"Dumb show" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tale to report. A Masque, armed cap- a-pie, as described by the guard, had visited each of their cells in succession; had instructed them by signs to dress, and then, pointing to the door, by a series of directions all communicated in the same dumb show, had assembled them together, thrown open the prison door, and, pointing to their college, had motioned them thither. This motion they had seen no cause to disobey, presuming their dismissal to be according to the mode which best pleased his highness; and not ill- pleased at finding ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... adopt the reading here produced, will be, when 'those who are incapable of receiving such things as do not directly fall under and strike the senses,' have, at last, got hold of it; when 'the groundlings, who, for the most part are capable of nothing but dumb show and noise,' have had their ears split with it, it will ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... waked from a doze by a very deferential 'I beg your pardon, sir,' and a sudden tweak, which abstracted a silver thread from his head; and Mab showed somewhat greater displeasure at a similar act of plunder upon her white chemisette. But the spying was followed by a sigh; and, in dumb show, Ethel was made to perceive that the Vintry hair had more affinity with the canine than the human. As to the scrapings of the window, nothing but vegetable fibre could there be detected; but on the stile, there was undoubtedly a mark containing human ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with a significant smile, as much as to say, "Yes, you may really eat it." For, in the excitement of carrying out her deed, she had forgotten her previous thought that the stranger would not be deaf, and had fallen into her habitual alternative of dumb show and shouting. ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... this: You are slightly obstructed in your perambulations on a fine afternoon by a small knot of loiterers pausing before a shop window in which an active young man of admirably mobile countenance is holding forth in dumb show. Your progress is slackened as you edge about the throng with the intention of proceeding on your way. As it were, you poise on the wing. Then, like a warming liquor stealing through the veins, the awakening of your interest in ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... there be the same net spread for her: and that must your daughter and her gentlewoman carry. The sport will be, when they hold one an opinion of another's dotage, and no such matter; that's the scene that I would see, which will be merely a dumb show. Let us send her to call ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Knight edition]
... levee, which he was to hold in state, accompanied by his bodyguard, as when I was first presented to him. In the afternoon we proceeded to court accordingly, but found it scantily attended; and after the first sitting, which was speedily over, retired to another court, and saw the women. Of this dumb show the king soon got tired; he therefore called for his iron chair, and entered into conversation, at first about the ever-engrossing subject of stimulants, till we changed it by asking him how he liked the gun? He pronounced it a famous weapon, which he would use intensely. We then began to talk ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... devils, spirits, ghosts, tragical stories; to such as are in fear they strike a great impression, renewed many times, and recall such chimeras and terrible fictions into their minds. [3440]"Make not so much as mention of them in private talk, or a dumb show tending to that purpose: such things" (saith Galateus) "are offensive to their imaginations." And to those that are now in sorrow, [3441]Seneca "forbids all sad companions, and such as lament; a groaning companion is an enemy to quietness." [3442]"Or if there ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... for they spoke only by their eyes, and by sighs, looking upon the lid, and upon one another, by turns, with hands lifted up. The presence of their young master possibly might awe them, and cause their grief to be expressed only in dumb show. ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... gale of laughter drowned his further remarks, but he continued in dumb show, with fervid gesticulations, and a mouth that moved rapidly but produced no sound, concluding with a humble bow; and stalked back to his chair with stately dignity, unmarred by even the semblance ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... twittering about his pocket, even his interest in the landscape and in sporadic anecdote entirely lost. Presently the pipe was in his hands again; he fitted, unfitted, refitted, and played upon it in dumb show for ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was extinguished. Upon this, Calderon pressed forward to the steps, hastily ascended them, and passed into the vestibule. Catalina followed on his traces. What succeeded was all one scene of continued, dreadful dumb show; different passions of panic, or deadly struggle, or hellish malice ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... associated with love and marriage, are played in this form. Both these methods allow of development. The circle varies from examples where all perform the same actions and say the same words to that where two or more players have principal parts, the others only singing or acting in dumb show, to examples where the singing has disappeared. The form or method of play and the actions constitute the oldest remaining parts of the game (the words being subject to alterations and loss through ignorance of their meaning), ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... the moderately exciting account of Caesar's doings in Gaul, Master Cook produced from his pocket a newspaper cutting. This, having previously planted a forcible blow in his friend's ribs with an elbow to attract the latter's attention, he handed to Knight, and in dumb show requested him to peruse the same. Which