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More "Prig" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... me a prig," she pleaded. "I'm talking as if I knew all about it. I don't really. I grope in the dark; and now and then—at least so it seems to me—I catch a glint of light. We are powerless in ourselves. It is only God working through us that enables us to be of any use. All we can do is to keep ourselves ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... simple, he and she, And swell, and blood, and prig; And some had carts, and some a chaise, ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... a right to expect of the American boy is that he shall turn out to be a good American man. Now the chances are strong that he won't be much of a man unless he is a good deal of a boy. He must not be a coward or a weakling, a bully, a shirk, or a prig. He must work hard and play hard. He must be clean-minded and clean lived, and able to hold his own against all comers. It is only on these conditions that he will grow into the kind of American man of whom ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... like you a little. I perfectly loathed you at first. I thought you the most odious, self-satisfied, boresome elderly prig I ever met. ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... stories, who have so emasculated and effeminated the boy who works hard and holds his head high that it is now well-nigh impossible to hear of such an one in real life without instantly setting him down as an intolerable prig. These writers have committed the greatest crime against their creations that authors can commit—they have made them non-human. If the stories about George Washington had narrated how on one occasion he laughed uproariously, or how he once ate ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... thought first present itself that the pips on playing-cards are significant of future events; and why did he think so? How did the 'grounds' of a teacup come to acquire that deep significance which they now possess for Mrs. Gamp and Betsy Prig? If the believers in these absurdities be asked why they believe, they answer readily enough either that they themselves or their friends have known remarkable fulfilments of the ominous indications of cards or tea-dregs, ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... Oh! but Polly must have explained, must have convinced him that owing to a prig's self-confidence they were all equally foolish, equally misled. Unless Hubert—? But then, how is she at fault? In imagination she says it all through Polly's lips. The words glow hot and piteous, carrying her soul with them. But that face ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... spight of this new Abjuration, Did banter the lawful King of this great Nation: Who call'd God's anointed a foolish old Prig, Was both a base and unmannerly Whigg: But since he is Dead No more shall be said, For he in Repentance has laid down his Head; So I wish each Lady, who in mournful Tone is, In Charity Grieve for the ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... conceited prig! Did you hear his sermon on the world and its temptations? I wonder if he thought temptation had come up to him in the person of us professionals out on a picnic. I think it was ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... It takes a prig to divide his reading into nicely staked off little plots, each with its own date. The art of injudicious reading, the art of miscellaneous reading which every normal man ought to cultivate, is a very fine and satisfactory art; for the best guide to books is a book itself. It clasps ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... endeavouring to avoid vulgar terms he too frequently dignifies trifles, and clothes common thoughts in a splendid dress that would be rich enough for the noblest ideas. In short we are too often reminded of that great man, Mr. Prig, the auctioneer, whose manner was so inimitably fine that he had as much to say on a ribbon as on a Raphael." It seems as if Gibbon had taken the stilted tone of the old French tragedy for his model, rather than the crisp and nervous prose of the best French writers. We are constantly ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... wondered if anything could disturb him or hurry him. Had he ever climbed trees and torn his clothes, or thrashed an adversary? Had he any weaknesses, or vivid joys, or passionate longings? Yet he did not seem a prig. His manner, though dignified, was easy and natural; his eyes, though steady and penetrating, were kindly; his bearing had the repose of strength. It was too awful to contemplate what his estimate of herself would be if he knew; but then ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... not wish to be thought a prig or one who made a pretence of great industry, and, although Miss Morgan's voice was without expression, he believed that irony lay hidden somewhere ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... her back alone, just we two in the car, but I dared not take the child at her word. I thought she was too ill to remember Mrs. Grundy's silly old existence, and I couldn't take advantage of her forgetfulness. At the same time it seemed the act of a prig grafted on to a bounder to put the idea into her head, and make her ashamed of having said the wrong thing. You see what a nuisance my conscience is! I petted it so much when it was young, now it won't stop in its cage. I didn't know ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... musical world, such as Mario and Grisi and Rachel; blue-stockings like Lady Eastlake and Madame Mohl; Mademoiselle de Montijo, who captivated an Emperor, and Lola Montez, who ruled a kingdom. No advantages of social education will convert a fool or a bore or a prig or a churl into an agreeable member of society; but, where Nature has bestowed a bright intelligence and a genial disposition, her gifts are cultivated to perfection by such surroundings as Frederick Leveson enjoyed in early life. And so it came about that alike as a young man, in middle ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... DEAN: In case the letter sent yesterday passes you on the way, I add a line to say that if ever I said a mean thing about Loring when we were in the corps, I take it back. I thought him a prig when we wore the gray. He rather 'held us under' anyhow, being a class ahead, you know, but the way he has panned out here and wiped up Wyoming with the only men I ever knew that tried to wrong you is simply wonderful. ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... the extravagant one, who drank little and did the listening. Dudley had cast off altogether the gravity and taciturnity which sometimes got him looked upon as a bit of a prig, and chatted and told his friend stories, with a tone and manner of irresponsible gayety which ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... "Essays of Elia" is as admirable as their fancy. The author hated a formal sentence as much as he disliked stately and insipid society. Unlike Thomas Carlyle, in avoiding the faults of rhetorical culture, he did not become a literary barbarian. In refusing to comb his hair like a prig, he did not go to the extreme of making himself horridly uncomely. His sentences are unsurpassed for neatness, are as graceful as they are quaint and clear. The writings of Sydney Smith rarely attain the perfect grace which uniformly distinguishes Elia; yet he never attempts ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... living in the first excitement and horror of the news of the massacre of Christians at Damascus. We are full of righteous and passionate indignation. 'Punish —restore the honour of the Christian nations' is the proud appeal of prelate, prig, and philanthropist, because some hundreds of Christians who knew their danger, yet chose to take up their abode in a fanatical Muslim city of the East, have ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... fear thieves, for aw've nowt they can tak, Unless it's thease tatters' at hing o' mi back; An' if they prig them, they'lt get suck'd do yo see, They'll be noa use to them, for they're little to me, Aw ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... flung his legs about; the muscles of his face had grown more expressive; his eyes looked as much information as his tongue spoke, and more. The manner of the scholar had nearly disappeared; still more the manner of the drawing-room young man. A prig would have said that he had lost culture, and a prude that he had become coarse. Such was the contagion of domiciliary fellowship with the Talbothays ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... other men spoke lightly of women in his presence he showed disapproval, if their character was attacked he championed their cause, if confronted with proofs, he flatly refused to consider them. Yet he was neither a prig nor a prude. He enjoyed a joke as well as any one, but at the same time he did not let his mind run in only one channel, as some men do. He pitied rather than blamed the wretched females who frequented the miners' camps. More sinned against ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... know French, or that he should have a sword at his side. In all this there is no passion, and scarcely anything that can be called preference. The hero intrigues just as he wears a wig; because, if he did not, he would be a queer fellow, a city prig, perhaps a Puritan. All the agreeable qualities are always given to the gallant. All the contempt and aversion are the portion of the unfortunate husband. Take Dryden for example; and compare Woodall with Brainsick, or Lorenzo ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... "Consummate little prig!" murmured Captain Ducie to himself as he refolded the letter and put it away. "I can fancy the smirk on his face as he penned that precious effusion, and how, when he had finished it, he would trot off to his clothes-prop of a wife and ask her whether she did not think it at once ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... part I always spell so, with lots of f's and g's and such like tailey, twirley, loopey things, when my heart is in the tender vein. And I hold that a man who will not do so, now he has been shown how to do it, is, in plain English, neither more nor less than a prig. The advantages of a varied spelling of names are very great. Industrious, rather than intelligent, people have given not a little time, and such minds as they have, to the discussion of the right spelling of our great poet's name. But he himself never dreamt of tying himself ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... "daslles" (tassels), big bedsteads, Chiny-ware, plush chairs, linen cupboards. It has all the fuss of preparation for childbirth—the accumulations of wrappings, the obstetric furniture, the nods and winks of the midwife and the gossips, authentic ancestors of Mrs Sarah Gamp and Mrs Elizabeth Prig—why, the haste to fetch the midwife at the crisis might almost be the foundation upon which Dickens built the visit of Seth Pecksniff, Esq., ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... more words would bring tears to your eyes—indeed, they are there now, shining and swimming; and a bead has slipped from the lash and fallen on to the flag. If I had time, and was not in mortal dread of some prating prig of a servant passing, I would know what all this means. Well, to-night I excuse you; but understand that so long as my visitors stay, I expect you to appear in the drawing-room every evening; it is my wish; don't neglect it. Now ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... to them both. In them they went back to the early world. They did not make the hard and self-conscious imaginative effort of the prig to hurl themselves into an historic past. They just let the land and its memories take them. As, sitting on the warm ground among the wild myrtle bushes, they looked across the emerald green unruffled waters to Salamis, that very long isle with its calm ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... their soul's condition we properly regard as a form of egotism; and we know how easily the unco' guid become prigs. Fogazzaro's hero is neither an egotist of the ordinary cloister variety, nor a prig. That our sympathy goes out to Jeanne and not to him shows that we instinctively resent the sacrifice of the deepest human cravings to sacerdotal prescriptions. The highest ideal of holiness which medievals could ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... once said of Phil that if she would keep a diary and write down honestly everything that happened to her if would some day put Pepys to the blush. Not every day was as rich in adventure as this; but this is not a bad sample. If Phil had been a prig or fresh or impertinent, she would not have been the idol of Main Street. A genius for being on the spot when events are forward must be born in one, and her casual, indifferent air contributed to a belief ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... though he was thus, of necessity, thrown much with his sister and her girl friends, Alan was far from belonging to that uninteresting species of humanity, the girl-boy; instead of that, he was a genuine, rollicking boy, with never a trace of the prig about him. ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... I have been," he said, sadly, and then with sudden conviction, as if he read her thoughts: "You do know! That prig of a parson has told you! Well, it's just as well you ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... Panjandrum," was the reply. "Nasty, consequential little prig! And who is he, I should like to know? Panjandrums are not to be mentioned in the same breath as Dodos—we are a much more ancient family than they are, and, besides, we ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... young prig from the North is sure to say at first, but they get to be one of the 'fast ones' at last. I was quite sober myself when I first came here. I was from the land of steady habits, ye see—the only son of my mother, and she was a widder; but she died, and nobody cared for ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... first sound and sight of the sea—the author's childhood at Uphill Parsonage—his reminiscences of the clock of Wells Cathedral—and some real villatic sketches—a portrait of a Workhouse Girl—some caustic remarks on prosing and prig parsons, commentators, and puritanical excrescences of sects—to some unaffected lines on the village school children of Castle-Combe, and their annual festival. This is so charming a picture of rural joy, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 350, January 3, 1829 • Various
... things. "Has it ever dawned upon you to imagine the pettiness—the pettiness!—of every soul concerned in a declaration of war?" he asked. He went on, as though speech was necessary to make it credible, to describe Laycock, who first gave the horror words at the cabinet council, "an undersized Oxford prig with a tenoring voice and a garbage of Greek—the sort of little fool who is brought up on the admiration of his elder sisters. . ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... literary fragments he has left, and that is found to be the character of a pusillanimous and ill-bred usurer, wholly lacking in foresight, in generous enterprise, and chivalrous enthusiasm—in matters of the Faith a prig or a doubter, in matters of adventure a poltroon, in matters of Science an ignorant Parrot, and in Letters a wretchedly bad rhymester, with a vice for alliteration; a wilful liar (as, for instance, 'The longest way round is the shortest way home'), a startling miser ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... triumph into Corfu," answered Paddy, taking a turn with a dignified air on the deck. "I should like, to see what that prig Spry will say ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... that, Honoria; but look here, it's jolly good, about as good as can be for that prig of a husband of yours. What do you think? that brat of a boy, the son of old Sir Robert Bingham and the cook or some ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... horrid little prig, Clay [so the letter ran]. Won't you come over to-morrow and go riding ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... water, who before drank beer; What's now the cause? we know the case is clear; Look in Prig's purse, the chev'ril there tells you Prig money wants, either to buy ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... won't, and you mustn't," said Howard. "That's the best of marriage, that one does get a glimpse into different things. You are perfectly and entirely right. It simply means that I can't talk their language, and I will learn it. I am a prig; your husband is a prig—but he will try to do better. It isn't a duty, and it isn't a pleasure, and it isn't a question of minds at all. It is just living life on ordinary terms. I won't have anything different at all. I'm ashamed of myself for my moans. When ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... don't like it for other folks," replied Sam. "You took your medicine yourself very well, if I am a good judge, especially when you so lovingly displayed your osculatory skill on the sweet lips of peerless Rachel, whom that young prig of a Hudson Bay Company's ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... Captain Quinn. 'Don't take it like that. From your point of view you were quite right to call me a blackguard. And, mind you, there are plenty of people in the world who aren't blackguards. There's my brother, for instance. He's a bit of a prig—in fact, he's as priggish as he well can be—but he's never done anything but run straight. I don't suppose he could go ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... rather a prig. He was evidently, immensely pleased with his own little bit of book-learning; he even insisted on talking and writing Latin—pure "swank"—whereas his family would surely have preferred their ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... such a prig, Jerry," put in Mignon, impatiently. "It isn't half so wicked to play a joke on those stupid sophomores as it is to ask one's mother for money for a fountain pen, and then use the money for candy and ...
— Marjorie Dean High School Freshman • Pauline Lester
... you please, he is making a fool of himself with Leo, and turning her into an insufferable little prig." ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... to acquire applause, Try various arts to get a doubtful cause; Or, as a dancing master in a jigg, With various steps instructs the dancing prig; Or as a doctor writes you different bills; Or as a quack prescribes you different pills; Or as a fiddler plays more tunes than one; Or as a baker bakes more bread than brown; Or as a tumbler tumbles up and down; So does our author, rummaging his brain, By various methods try to entertain; Brings ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... excellent reason for the quantity of lace on his coat, which was due, it seems, to a sentiment of filial reverence; and he could not fix his hour for dinner without an eye to the reformation of society. In short, he was a prig of the first water; self-conscious to the last degree; and so crammed with little moral aphorisms that they drop out of his mouth whenever he opens his lips. And then his religion is in admirable keeping. It is intimately connected ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... indifferent to all things in heaven above or in the earth beneath, I could have pitied them greatly for the obligation they were under to trail after those rough lads everywhere and at all times; even as it was, I felt disposed to scout myself as a privileged prig when I turned to ascend to my chamber, sure to find there, if not enjoyment, at least liberty; but this evening (as had often happened before) I was to be ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... is, that too many people take a fancy to it, and the competition is in consequence excessive. Every ignoramus of a fellow who finds that he hasn't brains in sufficient quantity to make his way as a walking advertiser, or an eye-sore prig, or a salt-and-batter man, thinks, of course, that he'll answer very well as a dabbler of mud. But there never was entertained a more erroneous idea than that it requires no brains to mud-dabble. Especially, there is nothing to be made in this way without method. I did only a retail ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... long ago that ill-gotten goods never prosper, and that they who make booty of other men's wits, are not excepted from the general condemnation of wrong-doers. Some day, perhaps, they will consent to profit by what they prig, and thus, like the fat knight, turn their diseases to commodity—the national disease of appropriation to the commodity ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... depends on them for its existence; it sanctions and encourages to all delights that are not unkind in themselves; if it lived to a thousand, it would not make excision of a single humorous passage; and while the self-improver dwindles toward the prig, and, if he be not of an excellent constitution, may even grow deformed into an Obermann, the very name and appearance of a happy man breathe of good-nature, and help the rest of us ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to deprive him of the bad opinion he had formed of me. I soon learned to like him, and for a considerable time, until shortly before his departure from Lucerne, he was my daily companion, from whose intercourse I derived much pleasure, as he was a highly gifted musician and by no means a prig. But Drasecke was not my ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... new Madame is a prig," Theodora said restively. "She may be worse than you are, Hope; but I doubt it. Never mind," she added sagely to herself, as she left the room; "it is two weeks till then, and there's plenty of chance for things to happen, ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray
... him for his interest with government in his behalf, stating how much he had suffered in the cause of the ministry. Swift immediately carried his letter to Lord Bolingbroke, then Secretary of State, who railed much at Sacheverell, calling him a busy intermeddling fellow; a prig and an incendiary, who had set the kingdom in a flame which could not be extinguished, and therefore deserved censure instead of reward. Although Swift had not a much better opinion of the Doctor than Lord Bolingbroke, he replied, "True, my Lord; but let me tell you a story. ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... So her trade flourished, and she lived a life of comfort, of plenty even, until the Civil War threw her out of work. When an unnatural conflict set the whole country at loggerheads, what occasion was there for the honest prig? And it is not surprising that, like all the gentlemen adventurers of the age, Moll remained most stubbornly loyal to the King's cause. She made the conduit in Fleet Street run with wine when Charles came ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... the previous ones; the hero is now in Italy, now in England, and there is much more attempt than either in Pamela or Clarissa to give the impression of a sphere in which a man of the world may move. Grandison is, however, a slightly ludicrous hero. His perfections are those of a prig and an egoist, and he passes like the sun itself over his parterre of adoring worshippers. The ladies who are devoted to Sir Charles Grandison are, indeed, very numerous, but the reader's interest centres in three ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... of a prig. She never preaches or finds fault with one, and she's just as jolly as ever she can be; and yet she always makes one feel ashamed if one isn't doing what's absolutely straight. I've never seen her play a nasty, mean trick, nor heard her say ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... remarkable degree. It was not only girls who carried themselves differently before Beatrice: every man who met her seemed to try and show her the best in him, or at least to suppress any thought or act which might displease her. It was not that she was a prig, or an angel, but she herself was so fine and sincere, and treated all with such an impersonal and yet gracious manner that it became contagious, and everybody who met her imitated the model she unconsciously furnished. I was very ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... a dear, plump little prig who adores the woman, and wears with as much gravity as her religious opinions—only eight, Jack!—a venerable horsehair atrocity which she calls her Bustle. I have just burned it, and the child is asleep in my bed as I write. She will come to me at once. Punch I ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... affection goes out to Tom Jones, his hatred to Blifil. Joseph Surface and Blifil are scoundrels, it is true; but deduct the scoundrelism, let Joseph be but a stale proverb-monger and Blifil a conceited prig, and the issue remains the same. Good humour and generosity carry the day with the popular heart all the world over. Tom Jones and Charles Surface are not vagabonds to my taste. They were shabby ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... family, of superior education and breeding, and with no eye for the pure gold of as true and loyal a soul as ever offered itself in daily unmurmuring sacrifice for others, and without a thought of sacrifice. Fool and dolt! A self-sufficient prig! That's ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... said Jock with a blush. "I was a little prig. Lucy, how strange it all is, like a picture one has seen somewhere, or a scene in a play or a dream! Sometimes I can remember little bits of it, just as he used to read it out to old Ford. Bits of it are all in and out of As You Like It, as if Touchstone ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... still in need of a friend, and take the consequences. He was not so irresistible, he told himself, as to be necessarily dangerous to the peace of mind of all the women of his acquaintance. He had acted the part of a prig and he ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... the squirrel Had a quarrel, And the former called the latter 'Little Prig; Bun replied, 'You are doubtless very big; But all sorts of things and weather Must be taken in together, To make up a year And a sphere. And I think it no disgrace To occupy my place. If I'm not so large ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... dark, and Lieutenant Otto announced positively that the weather was clearing up. Even Mademoiselle Fifi seemed unable to keep still. He rose and sat down again. His harsh and clear eye was looking for something to break; suddenly, glaring at the lady with the mustache, the young prig drew his revolver: "You shall not witness it, you!" said he, and, without leaving his seat, he aimed. Two bullets fired in rapid succession put out ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... always managed to find time for, even when she did not get up as early as on this occasion. For her age, and perhaps because of her mother's death, which still seemed recent to Janice, she was rather serious-minded. Yet she was no prig, and she loved fun and was as alert for good times as any girl ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... who read this narrative are beginning to have an idea that this fourteen-year-old boy was by way of becoming a prig they may be relieved by the knowledge that when the youngster was not taking a hand in polemics in the smithy or the cobbler's cottage he was often enough leading the boys of the village into some kind of mischief. One old inhabitant ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... representation of the hired attendant on the poor in sickness. The hospitals of London were, in many respects, noble Institutions; in others, very defective. I think it not the least among the instances of their mismanagement, that Mrs Betsey Prig was a fair specimen of a Hospital Nurse; and that the Hospitals, with their means and funds, should have left it to private humanity and enterprise, to enter on an attempt to improve that class of persons—since, greatly improved through the ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... meet you here and there... When Shakespeare's played you hold a chair, And some defunct, moth-eaten star Enchants the mental prig you are... A radical comes down and shocks The atheistic orthodox? You're representing Common Sense, Mouth open, in the audience. And, sometimes, even chapel lures That conscious tolerance of yours, That ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... cares they are comforts"—a maxim laid down By the Bard, what d'ye call him, that wore the black gown; And faith I agree with th' old prig to a hair, For a big-belly'd bottle's a heav'n ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... CHARLES, a young prig who was killed in a duel of small arms with Raphael de Valentin at Aix, Savoy, in 1831. Charles had boasted of having received the title of "Bachelor of shooting" from Lepage at Paris, and that of doctor from Lozes the "King of ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... his father's profession, but had early taken a disgust to it. At such schools as he had been able to frequent, he had gained the character of a boy rather insusceptible of ordinary teaching; and his letters (they are rare throughout his life) show him to us as something very like a juvenile prig. According to his own account, he "thought for at least eight years" without being able to pen a line, or at least a page; and the worst accusation that can truly be brought against him is that, by his own confession, he left off reading when he began to write. Those who (for their sins or for their ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... speak out like a man?" Forsythe demanded with a burst of rage, striking the table with his fist. "What do you mean by your damned impudence? So you dare to question my conduct to Lois Howe, do you?—you confounded prig!" ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... replied he, "we will see what can be done. Order and subordination are very good things; but people should know how much to require. As you tell the story, I cannot see that you are greatly to blame. Marlow is a coxcombical prig, that is the truth on't; and if a man will expose himself, why, he must even take what follows. I do hate a Frenchified fop with all my soul: and I cannot say that I am much pleased with my neighbour Underwood for taking the part of such a rascal. Hawkins, ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... sequel to this poem, entitled Sixty Years After, Tennyson unsays all the high-pitched dispraise of Amy and her squire. Locksley Hall is a piece of splendid versification, but the hero is a prig, which is a shade worse than a Philistine. Young fellows mouth the poem rapturously; their elders smile at the disguises ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... abatement, the publishers felt obliged to intimate that unless I put an end to their misery they would. Accordingly, I promptly gave Garth his quietus. The truth is, I was tired of him myself. With all his qualities and virtues, he could not help being a prig. He found some friends, however, and still shows signs of vitality. I wrote no other novel for nearly two years, but contributed some sketches of English life to Appletons' Journal, and produced a couple of novelettes,—"Mrs. ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... "You're a solemn prig, Prendick, a silly ass! You're always fearing and fancying. We're on the edge of things. I'm bound to cut my throat to-morrow. I'm going to have a damned Bank Holiday to-night." He turned and went out into the moonlight. "M'ling!" he cried; "M'ling, ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... in the making. There's everything to do—and I want to be doing some of it, Lois," he declared, with a little outburst. "I can't help it. I know some people think I'm an enthusiast, and others put me down as a prig—but I can't help it." ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... myself for a governess, that I should make a point of honor of such things, little pragmatical prig that you are; nor are you, that I know of. You will always have plenty of money. 'Rich as a Jew' is a proverb, you ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... supposed that Quentin was a prig. But he wasn't, and you would have owned this if you had seen him scampering through the greenwood on his quiet New Forest pony, or setting snares for the rabbits that would get into the garden and eat the precious lettuces and parsley. Also ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... said you were not a good writer but I wish you would let me know where you are and what you are doing, for I feel a deep interest in you, although I can not make myself believe that you are not the Harold Excell I saw in Rock River. In reality you are not he, any more than I am the little prig who sang those songs to save your soul! However, I was not so bad as I seemed even then, for I wanted ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... life which make the difference," he said, hesitating, because to say even so much made him feel a prig. "Stella just drifted ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... escaped singing altogether. Lilith also resented her having shown that she could do it—and this feeling was generally shared. It evidenced a want of good-fellowship, and made you very glad the little prig had afterwards come to grief: if you had abilities that others had not you concealed them, instead of parading them under ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... with myths and traditions, and so distorted by misleading criticisms, that ... he has been wellnigh lost. We have the religious and statuesque myth, we have the Weems myth (which turns Washington into a faultless prig), and the ludicrous myth of the writer of paragraphs. We have the stately hero of Sparks, and Everett, and Marshall, and Irving, with all his great deeds as general and President duly recorded and ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... rosebud of a girl going to marry Eustace Medlicott—insufferable, conceited prig, I remember him at Oxford," the cousin was musing to himself. "Lord Carford is an old stick-in-the-mud, or he would have prevented that. She is his own niece, and one can see by her frock that the poor child never even goes ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... an Oxford Man of rare and shining parts, which may or may not have been true—I did not know enough to check his statements—and, secondly, that he "had his hand on the pulse of native life"—which was a fact. As an Oxford Man, he struck me as a prig: he was always throwing his education about. As a Mohammedan faquir—as McIntosh Jellaludin—he was all that I wanted for my own ends. He smoked several pounds of my tobacco, and taught me several ounces ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... prig has come to grief, He's no call for desperation; Though I'm a conwicted thief, Still I've opes of liberation. The Reverend Chapling to deceive A certain dodge and safe resource is, Whereby you gets a Ticket of Leave, And then resumes ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... his very strongest. He was an ideal Trustee. And what made this evident was the fact that he talked comparatively little about his trust, and never behaved in regard to it as a pedant or a prig. As long as the principle was firmly maintained, he bothered himself very little ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... "She's a prig; I can see that, Aunt Clara. I can tell by the way she walks and moves around. She hasn't ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells
... those few rather brilliant persons who have contrived to keep sane without becoming a prig," she remarked. ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Cavalry, who was wounded, under a heavy fire from the Indians, at the imminent risk of his own life," the sergeant had never received a harsh word or a rebuke that he did not know was merited. But the sullen fury that this young prig aroused in him was unbearable. He felt that his inherent subordination to discipline ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... nothing but the want of means shall make me desist.'[183] He had a right to make that boast, and his ardour in the cause was as unimpeachable as honourable. It explains why Cobbett has still a sympathetic side. He was a mass of rough human nature; no prig or bundle of abstract formulae, like Paine and his Radical successors. Logic with him is not in excess, but in defect. His doctrines are hopelessly inconsistent, except so far as they represent his stubborn prejudices. Any view will serve his purpose which can ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... not a fair question to ask any man, for an affirmative makes a prig of him and a negative a mere politician. I will therefore generalize freely and tell you that a man who believes himself to be a statesman considers the nation first, as a matter of course. Howard, for instance, nearly killed himself at the end of last session over a measure which was of great ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... business of mine. I know of agents at the docks who do such things as a matter of course. It is only that I happen to know that Harris at Liverpool does not. Very possibly old Frith knows all about it. I should only get scored down as a meddlesome prig, worse hypocrite than ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... preceded him at Cambridge. No man ever went up from whom more was expected in every way. The dons awaited a sucking member for the University, the undergraduates were prepared to welcome a new Alcibiades. He was neither: neither a prig nor a profligate; but a quiet, gentlemanlike, yet spirited young man, gracious to all, but intimate only with his old friends, and giving always an impression in his general tone that his soul was not absorbed ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... of his prayer meetings, nor the trip to the Holy Land that he made in one long vacation ever deceived anyone who knew the fellow into thinking him a prig. He never pretended that his ideals of practical conduct were a bit higher than those of scores of the men who had none of these interests of his. So marked was this absence of the goody-goody in Tip that I, though I recalled his face and vaguely connected him with something or other in the ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... take for his hero an educated gentleman who expresses contempt for the licence and indecencies of modern life, it is ten to one that the critics, who confess themselves on other occasions as sick of prurient tales, will pronounce this hero to be a prig. In like manner, let a politician evince concern for the moral character of the nation and it is ten to one his colleagues in the House of Commons and his critics in the Press, and everywhere the very men most in despair ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... honest lad. He threw up the seminary, returned to Cleeve Court, and announced with tears to his mother (his father had died two years before) that he could not be a priest. She told him, stonily, that he had disappointed her dearest hopes and broken her heart. His brother—the Squire now, and a prig from his cradle—took him out for a long walk, argued with him as with a fractious child, and, without attending to his answers, finally gave him up as a bad job. So an ensigncy was procured, and John a Cleeve shipped from Cork to Halifax, to fight the ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Whispers go round, they grin, they shrug, They bow, they snarl, they scratch, they hug; And, just as chance or whim provoke them, They either bite their friends, or stroke them. There have I seen some active prig, To show his parts, bestride a twig: Lord! how the chatt'ring tribe admire! Not that he's wiser, but he's higher: All long to try the vent'rous thing, (For power is but to have one's swing). From side to side he springs, he spurns, ...
— English Satires • Various
... to himself again, "do you wish Dick dead and Hal, too, the finest fellow that ever lived, for the sake of a young girl whose mind is full of a prig ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... knowledge of himself to an ardent, faith in Mrs. Warwick's innocence; for, as there was no resemblance between them, there must, he deduced, be a difference in their capacity for enduring the perpetual company of a prig, a stick, a petrified poser. Moreover, the novel act of advocacy, and the nature of the advocacy, had effect on him. And then he recalled the scene in the winter beech-woods, and Diana's wild-deer eyes; her, perfect generosity to a traitor and fool. How could he ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... snuff-boxes, &c. was for a length of time the sole business of his life. He was however secured, after secreting himself for a time, convicted, and is now transported for life—as he conceives, sold by another cele-brated Prig, whose real name was Bill White, but better known by the ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... with that bayonet, Drake," he growls savagely at the sentry, who has thrown himself in front of the opening. "It'll be the worse for you fellows that you ever confined me, no matter by whose order; but as for that stuck-up prig, by——! you'll see soon enough what'll come of his ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... class did him homage, and even Thomas John was shaken out of his equanimity; but then Duncan Robertson's father was colonel of a Highland regiment, and Duncan himself was a royal fighter, and had not in his Highland body the faintest trace of a prig, while Thomas John's face was a standing reproof of everything that was said and done outside of lesson time ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... Sunday-schools, I did not see him. The Model Boy of my time—we never had but the one—was perfect: perfect in manners, perfect in dress, perfect in conduct, perfect in filial piety, perfect in exterior godliness; but at bottom he was a prig; and as for the contents of his skull, they could have changed place with the contents of a pie and nobody would have been the worse off for it but the pie. This fellow's reproachlessness was a standing reproach to every lad in the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... is poking fun at me," he thought; "and he and his father and that prig deserve—but what is one ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... reality can startle us into more solid imagination of events, so can even errors and exaggerations if they are on the right side. It does some good to call Alfred a prig, Charles I a Puritan, and John a jolly good fellow; if this makes us feel that they were people whom we might have liked or disliked. I do not myself think that John was a nice gentleman; but for all that the popular picture of ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... how it has always been, with ballads. From the standard of pure aesthetics, one ought not to consider "associations" in judging a poem or a tune, but with a song like "Tipperary" you would be an inhuman prig if you didn't. We all have our "associations" with this particular tune. For me, it recalls a window in Hampstead, on a grey day in October 1914. I had been having the measles, and had not been allowed ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... movement of her hands toward him seemed to beg for pity. "Jack! I can't help it. Maybe I'm a little prig, but ... mustn't we guide our lives by principle and not ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... part of what men know as wisdom. Some of us are wise in this way naturally and by genius; some of us never become so. But to have spent one's youth at college, in contact with the choice and rare and precious, and yet still to be a blind prig or vulgarian, unable to scent out human excellence or to divine it amid its accidents, to know it only when ticketed and labelled and forced on us by others, this indeed should be accounted the very calamity and shipwreck ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... about Fielding! How jealousy, spite, and the confusion of mind that befogs a prig when he is not taken seriously, do darken the eyes of the author of "those deplorably tedious lamentations, 'Clarissa' and 'Sir Charles Grandison,'" as Horace Walpole ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... did; and Comfort will send Tribulation hither as soon as ever he comes home. I could have brought young Mr. Prig to have kept my mistress company in the meantime. ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... fables where the rocks and the mountains speak. Emerson has given us one where the Mountain and the Squirrel had a quarrel. The Mountain called the Squirrel "Little Prig." And then continues a clash of personalities more possible to illustrate than at first appears. Here we come to the second stage of the fairy-tale where the creature seems so unmanageable in his physical ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... replied Ingleborough laughing. "No; I don't like him. I never do like a fellow who is an unnatural sort of a prig. He can't help being fat and pink and smooth, but he can help his smiling, sneaky manner. I do like a fellow to be manly. Hang him! Put him in petticoats, with long hair and a bonnet, he'd look like somebody's cook. But if I had an ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... events of the day, and a recollection of the facts which have occurred during the last twenty years, to be more valuable than all the ancient records in existence. Who talks of Caesar or Xenophon now-a-days, except some Cambridge or Oxford prig? and of what value is that knowledge in society? The escape of a modern pickpocket will afford more matter of conversation than the famous retreat of ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of his voice, his contemptible exultation. It was as though he were under some horrid spell which twisted his love and anguish into the expressions of a spiteful prig. Why couldn't he tell her of those deadly, shapeless fears, of his loneliness, his sorrowful jealousies? He was shut up in the iron fastness of his own will—gagged ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... Englishman in Paris, represents in the character of the pedantic prig named Classick, the sort of university tutor who was sometimes substituted for the ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... enjoyed listening, but that he was otherwise occupied. That he had to look unconcerned at his own deposition, while regarding as an intruder the man whose place he had so long in a sense usurped, was not his sorest trial: regarding as a prig the man who talked about things worth talking about, he could not help feeling himself a poor creature, an empty sack, beside the son of the low-born woman. But indeed Richard, brought face to face with life, and taught ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... of taking in what he was taught wonderfully great, though, fortunately for himself, his extreme good humour and merry nature made it impossible for his companions to dislike him or set him down as a prig. ...
— Grandmother Dear - A Book for Boys and Girls • Mrs. Molesworth
... called a prig by those who did not know him well. He had a trick of starting subjects suddenly, and he very often made his friends very uncomfortable by the precipitate introduction, without any warning, of remarks upon serious matters. Once even, shocking to say, he ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... kind that follow all you youngsters. Listen, boy. Brenton is a mixture of genius, and prig, and ignorant young hermit; or, rather, he has the elements all inside him, ready to be mixed. You'll have ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... reproached him. "He isn't a prig. And he's had to fight some things that you of all men ought to understand. He's only been here a few months, but he told me that Judge Pike has been against him from the start. It seems that Mr. Ladew is too liberal in his views. ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... of the Mortons, but Herbert had loudly insisted on inviting Rose for the evening and had had his way, but after all she would not come. Herbert felt himself aggrieved, and said she was as horrid a little prig as Constance, who on her side felt a pang of envy as she thought of Rose going to church and singing hymns and carols to her father and mother, while she, after a struggle under the mistletoe, which made her hot and miserable, had to sit playing waltzes. One good-natured lady ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... long ears and watched with pained disapproval the gambols of his elder. Himself incorruptible, he was no doubt well pleased at heart that Banjo's misconduct should throw up in high relief his own immaculate conduct. Lollypop was in fact a bit of a prig. Had he been a boy he would have been head of his school, a Scholar of Balliol, and President of the ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... preserved by Carlyle about the little Blenheim cocker who hated the "genus acrid-quack" and formed an immediate attachment to Sir Walter. Wordsworth was far from being an acrid quack, or even a solemn prig—another genus hated of dogs—but there was something a little unsympathetic in his personality. The dalesmen liked poor ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... boy couldn't look you in the face and tell you a lie. My dear Helen, I'm as certain of my theory being correct as of anything in the world. But hang that Limpney for a narrow-minded, classic-stuffed, mathematic-bristling prig! We'll have a better." ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... the laird gae kaim his wig, The sodger not to strut sae big, The lawyer not to be a prig; The fool he cried, Te-hee! I kenn'd that I could never fail! But she pinn'd the dishclout to his tail, And soused him frae the water-pail, And ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... kindred feeling. While a guest of the "touching" gentleman, Borrow was introduced to the Rev. Mr. Platitude, a notable character in his literary portrait gallery—"he did not go to college a gentleman; he went an ass and returned a prig," writes Borrow fiercely. No biographer, so far as I know, has identified Platitude, but Mr. Donne evidently knew him, for he calls Borrow's account a "gross and unfair caricature." I believe I have identified "the rascally Unitarian minister who went over to the High Church," with ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... I can't. It does not matter why. I am going to tell you the truth. You represent too much. You have been too great a temptation. Nobody meant anything or planned anything at first. It all came by degrees. To see you smiling and enjoying everything and adoring that stilted prig of a Walderhurst put ideas into people's heads, and they grew because every chance fed them. If ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... belong to themselves (if any), and loathe all fun and sport and athletics, and rave about pictures and books and music they don't understand, and would pretend to despise if they did—things that were not even meant to be understood. It doesn't take three generations to make a prig—worse luck! ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... Granville Gower have no store of sweetness to yield. They are the wooden letters of a wooden young man. He may have been a beautiful young man, and an estimable young man; but he was insensitive, dull, and a prig. The best things he ever did in his days were to be belettered by Lady Bessborough and married, finally, to her ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... the squirrel Had a quarrel, And the former called the latter "Little Prig"; Bun replied, "You are doubtless very big; But all sorts of things and weather Must be taken in together, To make up a year And a sphere. And I think it no disgrace To occupy my place. If I'm not so large as you You are not so small as I, ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... manner, that the horse could never have got any height into the air, and the story couldn't have been. He would have proved, by map and compass, that there was no such kingdom as the delightful kingdom of Casgar, on the frontiers of Tartary. He would have caused that hypocritical young prig Harry to make an experiment,—with the aid of a temporary building in the garden and a dummy,—demonstrating that you couldn't let a choked hunchback down an Eastern chimney with a cord, and leave him upright on the hearth to terrify ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... needed in their day to be done. The work done, the virtue of the book expires. Again, I agree with those who say that the steady working down one of these lists would end in the manufacture of that obnoxious product—the prig. A prig has been defined as an animal that is overfed for its size. I think that these bewildering miscellanies would lead to an immense quantity of that kind of overfeeding. The object of reading is ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... notwithstanding his being requested to name his own terms of compensation. Johnson signified his displeasure at Mr. Mason's conduct very strongly; but added, by way of shewing that he was not surprized at it, 'Mason's a Whig.' MRS. KNOWLES. (not hearing distinctly,) 'What! a Prig, Sir?' JOHNSON. 'Worse, Madam; a Whig! But ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... paws?" she railed at her. "They don't ply a needle, and they don't touch any thread! All you're good for is to prig things to stuff that mouth of yours with! The skin of your phiz is shallow and those paws of yours are light! But with the shame you bring upon yourself before the world, isn't it right that I should prick you, and make ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... challenged and (what is perhaps more insidious) it has been discovered. No one need be browbeaten any longer into accepting it. No one need be afraid, for instance, that his fate is sealed because some young prig may call him a dualist; the pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him. We need not be afraid of being less profound, for being direct and sincere. The intellectual world may be traversed ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... watched her walk primly down the corridor and out of the side entrance. "That infant," she said to Elinor who had been leaving Judith out, "is trembling on the brink of becoming a little prig. We've got to see to it, Norn, that she doesn't get ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... himself, "when I set the very niggers a-struggling for the greater glory of Biffen's—or is it Acton's? Then, there's that exhibition, which we must try to get for this double-superlative house. Raven must beat that Sixth prig Hodgson, the very bright particular star of Corker's. Would two hours' classics, on alternate nights, meet his case? He shall have 'em, bless him! He shall know what crops Horace grew on his little farm, and all the other rot which gains Perry Exhibitions. ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... a sincerity in his handshake that somehow had seemed to rob the apology of its satisfaction. And when McCorquodale had proffered a broken cigar Kendrick had accepted it with an uneasy feeling that he had made somewhat of a fool of himself; for Phil was no prig and he found that McCorquodale was a pretty good sort with a certain whimsicality that ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... and to accept the southern estimate of the hut in which he was born as a "mansion." In much of this false estimate Irving was doubtless misled by the fables of Weems. But while he has given us a dignified portrait of Washington, it is as far as possible removed from that of the smileless prig which has begun to weary even the popular fancy. The man he paints is flesh and blood, presented, I believe, with substantial faithfulness to his character; with a recognition of the defects of his education and ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... "but she isn't very mischievous, and she's as honest as the day is long. She positively abhors deceit. And, somehow, Alicia, all the things that you think are fun, are the sort of things she doesn't stand for. That's all. Doll isn't a prig,—is she, Bernice?" ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... have thought wrong things of one another. I thought you a prig, moral to your finger-tips with the morality of the law and the small places. Perhaps I was tempted for that reason to give you a wrong impression of myself. But you must understand this. Though I have had my standard and lived up to it all my life, ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Mary is something of a little prig," said Miss Ada to her brother when the little girls had ...
— Three Little Cousins • Amy E. Blanchard
... officer had already excited his interest; his behaviour as a soldier was loudly praised by his superiors; and then unprofessionally he was distinguished from the average type of young lieutenant by a certain attractive maturity of bearing, without, however, impressing one as a prig. Priggishness was even less endurable to Falkenhein than play ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... said Lund. "And yo're a damned prig! You'd like to bust me in the jaw, but you know I'm stronger. You've got some guts, Rainey, but yo're hidebound. You ain't got ha'f the git-up-an'-go to ye that she has. She's a woman, I tell you, an' ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... vership, you hear it's a waluable dog—now is it feasible as I should go for to prig a dog ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... don't. And they know it. They are already calling me a prig, and poking fun at me for not smoking and for not liking to have my hands patted and my cheeks pinched. Isn't it funny, Quin? At home I was always miserable because there were too many barriers; I wanted to tear them all down. Here, ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... courses by the perusal of that monstrous Autobiography, he must have been a man almost as astounding as his father. Now Franklin could only have written his "immortal classic" from one of three motives: (1) Sheer conceit. He was a prig, but he was not conceited. (2) A desire that others should profit by his mistakes. He never made any mistakes. Now and again he emphasizes some trifling error, but that is "only his fun." (3) A desire that ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... always together. His habits are formed; he does not suspect the humiliation which weighs upon my heart. Indeed, if he had the slightest inkling of this small sorrow which I am ashamed to own, he would drop society, he would become more of a prig than the people who come between us. But he would hamper his progress, he would make enemies, he would raise up obstacles by imposing me upon the salons where I would be subject to a thousand slights. That is why I prefer my sufferings to what would ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... women, by the way, are as true blue and as thoroughbred as any other class. I can never forget Maurice Hewlett's brave behaviour when he thought that his flying corps son had been killed by the Germans or drowned at sea. He's no prig, but a real man. And the women are as ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... the evil doing and you—that he cannot be chums with both. Chums should have strict honour between themselves, and always be ready to stand up for one another. A good chum prevents one becoming a prig, and there is nothing short of actual vice which is so hateful in a boy as priggishness. There is as much difference between a prig and a right- minded boy as between chalk and cheese. A right-minded boy goes on his way trying to do right and live honestly and ...
— Boys - their Work and Influence • Anonymous
... "Dreadful young prig that young Wentworth," said Mr Wodehouse, "but comes of a great family, you know, and gets greatly taken notice of—to be sure he does, child. I suppose it's for his family's sake: I can't see into people's hearts. It may be higher motives, to be sure, and all that. He's gone ...
— The Rector • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... mother he loved. When other men spoke lightly of women in his presence he showed disapproval, if their character was attacked he championed their cause, if confronted with proofs, he flatly refused to consider them. Yet he was neither a prig nor a prude. He enjoyed a joke as well as any one, but at the same time he did not let his mind run in only one channel, as some men do. He pitied rather than blamed the wretched females who frequented the miners' camps. More sinned against than sinning, was his humane judgment ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... away," laughed Cripps, mimicking the boy's tones. "When I calls up at the school I'll let them all know what a nice young prig he is, coming down and drinking at my public-house and then turning round on me. Never fear! I'll let them know, my beauties! I'll have a talk with your Doctor and open his eyes for him. Good-bye, you ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... packet-boat, and the first sound and sight of the sea—the author's childhood at Uphill Parsonage—his reminiscences of the clock of Wells Cathedral—and some real villatic sketches—a portrait of a Workhouse Girl—some caustic remarks on prosing and prig parsons, commentators, and puritanical excrescences of sects—to some unaffected lines on the village school children of Castle-Combe, and their annual festival. This is so charming a picture of rural joy, that we ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 350, January 3, 1829 • Various
... Whenever you think you have a chance of finding him in good authentic State papers, he gives you the slip; and if his existence were not vouched for by Horace Walpole, I should incline to deem of him as Betsy Prig thought of ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... who affects to doubt everything he hears, I never hesitate about writing him down an ass. A great doubter is a solemn and self-conceited prig. How amusing is it to see the blockhead shake his empty pate, compress his lips into a sneer, and turn up his absurd unmeaning eyes in dubious disbelief, when he hears aught which he thinks it would imply sagacity to discredit! Such persons ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 583 - Volume 20, Number 583, Saturday, December 29, 1832 • Various
... wrong, that the first line is a syllable short, and that Triboulet said 'colere' instead of amour. You always were a dry-as-dust, pedantic prig. But I say amour-love, do you hear? I'll translate, ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... passionate human beings, and the air they breathe is real air. The critic may wince and make faces over lapses from taste, and protest against a literary style which cannot be defended from any point of view; yet there is Mary in flesh and blood, and there is Caskoden, a veritable prig of a good fellow—there, indeed, are all the dramatis personae, not merely true ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... thing is to be cleanly and nice, And yet so as not to be over precise; To neither be constantly scolding your slaves, Like that old prig Albutus, as losels and knaves, Nor, like Naevius, in such things who's rather too easy, To the guests at your board ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... he was not a prig, or a snob, but a gentleman. And if he remembered that he "came over in the Mayflower," it was because he felt that that circumstance bound him to higher enterprises, to better work, than other men's. And he believed in his heart, as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... sword at his side. In all this there is no passion, and scarcely anything that can be called preference. The hero intrigues just as he wears a wig; because, if he did not, he would be a queer fellow, a city prig, perhaps a Puritan. All the agreeable qualities are always given to the gallant. All the contempt and aversion are the portion of the unfortunate husband. Take Dryden for example; and compare Woodall with Brainsick, or Lorenzo with Gomez. Take Wycherley; and compare ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... "you're within an ace of being a prig. It's only the freckles on your little unpowdered nose, and the yellow lights in your eyes, and the way your hair curls up at the ends that save you. Remember, please, that three-and-twenty with a perfect complexion has no call to reprove her elders. Just wait till you come ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... certain that these were relics of her mother's presence in the house. She knew the history of every other woman who had ever lived here since the place was built in the seventeenth century by an Alexander Hillard, an ancestor of Grandma's. A forbidding old prig he must have been, judging from the portrait over the dining-room mantelpiece, a worthy forbear of Ann Hillard, who had married Barrie's grandfather, John MacDonald of Dhrum. Barrie often said to herself that she did not feel related to Grandma. ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... expect men who are habitually easy-going to keep bucked up to a high pitch of efficiency for any length of time. All their training is against it. All their tradition. They hate being prigs. An Englishman will be any sort of stupid failure rather than appear a prig. That's why we've lost three good fights that we ought to have won—and thousands and thousands of men—and material and time, precious beyond reckoning. We've lost a year. We've dashed the ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... after the prosperous merchant, as the prancing horses drew him away. "After all," he thought bitterly, "she might be happier with that rich prig than she could be with me." He stepped into the hall, and spoke to the servant. The man had his message ready. Miss Regina would see Mr. Goldenheart, if he would be so good as to wait in ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... the age of 21 I was perfectly satisfied with my own society, something of a prig, fond of books and reading, etc. I was and ever have been absolutely insensible to the influence of the other sex. I am not a woman hater, and take intellectual pleasure in the society of certain ladies, but they are nearly ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... best reputation in this world as a steady man. Is he altogether the sort of man that mammas of the best kind are seeking for their daughters? I like a roue myself;—and a prig who sits all night in the House, and talks about nothing but church-rates and suffrage, is to me intolerable. I prefer men who are improper, and all that sort of thing. If I were a man myself I should go in for everything I ought to leave alone. I know I should. But you see,—I'm not a man, ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... Coningsby preceded him at Cambridge. No man ever went up from whom more was expected in every way. The dons awaited a sucking member for the University, the undergraduates were prepared to welcome a new Alcibiades. He was neither: neither a prig nor a profligate; but a quiet, gentlemanlike, yet spirited young man, gracious to all, but intimate only with his old friends, and giving always an impression in his general tone that his soul was ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... gae kaim his wig, The sodger not to strut sae big, The lawyer not to be a prig; The fool he cried, Te-hee! I kenn'd that I could never fail! But she pinn'd the dishclout to his tail, And soused him frae the water-pail, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... and announced with tears to his mother (his father had died two years before) that he could not be a priest. She told him, stonily, that he had disappointed her dearest hopes and broken her heart. His brother—the Squire now, and a prig from his cradle—took him out for a long walk, argued with him as with a fractious child, and, without attending to his answers, finally gave him up as a bad job. So an ensigncy was procured, and John a Cleeve shipped from Cork to Halifax, ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... smiling in the face of ill-treatment. No one cared for her in the very least. She had hundreds of acquaintances, who would eat her dinners and go away and poke fun at her, but not a single friend. Her husband lived on her and hardly spoke to her. Her boy at Eton, an amazing prig, looked down on her. Her little daughter never dreamed of obeying her. Anna herself was prevented by some stubborn spirit of fastidiousness, evidently not possessed by any of her contemporaries, from ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... to say he hardly ever saw her now that she was with Monsieur Didier, of the Credit Bourguignon. The financier had sent the artists to the right-about; he was a conceited, narrow-minded fellow, a dull, tiresome prig. ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... and pleased him. It put their visitor in the position of a prig. Somewhat mollified, ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... Emerson, who, in his poem of "The Mountain and the Squirrel," states the nub of the argument, with incomparable felicity, as follows:—you will recall that the two protagonists had a difference, originating in the fact that the former called the latter "Little Prig." Bun made a very sprightly retort, summing up ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... He was of all moralists the least solitary; he had spent his life as a soldier among soldiers, among those who did their best, in the midst of hardships, to live a life of pleasure without reflection. He was no prig, but he had formed the habit of giving fatherly counsel which was much beyond his years. He observes that "the advice of old men is like winter sunshine that gives out light without warmth," but that the words of ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... dance. The Rollstones were considered as beneath the dignity of the Mortons, but Herbert had loudly insisted on inviting Rose for the evening and had had his way, but after all she would not come. Herbert felt himself aggrieved, and said she was as horrid a little prig as Constance, who on her side felt a pang of envy as she thought of Rose going to church and singing hymns and carols to her father and mother, while she, after a struggle under the mistletoe, which made her hot and miserable, had to sit playing ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... And you must be as nice as you can. Say pretty things to her—that pleases her more than anything: and make yourself useful, if you get the chance. She's not half a bad little woman; and if you help me, Linda, I shall get in with her yet in spite of her conceited prig of ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... she always managed to find time for, even when she did not get up as early as on this occasion. For her age, and perhaps because of her mother's death, which still seemed recent to Janice, she was rather serious-minded. Yet she was no prig, and she loved fun and was as alert for good times as any girl ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... for want o' affection laird. The lad is a conceited prig. He's set up wi' himsel' about something he is going to do. Let him hae the money. I would show him you can gie as grandly as he can ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... of view. We have a healthy distrust of ascetics, whose anxiety over their soul's condition we properly regard as a form of egotism; and we know how easily the unco' guid become prigs. Fogazzaro's hero is neither an egotist of the ordinary cloister variety, nor a prig. That our sympathy goes out to Jeanne and not to him shows that we instinctively resent the sacrifice of the deepest human cravings to sacerdotal prescriptions. The highest ideal of holiness which medievals could ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... weather was clearing up. Even Mademoiselle Fifi seemed unable to keep still. He rose and sat down again. His harsh and clear eye was looking for something to break; suddenly, glaring at the lady with the mustache, the young prig drew his revolver: "You shall not witness it, you!" said he, and, without leaving his seat, he aimed. Two bullets fired in rapid succession put out the eyes of ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... infer that you and I are alike? What does the old prig mean? I'll banter him, and laugh at him, and leave him. [Aside.] I fancy you have a wrong ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... success, and his evident satisfaction with his lot, the man was neither a prig nor a teetotaller. He had probably seen too much of the world to be either. Yet he had, he said, been too busy all his life to spend much time in public-houses, as we drank a pint of ale together in the inn which stood at the end ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... turn out to be a good American man. Now the chances are strong that he won't be much of a man unless he is a good deal of a boy. He must not be a coward or a weakling, a bully, a shirk, or a prig. He must work hard and play hard. He must be clean-minded and clean lived, and able to hold his own against all comers. It is only on these conditions that he will grow into the kind of American man of whom America can be ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... said His Majesty, "this is most annoying. The Emperor of BARATARIA is to arrive in half an hour. He's a bit of a young prig, and bores me dreadfully—but we must meet him." With that he retired at once to the nearest palace, to change his uniform. In about ten minutes he came forth a changed man. On his head glittered an immense helmet, with a waving plume; a tunic of gold lace was buttoned tightly round ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various
... superior delicacy and humor. But it is none the less mean and ridiculous. Instead of condemnation, the world needs to bestir itself to remove the stupid and cruel creatures that make evil conduct necessary; for can anyone, not a prig, say that the small part of the human race that does well does so because it is naturally better than the large part ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... and the speech of soldiers. Yet he not merely kept his own lips" clean, but he shrank, as from a blow, from every coarse or indecent speech in others. He did not go around correcting people. He was too sensible for that. He was not a prig or a prude. But he knew, as we know, that vile speech is hateful to God; and, as so many of us do not do, he set his face ...
— For Greater Things: The story of Saint Stanislaus Kostka • William T. Kane, S.J.
... charmingly warped English, that he was "a dear old sing." Bobby, reverting quickly in mind to the fact of the extreme unconventionally of these people, took the occurrence quite as a matter of course, though it embarrassed him somewhat. He rather counted himself a prig that he could not sooner get over this habit of embarrassment, and every time Madam Villenauve insisted on calling him into her dressing-room when she was in much more of dishabille than he would have ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... you ask me I don't think she cares a bit for him. And one can scarcely be surprised. He is not a bad fellow, but rather a prig, and Edith Morriston is not exactly the sort of girl to suffer that type of man gladly. But her brother is all for the match; from Painswick's point of view she is just the wife for him, money and a statuesque style ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... truth. You represent too much. You have been too great a temptation. Nobody meant anything or planned anything at first. It all came by degrees. To see you smiling and enjoying everything and adoring that stilted prig of a Walderhurst put ideas into people's heads, and they grew because every chance fed them. If Walderhurst ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Reverend Ronald Macdonald, and the most disagreeable, condescending, ill-tempered prig ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... could withhold her tears. On inquiring her name and what business her husband followed, she replied that her name was Mrs. Pickle, (she having dropped Primrose for sufficient cause,) and that of her husband, Mr. Stephen Pickle, of the young American Banking House of Pickle, Prig, & Flutter, doing business near Wall Street. We returned to the parlor, and when the valise bearing my name, which I took good care to keep in sight, was sent up stairs, and I had told her how the accident to her portrait was caused, she blushed ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... that most men who, like myself, are doing poietic work, and who would be just as well off without obedience, find a satisfaction in adhesion. At first, in the militant days, it was a trifle hard and uncompromising; it had rather too strong an appeal to the moral prig and harshly righteous man, but it has undergone, and still undergoes, revision and expansion, and every year it becomes a little better adapted to the need of a general rule of life that all men may try to follow. We have now a whole literature, with many very fine things in it, written ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... the proudest young prig that ever pulled a throttle. I always loved the work and—well, you know how the first five years of it absorbs you if you are cut out for it and like it and intend ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... long time between drinks. There are the makings of a very fine prig in you, Dick,' ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... Bab-Balladish aspect, being considerably topsy-turvey, as rooms have a habit of being after any unusual ebullition of temper on the part of their occupants. It was certainly not swept and garnished, although its owner was preparing for the reception of a visitor. That visitor was BETSEY PRIG. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 24, 1890 • Various
... perusal of that monstrous Autobiography, he must have been a man almost as astounding as his father. Now Franklin could only have written his "immortal classic" from one of three motives: (1) Sheer conceit. He was a prig, but he was not conceited. (2) A desire that others should profit by his mistakes. He never made any mistakes. Now and again he emphasizes some trifling error, but that is "only his fun." (3) A desire ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... ne'er-do-weel, the extravagant one, who drank little and did the listening. Dudley had cast off altogether the gravity and taciturnity which sometimes got him looked upon as a bit of a prig, and chatted and told his friend stories, with a tone and manner of irresponsible gayety ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... of people to sneer at the teetotaler; people who make money out of drink naturally do so; people who drink themselves naturally do so; the unmarried girl may do so, thinking that the teetotaler is a prig and not quite a man. But there is one great class of the community, the most important of all, which does not sneer at teetotalers, and that is the wives. They know better, nay, they know best, and their verdict stands and will remain against that of all others. I am now ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... never have him caught at all," said Carroway, to his wife, when his year of precaption had expired, "than for any of those fellows to nab him; especially that prig ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... hideously tempted. Don't come with Mae, and fetch me. I couldn't resist if you did." In the next (18th of February), he is not the tempted, but the tempter. "Stanfield and Mac have come in, and we are going to Hampstead to dinner. I leave Betsey Prig as you know, so don't you make a scruple about leaving Mrs. Harris. We shall stroll leisurely up, to give you time to join us, and dinner will be on the table at Jack Straw's at four. . . . In the very improbable (surely impossible?) case of your not coming, we will call on you at a quarter ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... wrote, "has been so overlaid with myths and traditions, and so distorted by misleading criticisms, that ... he has been wellnigh lost. We have the religious and statuesque myth, we have the Weems myth (which turns Washington into a faultless prig), and the ludicrous myth of the writer of paragraphs. We have the stately hero of Sparks, and Everett, and Marshall, and Irving, with all his great deeds as general and President duly recorded and set down in polished and eloquent sentences; and we know him to be very great and wise ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... might have escaped singing altogether. Lilith also resented her having shown that she could do it—and this feeling was generally shared. It evidenced a want of good-fellowship, and made you very glad the little prig had afterwards come to grief: if you had abilities that others had not you concealed them, instead of parading ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... they know it. They are already calling me a prig, and poking fun at me for not smoking and for not liking to have my hands patted and my cheeks pinched. Isn't it funny, Quin? At home I was always miserable because there were too many barriers; I wanted to ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... up with the idea of honour. I feel there is something mean about not making complete confession and restitution after a historic error and slander. It is not the same thing to withdraw the charges against Rome one by one, or restore the traditions to Canterbury one by one. Suppose a young prig refuses to live with his father or his friend or his wife, because wine is drunk in the house or there are Greek statues in the hall. Suppose he goes off on his own and develops broader ideas. On the day he drinks his first glass of wine, I think it is essential to his honour that he ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... by a telegram which, reaching me after weary days and in the absence of any answer to my laconic dispatch to him at Bombay, was evidently intended as a reply to both communications. Those few words were in familiar French, the French of the day, which Covick often made use of to show he wasn't a prig. It had for some persons the opposite effect, but his message may fairly be paraphrased. "Have patience; I want to see, as it breaks on you, the face you'll make!" "Tellement envie de voir ta tete!"—that was what I had to sit down with. I can certainly ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... intelligence through a neglect of this fact, but otherwise reading should "come by nature." When I look through the list of The Best Hundred Books, I cannot help saying to myself, "Here are the most admirable and varied materials for the formation of a prig."'[13] ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... soldier work not for themselves, but others; they are contented with a poor pittance—the labourer's hire—and permit us, the great, to enjoy the fruits of their labours. Why, then, should the state of a prig differ from all others? Or why should you, who are the labourer only, the executor of my scheme, expect a share in the profit? Be advised, therefore; deliver the whole booty to me, and trust to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... McComases and others of that type or to have her dawdle over glasses, tall, broad, or short, in places of general democratic assemblage; and he told her so. I believe it was about here that she began to find him something of a prig and a doctrinaire; and she was not incapable, under provocation, of mentioning her impressions. It was about here, I suspect, that he told her something of Johnny McComas and his origins—at least he once or twice spoke of Johnny with a certain sharp scorn to me. He assuredly ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... in the turn of your head. You put up with things. You think perhaps they might have been worse. In every way that's your philosophy. And it's killing, killing to all life! I would rather far you said out, 'Adelaide's husband is a prig and I hate him.'" ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... champaign? Whether they tread the vale of prose, or climb, And whet their appetites on cliffs of rhyme; The college sloven, or embroider'd spark; The purple prelate, or the parish clerk; The quiet quidnunc, or demanding prig; The plaintiff tory, or defendant whig; Rich, poor, male, female, young, old, gay, or sad; Whether extremely witty, or quite mad; Profoundly dull, or shallowly polite; Men that read well, or men that only write; Whether peers, porters, tailors, tune the reeds, And measuring words to measuring ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... say of Stephen Brice? Let us confess at once that it is he who is the hero of this story, and not Eliphalet Hopper. It would be so easy to paint Stephen in shining colors, and to make him a first-class prig (the horror of all novelists), that we must begin with the drawbacks. First and worst, it must be confessed that Stephen had at that time what has been called "the Boston manner." This was not Stephen's fault, but Boston's. Young Mr. Brice possessed that ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... blame me if you don't like it, and do not set me down as a prig, though I am going to tell you your faults as I read them in your own words. You are proud and ambitious, and the cramped lines in which you are forced to live seem to strangle you. You have suffered, and have ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... dear, plump little prig who adores the woman, and wears with as much gravity as her religious opinions—only eight, Jack!—a venerable horsehair atrocity which she calls her Bustle. I have just burned it, and the child is asleep in my bed as I write. She ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... Democracy in our midst. Such a one is the hero of Miss MAUD DIVER'S latest novel, Strange Roads (CONSTABLE); but it is only fair to say that Derek Blunt (ne Blount), second son of the Earl of Avonleigh, is no prig, but, on the contrary, a very pleasant fellow. For a protagonist he obtrudes himself only moderately in a rather discursive story which involves a number of other people who do nothing in particular over a good ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... suspect, would never have been done by Dryden. Gray, Johnson, Richardson, Fielding, are all highly esteemed by the great body of intelligent and well informed men. But Gray could see no merit in "Rasselas," and Johnson could see no merit in "The Bard." Fielding thought Richardson a solemn prig, and Richardson perpetually expressed contempt and disgust ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... be just a big sister to you, of course. Ever so superior, I guess, and a good bit of a prig. And all this time over there in France with nothing but my letters and that silly picture of me in the khaki frame, I suppose you have been thinking of me, well,—as a sort of nice angel. I'm not either, really. I don't want to ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... shaken out of his equanimity; but then Duncan Robertson's father was colonel of a Highland regiment, and Duncan himself was a royal fighter, and had not in his Highland body the faintest trace of a prig, while Thomas John's face was a standing reproof of everything that was said and done outside of lesson ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... drinks water, who before drank beer; What's now the cause? we know the case is clear; Look in Prig's purse, the chev'ril there tells you Prig money wants, ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... he said, "who, as a child, were wise, but as a young woman with a little knowledge, become—a prig. What harm is my money likely to do you? I may be the Devil himself, but my gold is not tainted. For the rest, granted that I am at war with the world, I do not number children ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... face had grown more expressive; his eyes looked as much information as his tongue spoke, and more. The manner of the scholar had nearly disappeared; still more the manner of the drawing-room young man. A prig would have said that he had lost culture, and a prude that he had become coarse. Such was the contagion of domiciliary fellowship with ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... have it. It makes the chap at the top of the class a prig, and gives the poor chap at the bottom an inferiority complex. No, we want to encourage not competition but co-operation. Competition leads naturally to another world war, as competition between British and American capital ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... must follow White and Willis out of Bateman's lodgings. It was a Saint's day, and they had no lectures; they walked arm-in-arm along Broad Street, evidently very intimate, and Willis found his voice: "I can't bear that Freeborn," said he, "he's such a prig; and I like him the less because I ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... up to the sad admission upon our part that Payson, Jr., was a prig. And in the very middle of his son's priggishness Payson, Sr., up and died, and Tutt and Mr. Tutt were called upon ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... held out to me. To sit in the company of that condescending prig, to bore him and to be bored by him, was a doleful grievance I did not wish to inflict upon myself, and I eagerly answered that the day had been a long and hard one, and that I would be glad ...
— A Bicycle of Cathay • Frank R. Stockton
... Buccaneer's Bride, but evidently occupied with something in his mind. At length he said: "Marmion, I said suburban innocence and original sin, but you've a grip on the law of square and compass too. I'll say that for you, old chap—and I hope you don't think I'm a miserable prig." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in triumph into Corfu," answered Paddy, taking a turn with a dignified air on the deck. "I should like, to see what that prig Spry will say ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... of the grocer, in the shop. A conceited young prig, not yet out of the quarrelsome age. He makes boy-love to Priscilla Tomboy and Miss La Blond; but says he will "tell ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... that he must make his choice between the evil doing and you—that he cannot be chums with both. Chums should have strict honour between themselves, and always be ready to stand up for one another. A good chum prevents one becoming a prig, and there is nothing short of actual vice which is so hateful in a boy as priggishness. There is as much difference between a prig and a right- minded boy as between chalk and cheese. A right-minded boy goes on his way trying to do right and live honestly and purely, because it is right and honourable, ...
— Boys - their Work and Influence • Anonymous
... Charles Surface is applauded, and Joseph Surface is hissed. The novel-reader's affection goes out to Tom Jones, his hatred to Blifil. Joseph Surface and Blifil are scoundrels, it is true; but deduct the scoundrelism, let Joseph be but a stale proverb-monger and Blifil a conceited prig, and the issue remains the same. Good humour and generosity carry the day with the popular heart all the world over. Tom Jones and Charles Surface are not vagabonds to my taste. They were shabby fellows both, and were ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... thou, Sir Jamie Graham—prig; What was thy delighted musing? Now accepting, now refusing, Till on the Admiralty pitch'd, Still would that thought his speech prolong; To gain the place for which he long had itch'd, He call'd on Bobby still through all the song; But ever as his sweetest theme he chose, A sovereign's golden chink ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... former wishes; and when Lucia coolly announces her intention to play the hypocrite and puritan no more, but simply to enjoy herself with the moneys he has settled on her without let or proviso, he humorously declares he will for his part also drop the prig and canter, and ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... Ansell, "we are at issue. I consider a knowledge of the passing events of the day, and a recollection of the facts which have occurred during the last twenty years, to be more valuable than all the ancient records in existence. Who talks of Caesar or Xenophon nowadays, except some Cambridge or Oxford prig? and of what value is that knowledge in society? The escape of a modern pickpocket will afford more matter of conversation than the famous retreat of the ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... good-naturedly, 'I am not going to be preached to. The chief thing that made me take to you was, that you were not a prig, with all your extreme devotedness. And I will not enter into religious discussions. I might disturb your faith, and I don't want to do that. Keep your religion to yourself, and live it out, child, if you want to impress others. ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre
... though by no means into the worst phase of it. She was sure that if she closed her eyes she should see Madame Bonanni vividly before her, and hear her talking to Logotheti, and smell the heavy air of the big room. She felt that she could not call Lushington a prig. ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... had been good friends after a fashion. He was a bit of a snob but not much of a prig. She had the feeling about him that if he could be weaned away from the family he might stand for something fine in the way of character. But he was an adept at straddling fences, so that he was never fully on one side or the other, no ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... least bookish; had, as the old saying goes, "wit at will," and, though he never made deliberate and affected efforts to get out of ruts, kept out of them without the least trouble. He was as little of a "poser" or of a "rotter" as he was of a prig, and there was not a drop of bad blood in his veins. If these things could not make a good letter-writer nothing could; and there is little doubt that he will hold his place as such as long as English literature lasts. It is a great pleasure to me to give, as I hope to do, one unpublished ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... him, shentlemens, he's matt, matt as a Marsh Hase. Dree monats ago I call on board his prig to talk pizness. And he says like dis—'Glear oudt.' 'Vat for?' I say. 'Glear oudt before I shuck you oferboard.' Gott-for-dam! Iss dat the vay to talk pizness? I vant sell him ein liddle case first chop grockery for ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... "I'm no prig, Lord knows," he went on deliberately. "I like pleasure—and I like a lot of it on a vacation like this, but you're—you're in awful shape. I never heard you talk just this way before. You seem to be sort of ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... so, with lots of f's and g's and such like tailey, twirley, loopey things, when my heart is in the tender vein. And I hold that a man who will not do so, now he has been shown how to do it, is, in plain English, neither more nor less than a prig. The advantages of a varied spelling of names are very great. Industrious, rather than intelligent, people have given not a little time, and such minds as they have, to the discussion of the right spelling of our great ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... you stupid girl. (Gloria recoils in outraged surprise.) Yes, stupid girl: t h a t's a scientific fact, anyhow. You're a prig—-a feminine prig: that's what you are. (Rising.) Now I suppose you've done with me for ever. (He goes to the iron table and takes up ...
— You Never Can Tell • [George] Bernard Shaw
... one time and another given rise to conversation in which the laird and his son sought together to sound the abysses of hospitality: the old-fashioned sententiousness of the boy had in it nothing of the prig. ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... and rough form of practical joking. The players 'dumfounded' each other with sudden blows stealthily dealt. cf. Shadwell's The True Widow (1678), Act iv, I. Prig in the theatre says: 'You shall see what tricks I'll play; 'faith I love to be merry'. (Raps people on their backs, and twirls their hats, and then looks demurely, as if he did not do it.) The pit, often a very pandemonium, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... before Sir Hugh and his wife with quite as much ease as he could do in the rectory. Once or twice he had dined at the great house; but Lady Clavering had declared him to be a bore, and Sir Hugh had called him "that most offensive of all animals, a clerical prig." It had therefore been decided that he was not to be asked to the great house any more. It may be as well to state here, as elsewhere, that Mr. Clavering very rarely went to his nephew's table. On certain occasions he did do so, so that there might ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... New Zealand on account, with other goods and chattels, of that moral corporation, the New Zealand trading and emigration company, which so liberally salaries him with L.600 per annum for the use of his "principle?" Again, who so fitted as the renowned Rowland Hill, the very prig pragmatic of pretension, for the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer, or First Lord of the Treasury if you will? A man who could contrive a scheme for annihilating some two millions of post-office revenue at one stroke, must be qualified beyond all other pretenders for dealing with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... vicious, the unwholesome; to give us for our companions, in our hours of leisure and relaxation, only the silly and the weak-minded woman, the fast and slangy girl, the intrigante and the "shady"—to borrow the language of the society she seeks—the hero of irresolution, the prig, the vulgar, and the vicious; to serve us only with the foibles of the fashionable, the low tone of the gay, the gilded riffraff of our social state; to drag us forever along the dizzy, half-fractured precipice of the seventh commandment; to bring us into relations only with ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... was more careful to speak the truth than are most people, it was not his habit when a boy, and he had suffered severely in consequence. He was annoyed, therefore, at his question, set him down as a hypocritical, boastful prig, and was seized with a strong desire ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... much more likely, if you had Matilda and her prig of a book,' said Arthur, between anger and diversion. 'Tell her to mind her own business—she is not your mistress now, and she shall not teach you affectation. Why, you silly child, should I have had you if you had not been "proper ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pure joy to them both. In them they went back to the early world. They did not make the hard and self-conscious imaginative effort of the prig to hurl themselves into an historic past. They just let the land and its memories take them. As, sitting on the warm ground among the wild myrtle bushes, they looked across the emerald green unruffled waters to Salamis, that very long isle with its calm gray and orange hills and ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... Missioner. Let it be said at once that the Archdeacon hated Foster. Foster had been a thorn in the Archdeacon's side ever since his arrival in Polchester—a thin, shambly-kneed, untidy, pale-faced prig, that was what Foster was! The Archdeacon hated everything about him—his grey hair, his large protruding ears, the pimple on the end of his nose, the baggy knees to his trousers, his thick heavy hands that never seemed to ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... side, thank Heaven, even to war; but Mr. THURSTON had a great chance of doing serious good and he has only half used it. I am certain (though he may call me a prig for saying it) that if he had set himself to serve his country's cause through the great influence which the theatre commands, he could have done better work than this; and he ought to ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... of Jay quite disproves the oft-found myth that a dash of Mephisto in a young man is a valuable adjunct. John Jay was neither precocious nor bad. It is further a refreshing fact to find that he was no prig, simply a good, healthy youngster who took to his books kindly and gained ground—made head upon the whole ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... pieces of pie were disposed of, Willie offered the girls a second. It was mince pie, very nice and tempting; and though Ada knew a second piece was not generally allowed, she thought a holiday might make a difference. Dolly was busy feeding Prig,—a brisk Scotch terrier, with large, bright eyes, stiff, rough hair, and a tail about ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... down at her, his hands in his pockets. His face was twisted in a humorous disgust. Mary laughed gently. "It is possible to—to keep the rules without being a prig, you know, though I ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... of adventure by sea is regarded by every true-hearted boy as the very best story of all. The yarn—that's the thing! If the sea is a northern sea, full of ice and swept by big gales, if the adventures are real, if the hero is not a prig, if the tale concerns itself with heroic deeds and moves like a full-rigged ship with all sail spread to a rousing breeze, the boy will say "Bully!" and read the story again. "The Adventures of Billy Topsail" ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... past has set up as the incarnation of all that is best in wit and virtue—is a scholar and a gentleman. He is, moreover, on his own showing, a perfect combination of humour, wisdom, and honour; and yet, in spite of it all, not a bit of a prig. It is true that when he donned the dress-coat, and "Punch" and "Toby" put on airs as "Mr. Punch" and "Toby, M.P.," he became milder at the expense of some of his political influence. Yet what he lost ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... to my improvement. If I did not sin, and that so glaringly that my conscience is convicted on the spot, I do not know what I should become, but I feel sure I should grow worse. The man of very regular conduct is too often a prig, if he be not worse—a rabbi. I, for my part, want to be startled out of my conceits; I want to be put to shame in my own eyes; I want to feel the bridle in my mouth, and be continually reminded of my own weakness and the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his student days when I first knew him, I do not remember an occasion upon which the principal of a New England high-school would have criticised his conduct. And yet I never heard anyone call him a prig; and, so far as I know, no one was ever so stupid as to think him one. He was a quiet, good-looking, well-dressed boy, and he matured into a somewhat reserved, well-poised man, of impressive distinction in appearance and manner. He has always been well tended ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... the child of honest parince, To make away with folks' best things? Is this, pray, like the wives of Barrins, To go and prig a gentleman's rings?" ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... lectured and preached to besides. Good heavens! In his lofty manner, I suppose, that people talk of. Prig—odious, insufferable prig! So I have mistaken George, have I? My own husband! And insulted her—her! And she is actually downstairs, writing to ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... all our old books, too. Look, Helen, the Roman history with your wicked drawings on the fly-leaves: Tullia driving over her poor old father, and Cornelia—ironic little wretch you were even then—what a prig she is with her jewels! And what splendid butter-scotch you used to make over ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... most fortunately, it must be conceded, for Milton had not the knowledge of men necessary for a drama. As a study of character Paradise Lost would be a grievous failure. Adam, the central character, is something of a prig; while Satan looms up a magnificent figure, entirely different from the devil of the miracle plays and completely overshadowing the hero both in interest and in manliness. The other characters, the Almighty, the Son, Raphael, Michael, the angels and fallen spirits, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... there has been a change: but I don't think it a change for the worse. Yesterday I was a little prig. ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... bores her profoundly. She looks for Perseus, who doesn't come; the sea, always the sea without a moment's weakness; in brief, not the stuff of which friends are made! When the knight appears and kills her monster, he loses his halo for Andromede, who cherishes her monstrous guardian. Perseus, a prig disgusted by the fickleness of the Young Person, flees, and the death of the monster brings to life a lovely youth—put under the spell of malignant powers—who promptly weds his ward. In Lohengrin, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... now "at daggers drawn," as it is called. The story went, as told, I think, by Browning, who would begin: "I grew tired of Forster's always wiping his shoes on me." He was fond of telling his friend about "dear, sweet, charming Lady ——," &c. Forster, following the exact precedent of Mrs. Prig in the quarrel with her friend, would break into a scornful laugh, and, though he did not say "drat Lady ——," he insisted she was a foolish, empty-headed creature, and that Browning praised her because ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... all, remember, it is no business of mine. I know of agents at the docks who do such things as a matter of course. It is only that I happen to know that Harris at Liverpool does not. Very possibly old Frith knows all about it. I should only get scored down as a meddlesome prig, worse hypocrite than they think ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... can be very clearly deduced from the many literary fragments he has left, and that is found to be the character of a pusillanimous and ill-bred usurer, wholly lacking in foresight, in generous enterprise, and chivalrous enthusiasm—in matters of the Faith a prig or a doubter, in matters of adventure a poltroon, in matters of Science an ignorant Parrot, and in Letters a wretchedly bad rhymester, with a vice for alliteration; a wilful liar (as, for instance, 'The longest way round is the shortest way home'), a startling ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... behaviour as a soldier was loudly praised by his superiors; and then unprofessionally he was distinguished from the average type of young lieutenant by a certain attractive maturity of bearing, without, however, impressing one as a prig. Priggishness was even less endurable to Falkenhein than play ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... compelled to make choice between these impulses; so long as he is a material body and a personal consciousness, obliged to live in society and adjust himself to the rights of others. What I would like to say to young radicals—if there is any way to say it without seeming a prig—is that in choosing their own path through life, they will need not merely enthusiasm and radical fervor, but wisdom and ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... mouth, you young prig!" interrupted Grundy, and the entrance of Mr. Greyling put a stop to ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... chevaliers d'industrie, yet with something of the air noble about them which distinguishes them from the born "cad." The word "convey" once suffered such eclipse, (we are glad to say it has come up again,) and consorted, unless Falstaff be mistaken, with such low blackguards as "nim" and "cog" and "prig" ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... gone splendidly, there was a cent. per cent. profit; she was to come with him and buy the necklace at once. May loved necklaces and liked him for being so eager to give her one. And she did not wish to appear in the light of a prig (that had probably been his impression of her) again so soon. But had he not the evening before, as they talked over their prospects, told her that he owed Dick Benyon a thousand pounds or more, and was in arrears with the instalments by ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... right to expect of the American boy is that he shall turn out to be a good American man. Now the chances are strong that he won't be much of a man unless he is a good deal of a boy. He must not be a coward or a weakling, a bully, a shirk, or a prig. He must work hard and play hard. He must be clean-minded and clean lived, and able to hold his own against all comers. It is only on these conditions that he will grow into the kind of American man of whom ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... of those," he said, "who, as a child, were wise, but as a young woman with a little knowledge, become—a prig. What harm is my money likely to do you? I may be the Devil himself, but my gold is not tainted. For the rest, granted that I am at war with the world, I do not ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the purely academic training that produces the prig. Football, cricket, and other athletic sports are not favourable to his growth; and he receives equally little encouragement from his companions. The important point about him is that he is not a natural product at all, but the outcome of an artificial drilling of the mind. In a word, he is ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... would pitilessly suppress proclivities to gawster. I would ask power from Parliament to whip, when mild persuasion failed, the precocious prig, "neither man nor boy," who struts about on Sundays, scoffing at religion, and polluting the air with bad tobacco and worse talk; and I would authorise the police to supervise, and to send home at their discretion, those small giggling girls ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... so absurd a notion? To whom did the thought first present itself that the pips on playing-cards are significant of future events; and why did he think so? How did the 'grounds' of a teacup come to acquire that deep significance which they now possess for Mrs. Gamp and Betsy Prig? If the believers in these absurdities be asked why they believe, they answer readily enough either that they themselves or their friends have known remarkable fulfilments of the ominous indications of cards or tea-dregs, which must of necessity be the case where millions of ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... Dryden. Gray, Johnson, Richardson, Fielding, are all highly esteemed by the great body of intelligent and well informed men. But Gray could see no merit in "Rasselas," and Johnson could see no merit in "The Bard." Fielding thought Richardson a solemn prig, and Richardson perpetually expressed contempt and ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... see him. The Model Boy of my time—we never had but the one—was perfect: perfect in manners, perfect in dress, perfect in conduct, perfect in filial piety, perfect in exterior godliness; but at bottom he was a prig; and as for the contents of his skull, they could have changed place with the contents of a pie and nobody would have been the worse off for it but the pie. This fellow's reproachlessness was a standing reproach to every lad in the village. He was the admiration of all the mothers, and the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was not so dark, and Lieutenant Otto announced positively that the weather was clearing up. Even Mademoiselle Fifi seemed unable to keep still. He rose and sat down again. His harsh and clear eye was looking for something to break; suddenly, glaring at the lady with the mustache, the young prig drew his revolver: "You shall not witness it, you!" said he, and, without leaving his seat, he aimed. Two bullets fired in rapid succession put out the eyes ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... Unconditioned, or bore her by talking about Aristotle's Politics, or the revolutions in Corcyra. For you know, my dear Le Breton, if you HAVE a fault, it is that you're such a consummate and irrepressible prig; ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... Maudie; don't alarm yourself! She's the best specimen of the genus prig that I've ever come across in the course of my life. She ought to have a Form all to herself, instead of being plumped into the Fifth. I see dangerous possibilities in Maudie. Do you realize what she did this morning? Learnt ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... the whittler, brushing the litter from his lap. "Now I've no doubt that prig of a doctor, who they say is shining up to Alice, will be disappointed when he finds just how much she's worth. Let me see. What is his name? Lives up there," and with his jackknife Mr. Liston pointed ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... like the saint. But as the ordinary man you do like him. You revel in him. If you dislike him it is not because you are a nice ordinary man, but because you are (if you will excuse me) a sophisticated prig of a Fleet Street editor. That is just the funny part of it. The human race has always admired the Catholic virtues, however little it can practise them; and oddly enough it has admired most those of them that the modern world most sharply disputes. You complain of Catholicism for setting up ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... novel-reader's affection goes out to Tom Jones, his hatred to Blifil. Joseph Surface and Blifil are scoundrels, it is true; but deduct the scoundrelism, let Joseph be but a stale proverb-monger and Blifil a conceited prig, and the issue remains the same. Good humour and generosity carry the day with the popular heart all the world over. Tom Jones and Charles Surface are not vagabonds to my taste. They were shabby fellows both, and were treated a great deal too well. But there are other vagabonds ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... followed! The vitality of it swept down upon him now, so that he seemed never to have lived since then. He was the chosen of God and every one knew it. What a little prig and yet how simple it had all been, without any consciousness of insincerity or acting on his part. God had chosen him and there he was, for ever and ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... apparently well entertained by her conversation. "And I wanted to talk over old times with him so badly. His poor wife was my greatest friend. Mira Montanaro, daughter of the great banker, you know. It's not possible that that miserable little prig is my poor Mira's girl. The heiress of all the Montanaros in a black-lace gown worth twopence! When I think of her mother's beauty and her toilets! Does she ever wear the sapphires? Has anyone ever seen her in them? Eleven large stones in ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... embarrassing. He was not a philanderer, but he was young and she had made him feel that he had played an ungallant part. Jane was a flirt, but, after all, it would not have cost him much, so to speak, to play up to her. Perhaps he had acted like a prig. This made him angry, although he knew he had ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... compensation. Johnson signified his displeasure at Mr. Mason's conduct very strongly; but added, by way of showing that he was not surprised at it, 'Mason's a Whig.' Mrs. Knowles (not hearing distinctly): 'What! a prig, Sir?' Johnson: 'Worse, Madam; a Whig! But ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... fun at me," he thought; "and he and his father and that prig deserve—but what is ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... Bain's most interesting little book on John Stuart Mill, the youth at nine was appointed to supervise the education of the rest of the family, "a position more pleasing to his vanity than helpful to his manners." That he was a beautiful prig at this time goes ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... it all, I'm grumbling and complaining like an old prig! Perhaps I am one. I know Dick Burden thinks so. We'll let it go at that. I don't need to explain to you a matter which outwardly is insignificant, and is significant to me only for reasons which the past will account for to you ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... Martinique that he had been diligently unfaithful to the poor "uneducated" little Creole girl who really thought she loved him. From all accounts, and I have read many, Alexandre Beauharnais was an ill-conditioned cruel prig. This excellent son with "fine and noble qualities" had not been long at Martinique before he associated himself with a lady of questionable virtue, who was much older than he. This person's dislike to Josephine caused her to pour into his willing ears and receptive mind scandalous ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... Richardson always was about Fielding! How jealousy, spite, and the confusion of mind that befogs a prig when he is not taken seriously, do darken the eyes of the author of "those deplorably tedious lamentations, 'Clarissa' and 'Sir Charles Grandison,'" ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... type only the sentimentalist can declare. But they kept to the life of daylight. They are England's hope. Clumsily they carry forward the torch of the sun, until such time as the nation sees fit to take it up. Half clodhopper, half board-school prig, they can still throw back to a nobler stock, ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... him. "He isn't a prig. And he's had to fight some things that you of all men ought to understand. He's only been here a few months, but he told me that Judge Pike has been against him from the start. It seems that Mr. Ladew is too liberal in his views. And he told me ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. When asked at dinner what dish he preferred, he answered, 'the nearest.'" So many negative superiorities begin to smack a little of the prig. From his later works he was in the habit of cutting out the humorous passages, under the impression that they were beneath the dignity of his moral muse; and there we see the prig stand public and confessed. It was "much easier," says Emerson acutely, much easier for Thoreau to ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... story of adventure by sea is regarded by every true-hearted boy as the very best story of all. The yarn—that's the thing! If the sea is a northern sea, full of ice and swept by big gales, if the adventures are real, if the hero is not a prig, if the tale concerns itself with heroic deeds and moves like a full-rigged ship with all sail spread to a rousing breeze, the boy will say "Bully!" and read the story again. "The Adventures of Billy Topsail" is a book to be chummy ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... flight to Grogoff. That shocked him terribly. He confessed as much to me. She had always been so happy and easy about life. Nothing was serious to her. I remember once telling her she ought to take the war more deeply. I was a bit of a prig about it, I suppose. At any rate she thought me one.... And then to go off to a fellow ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... we saw, beginning with Washacum Pond, which we passed on our way to Worcester: "of considerable magnitude, ... and the small islands which dot its surface render it very beautiful." The buildings of New York impressed the little prig greatly. Trinity Church he pronounces "one of the most splendid edifices which I ever saw," and he waxes into "Opalian" eloquence over Barnum's American Museum, which was "illuminated ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... the pages into the breast of his jelab, and sat brooding over the paling fire for a while; then, by an abrupt transition, he said—"A fatal inclination for instructing the young was, perhaps, my undoing. I believe that I am a prig to the very fibres of me. If I had kept my didactics for my own sex, all might have gone well: I have never doubted but that I had things to teach my generation which it would be the happier of knowing. But it's a dangerous power to put into a ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... on each side of her; for, in fact, neither she nor any one else could, without the greatest difficulty, refrain from laughing at the monkeyfied appearance of Titmouse. The alderman was a stout, stupid little man—a fussy old prig—with small angry-looking black eyes, and a short red nose; as for his head, it seemed as though he had just smeared some sticky fluid over it, and then dipped it into a flour-tub, so thickly laden was it with powder. Mr. Deputy Diddle-daddle was tall and thin, and serious and slow of speech, with ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... of Blowers, who in this instance excited no small amount of merriment among the city wags, each of whom cracked a joke at his expense. Now it was not that those waggish spirits said of his placard things exceedingly annoying to his sensitive feelings, but that every prig made him the butt of his borrowed wit. One quizzed him with want of gallantry,—another told him what the ladies said of his oss,—a third pitied him, but hoped he might get back his property; and ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... "A prig—granted," said Richard; "but, I think a man of the world. That's where my point comes in. We politicians doubtless seem to you" (he grasped somehow that Helen was the representative of the arts) "a gross commonplace set of people; but we see both sides; we may be clumsy, but ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... great man—you're a sublime fellow; but you're a prig, a conceited noodle with it all, Joe! You need not to think that because you've picked up a little knowledge of practical mathematics, and because you have found some scantling of the elements of chemistry ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... "Sometimes I feel frightfully guilty, and then suddenly on the top of that I feel innocent. Oh, to be plain, I feel more than innocent. I feel dreadfully laudable. And then, to do me justice, I put up a little prayer that I may not become a prig or a donkey." ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... scrap of a prig. She never preaches or finds fault with one, and she's just as jolly as ever she can be; and yet she always makes one feel ashamed if one isn't doing what's absolutely straight. I've never seen her play a nasty, mean trick, ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... was a silly little prig," said she. Then, not without a subtle hint of sarcasm, "But I suppose we all go through that period—some of us ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... afraid Mary is something of a little prig," said Miss Ada to her brother when the little girls had ...
— Three Little Cousins • Amy E. Blanchard
... round," replied Ingleborough laughing. "No; I don't like him. I never do like a fellow who is an unnatural sort of a prig. He can't help being fat and pink and smooth, but he can help his smiling, sneaky manner. I do like a fellow to be manly. Hang him! Put him in petticoats, with long hair and a bonnet, he'd look like somebody's cook. But if I had an establishment and he was mine, I should be afraid ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... students. It is true that, as a schoolboy, a certain pompousness in the style of his letters home suggested to the more clear- sighted among his relatives the possibility that young Thomas might grow up into a prig; but, after all, what else could be expected from a child who, at the age of three, had been presented by his father, as a reward for proficiency in his studies, with the twenty-four volumes ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... monstrous Autobiography, he must have been a man almost as astounding as his father. Now Franklin could only have written his "immortal classic" from one of three motives: (1) Sheer conceit. He was a prig, but he was not conceited. (2) A desire that others should profit by his mistakes. He never made any mistakes. Now and again he emphasizes some trifling error, but that is "only his fun." (3) A desire that others should profit by the recital of his virtuous sagacity to reach ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... acquire applause, Try various arts to get a doubtful cause; Or, as a dancing master in a jigg, With various steps instructs the dancing prig; Or as a doctor writes you different bills; Or as a quack prescribes you different pills; Or as a fiddler plays more tunes than one; Or as a baker bakes more bread than brown; Or as a tumbler tumbles up and down; So does our author, rummaging his ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... plenty of people to sneer at the teetotaler; people who make money out of drink naturally do so; people who drink themselves naturally do so; the unmarried girl may do so, thinking that the teetotaler is a prig and not quite a man. But there is one great class of the community, the most important of all, which does not sneer at teetotalers, and that is the wives. They know better, nay, they know best, and their verdict stands and will remain against that of all others. I am now ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... its source in the fact that, although now he was more careful to speak the truth than are most people, it was not his habit when a boy, and he had suffered severely in consequence. He was annoyed, therefore, at his question, set him down as a hypocritical, boastful prig, and was seized with a strong ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... beneath, I could have pitied them greatly for the obligation they were under to trail after those rough lads everywhere and at all times; even as it was, I felt disposed to scout myself as a privileged prig when I turned to ascend to my chamber, sure to find there, if not enjoyment, at least liberty; but this evening (as had often happened before) I was ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... the effort of a lifetime than ever before. Here was a woman of mind and heart, one not bounded by narrow sectionalism, but seeing the good wherever it might be. He felt that he had behaved like a prig and a fool. Why should he be influenced by the idle words of some idle man in the street? He was not Lucia Catherwood's guardian; if there were any question of guardianship, she was much better fitted to ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... the rocks and the mountains speak. Emerson has given us one where the Mountain and the Squirrel had a quarrel. The Mountain called the Squirrel "Little Prig." And then continues a clash of personalities more possible to illustrate than at first appears. Here we come to the second stage of the fairy-tale where the creature seems so unmanageable in his physical aspect that some actor must be substituted who will embody the ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... and the manner in which I pestered distinguished authors for presentation copies of their books, in order to furnish the shelves of the library, I am driven to the painful conclusion that I must have been a terrible person in the days of my youth, and something of a prig to boot. Apropos of the begging for books as free gifts from authors, I had one or two amusing experiences. Among those whom I importuned in this impertinent way were Charles Kingsley, and the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Longley. Kingsley replied to my request in a manner that was ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... know." He looked about carelessly, his glance settling on the open doors of the Gayety. "Don't strike me this is exactly the sort of place for one of your moral respectability to be discovered in. Lord! but what would the old man or that infernal prig of a brother of yours say, if they could only see you now? A monologue artist at the Gayety was bad enough, but ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... bear up bravely with your Brute my lads, Higgen hath prig'd the prancers in his dayes, And sold good penny-worths; we will have a course, The Spirit of ...
— Beggars Bush - From the Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10) • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... professor, with a starched shirt and spectacles, would, if a stock of ideals were all alone by itself enough to render a life significant, be the most absolutely and deeply significant of men. Tolstoi would be completely blind in despising him for a prig, a pedant and a parody; and all our new insight into the divinity of muscular labor would be altogether ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... most complete prig in the 'Varsity," Dennison declared, "and as long as a college has a lot of men like him in it nothing else matters. ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... your poor relation off, You pious-looking prig, And open out Kit Denmark's box, And give him ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... after weary days and in the absence of any answer to my laconic dispatch to him at Bombay, was evidently intended as a reply to both communications. Those few words were in familiar French, the French of the day, which Covick often made use of to show he wasn't a prig. It had for some persons the opposite effect, but his message may fairly be paraphrased. "Have patience; I want to see, as it breaks on you, the face you'll make!" "Tellement envie de voir ta tete!"—that was what I had to sit down with. I can certainly not be said to have sat down, ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... neighbours as that he should know French, or that he should have a sword at his side. In all this there is no passion, and scarcely anything that can be called preference. The hero intrigues just as he wears a wig; because, if he did not, he would be a queer fellow, a city prig, perhaps a Puritan. All the agreeable qualities are always given to the gallant. All the contempt and aversion are the portion of the unfortunate husband. Take Dryden for example; and compare Woodall with Brainsick, or Lorenzo with Gomez. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that do duty as native-born or naturalized citizens in large sections of the United States, and among these words is the one that stands at the head of the present chapter. I know that some disdainful prig will assure me that it is but a corruption of the French "charivari," and so it is; but then "charivari" is a corruption of the low Latin "charivarium" and that is a corruption of something else, and, indeed, almost every word is a corruption of some ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... people came in for a dance. The Rollstones were considered as beneath the dignity of the Mortons, but Herbert had loudly insisted on inviting Rose for the evening and had had his way, but after all she would not come. Herbert felt himself aggrieved, and said she was as horrid a little prig as Constance, who on her side felt a pang of envy as she thought of Rose going to church and singing hymns and carols to her father and mother, while she, after a struggle under the mistletoe, which made her hot and miserable, had to sit playing waltzes. One good-natured ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... reverting quickly in mind to the fact of the extreme unconventionally of these people, took the occurrence quite as a matter of course, though it embarrassed him somewhat. He rather counted himself a prig that he could not sooner get over this habit of embarrassment, and every time Madam Villenauve insisted on calling him into her dressing-room when she was in much more of dishabille than he would have thought permissible ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... I do, Clarence," she said, with a pretty wrinkling of her own brows, which was her nearest approach to thoughtfulness. "You know you never really liked her, only you thought her ways were grander and more proper than mine, and you know you were always a little bit of a snob and a prig too—dear boy. And Mrs. Peyton was—bless my soul!—a Benham and a planter's daughter, and I—I was only a picked-up orphan! That's where Jim is better than you—now sit still, goosey!—even if I don't like him as much. Oh, I know what you're always thinking, ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... her walk primly down the corridor and out of the side entrance. "That infant," she said to Elinor who had been leaving Judith out, "is trembling on the brink of becoming a little prig. We've got to see to it, Norn, that she doesn't get ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... imminent appearance of the True Spirit of Democracy in our midst. Such a one is the hero of Miss MAUD DIVER'S latest novel, Strange Roads (CONSTABLE); but it is only fair to say that Derek Blunt (ne Blount), second son of the Earl of Avonleigh, is no prig, but, on the contrary, a very pleasant fellow. For a protagonist he obtrudes himself only moderately in a rather discursive story which involves a number of other people who do nothing in particular over a good many chapters. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... "Dreadful little prig! They should bottle him in spirits of wine as a specimen. It's the only thing he'll ever be fit for," remarked Mr. Page, who rarely said so sharp ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... set the very niggers a-struggling for the greater glory of Biffen's—or is it Acton's? Then, there's that exhibition, which we must try to get for this double-superlative house. Raven must beat that Sixth prig Hodgson, the very bright particular star of Corker's. Would two hours' classics, on alternate nights, meet his case? He shall have 'em, bless him! He shall know what crops Horace grew on his little farm, and all the ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... 1906). She considers that thirteen is quite early enough to begin teaching children the lessons of the Gospels, for a child who acted in accordance with the Gospels would be "aggravating," and would generally be regarded as "an insufferable prig." Moreover, she points out, it is dangerous to teach young children the Christian virtues of charity, humility, and self-denial. It is far better that they should first be taught the virtues of justice and courage and self-mastery, and the more Christian virtues later. She also ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... likely I am a prig. I understand the futility of what I am trying to do. I see that I have been mistaken in my power. I'm ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... time the boys were all in school. "There is not one prig in the whole lot," said the headmaster sadly. "I wish there was, but only those boys come here who are notoriously too good to become current coin in the world unless they are hardened with an alloy of vice. I should have liked to show ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... now drinks water, who before drank beer; What's now the cause? we know the case is clear; Look in Prig's purse, the chev'ril there tells you Prig money wants, either to ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... they possess, and that those in particular of Lord Granville Gower have no store of sweetness to yield. They are the wooden letters of a wooden young man. He may have been a beautiful young man, and an estimable young man; but he was insensitive, dull, and a prig. The best things he ever did in his days were to be belettered by Lady Bessborough and married, finally, to ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... of honest parince, To make away with folks' best things? Is this, pray, like the wives of Barrins, To go and prig a gentleman's rings?" ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... at his very strongest. He was an ideal Trustee. And what made this evident was the fact that he talked comparatively little about his trust, and never behaved in regard to it as a pedant or a prig. As long as the principle was firmly maintained, he bothered himself very little about matters ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... contrary, he was a moral prig," Haythorne blurted out, with apparently undue warmth. "He was a little scholastic shrimp without a drop of red blood in ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... her shrewdly. More than once she had felt that Terry was on the verge of becoming a complacent prig. So she ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... sitting-room; and we toasted the bread ourselves, which reminds me of a little circumstance not unworthy of being set down among these minutiae. Happening both of us to be engaged a few minutes one morning, when we had a young prig of a Scotch lawyer to breakfast with us, my dear sister, with her usual simplicity, put the toasting-fork with a slice of bread into the hands of this Edinburgh genius. Our little book-case stood on one side of the fire. To prevent loss of time, he took down a book, and fell ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... with all his wonderful achievements this youth would be top-heavy and a most insufferable prig. The fact was, he was a fine, rollicking, healthy young man much given to pranks, and withal generous ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... part, I am not altogether inclined to regret the little attention that is paid to Latin and Greek. Mr. Matthew Arnold's complaint of half-culture has always seemed to me to savour of the pedagogue, and his school of the prig—though I use these words in the better shade of their meaning. It would, I believe, be a gain if the splitting of the educational system into denominational schools had not taken place. A school with 200 boys—the usual size of our largest—cannot give ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... and sinks the author and hard student in "the gentleman who sometimes writes for his amusement." He writes always with a crow-quill, speaks slowly and sententiously, and shuns the crew of dissonant college revellers, who call him "a prig," and seek to annoy him. Long mornings of study, and nights feverish from ill-health, are spent in those chambers; he is often listless and in low spirits; yet his natural temper is not desponding, and he delights in employment. ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... for you," said Matt. "But I don't know that you had any cause to do it for me. It makes me feel pretty small after I've been such a beastly prig. I'll get even with you some way but I don't know how. Let me try ...
— The Boy Scout Treasure Hunters - The Lost Treasure of Buffalo Hollow • Charles Henry Lerrigo
... Cecil as subtle, and pleased him. It put their visitor in the position of a prig. Somewhat mollified, ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... taught at the University of Copenhagen. But it is much more than that. Holberg gives us a memorable series of genre paintings of Danish life of his day, and at the same time presents a situation of universal interest. Erasmus is a prig who has adopted some new ideas, not so much from righteous conviction as from the feeling that they will give him intellectual caste. His revolutionary theories raise an uproar in the village. Each apostle of the old order opposes them in his characteristic ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... wish to be thought a prig or one who made a pretence of great industry, and, although Miss Morgan's voice was without expression, he believed that irony ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... in Paris, represents in the character of the pedantic prig named Classick, the sort of university tutor who was sometimes substituted for the parson, as an ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... sense, the sense for ideal values. It is the better part of what men know as wisdom. Some of us are wise in this way naturally and by genius; some of us never become so. But to have spent one's youth at college, in contact with the choice and rare and precious, and yet still to be a blind prig or vulgarian, unable to scent out human excellence or to divine it amid its accidents, to know it only when ticketed and labelled and forced on us by others, this indeed should be accounted the very calamity and shipwreck ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... all you youngsters. Listen, boy. Brenton is a mixture of genius, and prig, and ignorant young hermit; or, rather, he has the elements all inside him, ready to be mixed. You'll have to do ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... high-toned Southerner, with unbuttoned frock-coat and baggy trousers, pays a visit to the heroine. He not only takes off his overcoat and rubbers, but tilts his chair, stays till midnight, and in every way calls down the wrath of that accomplished prig Mr. Louis Gaston, who is a high-toned Northerner. This yawning gulf between the generous faults of the South and the fastidious Phariseeism of the North is the problem of the book. The story is slight, wholly conventional, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... mother, he is a nice fellow, though a sort of a prig, and I wish to do all we can for him; only—I do hope he will not monopolize Betty and Barbara always, as he has seemed to ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... wanted a husband, should lend a willing ear to the pompous platitudes, the heavy rolling periods of this alien to her native State—a man without grace of manner or beauty—in their nomenclature, "a solemn prig," defied all ingenuity of explanation, was an increasing wonder outlasting the prescribed nine days. He rode with the ill assurance of one who, accustomed to the sawdust floor, treadmill round, and enclosing walls of a city riding-school, was bewildered by the unequal roads and ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... wished not only to wrestle with the best of them, but to be able to talk like the preacher, spell and cipher like the school-master, argue like the lawyer, and write like the editor. Yet he was as far as possible from being a prig. He was helpful, sympathetic, cheerful. In all the neighborhood gatherings, when settlers of various ages came together at corn-huskings or house-raisings, or when mere chance brought half a dozen of them at the same time ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... and the squirrel Had a quarrel, And the former called the latter 'Little prig;' Bun replied, 'You are doubtless very big, But all sorts of things and weather Must be taken in together To make up a year, And a sphere. And I think it no disgrace To occupy my place. If I'm not so large as you, You are not so small as ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... complete confession and restitution after a historic error and slander. It is not the same thing to withdraw the charges against Rome one by one, or restore the traditions to Canterbury one by one. Suppose a young prig refuses to live with his father or his friend or his wife, because wine is drunk in the house or there are Greek statues in the hall. Suppose he goes off on his own and develops broader ideas. On the day he drinks his first glass of wine, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... two o'clock and I had had quite enough of L'Abbaye. I had not enjoyed myself—had not expected to, so far as that went. I hope I am not a prig, and, whatever I am or am not, priggishness had no part in my feelings then. Under ordinary circumstances I should not have enjoyed myself in a place like that. Mine is not the temperament—I shouldn't ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... author's childhood at Uphill Parsonage—his reminiscences of the clock of Wells Cathedral—and some real villatic sketches—a portrait of a Workhouse Girl—some caustic remarks on prosing and prig parsons, commentators, and puritanical excrescences of sects—to some unaffected lines on the village school children of Castle-Combe, and their annual festival. This is so charming a picture of rural joy, that we ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 350, January 3, 1829 • Various
... did not let me acquire that Cockney accent. You can say a lot of things in a Cockney accent which said without any accent sound priggish. You must admit, Rector, that your inner comment on my tale of the gospellers and the innkeeper is 'Dear me! I am afraid Mark's turning into a prig.'" ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... acquire an intimate knowledge of humanity in its least sophisticated aspects. He would sell good beer, instead of drugged and adulterated stuff He would raise the tone of his customers, while he would insensibly gain some of their exuberant vitality. He would shake off the prig (which he knew to be a strong element in his nature), and would, at the same time, encourage temperance by providing good ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... injunction of the mother he loved. When other men spoke lightly of women in his presence he showed disapproval, if their character was attacked he championed their cause, if confronted with proofs, he flatly refused to consider them. Yet he was neither a prig nor a prude. He enjoyed a joke as well as any one, but at the same time he did not let his mind run in only one channel, as some men do. He pitied rather than blamed the wretched females who frequented the miners' camps. More sinned against than sinning, ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... that?" replied Sanine. "Literature is a very great, and a very interesting thing. Real literature, such as I mean, is not polemical after the manner of some prig who, having nothing to do, endeavours to convince everybody that he is extremely intelligent. Literature reconstructs life, and penetrates even to the very life- blood of humanity, from generation to generation. ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... thin stem of his glass with his pale, fine-pointed fingers. "Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others. One's own life—that is the important thing. As for the lives of one's neighbours, if one wishes to be a prig or a Puritan, one can flaunt one's moral views about them, but they are not one's concern. Besides, Individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. I consider that for any man of culture ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... pointed out to a raw hand, by the raw hand's experienced fellow-townsman, as "that beast Lewisham—awful swat. He was second last year on the year's work. Frightful mugger. But all these swats have a touch of the beastly prig. Exams—Debating Society—more Exams. Don't seem to have ever heard of being alive. Never goes near a Music Hall from one year's end ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... father was.' So I told him his father was ten thousand times nicer than ever he would be if be lived a hundred years, and I could not bear him if he talked in that wicked, disrespectful way, and Fly kissed me for it, mamma, and said her daddy was worth a hundred of such a prig as he was.' ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... flame: About mere peace or war a commotion to make, When the Party's existence was plainly at stake! When office was offer'd, to cast it behind, And to talk of such trash as the good of mankind! It is clear, my good friend, such a crotchety prig Has but little pretence to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... managed to find time for, even when she did not get up as early as on this occasion. For her age, and perhaps because of her mother's death, which still seemed recent to Janice, she was rather serious-minded. Yet she was no prig, and she loved fun and was as alert for good times as any girl of her age ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... filled life than James Tapster. How he had scorned the gambler, the spendthrift, the adulterer—in a word, all those whose actions bring about their own inevitable punishment! He had always been self-respecting and conscientious—not a prig, mind you, but inclined rather to the serious than to the flippant side of life; and, so inclining, he had found contentment ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... use of such paws?" she railed at her. "They don't ply a needle, and they don't touch any thread! All you're good for is to prig things to stuff that mouth of yours with! The skin of your phiz is shallow and those paws of yours are light! But with the shame you bring upon yourself before the world, isn't it right that I should prick you, and make ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... course; I believe it is more easy to unmake than to make a gentleman; I have known many gentlemanly youths go to college, and return anything but what they went. Young Mr. Platitude did not go to college a gentleman, but neither did he return one; he went to college an ass, and returned a prig; to his original folly was superadded a vast quantity of conceit. He told his father that he had adopted high principles, and was determined to discountenance everything low and mean; advised him to eschew trade, and to purchase him a living. The old man retired from business, purchased his son ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... feeling than another could have done; but he was driven to assert himself. "Nonsense, Rose, you know better," he said, in a voice of displeasure; but she pouted forth, "I don't know it. You believe every one against me, and you won't take my part against that nasty little spiteful prig!" ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was not a prig, or a snob, but a gentleman. And if he remembered that he "came over in the Mayflower," it was because he felt that that circumstance bound him to higher enterprises, to better work, than other men's. And he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Phyllis, quite puzzled. Had not her father felt a thrill of gratitude on reflecting that she had none of the qualities of the prig ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... country in the making, can we? In a way, it's a world in the making. There's everything to do—and I want to be doing some of it, Lois," he declared, with a little outburst. "I can't help it. I know some people think I'm an enthusiast, and others put me down as a prig—but I ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... was shaken out of his equanimity; but then Duncan Robertson's father was colonel of a Highland regiment, and Duncan himself was a royal fighter, and had not in his Highland body the faintest trace of a prig, while Thomas John's face was a standing reproof of everything that was said and done outside of lesson time in ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... came to you, did he? and sent you down at a moment's notice? ha! ha! He's a solemn old prig, is Pritchett; but a good servant; a very good servant. When I am gone, he'll have enough to live on; but he'll want some one to say a word to him now and again. Don't forget what I say about him. It's not so easy ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... other, must have lit in those purple depths the torches whose clear flames had leapt out to him. She loved him. She, the beautiful, the wonderful, had not tried to conceal her love for him. She had shown him all—had shown all, poor darling! only to be snubbed by a prig, driven away by a boor, fled from by a fool. To the nethermost corner of his soul, he cursed himself for what he had done, and for all he had left undone. He would go to her on his knees. He would implore her to impose on him insufferable penances. There was no penance, how bittersweet ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... sport and athletics, and rave about pictures and books and music they don't understand, and would pretend to despise if they did—things that were not even meant to be understood. It doesn't take three generations to make a prig—worse luck! ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... mountain and the squirrel Had a quarrel, And the former called the latter "Little Prig." Bun replied: "You are doubtless very big; But all sorts of things and weather Must be taken in together To make up a year And a sphere; And I think it no disgrace To occupy my place. If I'm not so large as you, You are not so small as I, And not half so spry. I'll ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... the butler. Indeed, Miss Bunion having considered Mr. Pendennis for a minute, who gave himself rather grand airs, and who was attired in an extremely fashionable style, with his very best chains, shirt studs, and cambric fronts, he was set down, and not without reason, as a prig by the poetess; who thought it was much better to attend to her dinner than to take any notice of him. She told him as much in after days with her usual candour. "I took you for one of the little Mayfair dandies," she said to Pen. "You looked as solemn as a little ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... blue-stockings like Lady Eastlake and Madame Mohl; Mademoiselle de Montijo, who captivated an Emperor, and Lola Montez, who ruled a kingdom. No advantages of social education will convert a fool or a bore or a prig or a churl into an agreeable member of society; but, where Nature has bestowed a bright intelligence and a genial disposition, her gifts are cultivated to perfection by such surroundings as Frederick Leveson enjoyed in early life. And so it came about that alike as a young man, in middle ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... Newcastle MSS. in the British Museum. But the James of these letters is the James of "Catriona." The scenes with the advocates of James of the Glens, at Inveraray, read as if they had been recorded in shorthand, at the moment. David himself is, of course, the Lowland prig he is meant to be, but Catriona, at last, was a moving heroine, though Stevenson, justly, preferred to her the beautiful Miss Grant, and entirely overcame the difficulty of making us realise her beauty. The Princess, in "Prince Otto," is a fair shadow, compared to Miss Grant, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the author did not know what to do with his characters. It has the amateurish fault of halting the narrative to talk with the reader; and it moralizes to such an extent that the heroine (who is pictured as of almost angelic virtue) eventually becomes a prig and a preacher,—two things that a woman must never be. Nevertheless, the romance has a host of enthusiastic readers, and to criticize it adversely is to bring a storm about one's ears.] In The Blithedale Romance (1852) Hawthorne deals with the present rather than the past and apparently ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... about art, and all four enjoyed the morning immensely. It was fine to go round recognising old favourites and finding new beauties, especially while so many people fumbled helplessly with Baedeker. Nor was he a bit of a prig, Miss Winchelsea said, and indeed she detested prigs. He had a distinct undertone of humour, and was funny, for example, without being vulgar, at the expense of the quaint work of Beato Angelico. He had a grave seriousness beneath it all, and was quick to seize ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... said Peter, firmly, "you just dry up. If you're not careful, you'll turn into a beastly little Sunday-school prig, so ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... his choice between the evil doing and you—that he cannot be chums with both. Chums should have strict honour between themselves, and always be ready to stand up for one another. A good chum prevents one becoming a prig, and there is nothing short of actual vice which is so hateful in a boy as priggishness. There is as much difference between a prig and a right- minded boy as between chalk and cheese. A right-minded boy goes on his way trying to do right and live honestly and purely, because ...
— Boys - their Work and Influence • Anonymous
... his street; but what are the duke and the coster to do? Neither of them has any effective choice in the matter: their children must either go to the schools that are, or to no school at all. And as the duke thinks with reason that his son will be a lout or a milksop or a prig if he does not go to school, and the coster knows that his son will become an illiterate hooligan if he is left to the streets, there is no real alternative for either of them. Child life must be socially organized: no parent, rich or poor, can choose institutions that do not exist; and ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... prayer meetings, nor the trip to the Holy Land that he made in one long vacation ever deceived anyone who knew the fellow into thinking him a prig. He never pretended that his ideals of practical conduct were a bit higher than those of scores of the men who had none of these interests of his. So marked was this absence of the goody-goody in Tip ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... The little prig was so diligent at her books she gave never the slightest sign of comprehending that there had been a fight about her. Having no real cognizance of Messrs. Bender and Milholland except as impediments to the advance of learning, she ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... men could be so disciplined as to believe in their souls that death must come, then there would be no lost days. Is there one of us who can say that he never lost a day amid this too brief, too joyous, too entrancing term of existence? Not one. The aged Roman—who, by-the-way, was somewhat of a prig—used to go about moaning, "I have lost a day," if he thought he had not performed some good action or learned something in the twenty-four hours. Most of us have no such qualms; we waste the time ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... has said, "'at it was a trial to Jamie to tak her ony gait, an' I often used to say to her 'at I wondered at her want o' pride in priggin' wi' him. Ay, but if she could juist get a promise wrung oot o' him, she didna care hoo muckle she had to prig. Syne they quarrelled, an' ane or baith o' them grat (cried) afore they made it up. I mind when Jamie went to the fishin' Leeby was aye terrible keen to get wi' him, but ye see he wouldna be seen gaen through the toon wi' her. 'If ye let me gang,' she said to him, 'I'll no seek to go through ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... Herbert with a faint smile, 'that depends on your definition of the word. He wasn't a flunkey, a fool, or a prig, if that's what you mean. He wasn't perhaps on Mrs Grundy's visiting list. He wasn't exactly gregarious. And yet in a sense that kind of temperament is so rare that Sappho, Nelson, and Shelley shared it. To the stodgy, suety world of course it's little else than sheer moonshine, ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... "Be quiet, you prig! I won't be dictated to by you. Look here, Dick!" His voice changed abruptly. "I'm not ordering. I'm asking. That boy is a mill-stone round your neck. Let him go! He'll be happy enough. I'll see to that. Give him up like a dear chap! Then you'll be free—free to chuck this absurd, ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... had married a wife like you, a girl with a level head and a stiff upper lip, a girl with not sufficient sentiment to make her a fool, nor enough brains to be a prig, but just clever enough to supply her husband's deficiencies, he would have been my heir, and this place and all my money ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... "Odious prig!" thought Hannah. "He actually doesn't see I'm sitting on him!" Aloud she said, "No? But you can't marry ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... more husbands and lovers behind her than a sailor has wives! Marion Delegass and that prig in petticoats! Well, Elsie, you do beat ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... she is. . . . If you think you have the simple feminine on your hands—forget it, Boots!—for she's as evanescent as a helio-flash and as stunningly luminous as a searchlight. . . . And here I've been doing the benevolent prig, bestowing society upon her as a man doles out indigestible stuff to a kid, using a sort of ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... not bad. Nevertheless,—thinking as the world around us does about hunting,—a clergyman in my position would be wrong to hunt often. But a man who can feel horror at such a thing as this is a prig in religion. If, as is more likely, a man affects horror, he is a hypocrite. I believe that most clergymen will agree with me in that; but there is no clergyman in the diocese of whose agreement I feel more ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... in our hours of leisure and relaxation, only the silly and the weak-minded woman, the fast and slangy girl, the intrigante and the "shady"—to borrow the language of the society she seeks—the hero of irresolution, the prig, the vulgar, and the vicious; to serve us only with the foibles of the fashionable, the low tone of the gay, the gilded riffraff of our social state; to drag us forever along the dizzy, half-fractured precipice of the seventh commandment; to bring ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... pleasing sense of superior delicacy and humor. But it is none the less mean and ridiculous. Instead of condemnation, the world needs to bestir itself to remove the stupid and cruel creatures that make evil conduct necessary; for can anyone, not a prig, say that the small part of the human race that does well does so because it is naturally better than the large part that ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... and beautiful, upright life are a living witness to his religious faith, known and read of all men. Angry, sneering, and selfish folk come to regard him with an affection akin to holy awe. But he is not in the least a prig or a stuffed curiosity. He is essentially a reasonable, kind-hearted man, who goes about doing good. Every one confides in him, all go to him for advice and solace. He is a multitudinous blessing, with masculine virility and shrewd ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... repeated this good story. It had impressed them at the time, but they did not tell it to others in an impressive way, and the girls, who had not seen Prissie, but had only heard the tale, spoke of her to one another as an "insufferable little prig." ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... can't. It does not matter why. I am going to tell you the truth. You represent too much. You have been too great a temptation. Nobody meant anything or planned anything at first. It all came by degrees. To see you smiling and enjoying everything and adoring that stilted prig of a Walderhurst put ideas into people's heads, and they grew because every chance fed them. If ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... solemn prig, Prendick, a silly ass! You're always fearing and fancying. We're on the edge of things. I'm bound to cut my throat to-morrow. I'm going to have a damned Bank Holiday to-night." He turned and went out into the moonlight. "M'ling!" he cried; "M'ling, ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... I one day grow honest, if I don't make up for last night's paltry prig. Come, let's have one roasted, missus—I prefers roast goose. Honest hanimal! only fit to be plucked and eaten. I say, missus, I stumbled on a cove this morning, that I thinks will prove a bleeding cull,—honest hanimal, only fit to ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... enrichments which have made each edition an improvement on the last. The public notices were, on the whole, extremely kind, and some were unintentionally amusing. Thus one editor, putting two and two together, calculated that the writer could not be less than eighty years old; while another, like Mrs. Prig, "didn't believe there was no sich a person," and acutely divined that the book was a journalistic squib directed against my amiable garrulity. The most pleasing notice was that of Jean La Frette, some extracts ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... announced positively that the weather was clearing up. Even Mademoiselle Fifi seemed unable to keep still. He rose and sat down again. His harsh and clear eye was looking for something to break; suddenly, glaring at the lady with the mustache, the young prig drew his revolver: "You shall not witness it, you!" said he, and, without leaving his seat, he aimed. Two bullets fired in rapid succession put out the eyes of ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... clamorous party strife, And all the hot activities of life; But most the Politician He mocks—for 'meanness.' How the prig would gasp If shown the slime-trail of that wriggling asp In ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... he flourished, yet his character can be very clearly deduced from the many literary fragments he has left, and that is found to be the character of a pusillanimous and ill-bred usurer, wholly lacking in foresight, in generous enterprise, and chivalrous enthusiasm—in matters of the Faith a prig or a doubter, in matters of adventure a poltroon, in matters of Science an ignorant Parrot, and in Letters a wretchedly bad rhymester, with a vice for alliteration; a wilful liar (as, for instance, 'The longest way round is the shortest way home'), a startling ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... than once she had felt that Terry was on the verge of becoming a complacent prig. So she countered ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... my arrival at Jenny Man's I saw an alert young fellow that cocked his hat upon a friend of his, who entered just at the same time with myself, and accosted him after the following manner: "Well, Jack, the old prig is dead at last. Sharp's the word. Now or never, boy. Up to the walls of Paris, directly;" with several other deep ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... imagine the situation of an adventurer who had figured virtually in many lives, to resemble that of the late revered Mr. Prig Bentham, when sitting like a contrite spider at the centre of his 'panopticon'; all the lines, which meet in a point at his seat, radiate outwards into chambers still widening as they increase their distance. This may be an ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... PALMER'S, who have exchanged their tools and toys, their pens, wigs, brushes, books, spats and dreams for stars (one, two or three) and scars; all drawn into the Great Adventure which began on that 4th of August so many long years ago. Dilettante Pelham, prig and pacificist not from passion but from detachment, always so unbeatable in argument and always so wrong; sportsman Rivers, seeing simply and straight; crank Smith; comfortable Baddeley in his snug Government berth; poser Ponsonby, always ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... an inhuman peace, hacking up human life into small sins with a chopper, sneering at men, women, and children out of respect to humanity, combining in one chaos of contradictions an unmanly Puritan and an uncivilised prig, then, indeed, we scarcely know whither Tolstoy has vanished. We know not what to do with this small and noisy moralist who is inhabiting one corner of a great ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... pleasanter and, from his own point of view, a better filled life than James Tapster. How he had scorned the gambler, the spendthrift, the adulterer—in a word, all those whose actions bring about their own inevitable punishment! He had always been self-respecting and conscientious—not a prig, mind you, but inclined rather to the serious than to the flippant side of life; and, so inclining, he had found contentment and ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... discussing the Absolute and the Unconditioned, or bore her by talking about Aristotle's Politics, or the revolutions in Corcyra. For you know, my dear Le Breton, if you HAVE a fault, it is that you're such a consummate and irrepressible prig; now aren't ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... who were inferior to him, growled in their conversations. "Four-flusher, prig! He wasn't satisfied with making so much money and now he's playing the sport among the aristocracy, to pick up more portraits, to get all he can ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... did mean to ask your permission to do so, Miss Eleanor,' he said slightly embarrassed, 'and I was prig enough to think you would allow it, but when you told me of your engagement I did not dare. After you left I had a dread that something might happen, and I could not rest satisfied until I had made up my mind to come ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... and East"—he said. His boast was, first, that he was an Oxford Man of rare and shining parts, which may or may not have been true—I did not know enough to check his statements—and, secondly, that he "had his hand on the pulse of native life"—which was a fact. As an Oxford Man, he struck me as a prig: he was always throwing his education about. As a Mohammedan faquir—as McIntosh Jellaludin—he was all that I wanted for my own ends. He smoked several pounds of my tobacco, and taught me several ounces of things worth knowing; ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... Oxford, where his industry and piety had given him a conspicuous place among his fellow students. It is true that, as a schoolboy, a certain pompousness in the style of his letters home suggested to the more clear- sighted among his relatives the possibility that young Thomas might grow up into a prig; but, after all, what else could be expected from a child who, at the age of three, had been presented by his father, as a reward for proficiency in his studies, with the twenty-four volumes of ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... for a year or more, with no signs of abatement, the publishers felt obliged to intimate that unless I put an end to their misery they would. Accordingly, I promptly gave Garth his quietus. The truth is, I was tired of him myself. With all his qualities and virtues, he could not help being a prig. He found some friends, however, and still shows signs of vitality. I wrote no other novel for nearly two years, but contributed some sketches of English life to Appletons' Journal, and produced a couple of novelettes,—"Mrs. Gainsborough's ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... make a gentleman; I have known many gentlemanly youths go to college, and return anything but what they went. Young Mr. Platitude did not go to college a gentleman, but neither did he return one; he went to college an ass, and returned a prig; to his original folly was superadded a vast quantity of conceit. He told his father that he had adopted high principles, and was determined to discountenance everything low and mean; advised him to eschew trade, and to purchase him a living. The ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... and I had had quite enough of L'Abbaye. I had not enjoyed myself—had not expected to, so far as that went. I hope I am not a prig, and, whatever I am or am not, priggishness had no part in my feelings then. Under ordinary circumstances I should not have enjoyed myself in a place like that. Mine is not the temperament—I shouldn't know how. I must have appeared the most solemn ass in creation, ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... experience. He was of all moralists the least solitary; he had spent his life as a soldier among soldiers, among those who did their best, in the midst of hardships, to live a life of pleasure without reflection. He was no prig, but he had formed the habit of giving fatherly counsel which was much beyond his years. He observes that "the advice of old men is like winter sunshine that gives out light without warmth," but that the words of a wise and genial young man may radiate heat and glow. His own advice, ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... change were not mysterious at all. They were very clear, and seemed to her very virtuous, very praiseworthy—up to the last minute. Then she thought that she was a prig, and a wretch, and several other things which she would have been furious to be thought by anybody else. She had wanted Nick to realize—that is, she had felt it her duty to make him realize—that things could not go on as they were, after last night. She had been incredibly ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... failures. It would be interesting to learn just what proportion of solitary children there is on the roll of those who have become great in our world. One thinks of John Ruskin, a particularly fine specimen of the highly focussed single son. Prig perhaps he was, but this world has a certain need of such prigs. A correspondent (a schoolmistress of experience) who has collected statistics in her own neighbourhood, is strongly of opinion not only that solitary ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... Came with Monsieur Triquet, a prig, Who arrived lately from Tamboff, In spectacles and chestnut wig. Like a true Frenchman, couplets wrought In Tania's praise in pouch he brought, Known unto children perfectly: Reveillez-vouz, belle endormie. Among some ancient ballads thrust, He found them ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... he, you've 'scaped from transportation All upon the briny main; So never give way to no temptation, And don't get drunk nor prig again! ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... under a heavy fire from the Indians, at the imminent risk of his own life," the sergeant had never received a harsh word or a rebuke that he did not know was merited. But the sullen fury that this young prig aroused in him was unbearable. He felt that his inherent subordination to discipline was being torn ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... uncomfortable. Beyond a certain point one cannot pretend denseness, and he was in an agony of dread lest his father would see what Therese was up to. She had begun kissing him good-night, and now more and more warmth crept into the embrace until he found himself trying to avoid it. He was no prig, and Therese was attractive, yet the distaste he felt for the situation neutralised her power to lure him. Moreover, she showed him a side which convinced him of what he had hitherto suspected—that Therese had all the instincts of a cocotte. Whether she actually ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... sermons from the recesses of his trunk or his lunch basket, or his gun-case, and goes at the work of weekly redemption with a will. And, what is more, he is listened to, and for the time being—though on week days he is styled a bore by the old and a prig by the young—he becomes temporarily invested with a dignity not his own, with an authority he could not claim on any other day. It is the dignity of a people who with all their faults have the courage of their opinions, and it is the authority that they have been taught from their childhood ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... had persevered, notwithstanding his being requested to name his own terms of compensation. Johnson signified his displeasure at Mr. Mason's conduct very strongly; but added, by way of showing that he was not surprised at it, 'Mason's a Whig.' Mrs. Knowles (not hearing distinctly): 'What! a prig, Sir?' Johnson: 'Worse, Madam; a ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... grateful for their recognition. He knew a great deal about art, and all four enjoyed the morning immensely. It was fine to go round recognising old favourites and finding new beauties, especially while so many people fumbled helplessly with Baedeker. Nor was he a bit of a prig, Miss Winchelsea said, and indeed she detested prigs. He had a distinct undertone of humour, and was funny, for example, without being vulgar, at the expense of the quaint work of Beato Angelico. He had a grave seriousness beneath it all, and ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... serious scrape. Others openly expressed themselves in this way, "That they would much rather have paid their money to Stone, if he had given me a good thrashing, than to have me punished by legal proceedings." And one of them, a parson prig, had the insolence and the folly to tell me, that they would get a better man for me next time, for that they were determined to bring down one of the prize-fighters to give me a drubbing. This fellow was then, and still is, an insufferable cockscomb, and I remember very well ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... men. In fact, she was fond of flirting, and as it must probably have been impossible to flirt with Montagu, she indulged herself in that agreeable pastime with more than one other—to the great annoyance of that pompous prig of an admirer of hers. The following letter, dated September 5, 1709, written to Anne Wortley for her brother's perusal, was clearly an endeavour to sooth away ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... English, that he was "a dear old sing." Bobby, reverting quickly in mind to the fact of the extreme unconventionally of these people, took the occurrence quite as a matter of course, though it embarrassed him somewhat. He rather counted himself a prig that he could not sooner get over this habit of embarrassment, and every time Madam Villenauve insisted on calling him into her dressing-room when she was in much more of dishabille than he would have thought permissible ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... is another argument. The argument here is that Bernard Shaw, in aiming at mere realism, makes a big mistake in reality. Misled by his great heresy of looking at emotions from the outside, he makes Eugene a cold-blooded prig at the very moment when he is trying, for his own dramatic purposes, to make him a hot-blooded lover. He makes the young lover an idealistic theoriser about the very things about which he really would have been a sort of mystical materialist. Here the romantic ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... by Cooper calling to Silk and asking if he were coming with him. The prudent Silk felt that to stay was to signify his approval of Mike's conduct in the case of the indiscreet countess. To leave with Cooper was to write himself down a prig, expose himself to the sarcasm of several past masters in the art of gibing, and to make in addition several powerful enemies. But the instinct not to compromise himself in any issue did not desert him, and rushing after Cooper he attempted the ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... uncle generally has his dinner parties on Saturday, or goes out; and aunt gives me ten shillings and sends me to the play; that's better fun than a dinner party." Here the lad blushed again. "I used," said he, "when I was younger, to stand on the stairs and prig things out of the dishes when they came out from dinner, but I'm past that now. Maria (that's my cousin) used to take the sweet things and give 'em to the governess. Fancy! she used to put lumps of sugar into her pocket and eat them in the schoolroom! Uncle Hobson don't live in such ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... of the beautiful goodness that floats over his face, a light from Paradise. But why from Paradise? Paradise is an ugly ecclesiastical invention, and angels are an ugly Hebrew invention. It is unpardonable to think of angels in Auteuil; an angel is a prig compared to the dear doctor, and an angel has wings. Well, so had this admirable chicken, a bird that was grown for the use of the table, produced like a vegetable. A dear bird that was never allowed to run about and weary itself as our helpless English ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... the idea of honour. I feel there is something mean about not making complete confession and restitution after a historic error and slander. It is not the same thing to withdraw the charges against Rome one by one, or restore the traditions to Canterbury one by one. Suppose a young prig refuses to live with his father or his friend or his wife, because wine is drunk in the house or there are Greek statues in the hall. Suppose he goes off on his own and develops broader ideas. On the day he drinks his first glass of wine, I think it is essential to his honour that ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Across, along, the gardens' shrubby maze, They walk, they sit, they stand. What crowds press on, Eager to mount the stairs, eager to catch First vacant bench or chair in long room plac'd. Here prig with prig holds conference polite, And indiscriminate the gaudy beau And sloven mix. Here he, who all the week Took bearded mortals by the nose, or sat Weaving dead hairs, and whistling wretched strain, And eke the sturdy youth, whose trade it is Stout oxen to contund, ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... the pleasantest of the fellows, and have turned out by no means the dullest in life; whereas, many a youth who could turn off Latin hexameters by the yard, and construe Greek quite glibly, is no better than a feeble prig now, with not a pennyworth more brains than were in his ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... associations. Perhaps that is how it has always been, with ballads. From the standard of pure aesthetics, one ought not to consider "associations" in judging a poem or a tune, but with a song like "Tipperary" you would be an inhuman prig if you didn't. We all have our "associations" with this particular tune. For me, it recalls a window in Hampstead, on a grey day in October 1914. I had been having the measles, and had not been allowed to go back to school. ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... neighbors as that he should know French, or that he should have a sword at his side. In all this there is no passion, and scarcely anything that can be called preference. The hero intrigues just as he wears a wig; because, if he did not, he would be a queer fellow, a city prig, perhaps a Puritan. All the agreeable qualities are always given to the gallant. All the contempt and aversion are the portion of the unfortunate husband. Take Dryden for example; and compare Woodall ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... at the cock again, which both began and ended the book. He stood and crowed so proudly and never slept. He was a regular prig, but when Sister was diligent he put a one-ore piece among the leaves. But the hens laid eggs, and it was evident that they were the same as the flowers; for when you were kind to them and treated them as if they belonged to the family, they were industrious in laying, but if you built a ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... circles to which it is still congenial, and where it will be preserved. But it has been challenged and (what is perhaps more insidious) it has been discovered. No one need be browbeaten any longer into accepting it. No one need be afraid, for instance, that his fate is sealed because some young prig may call him a dualist; the pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him. We need not be afraid of being less profound, for being direct and sincere. The intellectual world may be traversed in many directions; the whole has ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... to her, is he? He isn't even her guardian. And William Pressley is an honest man, isn't he, even though such a solemn, pompous prig? He can hardly be a confederate of counterfeiters, forgers, robbers, and murderers. And a single look at the judge's face shows him to be the most upright of men; his open, unswerving honesty of thought and deed, cannot be doubted. How ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... what I have been," he said, sadly, and then with sudden conviction, as if he read her thoughts: "You do know! That prig of a parson has told you! Well, it's just as well you ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... been done by Dryden. Gray, Johnson, Richardson, Fielding, are all highly esteemed by the great body of intelligent and well informed men. But Gray could see no merit in "Rasselas," and Johnson could see no merit in "The Bard." Fielding thought Richardson a solemn prig, and Richardson perpetually expressed contempt ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... and Prince won't stand it. He told Arch he was a prig and a parson, and Arch told him he wasn't a gentleman. My boots! weren't they both mad, though! I thought for a minute they'd pitch into one another and have it out. Wish they had, and not gone stalking round stiff and glum ever since. Mac and I settle our ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... perfectly weel," Jess has said, "'at it was a trial to Jamie to tak her ony gait, an' I often used to say to her 'at I wondered at her want o' pride in priggin' wi' him. Ay, but if she could juist get a promise wrung oot o' him, she didna care hoo muckle she had to prig. Syne they quarrelled, an' ane or baith o' them grat (cried) afore they made it up. I mind when Jamie went to the fishin' Leeby was aye terrible keen to get wi' him, but ye see he wouldna be seen gaen through the toon ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... to find out, for Sally May and Catherine look perfectly wretched—as if Sally May would; but some of them believe it. How Genevieve can act! She just hoodwinked Miss Watson completely; looked like a good little prig who'd done everything she ought to do—and she was thoroughly enjoying herself. I guess she'll go on the stage when she leaves school—it would be interesting to have people applauding. I believe she was glad I was there to see her do it—and I believe—she was ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... into the breast of his jelab, and sat brooding over the paling fire for a while; then, by an abrupt transition, he said—"A fatal inclination for instructing the young was, perhaps, my undoing. I believe that I am a prig to the very fibres of me. If I had kept my didactics for my own sex, all might have gone well: I have never doubted but that I had things to teach my generation which it would be the happier of knowing. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... (Independent Review, Oct., 1906). She considers that thirteen is quite early enough to begin teaching children the lessons of the Gospels, for a child who acted in accordance with the Gospels would be "aggravating," and would generally be regarded as "an insufferable prig." Moreover, she points out, it is dangerous to teach young children the Christian virtues of charity, humility, and self-denial. It is far better that they should first be taught the virtues of justice and courage and self-mastery, and the more Christian ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... issue. I consider a knowledge of the passing events of the day, and a recollection of the facts which have occurred during the last twenty years, to be more valuable than all the ancient records in existence. Who talks of Caesar or Xenophon nowadays, except some Cambridge or Oxford prig? and of what value is that knowledge in society? The escape of a modern pickpocket will afford more matter of conversation than the famous retreat of ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... legs about; the muscles of his face had grown more expressive; his eyes looked as much information as his tongue spoke, and more. The manner of the scholar had nearly disappeared; still more the manner of the drawing-room young man. A prig would have said that he had lost culture, and a prude that he had become coarse. Such was the contagion of domiciliary fellowship with the Talbothays nymphs ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... you'd stand up to me like that I'd just respect you. Anyhow, I respect Rosamund, and I dare say I'd have had to spend the night in her room, or perhaps even have had to come home, but something most welcome happened. Thank goodness, Rosamund isn't a prig! She's awfully passionate, and has plenty of strong feelings. She's not a bit a goody-goody; I'd just hate her like anything if she were. But that Lucy—you know that prim thing, the daughter of the Professor and ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... Tyrrel. "Well, well, man," replied he, "we will see what can be done. Order and subordination are very good things; but people should know how much to require. As you tell the story, I cannot see that you are greatly to blame. Marlow is a coxcombical prig, that is the truth on't; and if a man will expose himself, why, he must even take what follows. I do hate a Frenchified fop with all my soul: and I cannot say that I am much pleased with my neighbour Underwood for taking the part of such a rascal. ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... as celebrated or well-known. If that was really his feeling, he had his revenge; for no one book ever so suppressed another as Boswell's Life suppressed Hawkins's. In truth, Hawkins was a solemn prig, remarkable chiefly for the unusual intensity of his conviction that all virtue consists in respectability. He had a special aversion to "goodness of heart," which he regarded as another name for a quality properly called extravagance or vice. Johnson's tenacity of old acquaintance introduced ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... said, greatly embarrassed by the real affection he felt, "I don't want to seem like a prig and appear to be sitting in judgment upon a man of your experience and position especially since I have the honour to be your son, and have made a good deal of trouble by a not irreproachable existence. Since we have begun on the subject, however, I think I ought to tell you that I have ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... as true blue and as thoroughbred as any other class. I can never forget Maurice Hewlett's brave behaviour when he thought that his flying corps son had been killed by the Germans or drowned at sea. He's no prig, but a real man. And the women are ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... excellent reprover; yet burning with impatience to obliterate all remembrance of his error, by some brave action which should prove that he was not unworthy the clemency and confidence which his appearance had excited. He told Monthault what had passed. "The old Prig worded it bravely," said he, "but in one respect he is better than most of your precise moralists. Come turn out the pieces—share and share alike you know; and just now they are quite convenient, as there is not a single doit in my purse." Eustace hesitated, knowing ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... cupboards. It has all the fuss of preparation for childbirth—the accumulations of wrappings, the obstetric furniture, the nods and winks of the midwife and the gossips, authentic ancestors of Mrs Sarah Gamp and Mrs Elizabeth Prig—why, the haste to fetch the midwife at the crisis might almost be the foundation upon which Dickens built the visit of Seth Pecksniff, Esq., to ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... we not censure all the motley train, Whether with ale irriguous, or champaign? Whether they tread the vale of prose, or climb, And whet their appetites on cliffs of rhyme; The college sloven, or embroider'd spark; The purple prelate, or the parish clerk; The quiet quidnunc, or demanding prig; The plaintiff tory, or defendant whig; Rich, poor, male, female, young, old, gay, or sad; Whether extremely witty, or quite mad; Profoundly dull, or shallowly polite; Men that read well, or men that only write; Whether peers, porters, tailors, tune the reeds, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... healthy distrust of ascetics, whose anxiety over their soul's condition we properly regard as a form of egotism; and we know how easily the unco' guid become prigs. Fogazzaro's hero is neither an egotist of the ordinary cloister variety, nor a prig. That our sympathy goes out to Jeanne and not to him shows that we instinctively resent the sacrifice of the deepest human cravings to sacerdotal prescriptions. The highest ideal of holiness which medievals could conceive does not ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... He did not much care, for example, to have her "run" with the McComases and others of that type or to have her dawdle over glasses, tall, broad, or short, in places of general democratic assemblage; and he told her so. I believe it was about here that she began to find him something of a prig and a doctrinaire; and she was not incapable, under provocation, of mentioning her impressions. It was about here, I suspect, that he told her something of Johnny McComas and his origins—at least ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... her dislike to all that bears the name of Underwood. I own it is hard to have one's predecessor flung constantly in one's teeth, and by the very people who were the greatest thorns to dear Underwood himself. Then Clem, who was a born prig, though a very good boy, gave some of his little interfering bits of advice before he went away, and it has all been set down to Felix's account! One Sunday, Smith made a complaint of Felix having the biggest boys in the school. It was the consequence of his having taken ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... she's left more husbands and lovers behind her than a sailor has wives! Marion Delegass and that prig in petticoats! Well, Elsie, you do ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... As, however, Mr. Carlyle is the only person on record who has ever performed this feat, it will be best for the rest of mankind to be content with the nearest approach to a hero available, namely a prig. These animals are very plentiful, and easy to catch, as they delight in being run after. There are however many different kinds, not all equally fit for the present purpose, and amongst which it is very necessary to select the right one. Thus, for instance, there is the scientific and ...
— Every Man His Own Poet - Or, The Inspired Singer's Recipe Book • Newdigate Prizeman
... but there had been a sincerity in his handshake that somehow had seemed to rob the apology of its satisfaction. And when McCorquodale had proffered a broken cigar Kendrick had accepted it with an uneasy feeling that he had made somewhat of a fool of himself; for Phil was no prig and he found that McCorquodale was a pretty good sort with a certain whimsicality that was not to ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... laughing a little—but at Mr. Perry, not at Adam, as Faith clearly understood. "I never did like him. I went to school with him—he was a Glen boy, you know—and he was a most detestable little prig even then. Oh, how we girls used to hate holding his fat, clammy hands in the ring-around games. But we must remember, dear, that he didn't know that Adam had been a pet of yours. He thought he WAS just a common rooster. We must be just, ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... polite, nor were all great nobles libertines. Faithful husbands and wives were by no means exceptional; although, as in other places, well behaved people did not make a parade of their morality. There is such a thing as a French prig; but prigs are neither common nor popular in France. Before the Revolution the art of pleasing was more studied than it is to-day,—that art by which men and women make themselves agreeable to ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... this task, nothing but the want of means shall make me desist.'[183] He had a right to make that boast, and his ardour in the cause was as unimpeachable as honourable. It explains why Cobbett has still a sympathetic side. He was a mass of rough human nature; no prig or bundle of abstract formulae, like Paine and his Radical successors. Logic with him is not in excess, but in defect. His doctrines are hopelessly inconsistent, except so far as they represent his stubborn prejudices. Any view will serve his purpose which can be made a weapon of ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... world in the making. There's everything to do—and I want to be doing some of it, Lois," he declared, with a little outburst. "I can't help it. I know some people think I'm an enthusiast, and others put me down as a prig—but I can't ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... to join, though by no means into the worst phase of it. She was sure that if she closed her eyes she should see Madame Bonanni vividly before her, and hear her talking to Logotheti, and smell the heavy air of the big room. She felt that she could not call Lushington a prig. ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... his age. But though he was thus, of necessity, thrown much with his sister and her girl friends, Alan was far from belonging to that uninteresting species of humanity, the girl-boy; instead of that, he was a genuine, rollicking boy, with never a trace of the prig about him. ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... pockets of watches, snuff-boxes, &c. was for a length of time the sole business of his life. He was however secured, after secreting himself for a time, convicted, and is now transported for life—as he conceives, sold by another cele-brated Prig, whose real name was Bill White, but better known by the title of ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... he were giving a view-halloo. Then there is the moist-eyed, mottle-cheeked, puffy, convivial sub, who is knowing on the condition of ale, and is too friendly with Saccone's sherry. The convivial sub, I am happy to say, is dying out. Then there is the prig, who is "going in" for his profession. I call him a prig, because when people are going in for anything they should have the good sense not to blow about it. To hear Mr. Shells and his prattle about Hamley and Brialmont and Jomini, kriegspiel and the new drill, you would ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... not preparing myself for a governess, that I should make a point of honor of such things, little pragmatical prig that you are; nor are you, that I know of. You will always have plenty of money. 'Rich as a Jew' is a proverb, you know, all ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... been a horrid little prig in those days," said Evadne, smiling. "But, auntie, there can be no peace without plenty. And I think I would rather be a sensible realist than a foolish idealist. You mean that you think me too much of a utilitarian, do ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... principle. He finds sermons in his horses' tails; he could give an excellent reason for the quantity of lace on his coat, which was due, it seems, to a sentiment of filial reverence; and he could not fix his hour for dinner without an eye to the reformation of society. In short, he was a prig of the first water; self-conscious to the last degree; and so crammed with little moral aphorisms that they drop out of his mouth whenever he opens his lips. And then his religion is in admirable keeping. It is intimately connected with the excellence of his deportment; and is, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... was the reply. "Nasty, consequential little prig! And who is he, I should like to know? Panjandrums are not to be mentioned in the same breath as Dodos—we are a much more ancient family than they are, and, besides, we ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... accurately. If a lad of seven, nine, or eleven years of age should write such solemn little effusions amid the surroundings and influences of the present day, he would probably be set down justly enough as either an offensive young prig or a prematurely developed hypocrite. But the precocious Adams had only a little of the prig and nothing of the hypocrite in his nature. Being the outcome of many generations of simple, devout, intelligent Puritan ancestors, ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... of the True Spirit of Democracy in our midst. Such a one is the hero of Miss MAUD DIVER'S latest novel, Strange Roads (CONSTABLE); but it is only fair to say that Derek Blunt (ne Blount), second son of the Earl of Avonleigh, is no prig, but, on the contrary, a very pleasant fellow. For a protagonist he obtrudes himself only moderately in a rather discursive story which involves a number of other people who do nothing in particular over a good many chapters. We are halfway through before Derek takes the plunge, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... apologizing for Tegner, I am merely trying to account for him. From his Homer, whom he loved above all other poets, he had in a measure derived that artistic paganism which perceptibly colored his personality. There was nothing of the scholarly prig or pedant about him. In his lectures he gave himself, his own view of life, and his own interpretation of his authors. And it was because of the greatness of the man, the unhackneyed vigor of his speech, and the power of his intellect that ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... seminary, returned to Cleeve Court, and announced with tears to his mother (his father had died two years before) that he could not be a priest. She told him, stonily, that he had disappointed her dearest hopes and broken her heart. His brother—the Squire now, and a prig from his cradle—took him out for a long walk, argued with him as with a fractious child, and, without attending to his answers, finally gave him up as a bad job. So an ensigncy was procured, and John a Cleeve shipped from Cork to Halifax, to fight the French in America. At Cork he ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... is the end of all our amusement?" he said, as he came near. "You bring Cynthia here in your tiresome, condescending way, you live among us like an almighty prig, smiling gravely at our fun, and then you go off when it is convenient to yourself; and then, when you want a little recreation, you come and sit here in a corner and hug your darling, when you have never given ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... divorced from morality. Its frank disregard of ethical considerations startled Miss Balfour without shocking her. She liked his candor, even though it condemned him. It was really very nice of him to take her impudence so well. He certainly wasn't a prig, anyway. ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... silly little prig," said she. Then, not without a subtle hint of sarcasm, "But I suppose we all go through that period—some of us in childhood, ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... with her; I am certain of it. The girl was always very much attached to her, and I know the sly old devil has been sent to negotiate with me, but I declined. I knew better than to involve myself in a controversy with an old she prig who deals in nothing but maxims, and morals, and points of duty. I consequently sent her off in double quick time, as they say. Get me some burgundy and water. I really am not well. There is something wrong, Gibson, whatever ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... hearing of his case, I was touched with some compassion, and the more so, when, upon observing him nearer, I found he was a prig. I bade him produce his cane in court, which he had left at the door. He did so, and I finding it to be very curiously clouded with a transparent amber head, and a blue riband to hang upon his wrist, I immediately ordered my clerk Lillie to lay it up, and deliver ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... exercised any influence upon their practice, they would have learned long ago that ill-gotten goods never prosper, and that they who make booty of other men's wits, are not excepted from the general condemnation of wrong-doers. Some day, perhaps, they will consent to profit by what they prig, and thus, like the fat knight, turn their diseases to commodity—the national disease of appropriation to the commodity of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... Annaple when they were gone, 'he will not cry like the kloarek in the Breton ballad who wetted three great missals through with his tears at his first mass. He is very good, I am sure, but he is a bit of a prig!' ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... got to visit. He swore he had rather go to the tread-mill than stay there. He was not much beloved by the inhabitants. Lord Erith, Lord Rosherville's heir, considered his cousin a low person, of deplorably vulgar habits and manners; while Foker, and with equal reason, voted Erith a prig and a dullard, the nightcap of the House of Commons, the Speaker's opprobrium, the dreariest of philanthropic spouters. Nor could George Robert, Earl of Gravesend and Rosherville, ever forget that on one evening when he condescended ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... either of these Sunday-schools, I did not see him. The Model Boy of my time—we never had but the one—was perfect: perfect in manners, perfect in dress, perfect in conduct, perfect in filial piety, perfect in exterior godliness; but at bottom he was a prig; and as for the contents of his skull, they could have changed place with the contents of a pie and nobody would have been the worse off for it but the pie. This fellow's reproachlessness was a standing reproach to every lad in the village. He was the admiration of all the mothers, and the detestation ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... The vitality of it swept down upon him now, so that he seemed never to have lived since then. He was the chosen of God and every one knew it. What a little prig and yet how simple it had all been, without any consciousness of insincerity or acting on his part. God had chosen him and there he was, for ever and ever safe ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... and traditions, and so distorted by misleading criticisms, that ... he has been wellnigh lost. We have the religious and statuesque myth, we have the Weems myth (which turns Washington into a faultless prig), and the ludicrous myth of the writer of paragraphs. We have the stately hero of Sparks, and Everett, and Marshall, and Irving, with all his great deeds as general and President duly recorded and set down in polished and eloquent sentences; and we know him to ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... intended to be—as an approximate human ideal, one cannot help feeling that in spite of his humorous anarchism and subjective zest for life, Sanine has in him something sententious and tiresome. He is, so to speak, an immoral prig; nor do his vivacious spirits compensate us for the lack of delicacy and irony in him. On the other hand there is something direct, downright and "honest" about his clear-thinking, and his shameless eroticism which wins our ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... as my stock goes down the chances of a good report dwindle. Young Dent grieves to see me injuring my own case. Too damned a fool to see what will happen to the report! You see if only they can convince themselves I am just a prig and an egotist and an impractical bore, they escape from a great deal more than my poor propositions. They escape from the doubt in themselves. By dismissing me they dismiss their own consciences. And then they can scamper off and be sensible little piggy-wigs and not bother any ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... itself is not bad. Nevertheless,—thinking as the world around us does about hunting,—a clergyman in my position would be wrong to hunt often. But a man who can feel horror at such a thing as this is a prig in religion. If, as is more likely, a man affects horror, he is a hypocrite. I believe that most clergymen will agree with me in that; but there is no clergyman in the diocese of whose agreement I feel ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... long run if one cannot put the love of clean, wholesome life into his heart. But how to get at him? If you talk to him about his soul you disgust him, and you feel a sort of sneaking sympathy with him too. It does not seem the thing to make a chap self-conscious and a bit of a prig when he is not one to start with. On the other hand, if you just keep to buns and cinemas you never get any farther. Well, it is a big difficulty. The only experience that I have had which counts at all is experience that I gained ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... of superior delicacy and humor. But it is none the less mean and ridiculous. Instead of condemnation, the world needs to bestir itself to remove the stupid and cruel creatures that make evil conduct necessary; for can anyone, not a prig, say that the small part of the human race that does well does so because it is naturally better than the large part that ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... suggestive. Poor Fido—the "dog that got to be utterly sick of conventionality," and came to such bitter grief in his search for "life poignant and intense!" He might read a lesson to many a two-legged prig, were the bipedal nincompoop ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 20, 1892 • Various
... way; but we must follow White and Willis out of Bateman's lodgings. It was a Saint's day, and they had no lectures; they walked arm-in-arm along Broad Street, evidently very intimate, and Willis found his voice: "I can't bear that Freeborn," said he, "he's such a prig; and I like him the less because I am ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... more likely, if you had Matilda and her prig of a book,' said Arthur, between anger and diversion. 'Tell her to mind her own business—she is not your mistress now, and she shall not teach you affectation. Why, you silly child, should I have had you if you had not been "proper behaved"? You have nothing to do but to ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... but it were idle to grow angry with a Gosse. This must be the English literary exquisite whom Americans have hitherto incidentally heard bellowing before the tent of this or the other giant and taking tickets—I mean the prig, not the pug. He is comparatively youthful yet, and can, on occasion, digest a good dinner. Perchance when he is well past four-score, worn with long years of labor compared with which the slavery of the bagne were a blessing, and half-dead with dyspepsia, he too, will ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... merchant, as the prancing horses drew him away. "After all," he thought bitterly, "she might be happier with that rich prig than she could be with me." He stepped into the hall, and spoke to the servant. The man had his message ready. Miss Regina would see Mr. Goldenheart, if he would be so good as to wait ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... schools the competition is narrowed, the energies stinted. The schoolmaster's wife interferes, and generally coddles the boys. There is not manliness enough in those academies; no fagging, and very little fighting. A clever boy turns out a prig; a boy of feebler intellect turns out a well-behaved young lady in trousers. Nothing muscular in the system. Decidedly the namesake and descendant of Kenelm Digby should not go to a ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of her hands toward him seemed to beg for pity. "Jack! I can't help it. Maybe I'm a little prig, but ... mustn't we guide our lives by principle ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... to a kindred feeling. While a guest of the "touching" gentleman, Borrow was introduced to the Rev. Mr. Platitude, a notable character in his literary portrait gallery—"he did not go to college a gentleman; he went an ass and returned a prig," writes Borrow fiercely. No biographer, so far as I know, has identified Platitude, but Mr. Donne evidently knew him, for he calls Borrow's account a "gross and unfair caricature." I believe I have identified "the rascally Unitarian minister who went over to the High Church," with the Rev. ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... with pained disapproval the gambols of his elder. Himself incorruptible, he was no doubt well pleased at heart that Banjo's misconduct should throw up in high relief his own immaculate conduct. Lollypop was in fact a bit of a prig. Had he been a boy he would have been head of his school, a Scholar of Balliol, and President of ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... forgot the 'r,' The Englishman's affectation of a virtue he despises makes of him a prig—not a pig. Non, non! Mon Dieu! Not a pig—a prig! Is it ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... depravity, and that quiet children are not always free from deceit, cruelty, and meanness. The quiet, ideal child, of whom Mr. Abbott thinks so highly, generally proves, in real life, neither more nor less than a prig. He is more likely to die than live; and if he lives, you ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... he has always led that kind of life. Even in his student days when I first knew him, I do not remember an occasion upon which the principal of a New England high-school would have criticised his conduct. And yet I never heard anyone call him a prig; and, so far as I know, no one was ever so stupid as to think him one. He was a quiet, good-looking, well-dressed boy, and he matured into a somewhat reserved, well-poised man, of impressive distinction in appearance and manner. He has always been well tended and cared ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... pounces, When I prig your pigs or pullen; Your culvers take Or mateless make Your chanticleer and sullen; When I want provant with Humphrey I sup, And when benighted, To repose in Paul's, With waking souls ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... Trevelyan. "Of course you'll have some! If I think fit to eat it, you may. Don't play the blameless prig, for goodness' sake!" ...
— Jack of Both Sides - The Story of a School War • Florence Coombe
... old prig of a Hilary, don't worry. It's all going to come straight. When the novel of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries is published I guess you'll be proud of me. ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... imagine that with all his wonderful achievements this youth would be top-heavy and a most insufferable prig. The fact was, he was a fine, rollicking, healthy young man much given to pranks, and withal ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... that follow all you youngsters. Listen, boy. Brenton is a mixture of genius, and prig, and ignorant young hermit; or, rather, he has the elements all inside him, ready to be mixed. You'll have to do ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... warning in that little vague complimentary speech, and she thought nothing at all about it. It is quite impossible for a man to talk all day without saying meaningless if not foolish things, unless he happens to be a very solemn prig who carefully considers his words and lays them down like dominoes; and Eden was not that. His naturalness was his great charm, and she judged his feelings from her own; his simple transparent kindliness was ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... subtle, and pleased him. It put their visitor in the position of a prig. Somewhat ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... character is peculiarly well fitted for romance. But Irish subjects generally have become distasteful. This novel, however, is of itself a weak production. The characters do not excite sympathy. The heroine has two lovers, one of whom is a scamp and the other a prig. As regards the scamp, the girl's mother is her own rival. Rivalry of the same nature has been admirably depicted by Thackeray in his Esmond; but there the mother's love seems to be justified by the ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
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