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More "Pomposity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that," said the doctor, that night, concluding his narrative of busy days in the city, "but I have been appointed," with a great affectation of pomposity, "the magistrate for ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... better genius prevailed, He probably recollected that he was sent as my protector, and that the office would not have been fulfilled according to his instructions, by running me through the midriff. But, with all his pomposity, he had the national good-nature; and when we sat down to our chicken and bottle of Tinto in one of those delicious valleys, he was full of remorse for his burst ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... white face upon him, speechless. Plon, who was recovering his pomposity, pressed forward, and laid a ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... patent fact, the Kaisers of Rome had been for centuries, even in their decay and degradation, the rulers of the nations. Yet beneath that there must have been a perpetual under-current of contempt for it and for Rome—the 'colluvies gentium'—the sink of the nations, with its conceit, its pomposity, its beggary, its profligacy, its superstition, its pretence of preserving the Roman law and rights, while practically it cared for no law nor right at all. Dietrich had had to write letter upon letter, to prevent the green and blue factions cutting each other's throats at ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... nothing and sawing wood," said Miss Jones, knowingly. "He's too foxy to quit the firm as old Pomposity did! Probably he thinks it won't last, and he's willing ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... with a touch of asperity ill disguised. "Might one be allowed to enquire...?" Scared perhaps by his pomposity, he broke off: "No, that won't do. I'll ask you simply, what has happened? You liked me—to say no more. Now you don't. No, no, don't protest yet. Leave it at that. Well, and then there's Macartney. Macartney didn't ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... objectionable outgrowths of a false luxury and of an insincere culture. No doubt, among the circles of the highest nobility, while the king and queen may be people of simple and unpretending manners, there may be some arrogant and self-sufficient master of ceremonies, some Malvolio whose pomposity is in strange contrast to the good-breeding of Olivia. It is the lesser star which twinkles most. The "School for Scandal" is a lasting picture of the folly and frivolity of a certain phase of London society in the past, and it repeats itself ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... younger boy in delight. "You're a buster, Joe, and no mistake. The president himself couldn't have rolled that sentence off better, or that old piece of pomposity who conies to the secret meetings with ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... Palamedes of treachery during the siege of Troy (this is generally considered spurious). According to Alcidamas, the highest aim of the orator was the power of speaking extempore on every conceivable subject. Aristotle (Rhet. iii. 3) criticizes his writings as characterized by pomposity of style and an extravagant use of poetical epithets and compounds and far-fetched metaphors. Of other works only fragments and the titles have survived: Messeniakos, advocating the freedom of the Messenians and containing the sentiment that "all ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of fat, The offspring of a beggar's brat; As eels delight to creep in mud, To eels we may compare his blood; His blood delights in mud to run, Witness his lazy, lousy son! Puff'd up with pride and insolence, Without a grain of common sense. See with what consequence he stalks! With what pomposity he talks! See how the gaping crowd admire The stupid blockhead and the liar! How long shall vice triumphant reign? How long shall mortals bend to gain? How long shall virtue hide her face, And leave her votaries in disgrace? —Let indignation fire my strains, Another villain ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... some one to whom he could open his heart, Johnson himself was no less willing to look the matter in the face, and even during the long summer days, when he had begun to live upon his wardrobe, piece by piece, he still kept up; although some of his pomposity went, along with the Prince Albert coat and the shiny hat. He now wore a shiny coat, and less showy head-gear. For a couple of weeks, too, he disappeared, and as he returned with some money, it was fair to presume that he had been at work somewhere, ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... literati [Inclusion], one a Frenchman the other an Englishman [Exclusion], well-known for the pomposity and sonority of their style of writing [Inclusion], were born in the same year, 1709, and died the same year 1784, a double Concurrence—Lefranc de Pompignan—[pompous In. ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... Korff, General de Pfuel, and von Buelow the pianist, coming to lunch, and perhaps Wagner, if he could finish his rehearsal of "Lohengrin" in time, he was not sorry to see his table relieved of the dull pomposity and brilliant watch-chain of the pillar of Prague society. How mean to hide one's Judaism! What a burden to belong to such a race, degenerate sons of a great but long-vanished past, unable to slough the slave traits engendered by centuries ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Marjorie, Penrod Schofield flushed under his new moustache (repainted since noon) and lectured as he had never lectured before. A new grace invested his every gesture; a new sonorousness rang in his voice; a simple and manly pomposity marked his very walk as he passed from curio to curio. And when he fearlessly handled the box of rats and hammered upon it with cool insouciance, he beheld—for the first time in his life—a purl of admiration eddying ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... impressed itself upon the observation of those who met him for the first time, and each successive interview deepened the impression. People seemed delighted to find in the ruler of the nation freedom from pomposity and affectation, mingled with a certain simple dignity which never forsook him. Though oppressed with the weight of responsibility resting upon him as President of the United States, he shrank from assuming any of the honors, or even the titles, of the position. ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... Bishop Craye. While he, on his side, felt himself a benefactor to the Church in general, and to the Bishop of Markborough in particular, instinctively he knew that the Bishop's taste ungratefully disapproved of him; and the knowledge contributed an extra shade of pomposity to his manner. ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was to keep his hand in that he adopted a tone of serious chaff to Mr. Norbury, such as some people think a well-chosen one towards children, to their great embarrassment. He replied to that most responsible of butlers with some pomposity of manner. "The question before the house," said he—and paused to enjoy a perversion of speech—"the question before the house comes down to breakfast I take to be this:—Is it breakfast at all till somebody ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Indians and their eagerness to butcher the friends of independence, and he graciously promised protection to those who should return to their duty. The proclamation was so far from answering the general's intention that it was derided by the people as a model of pomposity. ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... or two Mr. Tufton, who had been in the large garden behind the house, hurried in. He was now quite an old man; and under the influence of age, and the cheerful society of Mrs. Marryat and her daughters, he had lost much of the pomposity which had ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... before the case is called to trial. It may be that among the spectators who have been sitting beside the lawyers in the back of the room, waiting for the case to be called, are those who may afterwards be called as jurors. Any affectation of manner or pomposity is quickly detected. ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... moment Lord Wetherby seemed somewhat confused, but, pulling himself together, he covered his embarrassment with a pomposity that blended ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... To eels we may compare his blood; His blood in mud delights to run; Witness his lazy, lousy son! Puff'd up with pride and insolence, Without a grain of common sense, See with what consequence he stalks, With what pomposity he talks; See how the gaping crowd admire The stupid blockhead and the liar. How long shall vice triumphant reign? How long shall mortals bend to gain? How long shall virtue hide her face, And leave her votaries in disgrace? ——Let indignation fire my strains, ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... pomposity the Germans, ignoring the fact that it was their own negligence which had led them into a most dangerous situation, claim that General von Kluck showed unusual skill in extricating the 1st ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... a little absurd in his youthful pomposity. "I suppose you refer to Parker and Einstein—my one mick friend, although he isn't Irish, and my, one Jewish friend. Well, I shall stick to them and see just as much of them as I like. I've told you that before, and you might as well get me straight right now: ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... look back over what I have written, much of it gives me a queer impression, as if the obvious were set forth so condescendingly that readers might well laugh at my pomposity. It may be, however, that concreteness as radical as ours is not so obvious. The whole originality of pragmatism, the whole point in it, is its use of the concrete way of seeing. It begins with concreteness, ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... come upon me without ceremony, madam," said Lord Hurdly, with a slightly old-fashioned pomposity in his polished manner, "and I may therefore ask you to excuse an absence of ceremony in me in alluding to the impression which you have made upon me. You are a stranger to me—an American, I judge from your speech. I hope that I am to be so fortunate as to hear ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... shoemaker's shop, and whose boyish games were played in the street of a Welsh hamlet remote from all the refinements of civilization and all the clangours of industrialism, announced to a breathless Europe without any pomposity of phrase and with but a brief and contemptuous gesture of dismissal the passing away from the world's stage of the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns—those ancient, long glorious, and most puissant houses whose history for an aeon was ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... I besought was an elderly German with a paternal manner. He listened to me kindly, said I looked quick, and offered to put me on as an apprentice, explaining with much pomposity that cigar-making was a very difficult trade, at which I must serve a three years' apprenticeship before I could become a member of the union and entitled to draw union wages. I left him feeling very humble, and likewise disillusioned of my ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... on deck, where he demanded to be shown the master. An introduction was unnecessary in this instance; for Captain Truck no sooner saw his visitor than he recognized the well-known features and solemn pomposity of a civil officer of Portsmouth, who was often employed to search the American packets, in pursuit of delinquents of all ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... are not an attractive class of men, considering them in the light of guardians of the law. With a good deal of pomposity and laziness, they mingle much filth and rascality. The emperor may have great confidence in them, based upon some knowledge of their talents and virtues not shared by casual tourists; but if he would trust one of them with ten kopeks, or agree to place the life of any intimate personal ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... the pied pomposity who strutted before her, saw a sharp contrast through the yew-tree arch. A man in sober habit was moving slowly over the grass in the direction of the pleasaunce, moving slowly, for he was carrying an open book and ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... bestow his hand and name upon the daughter of the retired senior partner of his firm: "that dear little girl of old Marvin's," as he described the lady of his choice, "his only child and a good child, too." He bore his surprise and honors with a courteous pomposity. Miss Knowles bore the situation with restraint and decorum. But that "dear little girl of old Marvin's" could not bring herself to bear it at all and wept away her modest claims to prettiness and spirit in one ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... this distinguished body of amateurs on the modest success which attended their efforts. Most of the performers are well-known to the Billsbury public. Alderman TOLLAND, as the heavy father, provoked screams of laughter by the studied pomposity of his manner. His unctuous rendering of the catch-phrase, "Constitutional Progress," has lost none of its old force. Mr. CHORKLE was, perhaps, not so successful as we have sometimes seen him in his representation of a real Colonel, but the scene in ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 18, 1891 • Various
... year of the life of the city. He was, as I remember him, the very embodiment of dignity and aristocracy. He had a diffuse and rather inflated style, both in public speaking and in private conversation. His dignity had a bare suspicion of pomposity in it. He looked with great disdain upon the simplicity of behavior of some of his successors, and their familiarity with all classes of the people. He came into my office one morning full of an intense disgust with something Governor ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... higher in the estimation of the Tory party than Sir Robert Sawyer. He was a man of ample fortune and aristocratical connections, of orthodox opinions and regular life, an able and experienced lawyer, a well read scholar, and, in spite of a little pomposity, a good speaker. He had been Attorney General at the time of the detection of the Rye House Plot; he had been employed for the Crown in the prosecutions which followed; and he had conducted those prosecutions with an eagerness which would, in our time, be called cruelty by all parties, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and though what I ate was of the plainest sort, and I took no variety, yet even this was partly the effect of accident, and I certainly rather exceeded in quantity, as I was fuzzy and sleepy after dinner.' 'I allowed myself to be disgusted, with — 's pomposity,' he writes a little later, 'also smiled at an allusion in the Lessons to abstemiousness in eating. I hope not from pride or vanity, but mistrust; it certainly was unintentional.' And again, 'As to my meals, I can say that I was always careful to see that no one else ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... countermarching of countless battalions, and all the pomp of war and parade of martial bombast with which the fertile mind of General Smyth hoped to terrify the apparently defenceless Canadians; to which he added a flaming proclamation, not excelled in pomposity and brag by that of General Hull issued to Canadians three months before. We give this proclamation, as we have done that of General Hull, in ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... this room!" The Senator was beginning to pull himself together. It was the first time he had ever been ragged in such a way, and his composure had suffered; he spoke now with more than his usual pomposity. ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... and exact in his speech, even then, as he was later on, when years had given an innocent, genial pomposity to his delivery of ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... with heavy pomposity the charge against the prisoners "to wit: That on Pennsylvania Avenue, Northwest, in the District of Columbia they did aid and abet in setting fire to certain combustibles consisting of logs, paper, ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... speaking for the first time in a perfectly natural tone, divested of all pomposity. 'Yes, she stickles for that, Lockwood. It was the one point she seemed to stand out for. Of course I told her she would be received with open arms by my relatives—that my family would be overjoyed to receive her as one of them. I only hinted that my lord's gout might prevent ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... the patronage of his grandfather, Lord Binkie, by studying the ancient and modern orators with great assiduity, and by speaking unceasingly at the debating societies. But though he had a fine flux of words, and delivered his little voice with great pomposity and pleasure to himself, and never advanced any sentiment or opinion which was not perfectly trite and stale, and supported by a Latin quotation; yet he failed somehow, in spite of a mediocrity which ought to have insured any man a success. He did not even get the prize ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... white hands on the head, and enunciate the principles of spiritual art, as he hoisted them one by one, as you might say, out of the depths of his moral consciousness. His benignant and imperturbable pomposity gave Roderick the sense of suffocating beneath a large fluffy bolster, and the worst of the matter was that the good gentleman's placid vanity had an integument whose toughness no sarcastic shaft could ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... philosophic, its style dignified. With our more elastic methods we may consider his manner pompous, but he lived in an age when Johnson's turgid periods had corrupted our literature. For my own part I do not dislike Gibbon's pomposity. A paragraph should be measured and sonorous if it ventures to describe the advance of a Roman legion, or the debate of a Greek Senate. You are wafted upwards, with this lucid and just spirit by your side upholding and instructing you. Beneath you are warring nations, ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... am I wrong?" asked Mr. Keith, whose pomposity was melting away under successive bottles of his own wine, specially ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... placed under his coat-tails, so as to show off all the glory of his waistcoat, frill, and splendid jewellery, he marched into the streets. He made so imposing a figure in his new dress, and assumed such an air of pomposity, that it was no wonder the uninitiated should have been deceived, and have taken him for a lion of the very first nobility; nor can we be surprised that a poor cur, almost in a state of nudity, should, ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... to business in small matters, how can you hope to succeed when you go out into life?" he asked with some pomposity. He had intended, when he opened his mouth, to say something very different. His pomposity, he felt, grew out of his embarrassment; he had a dim feeling that he was making ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... you do, Professor?" said the lady, with some little pomposity of manner. "You were very wise to stay out here on so lovely a day. Is ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... say," said Peter, with a touch of his father's pomposity. "Surely a bride has a right to look forward to arranging her home as she chooses. And Sarah is mad about old French furniture—Louis Seize, I think it is—but I know nothing about such things. I think a man ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... pensiero e concetto della sua pittura, the idea and conceit of his picture! Salvator bowed a modest acquiescence, and went on with his sketch. The doctor having gone the round of professional questions with his wonted pomposity, rose to write his prescription; when, as he sat before the table with eyes upturned, and pen suspended over the paper, Salvator approached him on tiptoe, and drawing the pen gently through his fingers, with one of his old Coviello gesticulations in his character of the mountebank, he said, ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... fine thing, and might be a better thing; but there is an education, that of life, which, when seconded by a pure will to learn, leaves the schools behind, even as the horse of the desert would leave behind the slow pomposity of the common-fed goose. For life is God's school, and they that will listen to the Master there will learn at God's speed. For one moment, I am ashamed to say, I was envious of Shepherd, and repined ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... young Dr. McGanum, and James Madison Howland, teetering on their toes near the stove, conversed with the sedate pomposity of the commercialist. In details the men were unlike, yet they said the same things in the same hearty monotonous voices. You had to look at them to see ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... after subject in his eager ebullient childhood. His mother found him at thirteen inditing a letter on the subject of The Faerie Queene to a school-friend, in which, with a sincerity which made her forgive the pomposity, he remarked— ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... not an institution: aristocracy is a sin; generally a very venial one. It is merely the drift or slide of men into a sort of natural pomposity and praise of the powerful, which is the most easy and ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... the solicitor were old cronies, and their greeting was most friendly. When the old gentlewoman had seated herself and taken her cup of tea, Mr. Copleston said to Stephen, with a sort of pomposity: ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... aspect glowed with what was clearly a genuine fire. The slight pomposity of look ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... what he called a "shore billet," was astonished at the importance of transactions (other than relating to shipping) which take place on dry land. Almost every event out of the usual daily course "marked an epoch" for him or else was "history"; unless with his pomposity struggling with a discomfited droop of his rubicund, rather handsome face, set off by snow-white close hair and short ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... function on the stage, it is that of imparting lyric beauty to passionate speech. For the mere rhetorical "elevation" of blank verse we have no use whatever. It consists in saying simple things with verbose pomposity. But should there arise a man who combines highly-developed dramatic faculty with great lyric genius, it is quite possible that he may give us the new poetic drama for which our idealists are sighing. He will choose his themes, I take it, from legend, or from the domain ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... was a most curious mixture of humour, pomposity, and business, which made it very hard to know how exactly to take him. If I dared to laugh at a joke, he fired up, and ordered me angrily to get on with my work. And if I did become engrossed in the ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... will permit me," Mr. Mangan said, with an inherited pomposity, "on our first meeting under the new conditions, I should like to offer you my hearty congratulations, not only upon what you have accomplished but upon what ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... intemperate in his expressions; upon which Johnson rose, and quietly walked away. When he had retired, his antagonist took his revenge, as he thought, by saying, 'He has a most ungainly figure, and an affectation of pomposity, unworthy of a man ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... of events has yet to be fully explained, President Harrison's dull pomposity may have been the underlying reason of the aversion which Blaine now began to manifest. Although on Harrison's side and against Blaine, Senator Cullom remarks in his memoirs that Harrison had "a ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... born. There are some who profess to attach importance to the goose-billed mouthings and vapourings of the butter-brained crew who follow in the wake of the most notorious professor of humbugging pomposity that even this age, rich as it is in putty-faced impostors, has ever produced. Well, let them. For my own part I follow the advice of the French King to the beautiful Marquise DE CENTAMOURS. "Sire," the Marquise is reported to have said, "quelle heure est-il?" To which the witty monarch ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... was lying flat now, gazing speculatively up at the projection of logs and earth which made them a partial roof—"along with a lot of other bright ideas, by a gentleman named Charles Fort, who took a lot of pleasure in pricking what he considered to be vastly over-inflated scientific pomposity. He gathered together four book loads of reported incidents of unexplainable happenings which he dared the scientists of his day to explain. And one of his bright suggestions was that such phenomena as the vast artificial earthworks found in Ohio and Indiana were originally thrown ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... last touch made the grand-prior of the cathedral wince a little, but it was welcomed with a roar from the multitude. The song proceeded; but if the prior had frowned at the first stanza, the podesta was doubly angry at the second, which sneered at Venetian pomposity in incomparable style. But the prior and podesta were equally outvoted, for the roar of the multitude was twice as loud as before. Then came other touches on the cavalieri serventi, the ladies, the nuns, and the husbands, till ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 340, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... BARBARISM.—Amid the fussy pomposity of the Queen's jubilee, the voice of the thinkers has not been entirely silent. The utter failure of her reign to present a single noble thought or impulse, a single evidence of sympathy with the immense mass of ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... which, at so early an age, my rare conduct and great natural talents had given me; sanguine as was my mind, and brilliant as were my prospects: yet I had seen so much of the meannesses, the unjust partialities, the insolent pomposity, the disgusting dissipations of that way of life, that I was weary of it: I longed, exchanging my fine laced coat for the Yankee farmer's home-spun, to be where I should never behold the supple crouch of servility, and never ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... one-half of the width of the fall; on the other, it was running over a clear thin stream, as gentle and amiable as water could be. That part of the fall reminded me of ladies' hair in flowing ringlets, and the one nearest me of the Lord Chancellor Eldon, in all the pomposity and frowning dignity of his full-bottomed wig. And then I thought of the lion and the lamb, not lying down, but falling down together; and then I thought that I was wet through, which was a fact; so I climbed up a ladder, and came to a wooden bridge above ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... The Hundred Worst Books, and a Mrs. L., a native of Rhode Island, but "by adoption a westerner," as she explains in her introduction. If it were a question of which had the less poetic merit it would be hard indeed to decide between them, but as to the sincerity of the one and the pomposity of the other, there can be no doubt. The Sweet Singer plays upon the strings of her own heart in a way that makes your eyes grow dim. She has moments of modesty, too, about her work that are very gratifying. But Mrs. ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... officer entered with one or two subordinates and a squad of soldiers. Certain formalities had to be gone through in which I played a prominent part. These completed the officer stood before me with all the pomposity he could command and delivered a harangue at high speed in a worrying monotone. To me it was gibberish, but one of the men who could speak English informed me that the gist of his wail was the intimation that "if I moved a pace to the right, or a pace to the left, or fell ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... mind them things so well 'taint no use tryen' to rake up the buried reck'lections o' the pas' times," said the old man, rebukingly, and with a certain pomposity. "I reckon now you 'member all the high quality gentlemen. The New Market Jockey Club, an' how they use to meet reg'lar as clock-work the second Tuesday in May and October; an' how my Mahs Duke, with all the fine ruffles down his shirt front, an' ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... son," said the author of my being, with characteristic pomposity, which age had not withered, "there is sufficient for but two. I am not, I hope, insensible to the hunger-light ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... the organist gave effect to the presentation by a nod, and something like a shrug of the shoulders, which deprecated the Rector's conceited pomposity, and implied that if such an exceedingly unlikely contingency as their making friends with Mr Westray should ever happen, it would certainly not be due to any introduction of Canon Parkyn. Mr Joliffe, on the other hand, seemed fully to recognise the dignity to ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... the doom of the book is sealed, for the adventures of Bildad are not in themselves diverting—his love-affair with the giantess is as unfunny a thing as ever I yawned over—and if you cease to chuckle at the burlesque pomposity of the style there is nothing left. There are some things which do not lend themselves to sustained parody, and the manner of the Arabian Nights is one of them. But, as I say, I am not going to allow this book to shake my opinion that Mr. CAINE is one ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... cannot imagine any man consciously incurring the execration of his fellow-men. And yet there exist innumerable bores scattered through the length and breadth of our happy country, and carrying on their dismal business with an almost malignant persistency. Longwindedness, pomposity, the exaggeration of petty trivialities, the irresistible desire to magnify one's own wretched little achievements, to pose as the little hero of insignificant adventures, and to relate them to the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various
... "What pomposity of expression!" exclaimed Darvid, with a slight smile. "I observe more and more that exaggeration is a disease in my family. I should prefer simple speech ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... us up at the Rocher de Cancale, wished to enclose a bottle of Portugal water in the package. Said our first comic man, 'If this can make him happy, let him have it!' growling it out in a deep bass voice with the bourgeois pomposity that he can act to the life. Which things, my dear boy, ought to prove to you how much we care for our friends in adversity. Florine, whom I have had the weakness to forgive, begs you to send us an article on Nathan's ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... dictum; now, if ever, she would write humorously. The material was at hand, seething and crowding in her mind, in fact—the monumental dullness and complacent narrowness of the villagers, the egoism, the conceit, the bland shepherd-of-his-flock pomposity of John Graham. What more could a humorist desire? ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... again been silent for a short time, when the door opened, and in came the earl. His usual pomposity of demeanour was somewhat softened by a lachrymose air, which, in respect to his ward's grief, he put on as he turned the handle of the door; and he walked somewhat more gently than ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... one thing. There is no conflict between the gravestone of Gertrude and a comic-opera tune played by Mildred Wain. But there is everlasting conflict between the gravestone of Gertrude and the obscene pomposity of the hired mute: and there is everlasting conflict between the comic-opera tune and any mean or vulgar words to which it may be set. These, which man hath joined together, God shall most surely sunder. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Punch once said, with a sigh, on hearing that someone would have been one hundred and fifty years old if he had been alive at the present day) he must be "a orfle old angel now." The word "lunch" is short, crisp, and appetising. The word "luncheon" is of a certain pomposity, which, though it may suit the mansions of the great, is out of place when applied to the meals of active sportsmen. So we will continue, if you please, to speak of "lunch." And now for your question. My charming ROSE, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 12, 1892 • Various
... on the mind of Lander, that Clapperton was in some respects made the dupe of the pride, pomposity, and deception of the African sultan. It may be remembered that the sultan offered him land on the sea coast, on which to form a settlement, when it was subsequently discovered, that he was not in possession of an inch of territory within several hundred miles of the sea; the seaport of ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... bourgeois, proud of their accomplishments, considered their society as far superior in attractions to that of Ville-aux-Fayes, and repeated with comic pomposity the local dictum, "Soulanges is a town of society and social pleasures," it must not be supposed that Ville-aux-Fayes accepted this supremacy. The Gaubertin salon ridiculed ("in petto") the salon Soudry. By the manner in which Gaubertin remarked, "We are a financial community, engaged in ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... colonel," put in Sir Arthur, with a touch of his old pomposity; "the government shall know how its representative was delivered from the hands of these impious fiends. But bless me, I don't see that we are so much better off, after all. How are we going to get ...
— The River of Darkness - Under Africa • William Murray Graydon
... consequential fashion. He soon made himself a sort of medium between ourselves and his fellow-loafers. Overhearing us say that we wished to pass the New York frontier for the sake of tracing out the strata then under examination, he proceeded with much pomposity to declare to his deeply curious auditory, that "it was his opinion that the Governor of the State should confer upon these gentlemen discretionary powers to pass the limits of Connecticut, whenever ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... matters as religion and politics, it may seem trifling to illustrate the subject from little boys. But it is not trifling. The bane of philosophy is pomposity: people will not see that small things are the miniatures of greater, and it seems a loss of abstract dignity to freshen their minds by object lessons from what they know. But every boarding-school changes as a nation changes. Most of us may remember ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... informed me that there was royal blood in his veins, and I have no reason to doubt it. One had only to watch him running in pursuit of a moth or other winged insect to be struck by the essentially aristocratic swing of his wattles and the symmetrical curves of his graceful lobes; and the proud pomposity of his tail feathers irresistibly called to mind the old nobility and the Court of LOUIS QUATORZE. Pimple, our tabby kitten, looked indescribably ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... the greatest temerity for me to venture upon a controversy with him." Referring to a comparison which had been made of Conkling to Henry Winter Davis, Blaine continued: "The gentleman took it seriously, and it has given his strut additional pomposity. The resemblance is great; it is striking. Hyperion to a Satyr, Thersites to Hercules, mud to marble, dunghill to diamond, a singed cat to a Bengal tiger, a whining puppy to a roaring lion."—Congressional Globe, April 20, 1866, Vol. 37, Part ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... by which, on consideration of some few pence every week, we were each to receive a bird at Christmas. My pence were duly paid, and the rest is familiar to you. I am much indebted to you, sir, for a Scotch bonnet is fitted neither to my years nor my gravity." With a comical pomposity of manner he bowed solemnly to both of us and strode ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... ostentation, display, show, flourish, parade, etalage[Fr], pomp, array, state, solemnity; dash, splash, splurge, glitter, strut, pomposity; pretense, pretensions; showing off; fuss. magnificence, splendor; coup d'oeil[Fr]; grand doings. coup de theatre; stage effect, stage trick; claptrap; mise en scene[Fr]; tour de force; chic. demonstration, flying ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... irregularities of the management of the provinces ruled in the name of Caesar by prefects and procurators had notoriously extended to the provinces ruled by proconsuls and propraetors in the name of the senate. I had always disliked, despised and even hated Bambilio for his pomposity, self-esteem and bad manners. I rejoiced at the opportunity to ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... fare was apparently very creditably accomplished by the older. The cocher gave me a look and remarked whatever it is Paris drivers remark to Paris cab horses, pulling dully at the reins. We entered the station and I collapsed comfortably on a bench; the younger, seating himself with enormous pomposity at my side, adjusted his tunic with a purely feminine gesture expressive at once of pride and nervousness. Gradually my vision gained in focus. The station has a good many people in it. The number increases momently. A great many are girls. I am in a ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... in Gosport to the peerage, employed the doctor "to larn him to talk English;" and subsequently made him tutor to his son Dick, with a salary of [pounds]300 a year. Dr. Pangloss was a literary prig of ponderous pomposity. He talked of a "locomotive morning," of one's "sponsorial and patronymic appellations," and so on; was especially fond of quotations, to all of which he assigned the author, as "Lend me your ears. Shakespeare. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... he must be made to understand. It cannot have been put to him properly." Then, with a certain recovery of fullness and even pomposity in the voice, "I shall go and tell ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... proceed to the more immediate examination of the poem in its different parts. The beginning, say the critics, ought to be plain and simple—neither embellished with the flowers of poetry, nor turgid with pomposity of diction. In this how exactly does our author conform to the established opinion! ...
— English Satires • Various
... 1865, of M. Langlais, the fifth financier sent by Napoleon III to organize the finances of the empire, caused considerable excitement and aroused the hopes of the court. His appointment to succeed M. de Bonnefons had been heralded by the French official papers with much pomposity. ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... which seemed to imply a consciousness even in the wood and leather of the dignity of the person within. He, for his own part, though a graceful and very courtly personage, full of high talent, policy, and wit, had nothing about him at all of the pomposity of his vehicle; and at the moment which we refer to, namely, about two hours after nightfall, tired with his long journey, and seated with solitary thought, he had drawn a fur-cap lightly over his head, and, leaning back in the carriage, ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... celebrated Letter to Chesterfield, and the letter in which he tells MacPherson that he will not be 'deterred from detecting what he thinks a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian,' are as good specimens of the smashing repartee as anything in Boswell's reports. Nor, indeed, does his pomposity sink to mere verbiage so often as might be supposed. It is by no means easy to translate his ponderous phrases into simple words without losing some of their meaning. The structure of the sentences is compact, though they are too elaborately ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... the tray of sandwiches high overhead, for his style in waiting was florid, though polished. He walked with a faint, shuffling suggestion of a prance, a lissome pomposity adopted in obedience to the art-sense within him which bade him harmonize himself with occasions of state and fashion. His manner was the super-supreme expression of graciousness, but the graciousness was innocent, being but an affectation and nothing inward—for inwardly Genesis was humble. ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... leader in his profession, secured a rich clientage, and prospered greatly. In 1759 he was made physician to Christ's Hospital, where, however valued professionally, he is charged with being brutal and offensive to the poor; with indulging his fastidiousness, temper, and pomposity, and with forgetting that he owed anything to mere ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... a specimen of the ultra florid or bombastic style which may be said to depend upon the pomposity of verbosity for its effect, the latter is a specimen of simple natural Style. Needless to say it is to be preferred. The other should be avoided. It stamps the writer as a person of shallowness, ignorance and inexperience. It has been eliminated from the newspapers. ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... Dillon there. Though bent on meeting him with hauteur and proper reserve, on account of his damnable character, he was yet cowed by his superior knowledge, so that Tom Toole's address was strangely chequered with pomposity and alarm. ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... some unexpected neglect of those social "taboos" or laws of behaviour which we call modesty, decency, and propriety. They either cause indignation and resentment in the onlooker at the neglect of respect for the taboo, or, on the contrary, the natural man, long oppressed by pomposity or by the fetters of propriety imposed by society, suddenly feels a joyous sense of escape from his bonds, and bursts into laughter—the laughter of a return to vitality and nature—which is enormously encouraged and developed into "roars of merriment" by the sympathy of others around him who are ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... extinguished. Liberty seemed lost, and the romance of the desert to have died out in one moment! At the camping-ground I found rows of salaaming Lahulis drawn up, and Hassan Khan in a state which was a compound of pomposity and jubilant excitement. The tahsildar (really the Tibetan honorary magistrate), he said, had received instructions from the Lieutenant-Governor of the Panjab that I was on the way to Kylang, and was to 'want for nothing.' So twenty-four men, nine ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... and commenting earnestly as he read. I can just remember the titles of some of the works. There were the "Ordonnance of Philip le Bel on Single Combat"; the "Theatre of Honor," by Favyn, and a treatise "On the Permission of Duels," by Andiguier. He displayed, also, with much pomposity, Brantome's "Memoirs of Duels,"—published at Cologne, 1666, in the types of Elzevir—a precious and unique vellum-paper volume, with a fine margin, and bound by Derome. But he requested my attention particularly, and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... black skin, his ebullitions of unexpected ire, his turgid pomposity, and love of long terms, may make the reader smile; but they could hardly amuse his friends just then; everything that touched upon Dodd was too serious now. The surgeon sat up with him nearly all night: in the daytime those two ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... ceremonial hero. He has no psychology; he has not even any particular character; but he is made deliberately a hero—young, poor, brave, unimpeachable, and ultimately triumphant. He is, in short, the hero. Mr. Vincent Crummles had a colossal intellect; and I always have a fancy that under all his pomposity he saw things more keenly than he allowed others to see. The moment he saw Nicholas Nickleby, almost in rags and limping along the high road, he engaged him (you will remember) as first walking gentleman. He was right. Nobody could possibly be more ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... when one is like the princess who replied to a question on the state of her soul, 'At twenty one has no soul;' and she possesses the qualities that are so essential to style—natural eclat, originality of expression, grace, color, amplitude without pomposity and abundance without prolixity; moreover, she invents nothing, but, knowing how to observe and to express in perfection everything she had seen and felt, she is a witness and painter of her century: also, she loves nature—a sentiment very rare in ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... battle that he was planning. For the first time in his presence and over his maps, I saw that after all there was such a thing as the science of war, and that it was not always a fetish of elementary ideas raised to the nth degree of pomposity, as I had been led to believe by contact with other generals and staff-officers. Here at least was a man who dealt with it as a scientific business, according to the methods of science—calculating the weight and effect ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... the other half of the establishment. His personal appearance harmonised with his voice. His countenance was austere, and his manner overbearing. The latter trait may have been intensified by his low stature. It is a fact of general observation that there is no pomposity like the pomposity of littleness. Parson Plaford may be five feet four, but I would lay anything he is not five feet five. I will, however, do him the justice of saying that he read the lessons with clearness and good emphasis, ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... wrote his poem for him. He has no style. He was too conversant with Milton not to catch at times his master's manner, and he has fine Miltonic lines; but he has no assured poetic style of his own, like Milton. When he seeks to have a style he falls into ponderosity and pomposity. In the Excursion we have his style, as an artistic product of his own creation; and although Jeffrey completely failed to recognize Wordsworth's real greatness, he was yet not wrong in saying of the Excursion, as a work of poetic ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... countess, but his placid face showed less wear and tear,—a benevolent, kindly face, without any evidence of commanding intellect, but with no lack of sense in its pleasant lines; his form not tall, but upright and with an air of consequence,—a little pompous, but good-humouredly so,—the pomposity of the Grand Seigneur who has lived much in provinces, whose will has been rarely disputed, and whose importance has been so felt and acknowledged as to react insensibly on himself;—an excellent man; but when you glanced towards the high brow and dark eye of ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... So soft, so fleecy, so purely white, that at times they almost seemed like the wings of cherubim, striving to soar away and bear Mr. Brimberly into a higher and purer sphere. Again, what Protean whiskers were these, whose fleecy pomposity could overawe the most superior young footmen and reduce page-boys, tradesmen, and the lower orders generally, to a state of perspiring humility; to his equals how calmly aloof, how blandly dignified; and to those a misguided fate had ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... curse Morris was free; no man of great ability was ever less conceited. You will not find in his work a trace of that tired pomposity which tells us that the great man is showing off, or of that empty pretentious singularity which betrays the vanity of the lonely British artist. Morris was never the self-conscious master calling on sun and moon to stand and watch ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... Walter Skinner, a trace of his pomposity returning. "Thou askest me questions. If I answer thee false, I lie. If I answer thee true, I die. And truly, death were not much worse than this ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... attests withal his interest in more serious reading. The specific type of Roman character rather repelled him. Sulla had nothing of the blunt hauteur which the grandees of Rome were fond of displaying in presence of the Greeks, or of the pomposity of narrow-minded great men; on the contrary he freely indulged his humour, appeared, to the scandal doubtless of many of his countrymen, in Greek towns in the Greek dress, or induced his aristocratic companions to drive ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... very considerably, for Scott was wholly lacking in the pomposity that characterizes many little men. She wondered what had been the subject of their discussion. It had been connected with Isabel, she felt sure. She was glad to think that she had Scott to protect her, ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... literature, and many were the amusing stories he used to tell at that time, and in after life, of the titles and contents of the literary oddities he unearthed. If you chanced at any moment to alight upon any obscure book particularly curious from its pretentiousness and pomposity, from the audacity of its claim, or the obscurity and absurdity of its writing, you might be sure that Rossetti would prove familiar with it, and be able to recapitulate with infinite zest its salient features; but if you happened to drop upon ever so interesting an edition ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... old man. Yet, though signs of chastening thus outwardly declared themselves, in spirit he had regained tone and returned to his former high estate. Along with the revival of financial security had come a revival of pomposity, an addiction to patronage in manner and platitudes in speech. He had ceased to be humble and human, self-righteous self-complacency again ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... with the author's views and feelings. The descent is indeed heavy from his Bannockburn to his Waterloo: the presence, or all but visible reality of what his dreams cherished, seems to have overawed his imagination, and tamed it into a weak pomposity of movement. The burst of pure native enthusiasm upon the Scottish heroes that fell around the Duke of Wellington's person bears, however, the broadest marks of the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... It is a kind of family name, pronounced 'Ma-rill- yer,'" explained Mrs. Spruce with considerable pomposity; "Many folks never gets it right—it wants knowledge and practice. But if you remember the pictures in the gallery at the Manor, sir, you may call to mind one of the ancestresses of the Vancourts, painted in a vi'let velvet; ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... "That thing is going to attract attention. It's well written—you can take the pomposity out of it, here and there and it's novel. Our people like a bold strike, and it's going to shake them up tremendously to have serfdom advocated on high moral grounds as the only solution of the labor problem. You see, in the first place, he goes for their sympathies by the way ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... explode pretension, pedantry, dignity, pomposity; we get a feeling of joy whenever those who are superior come a cropper, which is increased when we feel that they have no right to their places. So the humorous technique deals with the get-rich-quick folk, the foolish nobleman, the politician, the priest (especially in the ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... signore; "why not arrange to live together, you and we? I hate throwing away money on mere pomposity and grandiosity and show. We always take a little furnished apartment, elle et moi. Then I go and buy provisions, bon marche—and she cooks them—and we have our meals better than at the hotel and at half the price! Join us, unless you like to throw ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... the conductor's chair with all the pomposity of a provincial borough official. He tapped for the coda with the touch of a king knighting an illustrious subject. And when he led the boys through the National Anthem, standing up in his place and facing the house, all lights up—well, there are ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... duty of raising a gallant name sunk into disrepute, and sacrificing our own inclination for the redecorating the mouldered splendour of those who have gone before us. If the confusion of idea occasioned by a vague pomposity of phrase, or the infant inculcation of a sentiment that is mistaken for a virtue, so often makes fools of the wise on the subject of ancestry; if it clouded even the sarcastic and keen sense of Brandon himself, we may forgive its influence over a girl so little versed in the arts of sound reasoning ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... issued from the London press in 1594, is a light production hastily sketched for a Court Festival, based upon the great romance of Ariosto, "but the superstructure presents the most extravagant deviations from Ariosto's plan. The pomposity of the diction is not amiss in the mouths of such stately personages as the Emperor of Africa, the Soldan of Egypt, the Prince of Mexico, the King of the ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... heavy clouds of death which were already girdling Paris, that flabby Cyclops, Gambetta, was to mouth his monstrous platitudes, and brood over the battle-smoke, a nightmare of pomposity and fanfaronade—in a balloon. All France was bowed down in shame at the sight of the grotesque convoy, who were proclaiming her destiny among nations, and their destiny to lead her to victory and "la gloire." A scorched, blood-soaked ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... curiously humble origin has 'literature,' contrasted with the magnitude of its present import. It is just 'litteral'—letters in their most primitive sense; and [Greek: grammata] is nought other. Nor can even all the pomposity of the 'belles-lettres' carry us any farther than the very fine 'letters' or litteral; while even Solomon So-so may take courage when he reflects (provided Solomon be ever guilty of reflecting) that the 'literati' have 'literally' nothing more profound ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... ask my will," he replied, with some pomposity, for who that has just gained an object of ambition can be humble?—"it is that you shut up this whisky shop, and betake yourself to a more decent way of life ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... Maria", tells how an Italian thief utilized his questionable art to replace a loss in his family. "To General Villa" is a peculiar piece of verse written last summer for the purpose of defying those who had charged its author with pedantry and pomposity. It has suffered somewhat at the hands of the printer; "Intrepido" being spelled "Intrepedo", and the word "own" being dropped from the clause "your own name can't write" in the third line of the second stanza. Also, the first of the Spanish ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... at our work again, when another military step sounded, and another sword rattled in the passage outside. This time Dominique's arm swung back the door with less pomposity, and Dominique's voice was a trifle less emphatic as he ushered ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... much to establish the innocence of Phineas Finn,—not for the love of Phineas, but for the love of innocence;—but not even to do that would he have lied. But he was a bad witness, and by his slowness, and by a certain unsustained pomposity which was natural to him, had already taught the jury to think that he was anxious to convict the prisoner. Two men in the Court, and two only, thoroughly understood his condition. Mr. Chaffanbrass saw it all, and intended without the ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... may not, but I'm not going to have my future wife conduct herself in a silly style without saying a word," he answered with youthful pomposity. ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... over, Tommy extended his hesitating invitation to Lady Harriet and his commanding officer to follow the newly wedded pair to the vestry. They went. Colonel Mansfield with a species of jocose pomposity specially assumed for the occasion, his wife, upright, thin-lipped, forbidding, ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... Oliver, but eat your food and be thankful,' said Mr. Bumble, in a tone of impressive pomposity. 'You're a going to be made ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... most people do. Before such words as 'yet' and 'but,' he without exception uses a semicolon. The word 'only,' he always puts in its correct place. In short, he is so academic as to savour somewhat of the pomposity ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... a grain-field," tender and devoted as is their character. Such traits caught a singular and imposing hue from the grave deportment of these men, so dignified that they might almost be accused of pomposity. It was next to impossible that they should not contract a taste for this stateliness, when we consider that they had almost always before them the most exquisite type of gravity of manner in the followers of Islam, whose qualities they appreciated ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... cry." The big man had lost all his pomposity, and was comforting his sweetheart as simply as a boy. "It's all been my fault. I've been doing wrong for years—trying to pull myself out of the mire by my bootstraps. By Gad, you're a man, Sam Yesler, that's what you are. ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... and temper. Accordingly, his style acquired something of the old elaboration, though the attempt to conform to the canons of a later age renders the structure disagreeably monotonous. His tendency to pomposity is not redeemed by the naivete and spontaneity of ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... There seem to be several causes for this exceptional superiority of certain long words. We may ascribe it partly to the fact that a voluminous, mouth-filling epithet is, by its very size, suggestive of largeness or strength; witness the immense pomposity of sesquipedalian verbiage: and when great power or intensity has to be suggested, this association of ideas aids the effect. A further cause may be that a word of several syllables admits of more emphatic articulation; and as emphatic articulation ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... are, of course, simple in structure. When they are in the form of passacaglias they may be huge in design and effect. The grandest pieces are the overtures and choruses. The overtures are often very noble, but without pomposity or grandiloquence; indeed, they move as if unconscious of their own tremendous strength. One may hear half a dozen bars before a stroke reveals, as by a flash of lightning, the artistic purpose with which the ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... President. It was no new access of official pomposity, but the man's natural bearing, that maintained a lofty reserve at these public receptions. Possibly, too, he may have felt the necessity of maintaining the prerogative of the Federal head of all these independent, but now united, States. Hence, on his visit to Boston, soon after his inauguration, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... Puckler-Muskau, Baron Korff, General de Pfuel, and von Buelow the pianist, coming to lunch, and perhaps Wagner, if he could finish his rehearsal of "Lohengrin" in time, he was not sorry to see his table relieved of the dull pomposity and brilliant watch-chain of the pillar of Prague society. How mean to hide one's Judaism! What a burden to belong to such a race, degenerate sons of a great but long-vanished past, unable to slough the slave traits ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Napoleon which was then as now acceptable that side of the Rhine. It was not done with pomposity, but rather with the exuberance of a man whose purse and letter of ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... earth which made them a partial roof—"along with a lot of other bright ideas, by a gentleman named Charles Fort, who took a lot of pleasure in pricking what he considered to be vastly over-inflated scientific pomposity. He gathered together four book loads of reported incidents of unexplainable happenings which he dared the scientists of his day to explain. And one of his bright suggestions was that such phenomena as the vast artificial earthworks found in Ohio and Indiana were ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... incomparable conclusion of the whole poem, which are among the last a wise reader would wish to miss. Moreover, where the story is dullest it has things which give, perhaps, the most astonishing proof of Milton's power of style. It is true that he does himself occasionally fall into the empty pomposity which characterized his eighteenth-century imitators who fancied that big words could turn prose into poetry. So he talks of dried fruits as "what by frugal {191} storing firmness gains To nourish, and superfluous moist consumes." But the thing ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... him a quick look—his senior warden was trembling! The cloak of careful pomposity with which for so many years this poor maimed soul had covered its scars, was dropping away. He was clutching at it—clearing his throat, swinging his foot, making elaborate show of ease; but the cloak was slipping and slipping, and there was the man of fifty-six cringing ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... one a Frenchman the other an Englishman [Exclusion], well-known for the pomposity and sonority of their style of writing [Inclusion], were born in the same year, 1709, and died the same year 1784, a double Concurrence—Lefranc de Pompignan—[pompous In. ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... Artificiality, affectation, pomposity, mouthing, undue vehemence, monotony, intoning, and everything that detracts from the simplicity and genuine fervor of the speech should be avoided. Too much emphasis may drive a thought beyond the mark, and a conscious determination to make a "great speech" may keep the speaker ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... the gayest girl in the whole county of Wexford, with half the bachelors at her feet, and plenty of smiles and encouragement for every one of them, Bell Barry adopted a dignified reserve that almost amounted to pomposity, and was as starch as any Quakeress. Many a man renewed his offers to the widow, who had been smitten by the charms of the spinster; but Mrs. Barry refused all offers of marriage, declaring that she lived now for her son only, and for ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... drew himself erect with ridiculous pomposity. Now there are times when the bravest and wisest thing a brave and wise man can do is take to his heels. I have heard my Uncle Jack MacKenzie say that vice and liquor and folly are best frustrated by flight; and all three seemed to be embodied in Louis Laplante that night. A stupid ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... of, the two extremes of life—God and the devil. I mean on a Wagner night! Here is the inspiration of a sainted poet, here is ecstasy unthinkable, flung wide and glorious as the dawn; and here is all the sodden and brutal vulgarity of wealth, deaf, blind, and strutting in its insolent pomposity. ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... to my earthly government; Ease is her name, and she has damned more men than all ye together, and very few would ye catch without her. For in war, or danger, or hunger, or sickness, who would value tobacco, or money, or the pomposity of Pride, or would entertain a thought of welcoming either Wantonness or Sloth? Or who in such straits, would permit themselves to be distracted either by Hypocrisy or Inconsiderateness? No, no! they are too awake then, ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... saying nothing and sawing wood," said Miss Jones, knowingly. "He's too foxy to quit the firm as old Pomposity did! Probably he thinks it won't last, and he's willing to wait ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... terrible in his exposition of a battle that he was planning. For the first time in his presence and over his maps, I saw that after all there was such a thing as the science of war, and that it was not always a fetish of elementary ideas raised to the nth degree of pomposity, as I had been led to believe by contact with other generals and staff-officers. Here at least was a man who dealt with it as a scientific business, according to the methods of science—calculating ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... ferocity of the Indians and their eagerness to butcher the friends of independence, and he graciously promised protection to those who should return to their duty. The proclamation was so far from answering the general's intention that it was derided by the people as a model of pomposity. ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... the office of Mayor of Worcester the first year of the life of the city. He was, as I remember him, the very embodiment of dignity and aristocracy. He had a diffuse and rather inflated style, both in public speaking and in private conversation. His dignity had a bare suspicion of pomposity in it. He looked with great disdain upon the simplicity of behavior of some of his successors, and their familiarity with all classes of the people. He came into my office one morning full of an intense disgust ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... the heavy task of Beginning breeds discouragement, anger, vexation, irritability, bad style, pomposity and infinitives split from helm to saddle, and metaphors as mixed as the Carlton. But it is just true enough to remain fast in the mind, caught, as it were, by one finger. For all things (you will notice) are very difficult in their origin, and why, no one can ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... impressions of Bower have continued to grow unfavourable. Plainly, he cares next to nothing for the lectures. There is a curious pomposity about him, too, which grates upon me. I shouldn't have been at all sorry if he had been the seceder; he's bored terribly, I know, yet he naturally feels bound to keep his place. But I'm very sorry that ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... Clark, Jackson Elder, young Dr. McGanum, and James Madison Howland, teetering on their toes near the stove, conversed with the sedate pomposity of the commercialist. In details the men were unlike, yet they said the same things in the same hearty monotonous voices. You had to look at them to see which ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... also carried the chob or silver mace before the king. This was about five feet long with a knob at the upper end as thick as a man's wrist. The mace-bearer was known as Chobdar, and it was his duty to carry messages and announce visitors; this latter function he performed with a degree of pomposity truly Asiatic, dwelling with open mouth very audibly on some of the most sounding and emphatic syllables in a way that appeared to strangers almost ludicrous, [493] as shown in the following instance: "On advancing, the Chobdars or heralds proclaimed the titles of this princely cow-keeper ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... my meaning," returned Walter Skinner, a trace of his pomposity returning. "Thou askest me questions. If I answer thee false, I lie. If I answer thee true, I die. And truly, death were not much worse than ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... all persons of taste," said the head of the establishment, coming forward with that tradesman's suavity in which pomposity is agreeably blended with subservience. The Englishwoman took up her eyeglass and scanned the manufacturer from head to foot, unwilling to understand that the man before her was eligible for Parliament and dined at ...
— Gaudissart II • Honore de Balzac
... would burst. Actors begin where militia colonels, Fifth avenue rectors and Chautauqua orators leave off. The most modest of them (barring, perhaps, a few unearthly traitors to the craft) matches the conceit of the solitary pretty girl on a slow ship. In their lofty eminence of pomposity they are challenged only by Anglican bishops and grand opera tenors. I have spoken of the danger they run of bursting. In the case of tenors it must sometimes actually happen; even the least of them swells visibly as he sings, and ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... Dr. Hoxton little knows what you have been doing. It is a mockery, as I have always said, to see that old fellow sit wrapped up in his pomposity, eating his good dinners, and knowing no more what goes on among his boys than this umbrella! But he will listen to me—and we'll make those boys confess the whole— ay, and have up Ballhatchet himself, to say what your traffic with him was; and we will see what old ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... Professor?" said the lady, with some little pomposity of manner. "You were very wise to stay out here on so lovely a ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... seizes him I wait!' created laughter; it came in contrast with an extraordinary pomposity of self-satisfaction exhibited by Count Orso—the flower-faced, tun-bellied basso, Lebruno. It was irresistible. He stood swollen out like a morning cock. To make it further telling, he took off his yellow bonnet with a black-gloved hand, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... brown visage was swelling with wrath; when my better genius prevailed, He probably recollected that he was sent as my protector, and that the office would not have been fulfilled according to his instructions, by running me through the midriff. But, with all his pomposity, he had the national good-nature; and when we sat down to our chicken and bottle of Tinto in one of those delicious valleys, he was full of remorse for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... only been rolled out. He walked with his coat flying open, his thumbs stuck into the arm-holes of his waistcoat, so as to throw his shoulders back and increase his horizontal dimensions. He also held his head well aft, which threw his chest and stomach well forward. He was the prototype of pomposity and good-nature, and he strutted like ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... He hated a plug-hat. He disliked Col. Crockett Shaw, for Shaw was a man who employed politics as a business. Colonel Shaw was carrying his shoulders well back and seemed to be taller than usual, his new air of pomposity making him a head thrust above the horde. Colonel Shaw offensively banged the door behind himself. Mac Tavish removed a package of time-sheets that covered a pile of paper-weights. Colonel Shaw came stamping ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... Binkie, by studying the ancient and modern orators with great assiduity, and by speaking unceasingly at the debating societies. But though he had a fine flux of words, and delivered his little voice with great pomposity and pleasure to himself, and never advanced any sentiment or opinion which was not perfectly trite and stale, and supported by a Latin quotation; yet he failed somehow, in spite of a mediocrity which ought ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 'like the man that owned it.' Bixiou, who came to find us up at the Rocher de Cancale, wished to enclose a bottle of Portugal water in the package. Said our first comic man, 'If this can make him happy, let him have it!' growling it out in a deep bass voice with the bourgeois pomposity that he can act to the life. Which things, my dear boy, ought to prove to you how much we care for our friends in adversity. Florine, whom I have had the weakness to forgive, begs you to send us an article on Nathan's ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... learned the art of business, occupied only five shabby rooms of crepuscular windows and perpetually dusty corners, and hard, glistening wall-paint, in a converted (but not sanctified) old dwelling-house on West Eighteenth Street. The faculty were six: Mr. Whiteside, an elaborate pomposity who smoothed his concrete brow as though he had a headache, and took obvious pride in being able to draw birds with Spencerian strokes. Mr. Schleusner, who was small and vulgar and declasse and really knew something about business. A shabby man like a broken-down ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... formed by nature to become a royal favourite, unassuming, remarkably complaisant, possessing a refined taste, with a good-natured disposition, not handsome, but well formed, and untainted by haughtiness or pomposity. ...
— The Secret Memoirs of Louis XV./XVI, Complete • Madame du Hausset, an "Unknown English Girl" and the Princess Lamballe
... course, simple in structure. When they are in the form of passacaglias they may be huge in design and effect. The grandest pieces are the overtures and choruses. The overtures are often very noble, but without pomposity or grandiloquence; indeed, they move as if unconscious of their own tremendous strength. One may hear half a dozen bars before a stroke reveals, as by a flash of lightning, the artistic purpose with which the parts are moving, and the enormous ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... Daniel Dowlas, when he was raised from the chandler's shop in Gosport to the peerage, employed the doctor "to larn him to talk English;" and subsequently made him tutor to his son Dick, with a salary of [pounds]300 a year. Dr. Pangloss was a literary prig of ponderous pomposity. He talked of a "locomotive morning," of one's "sponsorial and patronymic appellations," and so on; was especially fond of quotations, to all of which he assigned the author, as "Lend me your ears. Shakespeare. Hem!" or "Verbum sat. Horace. Hem!" He also indulged in an affected ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... being too far gone to step into the breach. It may be of interest to say that the Tinkletown detective was the sensation of the hour. The crowd, merry once more, lauded him to the skies for the manner in which the supposed culprits had been trailed, and the marshal's pomposity grew almost ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... benefactor to the Church in general, and to the Bishop of Markborough in particular, instinctively he knew that the Bishop's taste ungratefully disapproved of him; and the knowledge contributed an extra shade of pomposity to his manner. ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... have heard of my method from others; have heard that it differs widely, in its frank simplicity, from the empty pomposity of the old-school "orthodox" elements, though of the principles of the old-school teaching they have really little or no conception, beyond a crude, unwholesome, fear of the unknown, consequent upon the, very necessary, veil of mystery with which its votaries surround themselves—a semi-superstitious ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... not arrange to live together, you and we? I hate throwing away money on mere pomposity and grandiosity and show. We always take a little furnished apartment, elle et moi. Then I go and buy provisions, bon marche—and she cooks them—and we have our meals better than at the hotel and at half the price! Join us, unless you ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... gold and white ball-room of the Colonade the True Treds were ushered with quite an imposing ceremony a few hours later; and if Grace and Cleo wanted to giggle, the pomposity of the uniformed functionaries forbade any ...
— The Girl Scouts at Sea Crest - The Wig Wag Rescue • Lillian Garis
... in our day, a writer of the Peacock[430] family. Nevertheless, to one who is accustomed to our style of things, it is comic to read the dialogue of a jealous husband, a suspected wife, a faithless maid-servant, a tool of a nurse, a wrong-headed pomposity of a priest, and a sensible physician, all talking Dr. Moore through their masks. Certainly an Irish soldier does say "by Jasus," and a cockney footman "this here" and "that there"; and this and the like is all the painting of characters which is effected out of the ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... being asked his opinion of the title of a very small volume remarkable for its pomposity, replied, "That it was similar to placing an eight-and-forty pounder at the door of ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... of saying pretension and pomposity do have a wonderful effect here in New York. I don't know whether it was the missionary or the plenipotentiary that brought my cousin to her oats, but rather think it was the latter—having a foreign twang to it, of course, ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... imagine any man consciously incurring the execration of his fellow-men. And yet there exist innumerable bores scattered through the length and breadth of our happy country, and carrying on their dismal business with an almost malignant persistency. Longwindedness, pomposity, the exaggeration of petty trivialities, the irresistible desire to magnify one's own wretched little achievements, to pose as the little hero of insignificant adventures, and to relate them to the whole world in every dull detail, regardless ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various
... Coltman, was asked what his trade was, and replied that "he represented the house of Dobson and Hobson," he showed himself to be a vulgar, mean-souled wretch, and was most properly reprimanded by his lordship. To be a bagman is to be humble, but not of necessity vulgar. Pomposity is vulgar, to ape a higher rank than your own is vulgar, for an ensign of militia to call himself captain is vulgar, or for a bagman to style himself the "representative" of Dobson and Hobson. The honest auctioneer, then, will not call his room his study; but his "private room," ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... said the doctor, that night, concluding his narrative of busy days in the city, "but I have been appointed," with a great affectation of pomposity, "the ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... of the Cossaean sovereigns does not appear to have been a happy one, in spite of the variety and pomposity of the titles which they continued to assume. They enjoyed but short lives, and we know that at least three or four of them—Kallimasin, Burnaburiash I., and Kurigalzu I. ascended the throne in succession ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... party undergoes the torments of the lost. Yet no one can listen, even casually, to his conversation without appreciating the fine manner, full both of dignity and of courtesy; the utter freedom from pomposity, formality, and self-assertion, and the agreeable dash of genuine cynicism, which modifies, though it does not mask, the flavour of his fun. After a visit to Hatfield in 1868, Bishop Wilberforce wrote in his ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... I won't disgrace you, and that I'll put on a grand manner that will fill those worthy notabilities and their wives with awe and reverence. And now, I'd best go," she added whimsically, "ere my good resolutions break down before your pomposity . . . I suppose the louts from the village will be again braced up in those moth-eaten liveries, and the bottles of thin Medoc purchased surreptitiously at a local grocer's will be duly smothered in the dust of ages. . . . All right! all right! I'm going. ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... remember the titles of some of the works. There were the "Ordonnance of Philip le Bel on Single Combat"; the "Theatre of Honor," by Favyn, and a treatise "On the Permission of Duels," by Andiguier. He displayed, also, with much pomposity, Brantome's "Memoirs of Duels,"—published at Cologne, 1666, in the types of Elzevir—a precious and unique vellum-paper volume, with a fine margin, and bound by Derome. But he requested my attention particularly, and with an air of mysterious sagacity, to a thick octavo, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... is a kind of family name, pronounced 'Ma-rill- yer,'" explained Mrs. Spruce with considerable pomposity; "Many folks never gets it right—it wants knowledge and practice. But if you remember the pictures in the gallery at the Manor, sir, you may call to mind one of the ancestresses of the Vancourts, painted in a vi'let ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... her, having indeed undergone a hundred pertnesses from the imperious little lady, now gave a disrespectful and ridiculous account of Madam Esmond, made merry with her pomposity and immense pretensions, and entertained General Braddock with anecdotes regarding her, until his ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the siege of Troy (this is generally considered spurious). According to Alcidamas, the highest aim of the orator was the power of speaking extempore on every conceivable subject. Aristotle (Rhet. iii. 3) criticizes his writings as characterized by pomposity of style and an extravagant use of poetical epithets and compounds and far-fetched metaphors. Of other works only fragments and the titles have survived: Messeniakos, advocating the freedom of the Messenians and containing the sentiment that "all are by ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Colonel Starbottle made his appearance next day upon the streets with somewhat of his usual pomposity, a little restrained by the presence of his nephew, who accompanied him, and who, as a universal favorite, also exercised some restraint upon the curious and impertinent. But Culpepper's face wore a look of anxiety quite at variance with ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Cathedral—ask it whether I have not loved it, adored it, worshipped it as I've worshipped no woman. Ask it whether I have not been faithful, drunkard and sot as I am. And ask it what it thinks of you—of your patronage and pomposity and conceit. When have you thought of the Cathedral and its beauty, and not always of yourself and your grandeur?...Why, man, we're sick of you, all of us from the top man in the place to the smallest boy. And the Cathedral is ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... promised several delightfully busy mornings.... Of course the setting out for Mercer had been postponed; there was no possibility of moving Eleanor for the present; so Maurice's "business career," as he called it, with grinning pomposity, had to be delayed—Eleanor turned white at the mere suggestion of convalascing at Green Hill without him! Consequently Maurice, when not worshiping his wife, had nothing to do, and Edith had seized the opportunity to make him useful.... "We'll shingle my henhouse," she had announced. Maurice ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... that had been bestowed on him, and my consequent resolution to dislike him, I was pleased and familiar with him before I had been ten minutes in his company. Lord Kilrush introduced him to me, with great pomposity, as a gentleman of talents, for whom he and his brother O'Toole interested themselves much. This air of patronage, I saw, disgusted Mr. Devereux; and instead of suffering himself to be shown off, he turned the conversation ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... occupied with some wood-carving, when the constables appeared in the yard. Charlotte Arlabosse rushed up to him and seized his arm, but he shook her off, saying: "Let them have their way, the abscess has been ripe a long time." Stepping forward to meet the gendarmes with satirical pomposity, he cried: "Your ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... "Ecclesiastical Polity" only too readily, so that much of his work of that winter, the more philosophical part of vol. ii., was damaged by inversions, and Elizabethan quaintness as of ruff and train, long epexegetical sentences, and far-sought pomposity of diction. It was only when he had waded through the chaos which he set himself to survey, that he could lay aside his borrowed stilts, and stand on his own feet in the Tintoret descriptions—rather stiff, ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... institution: aristocracy is a sin; generally a very venial one. It is merely the drift or slide of men into a sort of natural pomposity and praise of the powerful, which is the most easy and obvious affair in ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... Christmas Day. I am bound, however, to confess that the "good will" becomes a trifle strident towards nightfall. Many things conduce to this. The children are suffering from overfeeding; Mother is sick of Aunt Maria, her husband's sister; and Father is more than fed up with the pomposity of Uncle John. There is a general and half-uttered yearning among everybody to go upstairs and lie down. The jollifications of the coming evening, when the grown-ups come into their own and the children are being sick ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... began to vociferate "prologue, prologue, prologue," when Wignell finding them resolute without moving from the spot, without pausing, or changing his tone of voice, but in all the pomposity of tragedy, went on as if it were ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... at once. He is Lord Loam, settled down to the new conditions, and enjoying life heartily as handy-man about the happy home. He is comfortably attired in skins. He is still stout, but all the flabbiness has dropped from him; gone too is his pomposity; his eye is clear, brown his skin; he could ...
— The Admirable Crichton • J. M. Barrie
... the Opposition, and Sir Henry has resigned with the worst possible grace, having forfeited any regret that might have been felt for his overthrow by the abuse which he lavished on his opponents when he saw that the elections were going against him, and the ridiculous pomposity with which he has told the electors that they were not educated up to appreciating him. As to the cause of his fall, it may partly be attributed to the opposition of the Roman Catholics or denominational-education party, and of the publicans; but it is chiefly due to a strong feeling throughout ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... business in small matters, how can you hope to succeed when you go out into life?" he asked with some pomposity. He had intended, when he opened his mouth, to say something very different. His pomposity, he felt, grew out of his embarrassment; he had a dim feeling that he ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... Colonel Tom fired his guns. Walking up and down in the room before the men, sitting at a long table or in chairs tilted against the walls, he began talking with all of his old flamboyant pomposity of the past glories of the Rainey Company. Sam watched him quietly thinking of the exhibition as something detached and apart from the business of the meeting. He remembered a question that had come into his head when he was a schoolboy and had got his first peep into a school history. There had ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... almost ill with laughing. This Mr. B—y half convulses me ; yet I cannot make you laugh by writing his speeches, because it is the manner which accompanies them, that, more than the matter, renders them so peculiarly ridiculous. His extreme pomposity, the solemn stiffness of his person, the conceited twinkling of his little old eyes, and the quaint importance of his delivery, are so much more like some pragmatical old coxcomb represented on the stage, than like anything in real and common life, that I think, were I a man, I should sometimes ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... the chiefs unworthy of the scene to which they had been called. There was the Speaker, LOWTHER, his brow beaming with the good-humour which enabled him to abate pomposity without injuring the feelings even of the pompous, and to calm with a happy phrase the agitated waters of debate. There were ASQUITH, strong in the affection of his friends, and LLOYD GEORGE, braced to action by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 29, 1914 • Various
... all depends, for the individual, upon how he is doing his work. If he has other people in mind all the time, and does his work for them, and not to be praised for it, then all is well. But if he is thinking of his credit and his position, then he does not grow at all; that is pomposity—a very youthful thing indeed; but the worst case of all is if a man sees that the world must be helped and made, and that one can win credit thus, and so engages in work of that kind, and deals in all the jargon of ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... midst of it all Dr. Rathbone came in, and of course, man-like and doctor-like, with pretended pomposity, said: "I told you so. What did I say? Now Mrs. Porter, no more scolding over the ways of horses, a good horse is a delight, and a good daughter ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... these were! So soft, so fleecy, so purely white, that at times they almost seemed like the wings of cherubim, striving to soar away and bear Mr. Brimberly into a higher and purer sphere. Again, what Protean whiskers were these, whose fleecy pomposity could overawe the most superior young footmen and reduce page-boys, tradesmen, and the lower orders generally, to a state of perspiring humility; to his equals how calmly aloof, how blandly dignified; ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... rejoined the good-natured Sham Rao, with a touch of pomposity. "And so I hope I may be allowed to say that I have understood and duly appreciated their most recent developments. I have just finished studying the magnificent Anthropogenesis of Haeckel, and have carefully discussed in my own mind his logical, ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... one to whom he could open his heart, Johnson himself was no less willing to look the matter in the face, and even during the long summer days, when he had begun to live upon his wardrobe, piece by piece, he still kept up; although some of his pomposity went, along with the Prince Albert coat and the shiny hat. He now wore a shiny coat, and less showy head-gear. For a couple of weeks, too, he disappeared, and as he returned with some money, it was fair to presume that he ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... excessive "deportment" which is the best known feature of Johnson's style. Of another feature often found in it by hostile critics less need be said because it is not really there at all. Johnson is frequently accused of verbosity. If that word means merely pomposity it has already been discussed. If it means, as it should mean, the use of superfluous words adding nothing to the sense, few authors are so seldom guilty of it as Johnson. There are many good writers, Scott, for instance, ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... obliterated from my mind; but I remember that he became very warm and intemperate in his expressions; upon which Johnson rose, and quietly walked away. When he had retired, his antagonist took his revenge, as he thought, by saying, 'He has a most ungainly figure, and an affectation of pomposity, unworthy of a ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... or an affected humility are alike despicable. There is a deficient dignity in Robertson's; but the haughtiness is now to our purpose. This is called by the French, "la morgue litteraire," the surly pomposity of literature. It is sometimes used by writers who have succeeded in their first work, while the failure of their subsequent productions appears to have given them a literary hypochondriasm. Dr. Armstrong, after his classical poem, never shook hands cordially with the public for not relishing ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... in The Hundred Worst Books, and a Mrs. L., a native of Rhode Island, but "by adoption a westerner," as she explains in her introduction. If it were a question of which had the less poetic merit it would be hard indeed to decide between them, but as to the sincerity of the one and the pomposity of the other, there can be no doubt. The Sweet Singer plays upon the strings of her own heart in a way that makes your eyes grow dim. She has moments of modesty, too, about her work that are very gratifying. But Mrs. L. is cold and egotistical; lifted ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... clarity of the green stones, appeared. She had always been more or less indifferent to public opinion, but it had been a careless thoughtless indifference; it had not possessed the insolent twist of the past fortnight. To receive the cut direct from a man whose pomposity and mental density had excited her wit and amusement, surprised her even if it did not hurt. It had rudely awakened her to the fact that her independence might be leading her into a labyrinth. She was compelled to admit that at home she would have avoided Warrington, ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... of that appointment was well founded. I wrote that opinion to Mr. Jefferson at the time, and I was frank enough to say the same thing to Morris—that it was an unfortunate appointment? His prating, insignificant pomposity, rendered him at once offensive, suspected, and ridiculous; and his total neglect of all business had so disgusted the Americans, that they proposed drawing up a protest against him. He carried this neglect to such an extreme, that it was necessary to inform him of it; and I asked him one day, if ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... character, though here a little softened, prevails a good deal, as the continued boasting about their town proves, and a certain pomposity in their demeanour, which, however, is harmless and amusing. We were in the habit of employing a baker, who made what was called English bread, and the magnificent manner in which he paid his visits to our domicile was very ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... how to speak the truth. He would have sacrificed much to establish the innocence of Phineas Finn,—not for the love of Phineas, but for the love of innocence;—but not even to do that would he have lied. But he was a bad witness, and by his slowness, and by a certain unsustained pomposity which was natural to him, had already taught the jury to think that he was anxious to convict the prisoner. Two men in the Court, and two only, thoroughly understood his condition. Mr. Chaffanbrass saw it all, and intended without the slightest scruple to take advantage of ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... long as she sets that prodigious value upon herself, upon her name, upon her outward appearance, and indulges in that intolerable pomposity; as long as she goes parading abroad, like Solomon in all his glory; as long as she goes to bed—as I believe she does—with a turban and a bird of paradise in it, and a court train to her night-gown; as long as she is so insufferably virtuous and condescending; ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... bid the Greeks attack Persia, we know what he would have thought of Macaulay's antithesis. He blames Xenophon for a poor pun, and Plato, less justly, for mere figurative badinage. It would be an easy task to ransack contemporaries, even great contemporaries, for similar failings, for pomposity, for the florid, for sentences like processions of intoxicated torch-bearers, for pedantic display of cheap erudition, for misplaced flippancy, for nice derangement of epitaphs wherein no adjective is used which is appropriate. With a library of cultivated ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... to the other half of the establishment. His personal appearance harmonised with his voice. His countenance was austere, and his manner overbearing. The latter trait may have been intensified by his low stature. It is a fact of general observation that there is no pomposity like the pomposity of littleness. Parson Plaford may be five feet four, but I would lay anything he is not five feet five. I will, however, do him the justice of saying that he read the lessons with clearness and good emphasis, and that he strove to prevent his criminal congregation from ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... and indignation in fine flowery language, which he punctuated with theatrical gestures. His eloquence was that of a tribune of the romantic school, and as one listened to him one could divine that in spite of all his pomposity he was really a worthy, tender-hearted and somewhat foolish man. That afternoon he was stirred by genuine emotion; his heart bled at the thought of his disastrous destiny, he felt that a whole world was crumbling with himself. Ah! what a cry of despair he stifled, the cry of the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... dignified swagger about the vehicle itself, which seemed to imply a consciousness even in the wood and leather of the dignity of the person within. He, for his own part, though a graceful and very courtly personage, full of high talent, policy, and wit, had nothing about him at all of the pomposity of his vehicle; and at the moment which we refer to, namely, about two hours after nightfall, tired with his long journey, and seated with solitary thought, he had drawn a fur-cap lightly over his head, and, leaning back in the carriage, ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... creep in mud, To eels we may compare his blood; His blood delights in mud to run, Witness his lazy, lousy son! Puff'd up with pride and insolence, Without a grain of common sense. See with what consequence he stalks! With what pomposity he talks! See how the gaping crowd admire The stupid blockhead and the liar! How long shall vice triumphant reign? How long shall mortals bend to gain? How long shall virtue hide her face, And leave her votaries in disgrace? —Let ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... suggestiveness of the words, the cheap passions which they implied, the leer and pomposity with which they had been uttered by the comedian, the unhealthy, narrow-chested, pavement-bred audience by which the effort had been greeted with applause, the total uncleanness and unnaturalness of city-life, came vividly home ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... reputation, when one is like the princess who replied to a question on the state of her soul, 'At twenty one has no soul;' and she possesses the qualities that are so essential to style—natural eclat, originality of expression, grace, color, amplitude without pomposity and abundance without prolixity; moreover, she invents nothing, but, knowing how to observe and to express in perfection everything she had seen and felt, she is a witness and painter of her century: also, she loves nature—a sentiment very rare in ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... little on his professional pomposity to bolster up a certain lack of confidence in himself, and stripped of this legal regalia he shriveled to a very ordinary ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... stranded codfish with their tongues out. They looked like a series of caricatures of an American politician, a square-headed ponderous man, who had once dined with her father. He had the same appearance of imbecile gravity, the same enormous pomposity. The copper spouts were so many ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... laughs at our schools sometimes! Education, so-called, is a fine thing, and might be a better thing; but there is an education, that of life, which, when seconded by a pure will to learn, leaves the schools behind, even as the horse of the desert would leave behind the slow pomposity of the common-fed goose. For life is God's school, and they that will listen to the Master there will learn at God's speed. For one moment, I am ashamed to say, I was envious of Shepherd, and repined that, now old Rogers ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... confidence; and then, turning over his shoulder, whispers our foibles to our neighbour. What would Sir Roger de Coverley be without his follies and his charming little brain-cracks?(93) If the good knight did not call out to the people sleeping in church, and say "Amen" with such a delightful pomposity: if he did not make a speech in the assize-court a propos de bottes, and merely to show his dignity to Mr. Spectator:(94) if he did not mistake Madam Doll Tearsheet for a lady of quality in Temple Garden: if he were wiser than he is: if he had not his humour to salt his life, and were ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... weighed heavily upon Abrahm Kantor in avoirdupois only. He was himself plus eighteen years, fifty pounds, and a new sleek pomposity that was absolutely oleaginous. It shone roundly in his face, doubling of chin, in the bulge of waistcoat, heavily gold-chained, and in eyes that behind the gold-rimmed glasses gave sparklingly forth his estate ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... England he was 'My Lorded' and 'Your Lordshiped' everywhere, until he had gotten quite used to the dignity of it. But when he stepped on the dock at New York, one of his lay intimates took all the pomposity out of him by a sound slap on the back and the ...
— Charred Wood • Myles Muredach
... he called a "shore billet," was astonished at the importance of transactions (other than relating to shipping) which take place on dry land. Almost every event out of the usual daily course "marked an epoch" for him or else was "history"; unless with his pomposity struggling with a discomfited droop of his rubicund, rather handsome face, set off by snow-white close hair and short whiskers, he ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... in and shook hands gravely and with much dignity, especially with Mr. Kennedy, whose career as a statesman he had always greatly admired. St. George often said, in speaking of this manner of the Scotchman's, that Prim's precise pomposity was entirely due to the fact that he had swallowed himself and couldn't digest the meal; that if he would once in a while let out a big, hearty laugh it might split his skin wide enough for him to get a ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... should be held erect, as if the person to whom it belongs were not afraid to look the world in the face, and the chest by all means be allowed to expand. At the same time, everything like strutting or pomposity must be carefully avoided. An easy, firm, and erect posture is alone desirable. In walking, it is necessary to bear in mind that the locomotion is to be performed entirely by the legs. Awkward persons rock from side to side, helping forward each leg alternately ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... clouds of death which were already girdling Paris, that flabby Cyclops, Gambetta, was to mouth his monstrous platitudes, and brood over the battle-smoke, a nightmare of pomposity and fanfaronade—in a balloon. All France was bowed down in shame at the sight of the grotesque convoy, who were proclaiming her destiny among nations, and their destiny to lead her to victory and ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... our superiors. Unlike our authors, who, on those subjects which address the heart and reason jointly, adopt the style of a treatise on the differential calculus; and when pure science is their topic, lead us to suppose (if it were not for their disgusting pomposity) they had chosen for their model the florid confusion of a tenth-rate novel;—the French write on scientific subjects with simplicity and precision, and on moral, aesthetic, and theoretical questions with spirit, earnestness, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... world, but always retaining a sympathy for the scholar's life and temper. Accordingly, his style acquired something of the old elaboration, though the attempt to conform to the canons of a later age renders the structure disagreeably monotonous. His tendency to pomposity is not redeemed by the naivete and ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... support from one of the tablets with which my tablet will be colleague, the tablet that commemorates the first Sir Henry Strachey, the Secretary of Clive and a man who was for forty years and more a Member of the House of Commons. This epitaph has not the usual flowery pomposity that one would expect to find in the case of a man of his age and occupation and position. It is reticent, if conventional. One phrase, however, stands out. Henry Strachey is described as "an active friend." ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... wonderful satisfaction of knowing that I have been appreciated in my own time, and that's more than some of the world's best poets, philosophers, and other servants of mankind could have said. The superdalliance of some and the pomposity and congential insufficiency of others have always been a warning to me, and when opportunity sallied forth from her hiding place I never failed to recognise her queenly presence and extend a cead-mile-failte, and make of her my own, so to speak. Such was the way of Wellington and his contemporary ...
— Duty, and other Irish Comedies • Seumas O'Brien
... words, as well as the awfulness of the place, and the august character of the assembly to which they are addressed, sufficiently indicate the manner in which they ought to be uttered. Instead of this Mr. Cooper (no doubt with the view to avoid pomposity and bombast) threw into them an air of familiarity like that of a person narrating a private transaction to an intimate friend or acquaintance: Yet no sooner does he come to the impassioned parts, where ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... creep in mud, To eels we may compare his blood; His blood in mud delights to run; Witness his lazy, lousy son! Puff'd up with pride and insolence, Without a grain of common sense, See with what consequence he stalks, With what pomposity he talks; See how the gaping crowd admire The stupid blockhead and the liar. How long shall vice triumphant reign? How long shall mortals bend to gain? How long shall virtue hide her face, And leave her votaries in disgrace? ——Let indignation ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... manner made him a sharp contrast to Brummage. The latter personage was flabby in flesh, and the oppressively civil counter-jumper style of his youth had grown naturally into a deportment of most imposing pomposity. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... shrunken and had become an old man. Yet, though signs of chastening thus outwardly declared themselves, in spirit he had regained tone and returned to his former high estate. Along with the revival of financial security had come a revival of pomposity, an addiction to patronage in manner and platitudes in speech. He had ceased to be humble and human, self-righteous self-complacency again ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... say that I was partial to him; indeed, his pomposity, as I considered it, was to me a source of ridicule and dislike. He took more notice of me than he did of anybody else; but he appeared to consider that his condescending patronage was all that was necessary; whereas, had ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... a sigh. The temptation had been hard to resist. A democratic girl, pomposity was a quality which she thoroughly disliked; and though she loved him, she could not disguise from herself that, ever since affluence had descended upon him some months ago, her brother Fillmore had become insufferably pompous. If there are any young men whom inherited ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... plans, if he would but speak out, and yet we none of us know a jot better than the man in the moon does what is to become of Germany. No mortal, not even the most malevolently skeptical Democrat, will believe what a vast amount of charlatanism and consequential pomposity there is in this diplomacy. But now I have done enough scolding, and want to tell you that I am well, and that I was very glad and gave thanks to the Lord that, according to your last letter, all was well with you, and that ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... answered with a touch of his old pomposity, "my first duty was towards my mother ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... and pomposity never were designed for the highest types of men. Our great national figures have almost without exception had one quality which was a keynote to their ultimate success—this was their simplicity. Next was their accessibility. There are numberless big-hearted ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... he saw her, and to tell the truth the girl was shocked by his changed appearance. Mr. Starkweather was quite broken down. The cloud of scandal that seemed to be menacing him had worn his pomposity to a thread, and his dignified "Ahem!" had ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe
... London hotel. Ascott, at first considerably annoyed at the presence of what he called a "skeleton at the feast," had afterward got over it; and run on with a mixture of childish glee and mannish pomposity about his plans and intentions—how he meant to take a house, he thought, in one of the squares, or a street leading out of them: how he would put up the biggest of brass plates, with "Mr. Leaf, surgeon." and soon get an extensive practice, and have all his aunts ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... display, show, flourish, parade, etalage [Fr.], pomp, array, state, solemnity; dash, splash, splurge, glitter, strut, pomposity; pretense, pretensions; showing off; fuss. magnificence, splendor; coup d'oeil [Fr.]; grand doings. coup de theatre; stage effect, stage trick; claptrap; mise en scene [Fr.]; tour de force; chic. demonstration, flying colors; tomfoolery; flourish of trumpets &c (celebration) 883; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... fatal curse Morris was free; no man of great ability was ever less conceited. You will not find in his work a trace of that tired pomposity which tells us that the great man is showing off, or of that empty pretentious singularity which betrays the vanity of the lonely British artist. Morris was never the self-conscious master calling on sun and moon ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... with a sigh, on hearing that someone would have been one hundred and fifty years old if he had been alive at the present day) he must be "a orfle old angel now." The word "lunch" is short, crisp, and appetising. The word "luncheon" is of a certain pomposity, which, though it may suit the mansions of the great, is out of place when applied to the meals of active sportsmen. So we will continue, if you please, to speak of "lunch." And now for your question. My charming ROSE, this little treatise does not profess to do anything more than teach young ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 12, 1892 • Various
... still in the front rank of court-advocates. In an action brought to recover for damages done to a carriage, the learned counsel repeatedly called, the vehicle in question a broug-ham, pronouncing both syllables of the word brougham. Whereupon, Lord Campbell with considerable pomposity observed, "Broom is the more usual pronunciation; a carriage of the kind you mean is generally and not incorrectly called a broom—that pronunciation is open to no grave objection, and it has the great advantage of saving ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... brings a feeling not only of entire disagreement, but of almost personal distress. Strange as it may seem to those who have been accustomed to think of that great artist merely as a type of the frigid pomposity of an antiquated age, his music, to ears that are attuned to hear it, comes fraught with a poignancy of loveliness whose peculiar quality is shared by no other poetry in the world. To have grown familiar with the voice of Racine, to have realised once and for ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... afraid," said Fulkerson. "That thing is going to attract attention. It's well written—you can take the pomposity out of it, here and there and it's novel. Our people like a bold strike, and it's going to shake them up tremendously to have serfdom advocated on high moral grounds as the only solution of the labor ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Dukes had been set out for the Court of Beacon with a certain impromptu pomposity that seemed somehow to increase its cosiness. The big room was, as it were, cut up into small rooms, with walls only waist high—the sort of separation that children make when they are playing at shops. This had been done by Moses Gould and Michael Moon (the two ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... as President. It was no new access of official pomposity, but the man's natural bearing, that maintained a lofty reserve at these public receptions. Possibly, too, he may have felt the necessity of maintaining the prerogative of the Federal head of all these independent, but now united, States. Hence, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... of heaven like a turkey-cock on dress parade; forgotten aeons behind him, blank time before him, his birth a mystery, his death a leap in the dark; when I see him pose on the grave of forgotten races and puff himself up with pomposity like the frog in the fable; when I see him sprinkled with the dust of fallen dynasties and erecting new altars upon the site of forgotten fanes, yet staggering about under a load of dignity that would spring the knee-joints of an archangel, I don't wonder ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... now proceed in the more immediate examination of the poem in its different parts. The beginning, say the Critics, ought to be plain and simple; neither embellished with the flowers of poetry, nor turgid with pomposity of diction. In this how exactly does our Author conform to the ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... preposition. One feels as did Dickens after walking for an hour or two about the handsome but "distractingly regular" city of Philadelphia. "I felt," he wrote, "that I would have given the world for a crooked street."[132] Despite the pomposity, Gibbon's style is correct, and the exact use of words is a marvel. It is rare, I think, that any substitution or change of words will improve upon the precision of the text. His compression and selection of salient points are remarkable. ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... trial. It may be that among the spectators who have been sitting beside the lawyers in the back of the room, waiting for the case to be called, are those who may afterwards be called as jurors. Any affectation of manner or pomposity is quickly detected. ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... there was a touch of pomposity about this admirable gentleman, who was so excellent a landlord and so hard working a member of the British aristocracy. But pomposity would be far too superficial a word to apply to him; it would not adequately connote ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... his interest in more serious reading. The specific type of Roman character rather repelled him. Sulla had nothing of the blunt hauteur which the grandees of Rome were fond of displaying in presence of the Greeks, or of the pomposity of narrow-minded great men; on the contrary he freely indulged his humour, appeared, to the scandal doubtless of many of his countrymen, in Greek towns in the Greek dress, or induced his aristocratic companions ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... matter of the letter was a cruel dis-interment of some fatuous and forgotten speeches made by Sir Julian to his constituents not many years ago, in which the value of some of our Colonial possessions, particularly certain West Indian islands, was decried in a medley of pomposity, ignorance and amazingly cheap humour. The extracts given sounded weak and foolish enough, taken by themselves, but the writer of the letter had interlarded them with comments of his own, which sparkled with an ironical brilliance ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... "All the pomposity went out of Mr. Campbell, he became flurried, then excited, then he lost his temper. After that he was allowed to leave the court, and Sir James Fenwick resumed his seat, and waited like a ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... greatest temerity for me to venture upon a controversy with him." Referring to a comparison which had been made of Conkling to Henry Winter Davis, Blaine continued: "The gentleman took it seriously, and it has given his strut additional pomposity. The resemblance is great; it is striking. Hyperion to a Satyr, Thersites to Hercules, mud to marble, dunghill to diamond, a singed cat to a Bengal tiger, a whining puppy to a roaring lion."—Congressional Globe, April 20, 1866, Vol. 37, Part 3, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... done mind them things so well 'taint no use tryen' to rake up the buried reck'lections o' the pas' times," said the old man, rebukingly, and with a certain pomposity. "I reckon now you 'member all the high quality gentlemen. The New Market Jockey Club, an' how they use to meet reg'lar as clock-work the second Tuesday in May and October; an' how my Mahs Duke, with all the fine ruffles down his shirt front, ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... Cleopatra! If verse has any function on the stage, it is that of imparting lyric beauty to passionate speech. For the mere rhetorical "elevation" of blank verse we have no use whatever. It consists in saying simple things with verbose pomposity. But should there arise a man who combines highly-developed dramatic faculty with great lyric genius, it is quite possible that he may give us the new poetic drama for which our idealists are sighing. He will choose his themes, I take it, from legend, or from the domain of pure fantasy—themes ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
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