Knight, feeling no interest whatever in Caesar's doings in Gaul, and having, in consequence, a good deal of time on his hands, proceeded to do. The cutting was headed "Disgraceful Fracas", and was written ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... old Romans' deathless acts displayed, Their base, degenerate progeny upbraid: 80 Whole rivers here forsake the fields below, And wondering at their height through airy channels flow. Still to new scenes my wandering Muse retires, And the dumb show of breathing rocks admires; Where the smooth chisel all its force has shown, And softened into flesh the rugged stone. In solemn silence, a majestic band, Heroes, and gods, and Roman consuls stand; Stern tyrants, ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... Agrippina nothing could be better delineated. The forced calm of Agrippina, while reproaching her son with his ingratitude, and the impatience of Nero to get rid of such an importunate monitress, were given in a style impossible to be surpassed. Talma's dumb show during this scene was a masterpiece of the mimic art. If Talma gives such effects to his roles in a French drama, where he is shackled by rules, how much greater would he give on the English or German stages in a tragedy ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... a total ignorance of any language but his own. She, an Italian lady, remarks: "You know I say nothing to him, for he understands not me nor I him. He hath neither Latin, French, nor Italian. He is a proper man's picture, but, alas! who can converse with a dumb show." This moving plaint draws attention to a defect which is not yet supplied. There are few Englishmen nowadays who, on being challenged to court Portia in Italian, would not cut a sorry figure in dumb show—sorrier figures than Frenchmen or Germans. No true patriot ought to ignore ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... actors used to declaim, under a mask, the verses of Euripides and Menander. Now they no longer recite dramas, they act in dumb show; and of the divine spectacles with which Bacchus was honoured in Athens, we have kept nothing but what a barbarian—a Scythian even—could understand—attitude and gesture. The tragic mask, the mouth of ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... Perceiving that we were strangers, the Armenians showed their hospitality in an original way. First, when one of the congregation went forward to the chancel railing and received from the priest the triple kiss of peace, which he then proceeded to communicate to another person, who passed it on in dumb show, and so on through the whole assembly, neither men nor women would run the risk of offending us by offering the simulated kiss. Secondly, and more peculiar, besides throwing light on their motives in ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... like some elastic snake. One gentleman on the front bench below the gangway actually fell from his seat and rolled upon the floor, and the House laughed itself almost into hysteria, whilst the hapless orator stood waving in apologetic dumb show. Now here was a tragedy indeed: to have the dream of a whole lifetime at last actually realised and concrete and then to see it go to ruin in that way. So swift a transition from the very height of triumph to the very gulf! When our laugh was over I am sure there was not one of us who did not profoundly ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... intends to support you," broke in Olympia, washing her hands over again in dumb show, and drawing in her breath till it hissed through her white teeth, as if a snake had crept up from ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... triumphant at table, telling us of his victory, but his poor opponent could only point to his untouched plate and to the waves dashing against the portholes, and with that shrug of the shoulders, so suggestive to witness but so difficult to describe, would thus in dumb show explain the ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... sleepiness due to their previous five-mile walk. Felix went quite off, lying flat on his back, with his head on Cherry's little spreading lilac cotton frock, and his mouth wide open, much tempting Edgar to pop in a pebble; and this being prevented by tender Cherry in vehement dumb show, Edgar consoled himself by a decidedly uncomplimentary caricature of him as Giant Blunderbore (a name derived from Fee, Fa, Fum) gaping ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... diverted from the churchyard, saw a good deal of dumb show which was not so intelligible to her as she could have desired, and could not repress the question, "Who is ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... mistress to a sense of her cruelty. She apologized to the victim so earnestly and caressed him so tenderly that Joshua grew ashamed of his want of doghood, and began to assure his mistress, in eloquent dumb show, that it was all a misapprehension on her part; that he wasn't hurt at all; that she never did hurt him and never could; that, in face, he was howling at—well, at the squirrel over yonder on the tree; or, yes, at ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... moved to reduce charge for Dublin Police by L1000; proposed to show at some length charge is excessive. Committee thought Irish Members might be left to look after that for themselves. Howled at ALPHEUS continuously for space of ten minutes; then he sat down, moving reduction in dumb show. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 8, 1891 • Various
... Salome was originally to have been performed. Of a young lady's dancing, or of that of her rivals, I am not qualified to speak. I note merely that the critics who objected to the horror of one incident in the drama lost all self-control on seeing that incident repeated in dumb show and accompanied by fescennine corybantics. Except in 'name and borrowed notoriety' the music-hall sensation has no relation whatever to the drama which so profoundly moved the whole of Europe and the greatest living musician. The adjectives of contumely are easily transmuted ...
— A Florentine Tragedy—A Fragment • Oscar Wilde
... at Huish with an air of faint surprise, and looked pointedly away again. It was hard to be more offensive in dumb show. ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Joshua eyed closely, holding his hand so as to shade his forehead. Not a word was spoken; and as we rose to do them homage, they still presented the same surface to the view. Not being bona-fide representations of living people, we got rid of the splendid apparitions by signs and dumb show. As soon as they had melted into thin air, there was a loud noise at the outer door, and we found it was Giotto, Cimabue, and Ghirlandaio, who had been raised from the dead by their earnest desire ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... to speak, but even from the first it was all dumb show; and scarcely had he proceeded through two sentences, when his oration was extinguished as suddenly and by the same means as the conflagration of the Royal Palace at Lilliput. After many attempts to obtain a hearing, it became obvious that all ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... and we were left in ignorance of the situation. We knew only approximately the direction of the living enemy and the dead spoke to us only in dumb show, telling us unspeakable things about the horrors ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... dumb show with his sculls, dipping them as fast as he could, and looking very pale the while, till they were well out of reach, when he rested for a moment, and yelled back in defiant ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... with the naked lunatic thought! Once it is forth we may talk of what we dare not entertain; once the intriguing thought has been put to the door I can watch it out of the loophole where, with its fellows, it raves and threatens in dumb show. Years ago when that thought was young, it was dearer to me than all others, and I would speak with it always when I had an hour alone. These rags that so dismally trick forth its madness were once the splendid livery my favour wrought for it on my bed at night. ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... they retired backwards, and took refuge among their party, bringing the victim in with them, however. Mr Enderby declared this retreat too bad, and was gone before the entreaties of his little nieces could stop him. He held his ground longer; and the dumb show he made was so energetic as to cause a laugh in the summer-house, in the midst of the uneasiness of his friends, and to call forth shouts of mirth from the crowd at the ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... nephew is himself a boy, and the sniggerers tempt him to secular thoughts of marbles and string, by secretly offering such commodities to his distant contemplation. This young Saint Anthony for a while resists, but presently becomes a backslider, and in dumb show defies the sniggerers to 'heave' a marble or two in his direction. Here in he is detected by the aunt (a rigorous reduced gentlewoman who has the charge of offices), and I perceive that worthy relative to poke him in the side, with the corrugated hooked handle of an ancient umbrella. ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... moment she would weep and the next she would stroke the child. When the soldier looked more closely, there was the ghost sitting up on the beam. She had passed the rope around her neck and was hanging herself in dumb show. And whenever she beckoned with her hand the woman looked up toward her. This went on ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... of her aspect, and began to repent of having pretended ignorance of the language, by which he was restrained from exercising his eloquence upon her heart; he resolved, however, to ingratiate himself, if possible, by the courtesy and politeness of dumb show, and for that purpose put his eyes in ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... birds feeding. And here came another steamboat—and yonder another! The very drift logs, so countlessly frequent, vast trees from vast forests, some of them not yet dead, told to her sobering mind in tragic dumb show as they came gliding and plunging by, the age-long drama of their rise, decline, and fall. Unbrokenly green, yes, forever the one same green, were the low willow and cottonwood jungles of the creeping shores; but while the "labboard" ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... deeper. The audience were politely impressed, and the heavy villain did a bit of dumb show with the leading serious, which only needed to have been a trifle better to have ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... masterpiece. Occasionally the triumph of expectation would exceed his control, when he would spring from the floor, and caper and strut about like a pigeon—soft as a shadow, for he knew his father could not bear noise in the morning—or behind his back execute a pantomimic dumb show of delight, in which he seemed with difficulty to restrain himself from jumping upon him, and hugging him in his ecstasy. Oh, best of parents! working thus even on a Sunday for his Gibbie, when everybody else was at church enjoying himself! But Gibbie never dared hug his father ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... the grass in a row, and first, in dumb show, they lifted and carried from its house to the beach a long canoe. The straining muscles of their arms, the sway of their bodies, imitated the raising of the great boat, and the walking with its weight, the launching, the waiting ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... the gallant Laird of Louponheight, stimulated by the influence of a couple of bottles of claret, and by the presence of a partner who danced remarkably well, paid to Miss Menie Gray. He saw from his lofty stand all the dumb show of gallantry, with the comfortable feelings of a famishing creature looking upon a feast which he is not permitted to share, and regarded every extraordinary frisk of the jovial Laird, as the same might have been looked upon by a gouty person, who apprehended that the dignitary was about ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... was this dumb show of farewell, for no word passed between them while he was present, that not only his barbed gibes, but the questions that he meant to ask, died upon the lips of Montalvo. Try as he might he could ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... into an arm-chair, and began to turn over the leaves. After a few minutes he became absorbed. It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... thought of perpetual silence began to appal me. I could feel the sound of the oars in the rowlocks, and the dash of the waves against the boat, but though I could see men's lips moving it was all no more to me than dumb show. ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... house, inviting him by gesture to go in and rest there. Evidently she believed that, being a stranger, he could not speak or understand much of her language. He did not even try to undeceive her. It amused him to watch her dumb show, for her face spoke eloquently and her pretty, brown hands knew a language that was delicious. He had no longer any thought of sleep, but he felt curious to see the interior of the cottage, and he nodded his head in response to her invitation. At once she became the hospitable peasant hostess. ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Regent, on the outrageous and treasonable attack made upon his Royal Highness, on his return from opening the session of Parliament." The meeting was held on the 11th of March. Sir Charles Ogle moved an address, which was seconded by Mr. Asheton Smith; both did this in dumb show, for not one word that they said could be heard. Lord Cochrane moved an amendment, which was opposed by Mr. Lockhart; and as the Sheriff refused to put his Lordship's amendment, declaring it to be irregular, Mr. Cobbett addressed ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt |
