar of the grammarian, the supersubtle logic and the cumbrous technical language of the metaphysician, the disastrous fertility of the authors of machine-made epics.[6] The poor scholar had become proverbial; living in a garret where the very mice were starved, teaching the children of the middle classes ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... through the stations from all points of the compass—cattle buyers, drovers, station-owners, telegraph people—all bent on business, and all glad to get moving after the long compulsory inaction of the Wet; and lastly that great yearly cumbrous event takes place: the starting of the "waggons," with ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn

... trimmed with silver tinsel on the outside; and within it was lined with carnation-coloured velvet, embroidered with gold and silver. The curtains were of carnation damask, and it was drawn by four gray horses." [110] These royal conveyances were, however, far less convenient than showy, being cumbrous and ungraceful in form, rudely suspended upon leathern straps, and devoid of windows, the use of glass not becoming ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe

... But fundamentally, the two forms are ruled by the same set of conditions, which the verse-poet, no less than the prose-poet, can ignore only at his peril. Unless, indeed, he renounces from the outset all thought of the stage and chooses to produce that cumbrous nondescript, a "closet drama." Of such we do not speak, but glance and pass on. What laws, indeed, can apply to a form which has no proper element, but, like the amphibious animal described by the sailor, "cannot live on land and dies ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... Bookman is— Though cumbrous, gray and grim,— (With hi! hilloo! And honey-dew And odors musty-rare!) He bends him o'er that page of his As o'er the rose's rim. (With hi! and ho! And pinks aglow And roses everywhere!) Ay, he's the ...
— Songs of Friendship • James Whitcomb Riley

... and in good faith began to warn and advise me. They had heard the tales of raftsmen, and had conceived a vivid idea of the perils of the river below, gauging their notions of it from the spring and fall freshets tossing about the heavy and cumbrous rafts. There was a whirlpool, a rock eddy, and a binocle within a mile. I might be caught in the binocle, or engulfed in the whirlpool, or smashed up in the eddy. But I felt much reassured when they told me I had already passed several whirlpools and rock eddies; but ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs

... then Kusis takes off his cumbrous girdle of grass and replaces it by a narrow band of closely-woven banana fibre, stained black and yellow (there be fashions in these parts of the world) and reaches down his pig-spear from the cross-beams overhead, while Tulpe, ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke

... the sun,"—there is poetry, in its birth. If history is a grave study, poetry may be said to be a graver: its materials lie deeper, and are spread wider. History treats, for the most part, of the cumbrous and unwieldly masses of things, the empty cases in which the affairs of the world are packed, under the heads of intrigue or war, in different states, and from century to century: but there is no thought or feeling that can have entered into ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt

... and plants, or the detail of astronomical observations. Had I adopted a mode of composition which would have included in one and the same chapter all that has been observed on one particular point of the globe, I should have prepared a work of cumbrous length, and devoid of that clearness which arises in a great measure from the methodical distribution of matter. Notwithstanding the efforts I have made to avoid, in this narrative, the errors I had to dread, I feel conscious ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt

... has so recently taken on this ability to think, that he has not yet gotten used to handling it. The tool is cumbrous in his hands. He is afraid of it—this one characteristic that differentiates him from the lower animals—so he abdicates and turns his divine birthright over to a syndicate. This combination called a church agrees to take care of his doubts and fears and do his thinking for him, and to ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard

... struggles against science as soon as it contradicts traditional conceptions, and to the Protestant, who strives to bring his religious beliefs into accordance with his scientific knowledge, the Russian Church may seem to resemble an antediluvian petrifaction, or a cumbrous line-of-battle ship that has been long stranded. It must be confessed, however, that the serene inactivity for which she is distinguished has had very valuable practical consequences. The Russian clergy ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... be fairly claimed that the alert and inventive spirit of the American has lightened the cumbrous awkwardness of Old-World implements, has simplified their traditional complexity, has systematized methods of manufacture, and has shown a certain audacity in its innovations which might be expected from a community where every mechanic is a voter, and a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various

... is a very cumbrous rendering of the German Pollution. In English we greatly need a general term, first, to denote all involuntary emissions of semen, whether nocturnal or diurnal; and, secondly, to denote involuntary ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll

... dead men's bones, indeed thou hast rare wine for such cumbrous relics that can be turned to naught! And didst thou shrive the saint for the use of his bones a ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne

... to rest undisturbed in this grave where his family had laid him. But well-meaning, though ignorant, officiousness would not suffer it to be so. Nearly twenty years after the poet's death, a huge, cumbrous, unsightly mausoleum was, by public subscription, erected at a little distance from his original resting-place. This structure was adorned with an ungraceful figure in marble, representing, "The muse of Coila finding the poet at the plough, and throwing her inspiring mantle over him." To ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp

... nearly certain that the art of writing was known among the Chinese as early as 2000 B.C. The system employed is curiously cumbrous. In the absence of an alphabet, each word of the language is represented upon the written page by means of a symbol, or combination of symbols; this, of course, requires that there be as many symbols, ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... and the black one close together in the lamp-light, reading their Cicero. A rap at the door seemed a rude interruption; yet so unusual was the excitement of an evening visitor that they could not be quite indifferent to the event,—the less so when the visitor proved to be Polly's client of the cumbrous income. ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller

... autos were performed; the giants made sport for the multitude, and the entertainment concluded with music and dancing. Sometimes the procession was headed by the figure of a monster called the Tarasca, half serpent in form, borne by men concealed in its cumbrous bulk, and surmounted by another figure representing the woman of Babylon, —all so managed as to fill with wonder and terror the country people who crowded round it, and whose hats and caps were ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... Johnson, "there is a kind of cumbrous splendor which we wish away. . . These odes are marked by glittering accumulations of ungraceful ornaments; they strike rather than please; the images are magnified by affectation; the language is labored ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... proving of the anti-trust law as an effective weapon against the flagrantly offending trusts, according to Roosevelt's conviction, was only a part of the battle. As he said, "monopolies can, although in rather cumbrous fashion, be broken up by lawsuits. Great business combinations, however, cannot possibly be made useful instead of noxious industrial agencies merely by lawsuits, and especially by lawsuits supposed to be carried on for ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland

... five days' steaming is in my opinion highly important, in addition to the necessity of docks where ironclad vessels could obtain the necessary repairs after a naval engagement. It is a serious result of modern improvements that the cumbrous and complicated ironclads cannot be repaired in a few days after an action with the enemy by their own carpenters and crews, like the wooden vessels of old, but that docks must be within reach, and all the ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... professor undergoes a regular, severe, but essential course of study in that beautiful art, which is to purchase for him fame and emolument; but he who takes up his pencil merely for pastime, will do well to regulate its movements by a few rules, not cumbrous to the memory, and of easy application.—It is my intention briefly to state the object of Gilpin's first and second essays; from the third I have deduced those rules for sketching which appeared most obviously to result from the tenour ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 322, July 12, 1828 • Various

... island having been recaptured by General Nicols. Abercromby and his comrades thus saved those possessions from the most imminent danger. His services were almost as great in the quarters as on the field. He adapted the cumbrous uniform to the needs of the tropics, and, by abolishing parades and drills in the noontide heats, and improving the sanitary conditions of the camps, sought to stay the ravages of disease, of which the carelessness or stupidity of officials had been the most potent ally. On ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... continually find, in other examples of work of the same period, an unwholesome breadth or heaviness, which results from the mind having no longer any care for refinement or precision, nor taking any delight in delicate forms, but making all things blunted, cumbrous, and dead, losing at the same time the sense of the elasticity and spring of natural curves. It is as if the soul of man, itself severed from the root of its health, and about to fall into corruption, lost the perception of life in all things around it; and could no more distinguish the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin

... Quandt (1798) visited Neuwied-on-the-Rhine. In some ways the method was good, in others bad. it was good because it fostered the unity of the Church, and emphasized its broad international character. It was bad because it was cumbrous and expensive, because it exalted too highly the official element, and because it checked ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton

... far exceeds the Englishman. A certain conventional artifice and dainty affectation clouded the clear and beautiful nature of Sidney, when he wrote. The elaborate embroidery of thought, the stiff and cumbrous Elizabethan dress of language, with all its ruffles and laces, make the "Arcadia" an imperfect exponent of Sidney's nature. His intense thoughts, delicate emotions, and burning passions are half concealed in the form he adopts for their expression. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various

... demand for the limelight such as was never experienced before, and as the limelight is dependent upon the two gases, hydrogen and oxygen, for its support, these gases are now supplied in large quantities commercially. At first the gas cylinders were made of wrought iron; they were cumbrous and heavy, and the pressure of the inclosed gas was so low that a receptacle to hold only ten feet was a most unwieldy concern. But times have changed, and a cylinder of about the same size, but half the weight, is now made to hold four times the quantity of gas at the ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various

... and from Taymouth back to Dalkeith, 656 horses were employed. Yet this was nothing to the number of animals engaged on the royal progresses of former times. It is stated that 20,000 horses were in all employed in conveying Marie Antoinette, her enormous suite and cumbrous belongings, from Vienna to Paris. Poor woman!—it took all those horses to bring her into her kingdom, but only one to carry her out of her kingdom, via the Place de ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood

... construction is frequently found when the antecedent includes or implies both genders. The masculine does not really represent a feminine antecedent, and the expression his or her is avoided as being cumbrous. ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell

... grammar, till the true nature of an ellipsis is clearly ascertained; so that the writer shall distinguish it from a blundering omission that impairs the sense, and the reader or parser be barred from an arbitrary insertion of what would be cumbrous and useless. By adopting loose and extravagant ideas of the nature of this figure, some pretenders to learning and philosophy have been led into the most whimsical and opposite notions concerning the grammatical construction of language. Thus, with equal absurdity, Cardell ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... soldiers; almost all the valuable effects, not only of that army which was conquered, but of that which was serving with Hannibal in Italy, having been left on this side the Pyrenees, that the baggage might not be cumbrous to ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius

... size of machines has often attended their development and progress. Take the watch for instance. Examine the beautiful structure of the little animal, watch the intelligent play of the minute members which compose it; yet this little creature is but a development of the cumbrous clocks of the thirteenth century— it is no deterioration from them. The day may come when clocks, which certainly at the present day are not diminishing in bulk, may be entirely superseded by the universal use of watches, ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... was delighted with the present and willingly added the extra five pounds weight to his cumbrous and heavy burdens. ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt

... schools. With this plan in view, Miss Sirwell collected the specimens from various schools of the State, supervised the erection of the booth, and installed the displays. As a result, the Minnesota exhibit had a distinct system and unity, was free from useless and cumbrous repetition, its main idea was readily grasped, and it stood as a memorable proof of one woman's artistic sense of proportion and adequacy. It was original in conception; it had beauty of color, order, and arrangement, and, as Miss Sirwell herself laughingly ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission

... rows upon rows of big irregular volumes, with tarnished tooling and faded gilding on the sun-scorched backs. What are they? old editions of classics, old volumes of controversial divinity, folios of the Fathers, topographical treatises, cumbrous philosophers, pamphlets from which, like dry ashes, the heat of the fire that warmed them once has fled. Take one down: it is an agreeable sight enough; there is a gentle scent of antiquity; the ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson

... freight which the railway carried to Kosheh was the first of the new stern-wheel gunboats. Train after train arrived with its load of steel and iron, or with the cumbrous sections of the hull, and a warship in pieces—engines, armaments, fittings and stores—soon lay stacked by the side of the river. An improvised dockyard, equipped with powerful twenty-ton shears and other appliances, was ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill

... much more, was inaudible to me. I hurried from the place somewhat ashamed of my success. I doubt whether I should have had the like feelings had I lost. As it was, never did possession seem more cumbrous than the mixed gold, paper, and silver, with which my pockets were burdened. I gladly thought of Kingsley, to avoid thinking of myself. It was certain, I fancied, that he had not lost, else how could he have continued to play? My anxiety hurried me into ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms

... denominations, and advised them to obtain the permission of the king in council, that their names might be inserted in the deed; rendering them all the assistance that was in their power. Great difficulties were encountered in passing the cumbrous deed through the various offices, and then in pleading it in all parts of the country. The number of Quakers thus released from imprisonment was 471, being about the same number as those who had perished in the jails. The rest of the prisoners liberated by this deed were Baptists and Independents, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... and tables, or even provided with fireplaces;'[887] and cases might be quoted where the tedium of a long service, or the appetite engendered by it, were relieved by the entry, between prayers and sermon, of a livery servant with sherry and light refreshments.[888] Even into cathedrals cumbrous ladies' pews were often introduced. Horace Walpole tells an extraordinary story of Gloucester Cathedral in 1753. A certain Mrs. Cotton, who had largely contributed to whitewashing and otherwise ornamenting the church, had taken it ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton



Words linked to "Cumbrous" :   unwieldy



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