"Meretricious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wise in the critical Jeremiahs so despairingly to lift up their voices, and so strenuously to bewail the condition of the literature of the time. The literature of the time is very well, as they would see could they but turn their fascinated gaze from the meretricious and spectacular elements of that literature to the work of Thomas Hardy and George Meredith. With such men among the most influential in modern letters, and with Barrie and Stevenson among the ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... for those historians who were unable to distinguish history from poetry. "What!" he exclaims, "bedizen history like her sister? As well take some mighty athlete with muscles of steel, rig him up with purple drapery and meretricious ornament, rouge and powder his cheeks; faugh, what an object one would make of him with such defilements!"[105] But meretricious ornament was popular, and poets, historians, and orators alike scrambled to see who could most adorn his speech. Quintilian's pleas for the purer taste of a former age ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... the grande nation. It is this same taste, which, in that solemn commemoration of the death of their king, the service solennel for Louis XVI. contrived to introduce a species of affected parade,—a detailed and theatrical sort of grief,—a kind of meretricious mummery of sorrow, which banished all the feelings, and almost completely destroyed the impression which such a scene in any other country would inevitably have produced. Any thing, it may be easily imagined, ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... very affront to marriage. The haunting of those dissolute places, or resort to courtezans, are no more punished in married men than in bachelors. And the depraved custom of change, and the delight in meretricious embracements (where sin is turned into art), maketh marriage a dull thing, and a kind of imposition or tax. They hear you defend these things, as done to avoid greater evils; as advoutries, deflowering of virgins, unnatural lust, and the like. But they say, this is a preposterous wisdom; ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... strange that a young matron who had led, for some four years out of the eight years her married life had lasted, so wholly womanly and domestic an existence as had fallen to the lot of Flossy, should have been led astray by the meretricious allurements of unlawful love?—Maud's ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... Horace shew us what he might have made of a complete translation. What a brilliant thing a version of Lucretius, in the style of the "Essay on Man," would have been! And his "Rape of the Lock" proves that he had considerable sympathy with the elaborate fancy, although not with the meretricious graces of Ovid. But with Homer, the severely grand, the simple, the warlike, the lover and painter of all Nature's old original forms—the ocean, the mountains, and the stars—what thorough sympathy could a man have who never ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... magnificence. She saw herself putting the boy to bed by the light of a single candle on the deserted top floor of a "business house," dark under the roof and scintillating exceedingly with lights and cut glass at the level of the street like a fairy palace. That meretricious splendour was the only one to be met in Mrs Verloc's visions. She remembered brushing the boy's hair and tying his pinafores—herself in a pinafore still; the consolations administered to a small and badly scared creature by another creature nearly ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... or emotions to be conveyed. Who can tell what would be the effect of such a church music? What a feeling of earnestness and sincerity would it not lend to services now often marred by the shallowness or meretricious glitter of their musical portions? The range is wide, the field broad; there is scope for grandeur, sublimity, power, jubilation, the brightest strains of extatic joy, mourning, pathos, and the passionate pleading of the human soul severed from ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the complex works of man Heaven's easy, artless, unencumber'd plan, No meretricious graces to beguile, No clustering ornaments to clog the pile; From ostentation as from weakness free, It stands like the cerulean arch we see, Majestic in its own simplicity. Inscribed above the portal from afar, Conspicuous as the brightness of ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... that great pile of Victorian architecture the landlords and the lawyers, the bishops, the railway men and the magnates of commerce go to and fro—in their incurable tradition of commercialised Bladesovery, of meretricious gentry and nobility sold for riches. I have been near enough to know. The Irish and the Labour-men run about among their feet, making a fuss, effecting little, they've got no better plans that I can see. Respect it indeed! There's a certain paraphernalia ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... "Yes; slightly meretricious, perhaps. I shall want to see more of his work before I express a definite opinion. I think we must go and see what he has done for ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... with worn covers and dog's eared pages. She noticed that the chairs were all large and solid, with deep arms and backs upholstered in red leather, which looked as if it would never wear out, that the rug was good, and that, except for a few meretricious oil paintings on the greenish walls, the room was agreeably bare of decoration. After her first hesitating glance, she surmised that a certain expensive comfort was the end sought for and achieved, and that in the furnishing beauty ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... paltry compound of ignorance, false taste, and pretension, which assumes the dignity of classical feeling, that it may be able to abuse whatever is above the level of its understanding, but bursts into genuine rapture with all that is meretricious, if sufficiently adapted to ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... that urge the old medicament, Whose fusty vials have long dried impotent, Why prop ye meretricious things, Denounce the sane as vicious things, And call ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... promise, an enigmatical promise flashed up the river reach in letters of fire. London was indeed very beautiful that night. Without hope she would have seemed not only as beautiful but as terrible as a black panther crouching on her prey. Our hope redeemed her. Beyond her dark and meretricious splendours, beyond her throned presence jewelled with links and points and cressets of fire, crowned with stars, robed in the night, hiding cruelties, I caught a moment's vision of the coming City of Mankind, of a city more wonderful than all my dreaming, full of ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... observed. "Nobody but you ever accused me of such a thing. Marriage concerns the race and a man's whole future. If the children of the marriage are likely to be unsatisfactory, the marriage will certainly be so. We moderns bedeck and bedrape us in all sorts of meretricious togas, till a pair of fine eyes and a dashing manner pass for beauty; but when life tries the metal—when nature applies her inevitable test—the degenerate or neurotic type ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... sincerity are the keynotes of her poetry. The troubadour sang because he was a professional poet, but the lady who composed poetry did so from love of the art or from the inspiration of feeling and therefore felt no need of meretricious adornment for her song. The five poems of the Countess which remain to us show that her sentiment for Raimbaut was real and deep. "I am glad to know that the man I love is the worthiest in the world; may God give great joy to the one who first brought me to him: [66] may he trust ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... useful in their way, but are merely the incidents and measures by which the truth of the matter is reached. The client looks puzzled at the argument and the decision, the jurors have a not very clear conception of what is going on, the lawyers have a meretricious feeling that perhaps they are cheapening themselves a little by making so many motions, yet they, nevertheless, have a legal right to do so and they must take advantage of every legal right for the ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... delineated at all—and, with a view to their amendment, surely they may—the task could hardly be executed with a chaster and less offensive pencil. De Bernard paints immorality—it would be unjust to say that he encourages it. He neither deals in highly-coloured and meretricious scenes a la Sue and Dumas; nor supports, with the diabolical talent and ingenuity of a Sand, the most subversive and anti-social doctrines. His works are not befouled with filth and obscenity, such as that impure old reprobate Paul de Kock ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... writings of Watts and Doddridge, has been greatly improved, in at least the composition, by the emendations of Morrison and Logan. With all its faults, we know of no other collection equal to it as a whole. The meretricious stanzas of Brady and Tate are inanity itself in comparison. True, the later Blair, though always sensible, was ofttimes quite heavy enough in the pieces given to him to render—more so than in his prose; though, even when first introduced to that, Cowper could exclaim, not ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... Commissioners, and of the habits and customs of the lesser clergy, were greatly appreciated. Some of the furniture did not wholly commend itself to Rosamund. There were certain settees and back-to-backs, certain whatnots and occasional tables, which seemed to stamp the character of the Dean's widow as meretricious. But these could easily be "managed." Rosamund was enchanted with the house, and went from room to room with Canon Wilton radiantly curious, and almost as excited ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens |
