"Barmecide" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... same insipid story of self over again. We sit down at table with the writer, but it is to a course of rich viands, flesh, fish, and wild-fowl, and not to a nominal entertainment, like that given by the Barmecide in the Arabian Nights, who put off his visitors with calling for a number of exquisite things that never appeared, and with the honour of his company. Mr. Cobbett is not a make-believe writer: his worst enemy cannot say that of him. Still less is he a vulgar one: he ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... al-Rashid was walking one day with Ja'afar the Barmecide, when he espied a company of girls drawing water and went up to them, having a mind to drink. As he drew near, one of them turned to her fellows and improvised ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... much evil. Yet so it was. As starving men are said to dream of dainty banquets, so now a craze for fictitious wealth in the shape of paper money ran like an epidemic through the country. There was a Barmecide feast of economic vagaries; only now it was the several states that sought to apply the remedy, each in its own way. And when we have threaded the maze of this rash legislation, we shall the better understand that clause in our federal constitution which forbids ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... new, strange, superior type of creature, to us for ever unknown and utterly unrecognizable? Tormented by aspirations which neither time nor space, force nor matter, will realize or satisfy, consumed by spiritual hunger fiercer than Ugolino's, we are invited to seize upon the Barmecide's banquet of "The Law which formulates organic development as a transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous;" and that "this universal transformation is a change from indefinite homogeneity to definite heterogeneity; and that only when ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... man in the greatest distress, one day called on the rich Barmecide, who in merry jest asked him to dine with him. Barmecide first washed in hypothetical water, Schacabac followed his example. Barmecide then pretended to eat of various dainties, Schacabac did the same, and praised them highly, and so the "feast" went on to the close. The story says Barmecide ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... handsomely. But those who know the world and their own nature are always better pleased with one kind action carried through and executed, than with twenty that only glide through their minds, while perhaps they tickle the imagination of the benevolent Barmecide who supposes both the entertainment and the eater. These articles do not amount to less than L10,000 at least, and, without dispensing with them entirely, might furnish me with a fund for my younger children.[405] Now, suppose these creditors had not seriously carried their purpose into execution, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott |
