"Pompous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... observe that he lost all, and was obliged to abandon everything to the Spaniards in Peru, afterwards losing his little force in attacks and tempests. The Ministry of Rio sent for him, giving him the pompous title of "Admiral of the Brazils," and great promises—thinking that he would bring with him a squadron to help the Imperial fraudulence. This is the great wonder, who has come to carry fire and blood to the trusty Bahia, bringing ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... Over the rail appeared a blue helmet, and an instant later a big and very pompous police officer leaped to the deck. He was followed by the wharf watchman, who ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... purse-pride, pompous and outrageous arrogance, a cringing of the pregnant hinges of the knee, false standards, and a thousand faults in this admission. And yet the optimist finds the "very rich," with but few exceptions, amiable, generous, and kindly, often regretting that poorer friends will allow their ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... him—only three!—but Elsner in an earnest letter dissuaded his pupil from making any experiments that might hurt his originality of style. Chopin actually attended the class of Kalkbrenner but soon quit, for he had nothing to learn of the pompous, penurious pianist. The Hiller story of how Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt and Heller teased this grouty old gentleman on the Boulevard des Italiens is capital reading, if not absolutely true. Yet Chopin admired Kalkbrenner's finished technique despite his platitudinous manner. ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... a pompous gentleman sitting opposite, "I quite agree with this gentleman. You are ...
— The Erie Train Boy • Horatio Alger
... to the pleasures of the evening. The Turk was calmed, and the frightened company came slowly streaming back. Everything was explained and Brant became a greater hero than ever before. Yet it is hardly likely that the pompous follower of Islam ever forgot the lively scene which his ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... The pompous cortege of the Cardinal halted at the beginning of the camp. All the armed troops were drawn up in the finest order; and amid the sound of cannon and the music of each regiment the litter traversed a long line of cavalry ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... hearty oath would relieve you, don't mind me," said Henry. His chin was squarer than usual, and his eyes were harder. "You can see what happened, can't you? Aunt Mirabelle railroaded him through—and the pompous old fool looks the part—and she let him promise money she expects to get in August. And I'll bet it hurt him just as much to promise it as it ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... was that," Terence said. "We were arrested by the Maire of Granville, and had to tie him and one of his officials up. He was a pompous little man; and no doubt, when he got free, went down to the port and persuaded the captain of the lugger to put out, at once, to endeavour to find us. I expect he told him that we were prisoners of importance, either English spies or ...
— Under Wellington's Command - A Tale of the Peninsular War • G. A. Henty
... the Empress was at the pier when the three Bryces made their appearance on the day of the departure. They were taken out to the yacht at once, where Mr. Abercrombie Brendon was already ensconced. He was a pompous, red-faced little man, with a great deal of stomach and a great deal of manner. He was in high good humour with the weather and the world in general. He greeted Isabelle by singing, a line from a light opera success of his ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... an enigmatical description of a pair of stocks and whipping-post. It is so pompous and sublime that we are surprised so noble a structure could be raised from so ludicrous a subject. We perceive wit and humour in the strongest light in every part of the description."—Note by ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... to perform the ceremony, nor any duke to give away the bride. No long array of liveried servants with favours in their buttons and in their hats—no pompous paragraph in the morning papers to describe the beauties of the high-bred bride and the dresses of her aristocratic bridesmaids—but two hearts were united as well as two hands, and Heaven smiled ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... admirers; but, with the exception of a few pages of sublime beauty, I have never altogether liked the love scenes at the end of Siegfried and at the beginning of Goetterdaemmerung. I find their style rather pompous and declamatory; and their almost excessive refinement makes them border upon dulness. The form of the duet, too, seems cut and dried, and there are signs of weariness in it. The heaviness of the last pages of Siegfried recalls Die Meistersinger, which is also of that period. It is no longer ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... rhythm; but that beauty must be for one alone. It cannot, like music, be shared with others. The best of friends may, as rivals, become the bitterest foes. Fernando did not like the Englishman, for, with all his blandness, he thought he could observe a pompous air and self-consciousness of superiority, disgusting to sensible persons. This might have been prejudice or the result of imagination, yet he realized that he was in the presence of an ambitious rival, who would go to any length to ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... and desperately in earnest about anything which he undertook. Blessed or cursed with a solemnity that never was enlivened by a gleam of humor, a ray of fancy, or a flash of eloquence, Grenville regarded the House of Commons with the cold ferocity of a tyrannical and pompous schoolmaster. A style of speech that would have made a discourse upon Greek poetry seem arid and a dissertation upon Italian painting colorless—if it were possible to conceive Grenville as wasting time or thought on such trifles—added no grace to the exposition of a fiscal measure or charm to ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... detained in the public prisons to trying each other. This investigation is likely to be like all other Senatorial investigations—amusing but not useful. Query. Why does the Senate still stick to this pompous word, 'Investigation?' One does not blindfold one's self in ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... changed suddenly. From the impatient, slightly pompous official, conscious of her position, she became obsequious and even affectionate. Possibly she remembered that the girl was to become the wife of the most powerful man in Moscow, whose word was amply sufficient to send even Gregory ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... how to wait for us. Even the classic Salute waits like some great lady on the threshold of her saloon. She is more ample and serene, more seated at her door, than all the copyists have told us, with her domes and scrolls, her scolloped buttresses and statues forming a pompous crown, and her wide steps disposed on the ground like the train of a robe. This fine air of the woman of the world is carried out by the well-bred assurance with which she looks in the direction of her old- fashioned Byzantine neighbour; and the juxtaposition of ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... left, he smiled in such a pompous, self-satisfied way at the hurrah and scramble which ensued, that it was well worth my journey there just to see this exhibition of ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... Francis had accepted the hospitality of the bishop's palace in Rieti. Thomas of Celano enlarges with delight upon the marks of devotion lavished on Francis by this prince of the Church. Unhappily all this is written in that pompous and confused style of which diplomats and ecclesiastics appear to ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... see," thought Ramses, "if they can frighten my Greeks and Asiatics, who, fortunately, are so wild that they do not know pompous faces." ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... the Albans, returned to Rome in triumph, their advent to the city being marked by the first of those pompous processions which in after-years became known as Roman Triumphs, and were celebrated with the utmost splendor and costliness ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Island. He had come to the frontier to teach it the error of its ways and bring a message of sweetness and light to the unwashed barbarians of the Rockies. He was not popular. This was due, perhaps, to an unfortunate manner. The pompous little ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... morals of Aesop are interwoven with his fables that distinguishes him, and gives him the preference over all other mythologists. His 'Mountain delivered of a Mouse,' produces the moral of his fable in ridicule of pompous pretenders; and his Crow, when she drops her cheese, lets fall, as it were by accident, the strongest admonition against the power of flattery. There is no need of a separate sentence to explain it; no possibility of impressing it deeper, by that load we too often see of accumulated ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... forget yours," said the other, and extended once more his ungainly arms in an unnatural gesture. Then of a sudden there came out of him a spout of wild and yet pompous phrases. "It is as well that you should know the worst and the best. I am a man who knows no limit; I am the most callous of criminals, the most unrepentant of sinners. There is no man in my dominions so vile as I. But my dominions stretch from the olives of Italy to the fir-woods of ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... the transformation from the hunting to the agricultural mode of life was accompanied by changes in belief and worship quite as radical. These have been carefully studied by Cushing, Stevenson and Fewkes. The pompous ceremonials of the civilized tribes of Mexico and the Cordilleras in South America, when analysed, reveal only a higher grade of the prevailing idea. Im Thurn says of the Carib: "All objects, animate and inanimate, seem exactly of the same nature, except that they differ ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... perhaps the advice of his domestic genius, appeared under his altered circumstances. He was neither arrogant nor offensively polite, nor pompous in any way, and the duchess was not patronizing. Monsieur and Madame de Chessel gratefully accepted the invitation to dinner on the following Thursday. I pleased the duchess, and by her glance I knew she was examining a man of ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... exquisite Colonel and his ladies would visit the little capital of Williamsburg; so, at his door, stands ready his "lordly coach and six with liveried outriders in waiting." Again, the great gates are thrown open to guests arriving on horseback and in chariots and chairs. Pompous, beruffled dignitaries vie with gay gallants in obeisances and compliments to the ladies, and in assisting them to alight without harm to brocades and laces and rich cloaks and wide-hooped petticoats. And, yet again, all is a-bustle here with scarlet-coated horsemen and baying ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... a sigh and—sat down. He was no longer on familiar ground. Then Fra Diavolo proceeded to verify mademoiselle's judgment of him. Sombrero in hand and with a pompous courtliness, he repeated his natural supposition that the senorita was on her way to the City (meaning the City of Mexico), and perhaps to the court of His Glorious Majesty, Maximiliano. He offered himself, ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... and they ate together in the kitchen. It did not seem so gruesome with Lite there, and she told him some funny things that had happened in her work, and mimicked Robert Grant Burns with an accuracy of manner and tone that would have astonished that pompous person a good deal and flattered him not at all. She almost recovered her spirits under the stimulus of Lite's presence, and she quite forgot that he had threatened her ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... Assembly against the publication of pompous proclamations, and classed the demonstration of the night of August 4th as a theoretical display of liberty wholly without practical value. He was opposed to mob-law, and in no sense was he dazzled by the fall of the Bastille. He pleaded in favor of the royal ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... schoolmaster was the general scribe of the parish, to whom all who wanted letters or petitions written, uniformly applied—and these were glorious opportunities for the pompous display of pedantry; the remuneration usually consisted of a bottle ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... inflict myself on her. It would be no kindness to her or to me." He left her and began to pace back and forth agitatedly, in the pompous, hopping little strut. "You are wrong—you must be wrong. It is impossible. It would be terrible, tragic even though they are both good. And it would be my fault. I brought them together, thinking she would help make things cheerful for him. . . . ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... looks," ["Bennet's grave looks were a pretence" is a line in one of the best political poems of that age,] his mirth made his presence always welcome in the royal closet. While Buckingham, in the antechamber, was mimicking the pompous Castilian strut of the Secretary, for the diversion of Mistress Stuart, this stately Don was ridiculing Clarendon's sober counsels to the King within, till his Majesty cried with laughter, and the Chancellor with vexation. There perhaps never was a man whose ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... I say, to the Music of that grand last Scene in Fidelio: Sullivan & Co. supplying the introductory Recitative; beginning dreamily, and increasing, crescendo, up to where the Poet begins to 'feel the truth and Stir of Day'; till Beethoven's pompous March should begin, and the Chorus, with 'Arthur is come, etc.'; the chief Voices raising the words aloft (as they do in Fidelio), and the Chorus thundering in upon them. It is very grand in Fidelio: and I am persuaded might ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... I cannot recollect anything more sudden and startling than the first appearance of Thorneycroft Huxtable, M.A., Ph.D., etc. His card, which seemed too small to carry the weight of his academic distinctions, preceded him by a few seconds, and then he entered himself—so large, so pompous, and so dignified that he was the very embodiment of self-possession and solidity. And yet his first action when the door had closed behind him was to stagger against the table, whence he slipped down upon the ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... bestowing on him; and his father said, with a canting hypocritical air, which I hate, that Heaven's will must be done; that he would not have his children disobedient or corrupted for the sake of a bishopric, and wrote me a pompous and solemn letter, charged with Latin quotations, taking farewell of me and my house. 'I do so with regret,' added the old gentleman, 'for I have received so many kindnesses from the Hackton family that it goes to my heart to be disunited ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fill the swelling sails. Neptune, with thy trident long, Trident three-fork'd, trident strong: And ye Nereids fair and gay, Fairer than the rose in May, Nereids living in deep caves, Gently wash'd with gentle waves; Nereids, Neptune, lull asleep Ruffling storms, and ruffled deep; All around, in pompous state, On this richer Argo wait: Argo, bring my golden fleece, Argo, bring him to his Greece. Will Cadenus longer stay? Come, Cadenus, come away; Come with all the haste of love, Come unto thy turtle-dove. The ripen'd cherry on the tree Hangs, and only hangs for ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... humbly recommend my soul to the extensive mercy of that Eternal, Supreme, Intelligent Being who gave it me; most earnestly at the same time deprecating his justice. Satiated with the pompous follies of this life, of which I have had an uncommon share, I would have no posthumous ones displayed at my funeral, and therefore desire to be buried in the next burying-place to the place where I shall die, and limit the whole expense of ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... To that father,—the pompous head of the great firm of Dombey and Son—girls never showed a sufficient justification for their existence, and this one of his own was an object of supreme indifference to him; while upon the tiny boy, his heir and future partner in the firm, ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... she was in fashion's crowd, on parade in a show place—and such a show place! Jewellers' windows gleamed along the path with remarkable frequency. Florist shops, furriers, haberdashers, confectioners—all followed in rapid succession. The street was full of coaches. Pompous doormen in immense coats, shiny brass belts and buttons, waited in front of expensive salesrooms. Coachmen in tan boots, white tights, and blue jackets waited obsequiously for the mistresses of carriages who were ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... always spoke in a precise sort of pompous kind of way—"an exceedingly disturbing thing has happened. As you know, I dispatched the manuscript of my book to Messrs. Riggs and Ballinger, the publishers, yesterday afternoon. It should have reached them by the ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... Cats to carry him in his litter: a Fox on seeing him borne along in this pompous manner, said: "I advise you to be on your guard against treachery, for if you were to examine the countenances of those creatures, you would pronounce that they are carrying a booty, not a burden." As soon as the savage brotherhood[16] ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... artist teaches far more by his mere background and properties, his landscape, his costume, his idiom and technique—all the part of his work, in short, of which he is probably entirely unconscious, than by the elaborate and pompous moral dicta which he fondly imagines to be his opinions. The real distinction between the ethics of high art and the ethics of manufactured and didactic art lies in the simple fact that the bad fable has a moral, while ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... neighborhood was scarcely necessary they were both well aware, for there were few conspiracies against the king's authority and no plots against the king's life, and if Louis of France had chosen to go unattended his pompous, melancholy person would have been ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... more to Ballard's mind as he calculated the fleeting minutes than this peaceful, pompous farce. "Draw your bill, gentlemen," he said. "I would not ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... Davies was a man of good understanding and talents, with the advantage of a liberal education. Though somewhat pompous, he was an entertaining companion; and his literary performances have no inconsiderable share of merit. He was a friendly and very hospitable man. Both he and his wife (who has been celebrated for her beauty), though upon the ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... Christmas eve. In the old oak hall Preparations were made for the Christmas ball. Gay garlands were hung from ceiling and wall; The Yule log was laid, the tables arrayed, And the Lady Lorraine and her whole cavalcade, From the pompous old steward to the scullery-maid, Were all in a fluster, Excitement and bluster, And everything ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... awful rage, Val," said Denham, when he came to me after a thorough search had seemed to prove that the prisoner had eluded the vigilance of the sentries. "He swears that some one must have been acting in collusion with the pompous blackguard, and that he means to have the whole of our Irish boys before him and cross-examine ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... Ascott, I'd rather starve in a garret, break stones in the high road, or buy a broom and sweep a crossing, than I'd be dependent on this man, this pompous, purse-proud, illiterate fool!" ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... more patrons than ever Homer wanted. He would have thought himself happy to have met the same favour at Athens that has been shown me by its learned rival, the University of Oxford. And I can hardly envy him those pompous honours he received after death, when I reflect on the enjoyment of so many agreeable obligations, and easy friendships, which make the satisfaction of life. This distinction is the more to be acknowledged, as it ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... doctors are indeed pompous, self-sufficient, affectedly solemn, venal and unfeeling with ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... bottom of the valley flows an immense river, into which the various streams issuing from the mountains fall from all parts. In memory of their native land, the French formerly called this the river St. Louis. The Indians, in their pompous language, have named it the Father of Waters, ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... door of the railway carriage until the last minute; she sent all manner of absurd messages, to the Great Horatio; she told Christine to be sure, to give him her love; she kept up a running fire of chaff and banter till the train started away, and a pompous guard told her to "Stand back, there!" and presently the last glimpse of Christine's pale little face and Jimmy's worried eyes had been swallowed up in the darkness ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... exclaimed the colored man in pompous tones, as he opened the door for the officer, clad in khaki, whom Tom had ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... know, brother, what I have told you; and that does not effect many cures. All the excellency of their art consists in pompous gibberish, in a specious babbling, which gives you words instead of reasons, and promises instead ...
— The Imaginary Invalid - Le Malade Imaginaire • Moliere
... in its flippant or pompous, becomes terrible in its malignant, expression. Thus, the headstrong young men who pushed the French Revolution of 1789 into the excesses of the Reign of Terror were well-intentioned reformers, driven into crime by the fanaticism of mental conceit. This is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... in the mud, the wounded swept away by the current or buried alive in the quagmires. The air resounded with German, Spanish, Italian, and Flemish voices. Torches illuminated the great arquebuses, the pompous plumes, the strange, blanched faces. The battles seemed to be fantastic funerals. They were, in fact, the funerals of the great Spanish monarchy, which was slowly drowned in Dutch waters, smothered with mud and curses. One who is weak enough to feel ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... eyed the blooming Miss Rose Wynn, whose five feet five of feminine humanity, clad in bright red delaine, quite overshadowed the delicate figure beside him. But he obeyed the elder woman's command meekly, nevertheless, and went forward, asking in a pompous tone: ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... imperative as it is detestable. For the rest, at Tours there is a certain Rue Royale which has pretensions to the monumental; it was constructed a hundred years ago, and the houses, all alike, have on a moderate scale a pompous eighteenth-century look. It connects the Palais de Justice, the most important secular building in the town, with the long bridge which spans the Loire—the spacious, solid bridge pronounced by Balzac, in "Le Cure de Tours," "one of the ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... next thing most important to mention, Metaphysics will claim your attention! There see that you can clearly explain What fits not into the human brain: For that which will not go into the head, A pompous word will stand you in stead. But, this half-year, at least, observe From regularity never to swerve. You'll have five lectures every day; Be in at the stroke of the bell I pray! And well prepared in every part; Study each paragraph by heart, So that you scarce may ...
— Faust • Goethe
... expostulated with him like a prophet priest in full panoply of saintly virtue. And Lockyer was passing good at that exalted gesture. He was a Websterian figure, with the venality of the great Daniel in all its pompous dignity modernized—and correspondingly expanded. He abounded in those idealist sonorosities that are the stock-in-trade of all solemn old-fashioned frauds. The young man listened with his wonted attentive courtesy until the dolorous appeal disguised as fatherly counsel came ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... obtained. As it was, the only result was his parading about with him everywhere, from town to town, for months after his return, the lictors with laurelled fasces, which betokened that a triumph was claimed—a pompous incumbrance, which became, as he confessed, a grand subject for evil-disposed jesters, and ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... the two principal actors in the day's doings the affair was an unmitigated annoyance, and even their own great and true happiness could not lighten the excessive fatigue of the pompous ceremony and of the still more pompous reception which followed it. To describe that day would be to make out a catalogue of gorgeous equipages, gorgeous costumes, gorgeous decorations. Many pages would not suffice to enumerate the cardinals, the dignitaries, ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... end of what relates to Mr. Doyle, it would be proper to acquaint the public that the vanity of his wife extended so far as to make a pompous funeral for him at St. Sepulchre's church, whereat she, as chief mourner assisted, and was led by a gentleman whom the world suspected to be ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... small and dark, but blandly roguish; his mouth was wide and damp, and had in it a small selection of sample teeth, as it were; he wore a blue checked homespun dress garnished down the back with big horn buttons, sparsely set on; he clasped his chubby hands upon a somewhat pompous stomach; he sidled first to the right, then to the left, in doubt as to which of the ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... "A pompous butler is installed. I discovered all this when I went to call, and conscientiously told her I was going to St. Thomas with the Winthrops. He is elderly, of course, as all the middle-aged and young butlers are in khaki; and wonderful to relate, there is also ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... report of the attack on the Marmion "bloods" made by Radowitz at the dinner of the college debating society about a fortnight earlier. It was witty and damaging in the highest degree, and each man as he read it had vowed vengeance. Falloden had been especially mocked in it. Some pompous tricks of manner peculiar to Falloden in his insolent moods, had been worked into a pseudo-scientific examination of the qualities proper to a "blood," with the happiest effect. Falloden grew white as he read it. Perhaps on the morrow it would be in Constance Bledlow's hands. ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... colours, and chance-wise Doth daub, befouling walls and canvases, Is not a painter; but, unhelped by these, He who in art is masterful and wise. Cowls and the tonsure do not make a friar; Nor make a king wide realms and pompous wars; But he who is all Jesus, Pallas, Mars, Though he be slave or base-born, wears the tiar. Man is not born crowned like the natural king Of beasts, for beasts by this investiture Have need to know the head they must obey; Wherefore a commonwealth fits men, ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... for a time, but was a sort of pompous tomtit, with a short breath and a large aquiline opinion of himself. He was one of the arrogant old pie-plants whose growth was fostered by the beetle-bellied administration at home. He went back on board the City of Rome one ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... embassy, he could slip away from it to pursue his own inquiries in a private manner whenever he pleased, leaving the embassadors themselves and those of their train who enjoyed such scenes to go through all the public receptions and other pompous formalities which would have been so tiresome ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott
... them. "Dem wa' Massa South Ca'lina gwan to whip de 'Nited States wid Massa Goberna' order 'em last year, an 'e jus' come. Good masse gwan' to fight fo' we wid 'em." The poor old man seemed to take a great interest in the pieces of ordnance as they passed along, and to have inherited all the pompous ideas of his master. The negroes about Charleston have a natural inclination for military tactics, and hundreds of ragged urchins, as well as old daddies and mammies, may be seen following the fife and drum on ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... be wary of criticism. That Milton's poetry has little human interest, no humor, and plenty of faults, may be granted. His Paradise Lost especially is overcrowded with mere learning or pedantry in one place and with pompous commonplaces in another. But such faults appear trivial, unworthy of mention in the presence of a poem that is as a storehouse from which the authors and statesmen of three hundred years have drawn their choicest images and expressions. It stands forever as our ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... being remembered from the Stella that to-day is mine alone. For it is to this fictitious person that the people whom my Stella loved, as she did not love me, now bring their flowers; and it was to this person they erected their pompous monument,—nay, more, it was for this atrocious woman they ordered the very coffin in which my Stella lay when I last saw her. ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... depends,' rejoined Jack, blowing out his cheeks, and looking as pompous as possible—'that depends a good deal upon how he's been used in ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... faintest hint of the sentimentalist about him; his is never the softness of the lover, but rather the careful prudence of the utilitarian. Yet he unstintedly admires Katherine; this is somehow felt to be so by his rather pompous implication that he would hardly be taking all this trouble about the woman were she not the makings of a royal mate, fit even for his sky-wide vision ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... the Blind The Blind Man's Problem Dreams How to Help On Getting Away from Yourself Travel Work Farewells! The "Butters" Age that Dyes Women in Love Pompous Pride in Literary "Lions" Seaside Piers Visitors The Unimpassioned English Relations Polite Conversation Awful Warnings It's oh, to be out of England—now that Spring is here Bad-tempered People Polite Masks ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... communion, were rendered more imposing by the attendance of the civil and military authorities, and most persons of rank and wealth in the vicinity. Nor did they degenerate into mere processions and pompous forms, if the narrative is to be trusted. The missionaries appear on every occasion to have availed themselves of the excitation of the moment, in calling forth such feelings as must be approved by Christians of every country and persuasion, and which, among Frenchmen, may ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... now of much service; while the sprightly wit of his young wife attracted Josephine, as it has all readers of her piquant but rather spiteful memoirs. In her pages we catch a glimpse of the life of that singular Court; the attempts at aping the inimitable manners of the ancien regime; the pompous nullity of the second and third Consuls; the tawdry magnificence of the costumes; the studied avoidance of any word that implied even a modicum of learning or a distant acquaintance with politics; the nervous preoccupation ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... childishly important, it seemed to her that it would be easy to make them look ridiculous, and she often found herself framing replies for the Opposition. But of course there was a wide gulf between the pompous gentlemen who lolled and smoked their black cigars in the mahogany chairs on the redcarpeted floor of the House, and the bright-eyed little girl who sat on the edge of her seat in the gallery and looked ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... gesture marks his gait, No pompous tone his word; No studied attitude is seen, No palling nonsense heard; He'll suit his bearing to the hour, Laugh, listen, learn, or teach. With joyous freedom in his mirth, And candor in his ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... than usual on her sweet, sad face. "She's thinking of her wretched, ill-doing son," quoth the gossips, one to another. But who comes in now, with an air as if the whole church belonged to him? An imposing, pompous man, stern and grim, in a new flaxen wig, and a white rose in his buttonhole. It is Mr. Justice Hare, and he leads in one, whom folks jump upon seats ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... was not travelling like a nabob; and it would have been impossible to take more baggage. How could any one, with large provisions and a pompous retinue move in the midst of mountains covered with forests literally along untouched by human feet, and forced, in order to get through them, at every instant to swim across torrents, and having no other ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... made A grand parade, With marching train-band, guild, and trade: The burgomaster in robes arrayed, Gold chain, and mace, and gay cockade, Great keys carried, and flags displayed, Pompous marshal and spruce young aide, Carriage and foot and cavalcade; While big drums thundered and trumpets brayed, And all the bands of the canton played; The fountain spouted lemonade, Children drank of the bright cascade; Spectators ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... overcome by exposure, died at the Polish village of Zarnowiec on the 24th of December 1812. In 1807 he had published in a sumptuous volume the Columbiad, an enlarged edition of his Vision of Columbus, more pompous even than the original; but, though it added to his reputation in some quarters, on the whole it was not well received, and it has subsequently been much ridiculed. The poem for which he is now best known is his mock heroic ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... were, although singular in the extreme, remarkably charitable and considerate of the necessities of their neighbours, and their loss has been greatly felt. They seemed vain and pompous, but accomplished and intellectual, and were a strange compound of wisdom ...
— The "Ladies of Llangollen" • John Hicklin
... neckcloth, and button-hole, and an occasional hearty and kindly joke, a power of executing and setting agoing a good laugh, are stock in our trade not to be despised. The merry heart does good like a medicine. Your pompous man, and your selfish man, don't laugh much, or care for laughter; it discomposes the fixed grandeur of the one, and has little room in the heart of the other, who is literally self-contained. My Edinburgh ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... believe, had been the price paid cheerfully at one time for a complete set of Hearne. At Laxton, also, it was that first I saw the total array of works edited by Dr. Birch. It was a complete armilustrium, a recognitio, or mustering, as it were, not of pompous Praetorian cohorts, or unique guardsmen, but of the yeomanry, the militia, or what, under the old form of expression, you might regard as the trained bands of our literature—the fund from which ultimately, or in the last resort, students look for the materials of our vast ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... shouted in a very pompous voice, and three unhappy young men filed through the half-opened door into the solemn ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... answered in the negative, as undoubtedly they must, what becomes of the imaginary paradise of blessings and privileges to which baptism is to introduce the millions of our infants? Why should the holy Lord God, our Saviour, be represented as mocking his church by promises of mysterious, pompous nothings?" pp. 65-69. ...
— The Baptist Magazine, Vol. 27, January, 1835 • Various
... emerge. We have a way of dividing time into ancient and modern; and think the one forever past, the other forever to endure. It is quite silly. There are plenty of places now where it is 753 B.C.; and no doubt there were plenty then where it was pompous 1919.—Can anyone tell me, by the bye, what year it happens to be ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... village to inquire. The headman, evidently one of a former Casembe school, came to us full of wrath. "What right had we to come that way, seeing the usual path was to our left?" He mouthed some sentences in the pompous Lunda style, but would not show us the path; so we left him, and after going through a forest of large trees, 4-1/2 hours south, took advantage of some huts on the Kifurwa River, ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... hesitates to confront the unknown. The stairs were there before him; he began to descend, his right hand held forth, his eyes fastened in horror upon it. Then, as he heard the distant hum of voices below, once more pompous and erect he swung down the last broad treads between ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... I am a very ill-used young body. Now I don't think so. Grandfather was rich, but he must have had a bad heart, or he never could have cast off poor mamma; had he adopted me, I should never have been so happy as I am now, uncle is kind to me in his pompous, patronizing way, and dear Florence loves me like a sister, and so I am happy. I am my own mistress here, and not anybody's humble servant, I sometimes find myself singing as the birds do, ...
— Our American Cousin • Tom Taylor
... motion, and how it produces it. The idea of "increase and complication of the inorganic, merely mechanical motion," with which Haeckel throws a bridge from the living to the lifeless or from the organic to the inorganic, does not yet give us that proof; it seems rather to be one of those pompous phrases with which people hide their ignorance and make the uncritical multitude believe that the explanation is found: a manipulation against which, among others, Wigand, in his great work, repeatedly protests, as also does the Duke of Argyll in his lecture on "Anthropomorphism ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... impress their audience that they know far more about the subject than the lecturer. But worst of all is the chairman who knows absolutely nothing about the subject or about yourself. I remember one evening some pompous chairman getting up and saying: "I have great pleasure this evening in introducing to you Mr. Furniss. I know you have all heard of Mr. Furniss, and anyone connected as I am with engineering must look upon one of his great achievements with delight. ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... volumes which bear the imprint of A. K. Newman, and Dean and Mundy, are "A, Apple Pie," "Aldiborontiphoskyphorniostikos," "The House that Jack Built," "The Parent's Offering for a Good Child" (a very pompous and irritating series of dialogues), and others that are even more directly educational. In all these the engravings are in fairly correct outline, coloured with four to six washes of showy crimson lake, ultramarine, pale green, ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... were ringing, and mourning garments and mourning hats were everywhere. In stately mansions and in dreary attics real tears of sorrow were shed. The good princess was dead. In the palace, in a grand apartment all draped in black, lay her silent, wasted body, on a pompous funeral bier. Throngs of the loftiest and the noblest of the land passed slowly by, in solemn procession, to pay their last respects to the humble princess and the true-hearted woman who had gone to her reward. Rough peasants and the poor of the ...
— The Golden House • Mrs. Woods Baker
... never spoke a word but when his master unlocked his mouth. Porthos boasted of the strength of Mousqueton, who was big enough to thrash four men of ordinary size. Aramis, confiding in the address of Bazin, made a pompous eulogium on his candidate. Finally, d'Artagnan had entire faith in the bravery of Planchet, and reminded them of the manner in which he had conducted himself in ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... hear Queen Mab say he was going to spend his holidays in London? Uncle James is rather a pompous old fellow, but we shan't have to go there except for lunch; and father said we ought to call on them while we're here; besides, it'll be jolly on the river. You know them, ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... a cry for naturalism in other arts—we have Millet instead of Claude; we have Zola instead of Georges Sand; we have Dumas fils instead of Corneille; we have Mercie instead of Canova; but in music we have precisely the reverse, and we have the elephantine creations, the elaborate and pompous combinations of Baireuth, and the Tone school, instead of the old sweet strains of melody that went straight and clear to the ear and the heart of man. Sometimes my enemies write in their journals that I sing as if ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida |
