"Mawkish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... money there or at the theatre, or we will treat her to French wine or Cognac in the Aurelius Garden, but the tickets we will not buy. What sayest thou? Yet, another mug of beer?" and one and another successively having buried their blond whiskers in the mawkish draught, curled them and swaggered ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... is often mawkish and often portrays oddities; but these oddities do exist, especially in London (e.g., Sam Weller, Mrs. Todgers, Jo, etc.), and Dickens unearthed them for the first time. How his heart warms for the poor and the wretched! He is the great poet ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... physical peculiarities, they argue, the problem would be comparatively simple; but what can we say to his ignorance, shiftlessness, poverty, and crime? can a self-respecting group hold anything but the least possible fellowship with such persons and survive? and shall we let a mawkish sentiment sweep away the culture of our fathers or the hope of our children? The argument so put is of great strength, but it is not a whit stronger than the argument of thinking Negroes: granted, they reply, that the condition of our masses is bad; there is certainly on the one hand adequate ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... advanced years when it is difficult to say whether one is dealing with involution melancholia or stupor. Such patients show inactivity, considerable apathy and wetting and soiling, and with these a whining hypochondria, negativism, and often a rather mawkish sentimental death content without the dramatic anxiety which usually characterizes the involution state. In these cases the diagnosis is bound to be a matter of taste. In our opinion it is probably better to regard these as clinically impure types. They may be looked on as, fundamentally, involution ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... appearance of the girl behind the counter. What was it about Commies outside their own countries that they drew such crackpots into their camp? Heavy lenses, horn rimmed to make them more conspicuous, wild hair, mawkish tweeds, and dirty ...
— Combat • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... fantastic, nothing mawkish, nothing unmanly about this belief, but only the simple faith of a steady soul and a perfectly clear brain. It was good to see how it braced a strong man for life to ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... powerful. It has had an influence—and, I think, a good influence—on my thoughts from that day to this; and it ought to be preached in every pulpit in our country, at least once a year, as an antidote to our sickly, mawkish lenity ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... beyond the rebel lines and afterwards in being defeated for governor of his State by more than one hundred thousand majority, that many of the delegates were not content to sit with him,—a sentiment which Mr. Vallandingham is said to have considered one of mawkish sentimentality, but one to which he deferred by quietly withdrawing from all participation in the proceedings. It was believed, and indeed openly asserted, at the time, that if he had chosen to remain the attempt to eject him by resolution, as was threatened, ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... system formed the great incentive to martial daring, whereas when idealized in Beatrice it became almost undistinguishable from the ferveurs of religion, we find it with Tasso sinking into a weak and mawkish sensuality. More than any other sentimentalist Tasso justified his title by 'fiddling harmonics on the strings of sensualism,' and it may be added that the ear is ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... process of suppuration is known as pus. In its typical form it is a yellowish creamy substance, of alkaline reaction, with a specific gravity of about 1030, and it has a peculiar mawkish odour. If allowed to stand in a test-tube it does not coagulate, but separates into two layers: the upper, transparent, straw-coloured fluid, the liquor puris or pus serum, closely resembling blood ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... service of a nation, and then was put in jeopardy of his life because he used a privilege of nature to fly from such persecution as soon as circumstances placed the means in his power. The last age, however, witnessed many scenes of similar wrongs; and, it is to be feared, in despite of all the mawkish philanthropy and unmeaning professions of eternal peace that it is now the fashion to array against the experience of mankind, that the next age will present their parallels, unless the good sense of this nation infuse into the federal legislative bodies juster notions of policy, more extended ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... of America" was next examined. The general air of gloom—hopeless gloom—was depressing. Such mawkish sentimentality and despair; such inane and mortifying confessions; such longings for a lover to come; such sighings over a lover departed; such cravings for "only"—"only" a grave in some dark, ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... perpetual sense of sacredly loving and being loved. But how, immured in his quiet convent, away from the streets and the studios, did he become that genuine, finished, perfectly professional painter? No one is less of a mere mawkish amateur. His range was broad, from this really heroic fresco to the little trumpeting seraphs, in their opaline robes, enamelled, as it were, on the gold margins of ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... me, and mark my words. Either a morbid sensibility, which I despise, or a mawkish affectation, which I detest, injures the tone of your mind, and the truth of your character. Never let me hear again of wounded spirits, and self-reproaches, and poetic sufferings. When you were a girl you almost frightened ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... nauseated, and in a few weeks, perhaps, they do not speak as they pass each other, and their caresses are lavished on others. Such friendships are not only silly, they are even dangerous. They are a weakening of moral fiber, a waste of mawkish sentimentality. They may be even worse. Such friendship may degenerate even into a species of self-abuse ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... contrary, we have a sense of brotherhood—I don't know any other name for it—among ourselves which isn't to be found anywhere else in the world. You English haven't got it. That's why the thing I'm saying seems mere sentiment to you, and even mawkish. You're so afraid of sentiment. But it's true. It may be only a rudimentary sense of brotherhood; and it's certainly not universal, as it ought to be, because we feel it only among ourselves. We don't really include the foreigner—not at least ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... merges into something dull. He is like a bad swimmer, strikes out with great force, makes a confounded splash, and never gets a yard the further for it. It is a great effort not to sink. Indeed, Monsieur D'A—, your literature is at a very reduced ebb; bombastic in the drama—shallow in philosophy—mawkish in poetry, your writers of the present day seem to think, ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... about women. I don't know what it is—certainly not a sensual or passionate nature; mine is nothing of the sort. It's sheer sentimentality, I suppose. I can't be friendly with a woman without drifting into mawkish tenderness—there's the simple truth. If I had married happily, I don't think I should have been tempted to go about philandering. The society of a wife I loved and respected would be sufficient. But there's that need ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... God's own doing," and meant for her greater glory! We have no hesitation in saying that such teaching strikes us as fraught with infinite possibilities of moral harm, the more so because of the rather mawkish sentimentality with which it is decked out; for if any scoundrel is really the instrument of God's will, why should he be blamed for his scoundrelism? And we observe how yet once more, by a glib and vapid ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... of it the worm that made it. For some smiles are like the ruddiness of certain apples, which is owing to a centipede, or other creeping thing, coiled up at the heart of them. Only her worm had a face and shape the very image of her own; and she looked so simpering, and mawkish, and self-conscious, and silly, that she made the wise ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... vice." And the author's tale is an exemplification of this text. Poor Booth's habits and customs are bad indeed, but who can deny the benevolence, and charity, and pity, of this simple and kindly being? His vices even, if we may say so, are those of a man; there is nothing morbid or mawkish in any of Fielding's heroes; no passionate pleasing extenuation, such as one finds in the pseudo-moral romances of the sentimental character; no flashy excuses like those which Sheridan puts forward (unconsciously, most likely), for those ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... touch a poetic vein. They had ardent admirers once, even amongst competent judges. They may still be read, and they have scenes, descriptions, and detached thoughts of real charm, and almost of true beauty. They are not, in any sense, works of art; they are ill constructed, full of the mawkish gush of the Byronic fever, and never were really sincere and genuine products of heart and brain. They were show exercises in the Byronic mode. And, though we may still take them up for an hour for the occasional flashes of genius and wit they retain, no one ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... mawkish folly. I used to drink too much; the two things went well together. It would shame me to tell you all about it. But, happily, I have been able to go back about thirteen years—recover my old sane self—and with it what I ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... tried to convert carrots and beet-root into apricot and damson preserves, these notable women sometimes encouraged children to collect sufficient chuckie-chucks to make preserve. The result was a jam of a sweet mawkish flavour that gave some idea of a whiff caught in passing ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... just strong enough to dislike sentiment, to turn faint in the sickly, mawkish air. But I am not strong enough to charge it with vivid life. Moreover, the danger of a strong character taking up the anti-ascetic position is that he is apt to degenerate into a man like Goethe, who plucked ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... "but I had rather be the caterpillar with a future.—Why don't you put a stop to the man's lovemaking? He can't love you or any woman. He does not know what love means. It makes me ill to hear him when he thinks he is paying you irresistible compliments. They are so silly! so mawkish! Good heavens, Florimel! can you imagine that smile every day and always? Like the rest of his class he seems to think himself perfectly justified in making fools of women. I want to help you to grow as beautiful as God meant you to be when he thought of you first. I want you ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... of this habitual attitude on the part of the members of the club and its servants was an atmosphere in which a cataleptic fit would scarcely warrant unofficial interference; much less would merely mawkish or absent-minded behavior attract attention. That was the function of the club—to provide sanctuary for personal whims and idiosyncrasies; of course, always within the ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... himself a believer in God and in Christ, and detect him in no glaring and willful violation of God's law, we speak of him as a Christian; and, on the other hand, if we hear him or see him denying Christ, either in his words or conduct, we tacitly assume him not to be a Christian. A mawkish charity prevents us from outspeaking in this matter, and from earnestly endeavoring to discern who are Christians and who are not; and this I hold[144] to be one of the chief sins of the Church in the present day; for thus wicked men ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... progress from the general to the particular I am not blind to the dangers. Biology for the young readily degenerates into a mawkish "nature-study," or all-for-the-best claptrap about adaptation, but a sure remedy is the strong tonic of agnosticism, teaching one of the best lessons science has to offer, the ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... Hannaway Wells reflected, "whether the present generation is not inclined to be mawkish with regard to human life. History has shown us the marvellous benefits which have accrued to the greatest nations through the lessening of population by ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... will be commonplace, but—you congratulate yourself on this—they will certainly be short, and he will neither be surprised nor hurt if nobody listens to them. There will be nothing mawkish about his religion and he will not obtrude it over much, but when he starts the men singing "Fight the good fight," that hymn will go with a swing. In the officers' mess, when the shyness of the first few days has worn off, he will be recognised as "a good sort." The men's ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... acknowledged. The bars are even mentioned 32, 33, 36 and 37, where tempo license may be indulged. But here is a case which innate taste and feeling must guide. You can no more teach a real Chopin rubato— not the mawkish imitation,—than you can make a donkey comprehend Kant. The metronome is the same in all editions, 100 ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... certain rapidity and fire in the action, and a certain vigour in the characters of the impetuous son (Saint Albin) and the malignant brother-in-law (the Commander). But the dialogue is poor, and the Father of the Family himself is as woolly and mawkish a figure as is usually made out of benevolent intentions and weak purpose combined. The woes of the heavy father of the stage, where there is no true pathos, but only a sentimental version of it, find us very callous. The language has none of that exquisite ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... I understand you, that it is a piece of mawkish hypocrisy to shake the head and throw up the eyes at Mr. this or that for being the head of a religious party, while we return thanks for our pure and reformed Church; because purity, reformation, apostolicity, toleration, all these boasts and glories of the Church of ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... partitions covered with small points; branches opposite. Leaves 4 times odd pinnate. Leaflets obliquely ovate, acute, entire, glabrous. Flowers in racemes with long, primary peduncles, large, fleshy, lurid, violet color, odor mawkish. Calyx inferior, cylindrical, monophyllous, entire. Corolla much longer than calyx, fleshy, bell-shaped, 5-lobed. Stamens 5, all fertile, fixed on the corolla, nearly equal in height. Style longer than stamens, flattened. Stigma cleft in 2 flat leaves. Silique or pod about 3 long and 2' wide, ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... learned mistress, and cause her to think she was saying her litanies with two colleagues. When Jaco was out of food, and any one passed by him, he would say, "My poor Cocotte!" or "My poor rat!" in an arch, mawkish, protracted tone that indicated very clearly what he wanted, and that his drinking cup was empty. There was no doubt in the house as to his meaning; and whenever one heard it he said: "He has nothing to eat." He was exceedingly fond of fresh pits of apples and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... things speedily, and the kindly, forbearing look in them promised that his understanding would not be stiffened by harshness, that it would be accompanied by sympathy so keen that, were it not for the hint of humour which they also held, he might almost have been mawkish, a sentimentalist too easily dissolved in tears. His thick eyebrows clung closely to his eyes, and gave him a look of introspection that mitigated the shrewdness of his pointing nose. There was some weakness, but not much, in the full, projecting lower lip and the slightly ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... the tirades of a cheap philosopher form an unique compound, at once sickening and irritating, like the fiery, pungent mixtures of cheap bars, which suit his audience better because they contain the biting, mawkish ingredients that compose the adulterated brandy of the Revolution.—He is posted on foreign maneuvers, and enlarges upon the true reasons for the famine: "A lot of bread has been lately found in the privies: the Pitts and Cobourgs and other rascals who want to enslave justice and reason, and assassinate ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... of the godless rake, the defender of the roue; but I have small patience with those mawkish purists who persist in measuring men and women by the same standard of morals. We might as well apply the same code to the fierce Malay who runs amuck and to McAllister's fashionable pismires. We might as wisely bring to the same judgment bar ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... in spurning the love of a blackfellow if he behaves in a manly way; but Frank Hawden was such a drivelling mawkish style of sweetheart that I had no patience ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... burlesques an epistle from Charlotte, slipping in a few of Lovelace's locutions as well (pp. 47-48; cf. Grandison, 1754, VI, 288). The author of the Candid Examination distinguishes between what he considers the low mawkish talk of some of Richardson's characters, which he condemns (pp. 11-12), and Richardson's freedom in coining words, which he approves (p. 36). These slight instances may serve to remind us that many of Richardson's early readers must have been ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... distinguishes man from the other higher vertebrate, indeed, is his excessive timorousness, his easy yielding to alarms, his incapacity for adventure without a crowd behind him. In his normal incarnation he is no more capable of initiating an extra-legal affair—at all events, above the mawkish harmlessness of a flirting match with a cigar girl in a cafe-than he is of scaling the battlements of hell. He likes to think of himself doing it, just as he likes to think of himself leading a cavalry ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... their pass-time, or rather kill-time, with the name of reading. Call it rather a sort of beggarly day-dreaming, during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness, and a little mawkish sensibility; while the whole materiel and imagery of the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera obscura manufactured at the printing office, which pro tempore fixes, reflects, and transmits the ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... policy of keeping in power a mawkish Sicilian Court, saturated with the incurable vices of cowardice, falsehood, dishonesty, and treachery, failed; and the Government of the day was saddled with the crime of squandering human life, wealth, and energy without receiving any commensurate return. If it was in the national ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... with sentiments of virtue and decency. There is in him absolutely nothing loose or obscene, and yet he is entirely free from the milk-and-water propriety which sometimes irritates the reader in such books as Habington's Castara. Wither is never mawkish, though he is never loose, and the swing of his verse at its best is only equalled by the rush of thought and feeling which animates it. As it is perhaps necessary to justify this high opinion, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... faults are bad enough; but the heavenly virtues carry them all off triumphantly. There is no creation like Arthur in the whole realm of poetry; he is all angelic love and gentleness, and yet neither mawkish nor unnatural; his fears make him real to us, and the horror of his situation allows us to accept his exquisite pleading as possible. We need only think of Tennyson's May Queen, or of his unspeakable ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... orgies of the savages varied the monotony of dull days and long nights. The winter I spent with the Mandanes was my first in the north. I had not yet learned to take events as the rock takes wave-blows, and was still at that mawkish age when a man is easily filled with profound pity for himself. A month after our arrival, Father Holland left the Mandane village. Eric Hamilton had not yet come; so I felt much like the man whom ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... succouring themselves in succouring him. I do it also for lack of anything better to do; for life is so desperately insipid we must find distraction at any cost, and benevolence is an amusement, of a mawkish sort, one indulges in for want of any more savoury; I do it out of pride and to get an advantage over you; I do it, in a word, as part of a system and to show you what ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... was a young fellow who had been second captain of the mizen-top on board of H.M.S. "Vengeance;" but not liking the style of discipline, especially—as he said—the irritating substitutes for flogging which have been introduced of late years into the Navy, to suit the mawkish sensibility of public opinion in England, as well as the clamours of the all-ruling Press, he took the first opportunity of running away, to seek his fortune in the Far West. He observed to me one day, "Those chaps who kick up such a devil of a row about flogging in the Navy, whatever ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... with refreshing and peculiar enjoyment. I regret, however, to say, that the majority of albums are comparatively valueless: they are written with so much negligence; many of the pieces are of so light and frivolous a character; there is so much childish and mawkish sentimentality in numbers of the effusions poured forth; and there is so great a destitution of solid, original, and striking thought, that, in my unpretending, yet honest estimation, the majority of albums are worth comparatively nothing. A good ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 491, May 28, 1831 • Various
... the negro can be civilised, and a high responsibility rests upon them as the representatives of possible progress. But hitherto the African, as will presently appear, has not had fair play. The petting and pampering process, the spirit of mawkish reparation, and the coddling and high-strung sentimentality so deleterious to the tone of the colony, were errors of English judgment pure and simple. We ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... of Rome are sitting after a full meal, and inquiring in their cups, 'What news from the divine world of poesy?' Hereupon a personage with a hyacinth-coloured mantle over his shoulders brings out some mawkish trash or other, with a snuffle and a lisp, something about Phyllises or Hypsipyles, or any of the many heroines over whom poets have snivelled, filtering out his tones and tripping up the words against the roof of his delicate ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... No one would have accused him of mawkish sentiment. The woman whose portrait he wore night and day next his skin was the woman he loved. He had no other way of proving his sincerity than by exhibiting ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken! What had I on earth to do With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... left the island soon afterwards to wander away back to Eastern Polynesia, but his continued fits of melancholy annoyed the girl so much that she one day quarrelled with and left him, and made a fresh matrimonial engagement with a man less given to mawkish sentiment. ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... thoughts of Youth are long, long thoughts. What George was thinking was that the late King Herod had been unjustly blamed for a policy which had been both statesmanlike and in the interests of the public. He was blaming the mawkish sentimentality of the modern legal system which ranks the evisceration and secret burial of small boys ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... heaping words together regardless of meaning, should so bewilder men and deprive them of all wise and sober judgment! By my faith! ... I would as soon listen to the gabble of geese in a farmyard as to the silly glibness of such inflated twaddle, such mawkish sentiment, such ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... inspected him anew from the critical viewpoint of the woman who intends to marry without love. As she dissected him it occurred to her that Sprudell exemplified every petty feminine prejudice she had. She disliked his small, red mouth, which had a way of fixing itself in an expression of mawkish sentimentality when he looked at her, and there was that in the amorous, significant light in his infantile blue eyes which sickened her very soul. She disapproved of his toddling walk, his fat, stooped shoulders, his spats and general ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... from her:—"Touching? Romantic? Fiddle-de-dee! You ought to be ashamed of yourself for thinking so at your age, Dorothy. A bargain's a bargain, and in my opinion the bride has got much the best of it. For she's a mawkish, milk-and-water, little schoolgirl, while he is charming—all there is of him. If there'd been a little more I declared I'd have married him myself." And good-looking Mr. Decies, of the 101st Lancers, got into very hot water with the ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... of us, and we haven't done anything to endear ourselves to the meteorologists—but we're weak and mawkish Intermediatists—several times we've tried to get the aeronauts with us—extraordinary things up there: things that curators of museums would give up all hope of ever being fixed stars, to obtain: things left over from whirlwinds of ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... woman's expense to save his life. With a man of his sort, the girl is to blame nine times out of ten. I wouldn't give a fippenny bit for a man no other girl wanted. There is a large class of women you don't know yet, Rita. You are too young. The world has a batch of mawkish theories about them, but there are also a few very cold facts kept in the dark,—lodge secrets among the sex. Dic is modest, and modesty in an attractive man is dangerous—the most dangerous thing in the world, Rita. Deliver me from a shy, attractive man, unless he cares a great deal for me. Shyness ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... The notification was made in my presence; and though the young Countess said 'Never!' and fell down in a swoon at her lady's feet, I was, you may be sure, entirely unconcerned at this little display of mawkish sensibility, and felt, indeed, now that my ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... scenes interest us more for their good sense than for any more stirring qualities. His nearest approach to a strong character is the paterfamilias himself, who is certainly much less "woolly and mawkish"[52] than his pendant in Diderot. Next one may place the artist Wehrmann. Karl is a poor stick, Amaldi is rather colorless, and Lotte would be quite insipid but for her impending motherhood, on which everything is made to turn. Such as it was, however, ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... and judgment thee peruse: Thy faults to kind oblivion he'll consign; Nor to thy merit will his praise refuse. Thou may'st be searched for polish'd words and verse By flippant spouter, emptiest of praters: Tell him to seek them in some mawkish verse: My periods all are rough as nutmeg graters. The doggerel poet, wishing thee to read, Reject not; let him glean thy jests and stories. His brother I, of lowly sembling breed: Apollo grants to few Parnassian glories. Menac'd by critic with sour furrowed brow, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... from time to time, as much as to say, 'Here goes!' Nothing could be more ludicrous than his face; however much he twitched up his eyebrows, his heavy lids would hardly rise, but seemed lying upon his scarcely visible, dim, and mawkish eyes. He was in that amiable frame of mind of a perfectly intoxicated man, when every passer-by, directly he looks him in the face, is sure to say, 'Bless you, brother, bless you!' The Blinkard, as red as a lobster, and his nostrils dilated wide, was laughing malignantly in a corner; only ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... in answering the charge that Socialism undermines patriotism, says: "So it does, and is proud of it, if by patriotism is meant that mawkish sentiment which causes a man, for the sum of $15 a month, to go out and get himself killed in defense of a country of which he owns not a single foot and can never hope to own any. If a wage slave is paid only ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... variety of incident or ease of manner. This necessary defect is observable in his best works, and is still more so in Fleetwood and Mandeville; the one of which, compared with his more admired performances, is mawkish, and the other morbid. Mr. Godwin is also an essayist, an historian—in short, what is he not, that belongs to the character of an indefatigable and accomplished author? His Life of Chaucer would have given celebrity to any man of letters ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... most famous of the hetairai—Leontium, Lais, Phryne, and others, drawn by Athenaeus, need not be transferred to these pages. Combined with the revelations made in Lucian's [Greek: Etairikoi dialogoi], they demonstrate absolutely that these degraded, mercenary, mawkish creatures could not have inspired romantic sentiment in the hearts of the men, even if the latter had been ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... but it has not been the fashion to say it lately. It is not the whole of the truth. Noble rivers have their own natural defects of swamp and mudbank. Sometimes his tides ran sluggishly, as in 'The Battle of Life,' for example, which has always seemed to me, at least, a most mawkish and unreal book. The pure stream of 'The Carol,' which washes the heart of a man, runs thin in 'The Chimes,' runs thinner in 'The Haunted Man,' and in 'The Battle of Life' is lees and mud. 'Nickleby,' ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... additions, for which the distinguished coadjutors are responsible, reek with mawkish sentimentality, inane vapidity, or vulgar buffoonery. Most of the leading characters are duplicated or triplicated. Miranda has a sister, Dorinda, who is repellently coquettish. This new creation finds a lover in another new character, ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... had been starved of the things which were a boy's natural right and heritage, and he ate and drank eagerly of the masculine fare I provided. He had shed a few tears at Miss Redwood's departure and I liked him for them, for they showed his loyalty, but he had no more games of the nursery nor the mawkish sentimentality that I found upon the nursery shelves. I had other plans for Jerry. John Benham should have his wish. I would make Jerry as nearly the Perfect Man as mortal man could make God's handiwork. Spiritually ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... creation an eternal spring ever trembling on the verge of summer? It seemed so to the curate, who was not given to sad, still less to sentimental moralizing over the graves. From such moods his heart recoiled. To him they were weak and mawkish, and in him they would have been treacherous. No grave was to him the place where a friend was lying; it was but a cenotaph—the place ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... foolish sort of a reverie, and scarcely worth the setting down. It was a reverie of the kind that everyone, and especially everyone's wife, admits to be mawkish and unprofitable; and yet, somehow, the next still summer night, or long sleepy Sunday afternoon, or, perhaps, some cheap, jigging and heartbreaking melody, will set a carnival of old loves and old faces awhirl in the brain. One grows very sad over it, of course, and it becomes ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... world, parsnips. I have lately been given of this wine to taste. It is a cordial rather than a wine and on the good rather than the bad side. The addition of spices is admitted; nevertheless out of a particularly mawkish vegetable is made a palatable drink. "Out of the strong come forth sweetness." After it I shall be prepared to find a potable in the banana, which is favoured by many people, of whom I am not one. But I don't find it nastier than the parsnip, and it is evident that ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... urged to action by a beautiful ideal. The motive force must be likewise true and beautiful. It is love of country that inspires us; not hate of the enemy and desire for full satisfaction for the past. Pause awhile. We are all irritated now and then by some mawkish interpretation of our motive force that makes it seem a weakly thing, invoked to help us in evading difficulties instead of conquering them. Love in any genuine form is strong, vital and warm-blooded. Let it not be confused with any flabby substitute. Take a parallel case. ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... be spoiled by too little or too much boiling; if too little, then the Drink will always taste raw, mawkish, and be unwholsome in the Stomach, where, instead of helping to dilute and digest our Food, it will cause Obstructions, Colicks, Head-achs, and other misfortunes; besides, all such underboil'd Drinks ...
— The London and Country Brewer • Anonymous
... Terminalia, Coniogeton arborescens, an umbrageous white-gum tree, and Pandanus, together with the luxuriant young grass, gave to the country a most pleasing aspect. But the late thunder-storm had rendered the ground very damp, and that with the mawkish smell of our drying meat, soon made our camp very disagreeable. In the rocky gullies of the table land, we had observed a great number of shrubs, amongst which a species of Pleurandra, a dwarf Calythrix, a prostrate ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... it not, my only son? (He claps his hands. The slaves hurry in to the table.) No more of this mawkish reveling: away with all this stuff: shut it out of my sight and be off with you. (The slaves begin to remove the table; and the curtains are drawn, shutting in the colonnade.) You understand about ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... otherwise, as far as that asserted any claim; such a mere man and brother! Before he put his hand on my door-knob a belated curiosity stirred in me, which I tried, as delicately as I could, to appease. 'Was your trouble something about the'—I was going to say the ladies, but that seemed too mawkish, and I boldly outed with—'women?' 'Oh no,' he said, meekly; 'it was just cloth, a piece of cloth,' 'Breaking and entering?' I led on. 'Well, not exactly, but—it came to grand larceny,' and I might have fancied ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... lifted his hands to heaven in mawkish admiration. "I have gotten a pearl," thought he, "and wow but this will be a good day's work ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... think it's a very unhealthy sign of any place to have all the girls sighing and groaning about one or two— dying to possess their autographs, and kissing their photographs, and framing them, and putting them up in their rooms. I hate that mawkish kind of nonsense," continued Miss Day, looking very virtuous, "and I think Miss Heath ought to know about it, and put a stop to it. ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... about the journey, and we do not need a repetition of it. Of course there, are touches of genius. No writing of Bunyan's could be wholly without it. But the rough simplicity is gone, and instead of it there is a tone of sentiment which is almost mawkish. Giants, dragons, and angelic champions carry us into a spurious fairy land, where the knight-errant is a preacher in disguise. Fair ladies and love matches, however decorously chastened, suit ill with the sternness of the mortal conflict between ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... ranks said to the haughty nobles of Vienna boasting of their long line of descent, when they refused to associate with him: "I am an ancestor; you are only descendants!" He was never guilty of any posing for effect, any attitudinizing in public, any mawkish sentimentality, any of that puppyism so often bred by power, that dogmatism which Johnson said was only puppyism grown to maturity. He made no claim to knowledge he did not possess. He felt with Addison that pedantry and learning are like hypocrisy ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... like thine inspirer, beer, Tho' stale, not ripe; tho' thin, yet never clear; So sweetly mawkish, and so smoothly dull; Heady, not strong; and ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... allurement nor sawce, my stomacke is good enough to digest raw meat: And whereas with these preparatives and flourishes, or preambles, they thinke to sharpen my taste or stir my stomacke, they cloy and make it wallowish. [Footnote: Mawkish.] Shall the privilege of times excuse me from this sacrilegious boldnesse, to deem Platoes Dialogismes to be as languishing, by over-filling and stuffing his matter? And to bewaile the time that a man who had so many thousands ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... nature, he had come to the conclusion that the black man was born to and intended for slavery, and that he was fit for nothing else. [Sensation.] Honorable gentlemen might try to groan him down, but he was not to be moved by mawkish sentiment, and he was persuaded that they might as well try to change the spots of the leopard as to make the black a good citizen. He had told black men so, and the lazy rascals had shrugged their shoulders ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... really, though I had always suspected that she cared for him personally. Kathleen Somers's love, when it came, would be a very complicated thing. She had seen sex in too many countries, watched its brazen play on too many stages, within theatres and without, to have any mawkish illusions. But passion would have to bring a large retinue to be accepted where she was sovereign. Little as I knew her, I knew that. Yet I always thought she might have taken him, in that flaming October, if ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... theme expands, and I am departing from the purposes of this work; yet I cannot forbear the expression of opinion as to the causes of this result. I know I shall incur the deepest censure from the professors of a mawkish philanthropy, and a hypocritical religion which is cursing with its cant the very sources of this unparalleled ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... softened rolled pith of bread mustard a moment mawkish cheese. Nice wine it is. Taste it better because I'm not thirsty. Bath of course does that. Just a bite or two. Then about six o'clock I can. Six. Six. Time will ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... for the average individual to avoid literature that deals with the morbid and pathological, that depicts and analyzes abnormal psychological conditions. Such studies are better left for alienists. Literature of mawkish sentimentality should also be avoided. Within the range of sound literature there is a wide choice of abundant ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... if any "marchands de coco" still survive in Paris. "Coco" had nothing to do with cocoa, but was a most mawkish beverage compounded principally of liquorice and water. The attraction about it lay in the great tank the vendor carried strapped to his back. This tank was covered with red velvet and gold tinsel, and was surmounted with a number of little tinkling silver bells. In addition ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... her letters Nancy had remarked an excessive simplicity, a sort of childishness, very unlike Jessica's previous way of writing; and the same peculiarity now appeared in her conversation. By turns she was mawkish and sprightly, tearful and giggling. Her dress, formerly neglected to the point of untidiness, betrayed a new-born taste for fashionable equipment; she suddenly drew attention to it in the midst of serious talk, asking with a bashful smirk whether ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... of mawkish sentimentality, of effort to conceal the secret motives and desires of the heart beneath specious language and words of double meaning. On the contrary, they tear away from the heart the curtain of deceit, ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... have chosen not to write at all. He could have said that her mawkish hypocrisy was a little too much; that she was really wanting him to whitewash Durgin for her, and she had no right to put upon him the responsibility for the step she clearly wished to take. He could have made either of these decisions, and defended them to himself; but ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a pauper - flabby, raw-boned, untidy - unpromising and coarse of aspect as need be. But, on being spoken to about the patients whom she had in charge, she turned round, with her shabby gown half on, half off, and fell a crying with all her might. Not for show, not querulously, not in any mawkish sentiment, but in the deep grief and affliction of her heart; turning away her dishevelled head: sobbing most bitterly, wringing her hands, and letting fall abundance of great tears, that choked her utterance. What was the matter with the nurse of the itch-ward? Oh, 'the dropped child' was dead! ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... insipid or priggish; the heroine, Augustine Luceval, by marriage Jenneville, is in the same way one of his nearest approaches to a lady, and, though not such a madcap as the similarly situated Frederique of Une Gaillarde (v. inf.), by no means mawkish. It is needless to say that these are "l'Amant" and "la Femme," or that they are happily united at the end: it may be more necessary to add that there is no scandal, but at the same time no prunes and prism, earlier. "Le Mari," M. Jenneville, is very much less of a success, being ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... nodded to your untouched cup: "Drink, Svanhild dear, before your tea grows cold." And then you drank the vapid liquor up, The mawkish brew beloved of young and old. But that name gripped me with a sudden spell; The grim old Volsungs as they fought and fell, With all their faded aeons, seemed to rise In never-ending line before my eyes. In you I saw a Svanhild, ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... your frocks lengthened. You look positively gawky. Shake hands with Miss Munnion. Ah, mind the parrot! Moore!" raising her voice to call to the gardener, "is it possible I see that odious pink and white stripe amongst the tulips again?—you know I hate it. The most mawkish, foolish thing! It offends the eye. See that it is rooted up without delay. Miss Munnion, we will now go indoors, and you'll perhaps be kind enough to show this young lady her room, and tell her when we dine and so ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... rather chilled by, high-life in the modern English manner, and eventually goes back to her own people and her girlhood's friend, Donal Sheehy, who returns from America a made man. 'Tis not a chronicle to set the Liffey afire, but it is wholesome, escapes being mawkish, and may be confidently recommended for an anxious old person to give to sensitive young persons—if there be still any such. Mrs. HINKSON, though she loves her own, is no blind partisan and does not spare her criticism. So that you get a plausible picture of a kindly decent native ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 18, 1917 • Various
... mother does good Watts bend over the little children, and secure that their first words of song shall be those of simple, heartfelt trust in God, and of faith in their Elder Brother. To create a little heaven in the nursery by hymns, and these not mawkish or twaddling, but beautifully natural and exquisitely simple breathings of piety and praise, was the high task to which Watts consecrated, and by which he has ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan |
