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More "Unctuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a poor man to make a living for his family than to help a rich man make more profit for his company. This principle was too sound to be fought openly. It is the kind of principle to which politicians delight to pay unctuous homage in words. But we translated the words into deeds; and when they found that this was the case, many rich men, especially sheep owners, were stirred to hostility, and they used the Congressmen they controlled to assault us—getting ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... flowery marge, to the Reverend Don So-and-so, Who is Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca, Saint Jerome, and Cicero; "And, moreover" (the sonnet goes rhyming), "the skirts of Saint Paul has reached, Having preached us those six Lent-lectures more unctuous than 50 ever he preached." Noon strikes—here sweeps the procession! our Lady borne smiling and smart With a pink gauze gown all spangles, and seven swords stuck in her heart! Bang-whang-whang goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the fife; ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... that the gneiss manifests a tendency to pass into eurite.) The primitive limestone often simply covers this latter rock in concordant stratification. Very near the Hato the talcose slate becomes entirely white, and contains small layers of soft and unctuous graphic ampelite.* (* Zeichenschiefer.) Some pieces, destitute of veins of quartz, are real granular plumbago, which might be of use in the arts. The aspect of the rock is very singular in those places where thin plates ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... motive, and he affects to be a very model of domesticity. The sentiment of piety also was strong upon him, and if he did not, like the illustrious Peace, pray for his jailer, he rivalled the Prison Ordinary in comforting the condemned. Had it only been his fate to die on the gallows, how unctuous ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... that is to say, so resting one upon the other that the flames could play freely through them, in order that the metal might heat and liquefy the sooner. At last I called out heartily to set the furnace going. The logs of pine were heaped in, and, what with the unctuous resin of the wood and the good draught I had given, my furnace worked so well that I was obliged to rush from side to side to keep it going. The labour was more than I could stand; yet I forced myself to strain every nerve and muscle. To ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... firewood. Fit ending of the ancient edifice which had stood for almost exactly one hundred years, and in which the three Mathers, Increase, Cotton, and Samuel,—father, son, and grandson,—had preached the unctuous doctrine of hell-fire and damnation; teaching so incendiary was bound sooner or later to ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... element Fire:—"Fire is the purest and noblest of all Elements, full of adhesive unctuous corrosiveness, penetrant, digestive, inwardly fixed, hot and dry, outwardly visible, and tempered by the earth.... This Element is the most passive of all, and resembles a chariot; when it is drawn, it moves; when it is not drawn, ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... bone to another, or from one region of a limb to another, these tendons must necessarily have smooth surfaces over which to glide, either upon the bones themselves or formed at their articulations, and this need is supplied by the secretion of the synovial fluid, a yellowish, unctuous substance, furnished by a peculiar tendinous synovial sac designed for ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... and in his pink-striped shirtsleeves, sat upon the steps of his saloon as they went by. He wished them an unctuous good-evening. The oily smoothness of Mr. Saunders' voice cannot be described with plain pen and ink; it gurgled with sweetness, like molasses poured from a jug. This was not a special tone ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... felt at finding that the carcase of the harpooner was in my possession. I surveyed my treasure over and over again with delight. I could now cook my French dishes. He was soon dissected, and all his unctuous parts carefully melted down, and I found that I had a stock which would last me as long as the bodies which I had remaining to exercise my skill upon. The first day I succeeded admirably—I cooked my dishes; ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... Jove!" A period of profound introspection followed, and then he broke forth: "Well, I 'll be hanged!" emphasizing each word with a slow nod. Then he began to laugh,—not noisily; scarcely audibly, indeed; but with the deep, unctuous chuckle of one who gloats over some exquisitely absurd situation, some jest of many facets, each contributing ...
— A Love Story Reversed - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... scoundrel, knowing well that it is elsewhere, pipes out, "There it is, Fa-ther, there it is, Fa-ther!" with an unctuous humility shading into impatient contempt that is simply indescribable, being ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... Guermantes whose lover he had been); their colours had melted into one another, so as to add expression, relief, light to the pictures. A touch of red over the lips of Esther had strayed beyond their outline; the yellow on her dress was spread with such unctuous plumpness as to have acquired a kind of solidity, and stood boldly out from the receding atmosphere; while the green of the trees, which was still bright in Silk and wool among the lower parts of the panel, but had quite 'gone' at the top, separated ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... monster, fierce and strange, Through his wide threefold throat barks as a dog ... His eyes glare crimson, black his unctuous beard, His belly large, and clawed the hands with which He tears the spirits, flays them, and their limbs ...
— 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.
... a better thing. The only emigrant in his party was Leonora, and I like to think they lived happily ever after on his little orange-farm. I can only hope that his rival, Pike-Sarpe, a horrible little unctuous cad of a solicitor, will shortly do something to attract the official attention ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various
... sluicing adrift, and the trails and wagon roads to Rough and Ready knee-deep in mud. The stage-coach from Sacramento, entering the settlement by the mountain highway, its wheels and panels clogged and crusted with an unctuous pigment like mud and blood, passed out of it through the overflowed and dangerous ford, and emerged in spotless purity, leaving its stains behind with Rough and Ready. A week of enforced idleness on the river "Bar" had driven the miners ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the man was changed beyond all recognition. Caste-mark, stomach, slate-colored continuations, and unctuous speech were all gone. I looked at a withered skeleton, turban-less and almost naked, with long matted hair and ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... of age, was sent for by the Board of Guardians, to decide the point by her personal testimony. One can imagine the half-dozen portly prosperous figures, and the contrast their appearance offered to that of the bent and withered crone. 'Now, Betty,' said the chairman with unctuous patronage, 'you look hale and hearty enough, yet they tell me that you are a hundred years old; is this really true?' 'God Almighty knows, sir,' was her reply, 'but I feel ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... tinkling note of the muffin-bell strikes agreeably upon the ear, suggestive of fragrant souchong and bottom-crusts hot, crackling, and unctuous. Now ensues a delicate savour in the atmosphere of the terrace kitchens, and it is just at its height when Smith, Brown, Jones, and Robinson are seen walking briskly up the terrace. They all go in at Smith's, where the muffin-man went in about half an hour before, and left half his stock behind ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... to tell us that Monsieur Bergeret made some naive remark, or the Abbe Jerome Coignard uttered some unctuous sally, in so large and deliberate and courtly a way that the mere "he said" or "he began" falls upon us like a papal benediction or like the ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... no doubt in the world that you are doing well in that greasy Flanders; living probably on the fat of the unctuous land; sitting like a black-haired, tawny-skinned, long-nosed Israelite by the flesh-pots of Egypt; or like a rascally son of Levi near the brass cauldrons of the sanctuary, and every now and then plunging in a consecrated ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... but we'll leave it go at the reglar price. So, just you skin off six hundred an' thirty bucks, an' eighteen more, an' pass 'em acrost. An' do it pronto or somethin' might happen to Fatty right where he's thickest." The cowpuncher emphasized his remarks by boring the muzzle even deeper into the unctuous periphery of the proprietor. The croupier shot a questioning glance toward ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... rheumatic pains, particularly those of the fixed kind, and which were seated deep. In these cases I have given from ten grains to a scruple of the fresh root twice or thrice a day, made into a bolus or emulsion with unctuous and mucilaginous substances, which cover its pungency, and prevent its making any painful impression on the tongue. It generally excited a slight tingling sensation through the whole habit, and, when the patient was kept warm in bed, produced a ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... words of a real spiritual teacher. Archbishop Thomson will never get within a million miles of their meaning; nor will anybody be deceived, by the unctuous "Oh that" with which he concludes his discourse, like a mental rolling of the ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... a few strides, and stopped again. Suddenly, changing my attitude, I fold my hands, hold my head to one side, and ask, with an unctuous, sanctimonious tone of voice: "Hast thou appealed also to him, my child?" It ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... and there, sure enough, on the roof of the sepulchre, was a peculiarly unctuous and sooty mark, three feet or more across. Doubtless it had in the course of years been rubbed off the sides of the little cave, but on the roof it remained, and there was ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... Mr Kibble, an unctuous broad man of few words and many mouthfuls, said, more briefly than pointedly, raising his ale to his lips: 'Same to you.' Mr Job Potterson, a semi-seafaring man of obliging demeanour, ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... sentiment—a piece of cant, because he did not feel what he was saying—to deaden the cannon-ball of Christ's word, is only a pattern of a good many of us who think that to say, 'Blessed is he that eateth bread in the Kingdom of God,' with the proper unctuous roll of the voice, is pretty nearly as good as to take the bread that is offered to us. There are no more difficult people to get at than the people, of whom I am sure I have some specimens before me now, who bow their heads in assent to the word of the Gospel, and by bowing them escape its ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... distinctly, and provoke the observer to take pleasure in seeing how completely the workman is master of the particular material he has used, and how beautiful and desirable a substance it was, for work of that kind. In oil painting, its unctuous quality is to be delighted in; in fresco, its chalky quality; in glass, its transparency; in wood, its grain; in marble, its softness; in porphyry, its hardness; in iron, its toughness. In a flint country, one should feel the delightfulness of having flints ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... Goolsby smiled an unctuous and knowing smile. "Maybe you think I ain't a-comin'," he exclaimed, with the air of a man who has invented a joke that he relishes. "Well, sir, you're getting the wrong measure. I was down in 'Zalia Monday ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... elevates, and Joy Brightens his Crest; as when a wandering Fire, Compact of unctuous Vapour, which the Night Condenses, and the Cold invirons round, Kindled through Agitation to a Flame, (Which oft, they say, some evil Spirit attends) Hovering and blazing with delusive Light, Misleads th' amaz'd Night-wanderer from his Way To Bogs and Mires, and oft through Pond ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... gentleman I (replied Harrington), how unctuous you are! Forgive my laughing; but it does so remind me of Douce Davie Deans. I will make you professor of spiritual insight, &c., ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... coarse-grained and some are fine; some are thinskinned and some are thick. One variety is quick and vigorous beneath the touch, another gentle and yielding. The pinnock has a thick skin with a spongy lining; a bruise in it becomes like a piece of cork. The tallow apple has an unctuous feel, as its name suggests. It sheds water like a duck. What apple is that with a fat curved stem that blends so prettily with its own flesh,—the wine apple? Some varieties impress me as masculine,—weatherstained, freckled, lasting, and rugged; others are indeed lady apples, fair, delicate, ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... distinctly; the sausage asked a foremost place; pancakes, griddle-cakes, dough-nuts, gravies, and sauces, all struggled for precedence; the land and the sea waged internecine war for place, through their representative fries of steak and mackerel; and as the unctuous pork—no nursling of the flock, but seasoned in ripe old age with salt not Attic—rooted its way into the front rank, I thought of the wisdom of Moses. All these were, so to speak, the mere outlying flakes, the feathery curls, of the balmy cirro-cumulus, whose ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... Charles, 1648,' was opened at the head. A second Charles I, coffin of wood was thus disclosed, and, through this, the body carefully wrapped up in cere-cloth, into the folds of which a quantity of unctuous or greasy matter, mixed with resin, as it seemed, had been melted, so as to exclude, as effectually as possible, the external air. The coffin was completely full; and, from the tenacity of the cere-cloth, great difficulty was experienced in detaching it successfully from ...
— Shakespeare's Bones • C. M. Ingleby
... numberless feet; and an indescribable frowziness prevailed which imparted itself to the condition of widowhood dug up by the young foreigner from the basement. Sometimes there responded to his summons a clerical, an almost episcopal presence, which was clearly that of a former butler, unctuous in manner and person from long serving. Or sometimes there would be something much more modern, of an alert middle-age or wary youth; in every case the lodging-keeper was skilled far beyond the lodging-seeker ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... was a man of about forty, with a high-coloured face and an active, vigorous frame. He gesticulated freely and spoke in an unctuous, fawning tone. ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... had ever seen. His name was Cornelius Heemskerk. Holland was his birthplace, but America was his nation. He was short and extremely fat, but he had an agility that amazed the five when they first saw it displayed. He talked much, and his words sounded like grumbles, but the unctuous tone and the smile that accompanied them indicated to the contrary. He formed for Shif'less Sol an inexhaustible ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Katie was not without reading; but she was not of those who dabble in sentimental novels (the source of imaginary tears), and saturate themselves with unctuous charities; and whose powers to act are sapped by ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... household fortunes (for the man Had risk'd his little) like the little thrift, Trembled in perilous places o'er a deep: And oft, when sitting all alone, his face Would darken, as he cursed his credulousness, And that one unctuous mount which lured him, rogue, To buy strange shares in some Peruvian mine. Now seaward-bound for health they gain'd a coast, All sand and cliff and deep-inrunning cave, At close of day; slept, woke, and went the next, The Sabbath, pious variers from the church, To chapel; where a heated pulpiteer, ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... other stretched out his hand to a paper on the table. "Here, comrade," he said, with a laugh, "here is a place for you to begin. A bishop whose wife has just been robbed of fifty thousand dollars' worth of diamonds! And a most unctuous and oily of bishops! An eminent and scholarly bishop! A philanthropist and friend of labor bishop—a Civic Federation decoy duck for the chloroforming of ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... he met them halfway; he was so patient and considerate, so entirely devoted to pleasing the critical trout, and so successful in his efforts,—surely his heart was upon his hook, and it was a tender, unctuous heart, too, as that of every angler is. How nicely he would measure the distance! how dexterously he would avoid an overhanging limb or bush and drop the line exactly in the right spot! Of course there was a pulse of feeling and sympathy to the extremity of that line. If your heart is a stone, ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... unctuous, fat or wax-based solid, sometimes medicated, formerly applied to the skin ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... reminds us of Dickens; but Sipyagin and his wife might belong to the great Dickens gallery, though drawn with a restraint unknown to the Englishman. Sipyagin himself is a miniature Pecksniff, unctuous, polished, and hollow. The dinner-table scenes at his house are pictured with a subdued but implacable irony. How the natural-born aristocrat Turgenev hated the Russian aristocracy! When Solomin appears in this household, he ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... as old women talk about a crazy saint, all sorts of unctuous nonsense; it's a mistake for him ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... "Whether they unctuous exhalations are Fired by the sun, or seeming so alone, Or each some more remote and slippery star Which loses footing when to ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... Leprosy of the Arabs. A contagious disease; the skin is thickened, wrinkled, rough, unctuous, destitute of hair, without any sensation of touch in the extremities of the limbs; the face deformed with tubercles; the voice hoarse, and with ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... with such unctuous satisfaction that even the callous lawyer experienced a slight ripple of repulsion. He now saw clearly in his fatuous visitor the conceit of the lady-killer, the egoistic complacency of ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... contains a curious odoriferous substance, called by the trappers barkstone, but more scientifically "castor," or "castoreum." It is contained in two little bags about the size of a hen's egg, and is of a brownish, unctuous consistency. At one time it was supposed to possess valuable medicinal properties. It is now, however, chiefly employed by perfumers. The beavers themselves are strangely attracted by this substance, and when scenting ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... now, finishing his dish of beans and oil, and debating whether he should indulge himself in another mezza foglietta of his favourite white wine. He was installed upon the wooden bench against the wall, behind the narrow table on which was spread a dirty napkin with the remains of his unctuous meal. The light from the solitary oil-lamp that hung from the black ceiling was not brilliant, and he could see well enough through the panes of the glass door that the carriage which had just stopped on the opposite side of the street was not a cab. Suspecting ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... deep around them, the raging thirst and burning fever of the marshes consuming them, with only the warm and impure river water to drink, and little even of this; with but a small supply of medicines, and no food or delicacies suitable for the sick, the bean soup, unctuous with rancid pork fat, forming the principal article of low diet; uncheered by kind words or tender sympathy, it is hardly matter of surprise that hundreds of as gallant men as ever entered the ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... really laughing, as he said, fit to break his jaws. And he was no longer the timid little unctuous and obsequious provincial usher, but a well-set-up fellow, who, after reciting and mimicking the whole scene with impressive ardour, was now laughing with a shrill laughter the sound of ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... too. Moreover, the colonel does not deny that the Expedition achieved all possible success. But he considers most objectionable that self-asserting propensity to boast about it associated as it so often is with an unctuous piety. "Of course," he said, "it's only one of the signs of the times; and it is just these times that don't please me. All this outward show in religion is detestable. It was just so in Berlin and Potsdam in the ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... abundance of infinite depth, with oranges. This done, he calmly made a hole in the next orange which came to his hand and began to suck it loudly and persistently, boy-fashion, meanwhile smacking his lips. His face was one wreath of unctuous smiles. "There is but one way to eat an orange," he chuckled; "that's through ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... can never read far in Spenser without taking a rest—as we farmers lean upon our spades, when the digging is in unctuous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... determination of its defluency, and amitteth not its essence, but condition of fluidity. Neither doth there any thing properly conglaciate but water, or watery humidity, for the determination of quicksilver is properly fixation, that of milk coagulation, and that of oil and unctuous bodies only incrassation."—Is this written by Brown ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... Carlyle its outcome is reverence, a noble mood, which is one of the highest predispositions of the English character. The instincts of sanctification rooted in Teutonic races, and which in the corrupt and unctuous forms of a mechanical religious profession are so revolting, were mocked and outraged, where they were not superciliously ignored, in every line of the one, while in the other they were enthroned under the name of Worship, as the very key and centre of the ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... now fully exerted powers of body and mind, travelling in wild country and observing and conflicting with men, he adopted not merely the unctuous phraseology of "I am at present, thanks be to the Lord, comfortable and happy," {128b} but a more attractive religious arrogance. "That I am an associate of Gypsies and fortune-tellers I do not deny," he says, ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... elevates and depresses his voice, as if he was actually engaged in the combat he describes—preserving the utmost gravity of face, until he finds that the Prince has really detected him. Then the "fat rogue" bursts into a jolly, unctuous laugh, and carries off the honors, ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... conventional as his composition. One may compare him to Hogarth, though both as a moralist and a technician a longo intervallo, of course. He is assuredly not to be depreciated. His scheme of color is clear if not rich, his handling is frank if not unctuous or subtly interesting, his composition is careful and clever, and some of his heads are admirably painted—painted with a genuine feeling for quality. But his merits as well as his failings are ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... Madame," said her cruel enemy's unctuous voice close to her ear, "that we have tried our humble best to make your brief sojourn here as agreeable as possible. May I express a hope that you will be quite comfortable in this room, until the time when Sir Percy will be ready to accompany ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... but too well that we have not the means to do it. I tried to make him change his mind. I became pressing, unctuous, parental. It was no use, and I wasted on him an eloquence which, employed in the pulpit of a parish church, would have brought me a full reward in honour and coin. Alas! my dear boy, it seems to be written that none of my actions will ever produce any kind of savoury ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... ministers pray to their Deity for the success of their country's arms, and sing their Te Deums over the mangled corpses of the vanquished. An archbishop in Spain offered to guarantee the harmlessness of every American bullet, and unctuous prayers were reported in the newspapers of last spring as emanating from Transatlantic pulpits. Indeed, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to imagine what the supreme court of their heaven must be, the perplexities of patron saints and angels, and ultimately ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... existence. He had the advantage of a business reputation in the district, although he had very little to do with the success of the firm's ventures. He only contributed method and industry. For the rest he was absolutely honorable, and was everywhere deservedly esteemed. His pleasant unctuous manners, though perhaps a little too familiar for some people, a little too expansive, and just a little common, had won him a very genuine popularity in the little town and the surrounding country. He was more lavish with his sympathy than with his money: tears came readily ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... a rich, unctuous voice just behind the lads; and the boys started round at the familiar tones, to see the benignant-looking Doctor blinking through his gold-rimmed spectacles and commenting upon the spectacle for the benefit of his younger pupils. ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... an unctuous accent in his voice, and rubbing his hands like a miserable old Fagin, "Truly the Lord is delivering them into our hands. What are ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... they are. They're crazy over it," said Clown with an unctuous smile. Strange that whatever Clown says, it makes me itching mad. "But, if you don't look out, there is danger," warned ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... his mere presence carried with it a sacred authority. He was very fond of the Voltairean chevalier. Those two majestic relics of the nobility and clergy, though of very different habits and morals, recognized each other by their generous traits. Besides, the chevalier was as unctuous with the abbe as he was paternal with ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... twelve. N. B.—My single affection is not so singly wedded to snipes; but the curious and epicurean eye would also take a pleasure in beholding a delicate and well-chosen assortment of teals, ortolans, the unctuous and palate-soothing flesh, of geese wild and tame, nightingales' brains, the sensorium of a young sucking-pig, or any other Christmas dish, which I leave to the judgment of you and the ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... fire: this so burnt the Romans, that it dispersed that united band, who now tumbled clown from the wall with horrid pains, for the oil did easily run down the whole body from head to foot, under their entire armor, and fed upon their flesh like flame itself, its fat and unctuous nature rendering it soon heated and slowly cooled; and as the men were cooped up in their head-pieces and breastplates, they could no way get free from this burning oil; they could only leap and roll about in their pains, as they fell down from the bridges they had laid. And as they ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... you tempter!" he declared. "No more, you unctuous ambassador from the court of Gutenberg! Why, this one would take enough alfalfa at the present price a ton to bury your store under a haycock as ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... boiling, chaotic waves of frustration. What was the good of his work, all this great installation, all the gleaming expensive equipment in the lab around him? He was alone. None of them seemed to share his problem, the unctuous, always correct Gordon, the easy-mannered, unbearable Mason, all of them gave him a feeling of ...
— Security • Ernest M. Kenyon
... manner of Bishop Wilberforce as "unctuous, oleaginous, saponaceous." And the good prelate was ever afterward known as Soapy Sam. For every man there is something in the vocabulary that would stick to him like a second skin. His enemies have ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... it would appear that even human sacrifices were offered, but this custom was obsolete except on rare occasions, and lambs, oxen, sometimes swine's flesh, formed the usual elements of the sacrifice. The gods seized as it arose from the altar the unctuous smoke, and fed on it with delight. When they had finished their repast, the supplication of a favour was adroitly added, to which they gave a favourable hearing. Services were frequent in the temples: there was one in the morning and another in the evening on ordinary ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... but the Yiddish shopman could not place his prospective customer under any head or type with which he was familiar. He was neither "kike," "wop," "rough-neck," nor beggar, and, as the proprietor laid out his wares with unctuous solicitude, he was, also, studying his unresponsive and early visitor. When Samson, for the purpose of trying on a coat and vest, took off his own outer garments, and displayed, without apology or explanation, ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... neither have her rent raised nor be evicted before Michaelmas. Hester would have been puzzled to say precisely what sealed her lips from inquiry. Partly, no doubt, she shrank from discovering a fresh obligation to Mr. Sam, whose unctuous handshake she was learning to detest. Tom Trevarthen had disappeared. His mother kept house unmolested. Why not let sleeping dogs lie? For the rest, the school absorbed most of her thoughts, and paid back interest in cheerfulness. ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... dissolution or mixing of several bodies, whether fluid or solid, with saline or other Liquors, might not partly be attributed to this Principle of the congruity of those bodies and their dissolvents? As of Salt in Water, Metals in several Menstruums, Unctuous Gums in Oyls, the mixing of Wine and Water, &c. And whether precipitation be not partly made from the same Principle of Incongruity? I say partly, because there are in some Dissolutions, ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... rested his elbows upon the arms of his chair, and matched his hands together by the thumbs and by the forefingers, and by the other fingers, one by one; and little by little the musical, false voice of his lady, and the singularly gentle and unctuous tones of his host, Arnold de Curboil, blended together and lost themselves, just as the gates of dreamland softly ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... breath, and then ventured to draw back the curtains of the bed—my mother was not there! but there appeared to be a black mass in the centre of the bed. I put my hand fearfully upon it—it was a sort of unctuous, pitchy cinder. I screamed with horror—my little senses reeled—I staggered from the cabin and fell down on the deck in a state amounting almost to insanity: it was followed by a sort of stupor, which ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... daughter Verona eccentrically took baths in the morning, now and then.) He slipped on the mat, and slid against the tub. He said "Damn!" Furiously he snatched up his tube of shaving-cream, furiously he lathered, with a belligerent slapping of the unctuous brush, furiously he raked his plump cheeks with a safety-razor. It pulled. The blade was dull. ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... deep, hearty, unctuous laugh that came from the very depths of the man's chest. It was a laugh with no trace of merely superficial joy. He who uttered it laughed because his heart and soul were in it. It was a laugh of mirth, ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the brain was pregnant. To what purpose doth the Pia Mater lie in so dully in her white formalities; sure she hath had hard labour, for the brows have squeezed for it, as you may perceive by his buttered bon-grace that film of a demicastor; 'tis so thin and unctuous that the sunbeams mistake it for a vapour, and are like to cap him; so it is right heliotrope, it creaks in the shine and flaps in the shade; whatever it be I wish it were able to call in his ears. There's no proportion between that ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... seeds are surrounded with a thin coating of a waxy pulp, which is separated from them by washing in water, passing the liquid through a sieve and allowing the suspended pulp to deposit. The water is then drained away and the paste dried, till it is a thick, stiff, unctuous mass. In this state it has a dark orange-red colour and is known as "roll'' or "flag'' arnotto, according to the form in which it is put up, but when further dried it is called "cake'' arnotto. Arnotto is much used by South ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... his senses ruled what he himself styled 'the fair habitation of an immortal soul.' His eyes were small, and seemed to express inordinate greed, when they were not, as was usually the case, lifted to the sky in pious self-assurance, yet with feigned humility. Pastor Mueller was at once unctuous and insolent, a combination of contending characteristics which is often the possession of those who patronise God Almighty with their approval, and use His Name as a convenient adjunct in their homilies against all things human. His health, he was wont to declare, had suffered from ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... walls are pleasantly diversified with bags of oil hung on pegs, scraps of meat, old bottles and jars, and divers rusty-looking instruments for shearing sheep and cleaning their hoofs. The floor consists of the original lava-bed, and artificial puddles composed of slops and offal of divers unctuous kinds. Smoke fills all the cavities in the air not already occupied by foul odors, and the beams, and posts, and rickety old bits of furniture are dyed to the core with the dense and variegated atmosphere around them. This is a fair ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... valley between my extended arms, or hang over them like a tablecloth, rather than keep its desired form. But with patience, and the loan of one of Dan's huge palms, it finally fell with an unctuous, dusty "whouf" into the opened-out ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... asked for anything but daily rations, Sister Halsey; glad to see you plucking up heart. The living God giveth us all things richly to enjoy." He repeated the last words in an unctuous drawl while he was looking for the paper, "richly to—enjoy. Well now, I was thinking we had some with a black border on it, but you're more than welcome to such ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... as the medium of ablution. It is a well-known physiological law that it is necessary, in order to enable the skin to carry on its healthful action, to have washed off with water the constant cast of scales which become mingled with the unctuous and saline products, together with particles of dirt which coat over the pores, and thus interfere with the development of the hairs. Water for ablution can be of any temperature that may be acceptable and agreeable, according ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... Hall grew unctuous, and had many a sly wink with Chaplain McDevitt. Senator Blair was moody, restless and irritable, except in the hours which he spent with Mrs. Latimer. Winifred, in her anxiety, became a stranger to sleep, but she made no complaint of her haunting fear. A reserve, unnatural ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... and blackest I have ever seen. He wore gold-rimmed pince-nez, and had a curious impassivity of feature. It struck me that he might look natural on a stage, but was strangely out of place in real life. His voice was rather deep and unctuous. He placed a wooden ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... not such a trifling feat,—this climbing upon the carcass of the dead whale. Nor was it to be done without danger. The slippery epidermis of the huge leviathan,—lubricated as it was with that unctuous fluid which the skin of the sperm-whale is known to secrete,— rendered footing upon it ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... ascended was pure Phlegm, which dropt for about two Hours; a little white unctuous Matter swam on ...
— The Natural History of Chocolate • D. de Quelus
... known nothing but falsehood and scheming wickedness;—and, though she rebelled against the consequences, she had not rebelled against the wickedness. Now to this unfortunate young woman and her two companions, Mr. Emilius discoursed with an unctuous mixture of celestial and terrestrial glorification, which was proof, at any rate, of great ability on his part. He told them how a good wife was a crown, or rather a chaplet of aetherial roses to her ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... beauty,—that small and light body, capable of being suspended for a great length of time in the air by those broad wings, so that, as a bird of prey, it should watch for its food without the aid of a perch; the feathers, supplied by an unctuous substance, to enable them to throw off the water and keep the body dry; the web-feet for swimming; and the long legs, which it uses as a kind of stay, by turning them towards the head when it bends the neck, to apply the beak—that ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... cleaning in Pauline's sink, there never was a teaspoonful of flour spilled upon her biscuit board. Her gingham cuffs were always starched and stiff, her colourless hair smooth. She was a silent, dun-coloured creature, whose most violent expression was an occasional deep, unctuous laugh at Mrs. ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... first rehearsal of "The Beggar's Opera." Hippisley with his rich, unctuous humour was Peachum, and not less well suited to Lockit was Jack Hall's quaint face and naive manner. James Spiller, the favourite of the gods, was Mat o' the Mint, and the solemn visaged Quin essayed ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... discoveries about her husband which had the effect of destroying any remnant of respect she may still have felt for him. She found that he was in the habit of examining her private papers in her absence, and that he had opened her letters and resealed them. His manner to her was unctuous as a rule; but she knew he lied to her without hesitation if it suited his purpose—and that alone would have been enough to destroy her liking for him, for it is not in the nature of such a woman to love a man who has looked her in the face ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... &c adj.; unctuosity^, lubricity; ointment &c (oil) 356; anointment; lubrication &c 332. V. oil &c (lubricate) 332. Adj. unctuous, oily, oleaginous, adipose, sebaceous; unguinous^; fat, fatty, greasy; waxy, butyraceous, soapy, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... started, and then his Scotch sense of humor—and, for all the famed wit of the Irish, no humor on earth is so unctuous as that of the Scotch—commenced to bubble up. He suspected a joke on himself and was ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... the scent of a precarious situation which is liable to involve everybody in total collapse. In this instance he seemed to snuff the battle from afar and stirred up all the slumbering elements of discord with unctuous satisfaction; and if it had not been for the wicked twinkle in his Irish blue eyes, which none of his victims could withstand, it might have resulted seriously. He gayly rallied Charlie Hardy on his flirtations; predicted seeing him yet brought up with a round turn in ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... to the store," he said taking her proposal as an invitation to dine, and turning to expectorate a mouth full of tobacco juice before continuing. "Capital sardines them air," passing his hand over his mouth and beard in unctuous remembrance ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... He was fat, unctuous, and florid, and lived well. His wife's nose was much too long, and her bones much too prominent, but she loved him with all her heart, and made him little sweetmeats. A perfect congeniality of sentiment united this charming couple. They talked with each other with open hearts, and never ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... was escorting. I was rather tickled that they took me for my own intendant. I judged we must be approaching the entrance to Villa Satronia and that they were people from there. I assumed an exaggerated imitation of Dromanus' most grandiloquent manner and in his orotund unctuous delivery I declaimed: ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... her. Then suddenly, as though she had pushed open a door and gone through, she was back in the world again, a flood of sound was about her ears, and in front of her the red face of Mrs. Smith, her mouth wide open, like the mouth of an eager fish, singing about "the Blood of the Lamb" with unctuous satisfaction ... ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... complain of it; he does not insist, in printed Utopian dreams, on the mutual consent and bond of souls which can never become general; he pairs with a vehemence of which the bonds are constantly riveted by the hammer of necessity. Modern innovators write unctuous theories, long drawn, and nebulous or philanthropical romances; but the thief acts. He is as clear as a fact, as logical as a ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... your forte is not invention. It is judgment, particularly shown in your choice of dishes. We seem in that instance born under one star. I like you for liking hare. I esteem you for disrelishing minced veal. Liking is too cold a word.—I love you for your noble attachment to the fat unctuous juices of deer's flesh & the green unspeakable of turtle. I honour you for your endeavours to esteem and approve of my favorite, which I ventured to recommend to you as a substitute for hare, bullock's heart, and ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... tenth: First of Metallurgy, and the way how that unctuous Body, out of which mettals are produced, is elaborated by Nature, and what therein are Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury; besides, what it is that renders Mettals fluid in the Fire, but not Stones and ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... was remarking in her unctuous voice. "I always felt there was something just a little—well, what shall I call it?—second-rate about the girl. Mr. Rose being a gentleman in every sense of the word makes the ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... enables us to know the real man. For a few days he kept aloof, unapproachable, overcome by the ruin of his work. He made no attempt to conciliate opinion: in moments of bitterness he scoffed at the 'unctuous rectitude' of certain politicians who were improving the occasion. But he spoke frankly to those who had the right to question him. He went to London in February and saw Mr. Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... having been entrapped, through an unconscious expression, in the meshes of some antiquated law, was doomed to administer in some measure to their need by the payment of a penalty and costs. The fat old fellow who presided as judge, and beneath whose robe of office an unctuous leathery surtout was all too visible, peered in vain through a pair of massive horn-spectacles into a huge timber-swathed volume in search of the act, the provisions of which I had violated. At length, the schoolmaster—a meagre, pensive-looking scarecrow, industriously ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... her sleep. Forth swarm Footmen and horsemen, and in wild career Whirl up the dust. "Arm," cry the warriors, "arm!" With unctuous lard their polished shields they smear, And whet the axe, and scour the rusty spear. Their banners wave, their trumpets sound the fight. Five towns their anvils for the war uprear, Crustumium, Tibur, glorying in her might, Ardea, Atina strong, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... hazel; neither take The topmost shoots for cuttings, nor from the top Of the supporting tree your suckers tear; So deep their love of earth; nor wound the plants With blunted blade; nor truncheons intersperse Of the wild olive: for oft from careless swains A spark hath fallen, that, 'neath the unctuous rind Hid thief-like first, now grips the tough tree-bole, And mounting to the leaves on high, sends forth A roar to heaven, then coursing through the boughs And airy summits reigns victoriously, Wraps all the grove in robes of fire, and gross With pitch-black vapour heaves the murky reek ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... story, as Beverley received it, told scrappily, but with certain rude art. In the end Oncle Jazon said with unctuous self-satisfaction: ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... worm, that's shut Within the concave of a nut, Brown as his tooth. A little moth, Late fatten'd in a piece of cloth; With wither'd cherries, mandrakes' ears, Moles' eyes: to these the slain stag's tears; The unctuous dewlaps of a snail, The broke-heart of a nightingale O'ercome in music; with a wine Ne'er ravish'd from the flattering vine, But gently prest from the soft side Of the most sweet and dainty bride, Brought in a dainty daisy, which He fully quaffs up, to bewitch His blood to height; ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... smiled faintly in decorous response, and bowed in silence; but his wife resented the unctuous beaming of content on the other's wide countenance, and could ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... that, criticism is out of season. But, on the whole, it is only with women of a certain age that he can be said to have succeeded, in at all the same sense as we say he succeeded with men. The younger women do not seem to be made of good flesh and blood. They are not painted in rich and unctuous touches. They are dry and diaphanous. And although young ladies in Great Britain are all that can be desired of them, I would fain hope they are not quite so much of that as Raeburn would have us ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a carriage and drove a little way, and got out and went into a house, and after some talk we were married. I don't know the street. But I would know him if I saw him. He was a young, fat man, that smiled and stood on his toes." The picture brought up to Keith the fat and unctuous Rimmon. ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... of these oarsmen, at once slender and sinewy. Both bride and bridegroom looked uncomfortable in their clothes. The light that fell upon them in the church was dull and leaden. The ceremony, which was very hurriedly performed by an unctuous priest, did not appear to impress either of them. Nobody in the bridal party, crowding together on both sides of the altar, looked as though the service was of the slightest interest and moment. Indeed, ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... aristocratic-looking elderly man, whose white hair was carefully combed and smoothed, and whose appearance and manner suggested a very different arena to the one he waged battle in now, claimed the attention of the Thoughtful ones. Addressing 'Mee Grand' in the rich and unctuous tones which a Scotchman and Englishman might try for in vain, this orator proceeded, with every profession of respect, to contradict most of the chief's statements, to ridicule his logic, and to ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Falstaff. Her features were as ill-suited for the expression of grief as a circus clown's. She had not even a channel in her plump cheeks to drain the tears from the corners of her eyes; and the slow drops, large and unctuous, trickled down her round jowl and soaked into her bonnet-strings, leaving her cheeks as fresh and as ruddy in the sunlight as if they had been merely wet with perspiration. Her eyes stared, unpuckered, apparently unconscious that they wept. Her mouth was tight in an expression of resentful ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... Baux, in a word, were great feudal proprietors; and there was a time during which the island of Sardinia, to say nothing of places nearer home, such as Arles and Marseilles, paid them homage. The chronicle of this old Provencal house has been written, in a style somewhat unctuous and flowery, by M. Jules Canonge. I purchased the little book—a modest pamphlet—at the establishment of the good sisters, just beside the church, in one of the highest parts of Les Baux. The sisters have a school for the hardy little Baussenques, whom I heard piping their ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... begin to reveal their signs in the countenance, and to broaden and confuse the clear-cut, statuesque lines of early youth. Evidently, that is the head of an easy-going, pleasure-loving man, who has waxed warm with good living, and performs the duties of his office with an unctuous grace as something becoming and decorous to be gone through with. Evidently, he is puzzled and half-contemptuous at the revelations which come through the grating in hoarse whispers from those thin, trembling lips. That other man, who speaks with the sweat ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... corners of which represented four bending figures, similar to the Caryatides, the forms of women, symbols of the angels aspiring to heaven. He placed the casket on the table; then opening it took out a little golden box, the top of which flew open when touched by a secret spring. This box contained an unctuous substance partly solid, of which it was impossible to discover the color, owing to the reflection of the polished gold, sapphires, rubies, emeralds, which ornamented the box. It was a mixed mass of blue, red, and gold. The count took out a small quantity of this with a gilt spoon, and ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... bruises, blows, and other mechanical injuries, the condition is more common in the ox in connection with the comparative inactivity of the parts. The sheath has a very small external opening, the mucous membrane of which is studded with sebaceous glands secreting a thick, unctuous matter of a strong, heavy odor. Behind this orifice is a distinct pouch, in which this unctuous matter is liable to accumulate when the penis is habitually drawn back. Moreover, the sheath has two muscles ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... like the crash of doom to the cautious old tenants of the Hanover aviary. If there were any drops of false or questionable doctrine in the silver shower of eloquence under which they had been sitting, the plumage of orthodoxy glistened with unctuous repellents, and a shake or two on coming out of church left the sturdy old dogmatists as dry ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... his knees. Around his open neck was hung a string of black ebony beads, hooked on to a heavy gold cross, which rested on his capacious breast, and which the wearer was continually feeling, and occasionally pressing to his lips. His face was dark and sensual—thick, unctuous lips, a flat nose, and large black eyes—while a glossy fringe of raven hair went like a thick curtain all around his head, only leaving a bluish-white round patch on the shaved crown. This individual was the Padre Ricardo, who, for some good reasons best known to himself, had ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... later, accordingly, I found myself shut into a narrow box, like one of those which considerate pawnbrokers provide for their more diffident clients, and in a similar, but more intense, degree, pervaded by a subtle odour of uncleanness. The woodwork was polished to an unctuous smoothness by the friction of numberless dirty hands and soiled garments, and the general appearance—taken in at a glance as I entered—was such as to cause me to thrust my hands into my pockets and studiously avoid contact with any part of the structure but the floor. The end of the box opposite ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... When they say things to you, don't talk back. It's them that just takes things as they come, and lets bygones be bygones, that get the good checks at the end of the week. Some of them fight more 'n they work, but I guess you won't be that kind," she concluded, with an unctuous smile, displaying two rows of false teeth. Then, with a quick, nervous, jerky gait, she hopped up the flight of rough plank stairs, threw open a door, and ushered me into the bedlam noises of the "loft," where, amid the roar of machinery and ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... had undergone a change. He had become suave and unctuous, a kind of elephantine irony pervading his laborious attempts at conciliation. He and the Public Prosecutor would be severely blamed for this day's work, if the popular Deputy, relying upon the support of the people of Paris, chose to take ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... had his own views on this question. With a courteous wave of one dusky hand, he motioned us gracefully into somebody else's deck chairs, and then sat down on another beside us, while the gorgeous suite stood by in respectful silence—unctuous gentlemen in pink-and-gold brocade—forming a court all round us. Elsie and I, unaccustomed to be so observed, grew conscious of our hands, our skirts, our postures. But the Maharajah posed himself with perfect unconcern, ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... upper stratum of being, which floats over the turbid waves of common life like the iridescent film you may have seen spreading over the water about our wharves,—very splendid, though its origin may have been tar, tallow, train-oil, or other such unctuous commodities. I say, then, we are forming an aristocracy; and, transitory as its individual life often is, it maintains itself tolerably, as a whole. Of course, money is its corner-stone. But now observe ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... found to be more savory; the cakes were lighter; and the pork less greasy. On this subject of grease, however, we could wish that a sense of right would enable us to announce its utter extinction in the American kitchen; or, if not absolutely its extinction, such a subjection of the unctuous properties, as to bring them within the limits of a reasonably accurate and healthful taste. To be frank, Dorothy carried a somewhat heavy hand, in this respect; but pretty Margery was much her superior. How this difference in domestic discipline occurred, ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... delighted to have this opportunity of telling you, Lady Tressady, how much I admired your husband's great speech," said the deep and unctuous voice of the grey-haired Solicitor-General as he sank into a chair beside her. "It was not only that it gave us our Bill, it gave the House of Commons a new speaker. Manner, voice, matter—all of it excellent! I hope there'll be no nonsense about his giving up his seat. ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... superior skill. Without the court, and to the gates adjoin'd A spacious garden lay, fenced all around Secure, four acres measuring complete. There grew luxuriant many a lofty tree, Pomegranate, pear, the apple blushing bright, The honied fig, and unctuous olive smooth. Those fruits, nor winter's cold nor summer's heat 140 Fear ever, fail not, wither not, but hang Perennial, whose unceasing zephyr breathes Gently on all, enlarging these, and those Maturing ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... after an Amen that lasted five minutes; and the priest, in an unctuous voice, murmured some Latin words, of which one could hear only the sonorous endings. He then walked round the boat, sprinkling it with holy water, and next began to murmur the "Oremus," standing alongside the boat opposite the sponsors, ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... from New York, the image is that of a great green prairie, the monotony of whose surface is scarcely broken by the rivers which cross it here and there, and the great lines of railroad that serve as causeways through the desperate mud of spring and winter. A scattered people, who till the unctuous black soil only too easily, and leave as much of the crop rotting on the ground through neglect as would support the entire population; rude though thriving towns, where the grocery and the tavern, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... pay more. You ask for an attic. Just now there are two gentlemen there. Will there be a place under the eaves? Possibly, next week. But before then the two gentlemen are on hand again, have unpacked their vials of unctuous hair-oil, and are happily snuggled under the eaves. Indeed, they seem to make long journeys expressly to head one off, and to be where they should not be. They are on time always, and in at the winning. Some day one will pathetically die of two gentlemen ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... cried one, a wealthy and usurious merchant, with a twinkling and humid eye, and a sleek and unctuous aspect, which did not, however, suffice to disguise something fierce and crafty in his low brow and pinched lips—"trusty and well-beloved Ximen," said this Jew—"truly thou hast served us well, in yielding to thy persecuted brethren this secret shelter. Here, indeed, may the ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book V. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... lady," he replied, in his usual unctuous tones, "but I naturally wished to ascertain all the facts possible regarding this new deal, and, seeing Whitney nosing about on the trail, I decided to remain within ear-shot and pick up what information I ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... mud, with raiment torn, wild hair And ragged beard, to Vladislaw. He sat Expectant in his cabinet. On one side His secular adviser, Narzerad, Quick-eyed, sharp-nosed, red-whiskered as a fox; On the other hand his spiritual guide, Bishop of Olmutz, unctuous, large, and bland. "So these twain are chief culprits!" sneered the Duke, Measuring with the noble's ignorant scorn His masters of a lesser caste. "Stand forth! Rash, stubborn, vain old man, whose impudence ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... marge, to the Reverend Don So-and-so, Who is Dante, deg. Boccaccio, deg. Petrarca, deg. St. Jerome deg. and Cicero, deg. deg.48 "And moreover" (the sonnet goes rhyming), "the skirts of St. Paul has reached, deg. deg.49 Having preached us those six Lent-lectures more unctuous than ever he preached." 50 Noon strikes,—here sweeps the procession! our Lady deg. borne smiling and smart. deg.51 With a pink gauze gown all spangles, and seven swords deg. stuck in her heart! deg.52 Bang-whang-whang goes ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... at all," returned Penfield coolly, "I mean just what I said—the owner. Ah," the most unctuous satisfaction in his voice, "for all your non-committal manner I don't believe you know as ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... sullenly uprose, hardly seen in the black night air, a huge black cross. It reached its elevation, and was made fast in almost less time than it has taken to relate it, and instantly a pile of faggots which had been raised a short distance in front if it, and steeped in oil or some other unctuous ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... variety of the mineral called talc, unctuous to the touch, of greenish color, glossy, soft, and easily scratched, and leaving a silvery line when drawn on paper. It is used for marking on cloth, and ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... departed priests are disposed of, and also the crude cells and the large refectory of the order. But somehow these priests, who pretend to lead such lives of self-denial, are wonderfully round and unctuous in personal appearance. Our visit to the Temple of Honan was a very curious and not uninteresting experience, made up of a strange conglomerate of swine, priests, fat idols, flower gardens, human roasting ovens, and ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... clearness of his passages and embellishments could not be surpassed. If sensuous beauty is the sole end of music, his touch must be pronounced the ideal of perfection, for it extracted the essence of beauty. Strange as the expression "unctuous sonorousness" may sound, it describes felicitously a quality of a style of playing from which roughness, harshness, turbulence, and impetuosity were altogether absent. Thalberg has been accused of want of animation, passion, in short, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... insist, in printed Utopian dreams, on the mutual consent and bond of souls which can never become general; he pairs with a vehemence of which the bonds are constantly riveted by the hammer of necessity. Modern innovators write unctuous theories, long drawn, and nebulous or philanthropical romances; but the thief acts. He is as clear as a fact, as logical as a blow; and ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... had been caricatured as cunning; his presence of mind taken for vulgar audacity; he was held up as a half-educated debater, filled with a miserable self-sufficiency. He was attacked as a demagogue. The East held itself aloof from him in unctuous self-righteousness, because of his stand in the Mexican War. His fight for Oregon had aligned against him the friends of England in America. Yet men were in power because of him. A Whig had been elected President upon a war record of a fight ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... Fontanes was presented to Bonaparte, who, recognizing his supple nature and the unctuous flattery of his eloquence, chose him to deliver the eulogy on Washington, and perhaps something of his own at the ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... proprietors; and there was a time during which the island of Sardinia, to say nothing of places nearer home, such as Arles and Marseilles, paid them homage. The chronicle of this old Provencal house has been written, in a style somewhat unctuous and flowery, by M. Jules Canonge. I purchased the little book—a modest pamphlet—at the establishment of the good sisters, just beside the church, in one of the highest parts of Les Baux. The sisters have a school for the hardy little Baussenques, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... all miserably dirty. The promise of a dish of fresh trout from the Golo was a redeeming feature in the aspect of affairs to one who had waited long, and walked far, without his breakfast. But the dish reeked as if the Golo ran oil, and the fish were still floating in the unctuous stream, spite of my injunctions to the weird priestess of the mysteries of the cave beneath—“Senza olio, senza olio,” reversing the phrase in the Baron de Grimm's story of the Frenchman, who, having sacrificed his own goût to his guest's penchant ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... Nancy but with stress of unctuous generosity. This, if his hearers knew what he had suffered at her hands, must tell greatly to his credit; if they were not aware of the circumstances, such a tone would become him as the ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... troublesome in their day, and in East Anglia they were more numerous than in London. It may be that they have helped to weaken Dissent in that part of the world. Men of independent intellect must have been not a little shocked by that unctuous familiarity with God and the devil which is the characteristic of that class. On a Sunday morning Jemmy Wells, as his admirers called him, would describe in the most graphic manner what the devil had said to him in the course of the week; ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... the East to the priests, who take up their residence indefinitely, and are treated as visible incarnations of the Deity whose appetites it is meritorious to satisfy. Indeed, these young men, who have perhaps been trained as missionaries, often discourse of Buddha with a very long and unctuous 'Boo.' ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... victory!' cried a little newsboy, lately, through the streets of a certain village, wherein we were 'over-nighting,' as the Germans say. He had not well learned orthoepy, and held that u-n, un, was to be pronounced as in 'unctuous.' Still there are some droll sounds to be extracted from the word—witness the following song in which by a slight modulation of sound the word Union is made a war-cry ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... that the idealist pleads in vain for the painters of the groping periods of art, or for the pre-Raphaelites of the nineteenth century, who in their spirit beg that we accept their unctuous will for the deed completely wrought. When however they do fill the condition of natural aspect in its fundamental essence, in its condition of non-violation of physical law, when, uncompromised by such discrepancy, the presentment of the idea is complete and this alone engages us, the work ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... the sound of the last word which roused the unctuous boy. He jumped up, and the leaden eyes which twinkled behind his mountainous cheeks leered horribly upon the food as he unpacked it from ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... Moozuffernuggar, however, had his own views on this question. With a courteous wave of one dusky hand, he motioned us gracefully into somebody else's deck chairs, and then sat down on another beside us, while the gorgeous suite stood by in respectful silence—unctuous gentlemen in pink-and-gold brocade—forming a court all round us. Elsie and I, unaccustomed to be so observed, grew conscious of our hands, our skirts, our postures. But the Maharajah posed himself with perfect unconcern, like one well used ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... blamed glad he's gone away, anyhow." And then, to French's relief, Marble came and announced in his unctuous voice: ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... certain thing. Aldrovandi, doing the humble, replied that to be sure many of his brethren had deigned to think of him, but that he did not make any progress—that there were those who were too determinately opposed to his election, etc. The monk thereupon goes into a long and unctuous discourse on all the sad evils to Christendom of a conclave so prolonged. (It had already lasted over five months.) To which Aldrovandi replies that he ought rather to address his remonstrances to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... take pleasure in seeing how completely the workman is master of the particular material he has used, and how beautiful and desirable a substance it was, for work of that kind. In oil painting, its unctuous quality is to be delighted in; in fresco, its chalky quality; in glass, its transparency; in wood, its grain; in marble, its softness; in porphyry, its hardness; in iron, its toughness. In a flint country, one should feel the delightfulness of having flints to pick up, and fasten together ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... otherwise these things amuse me beyond expression, and I am never weary of staring into gateways, of lingering by dreary, shabby, half-barbaric farm-yards, of feasting a foolish gaze on sun-cracked plaster and unctuous indoor shadows. I mustn't forget, however, that it's not for wayside effects that one rides away behind St. Peter's, but for the strong sense of wandering over boundless space, of seeing great classic lines of landscape, of watching them dispose themselves into pictures ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... at varying points. Jimmie might be said to prevail. There was a fatuous tenderness in his attack and the thudding currycomb gave it spirit. Nor did he slur any of the affecting words; they clave the air with an unctuous precision: ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... The curiously unctuous gesture grew menacing, brutal. Don Anastasio twitched and trembled before it. Under the towering and prismatic Fra Diavolo he cowered, an insignificant figure. The unrelieved black of his attire accorded with his meagre frame. It was secretive, miserly. A black stock covered a withered collar. A ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... upon her death-bed. Possibly, as her end drew near she had perceived herself tower to camel size, the entrance to Paradise shrink to the circumference which refuses to receive a thread manipulated by an unsteady hand. Yes, yes; they began to expand in unctuous conjecture that merged into deliberate assertion, when some one remarked that Mrs. Errington had died in exactly three minutes of the rupture of a blood-vessel on the brain. So this comfortable theory was exploded. And no other seemed tenable. No other explained the fact that this wealthy ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... chilled and congealed into patches of greasy white. He managed to swallow it with many pauses of invincible disgust—only to find it replaced by a solid slab of pale brown suet pudding, sparsely bedewed with unctuous black treacle. ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... of whose surface is scarcely broken by the rivers which cross it here and there, and the great lines of railroad that serve as causeways through the desperate mud of spring and winter. A scattered people, who till the unctuous black soil only too easily, and leave as much of the crop rotting on the ground through neglect as would support the entire population; rude though thriving towns, where the grocery and the tavern, the ball room and the race course are more lovingly ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the Doctor's door, I confess that I threw it down, and went hastily to bed. It is the most gruesome of all his writings, and so perfect that one can complain only of the slightly too obvious moral; and, again, that really Mr. Hyde was more of a gentleman than the unctuous Dr. Jekyll, with his ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... mother. I'm heartily glad the fellow has gone. I hate his supercilious manner, his superior tone, and his unctuous bearing. He's simply odious! ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... true fools in the world bred than they are generally; and yet you see, by the fineness and delicacy of their diet, diving into the fat capons, drinking your rich wines, feeding on larks, sparrows, potato-pies, and such good unctuous meats, how their wits are refined and rarified; and sometimes a very quintessence of conceit flows from them, able to drown ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... idea that you are a believer in the New Testament, while you in fact reject it, or one of the most barren uninventive of all human beings, or fanatically fond of mystical language,—do not, I say, affect this very unctuous way of talking. And, for another reason, do not. I beseech you, adopt the phraseology of men who, according to your view, must surely have been either the most miserable fanatics or the most abominable impostors; for if they ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... his mood to theirs; if they were frank and sincere, he met them halfway; he was so patient and considerate, so entirely devoted to pleasing the critical trout, and so successful in his efforts,—surely his heart was upon his hook, and it was a tender, unctuous heart, too, as that of every angler is. How nicely he would measure the distance! how dexterously he would avoid an overhanging limb or bush and drop the line exactly in the right spot! Of course there was a pulse of ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... trifling feat,—this climbing upon the carcass of the dead whale. Nor was it to be done without danger. The slippery epidermis of the huge leviathan,—lubricated as it was with that unctuous fluid which the skin of the sperm-whale is known to secrete,— rendered footing upon it ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... necessities instead of luxuries. He juggled figures, and thought nothing of four of them in a row. We looked at our five-thousand-dollar salary, so strangely shrunken and thin now, and even as we looked we saw that the method of the unctuous, anxious stranger had ...
— Personality Plus - Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock • Edna Ferber
... entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... savory; the cakes were lighter; and the pork less greasy. On this subject of grease, however, we could wish that a sense of right would enable us to announce its utter extinction in the American kitchen; or, if not absolutely its extinction, such a subjection of the unctuous properties, as to bring them within the limits of a reasonably accurate and healthful taste. To be frank, Dorothy carried a somewhat heavy hand, in this respect; but pretty Margery was much her superior. How this difference in domestic discipline occurred, is more ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... come upon thee, and overtake thee.' And suddenly, in the mild summer air, it seemed as if, like a swarm of bees inadvertently wakened, the blessings of the Bible were actually rushing after me. From the hot, remote, passionate past of Hebrew history, out of the Oriental climate and unctuous lives of that infuriate people, gross good things were coming to overwhelm me with benedictions for which I had not bargained. Great oxen and camels and concubines were panting close behind me, he-goats and she-goats and rams of the breed of Bashan. ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... quite his own of pronouncing those contradictory monosyllables, rich and poor: the former he gave out with an unctuous, fish-saucy gusto, and the word seemed to linger on his palate as a delicious morsel in the progress of delightful deglutition; but when he uttered the word poor, it was with that "mewling and puking" miserable face, appropriated ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the tinkling note of the muffin-bell strikes agreeably upon the ear, suggestive of fragrant souchong and bottom-crusts hot, crackling, and unctuous. Now ensues a delicate savour in the atmosphere of the terrace kitchens, and it is just at its height when Smith, Brown, Jones, and Robinson are seen walking briskly up the terrace. They all go in at Smith's, where the muffin-man went in about half an hour before, and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... gone; the Belwether establishment could jog through another day. Various specialists, who cared for the health and beauty of her body, had entered and made their unctuous exits. The major had gone to Tuxedo for the week's end; her maid had bronchitis; two horses required the veterinary, and the ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... people—take them as a whole— Are careless on the score of grace; And hence you needn't comb your poll Or decorate your unctuous face. ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... koilias]"[73]—"the candle of God, searching the inmost parts." If that light within become but a more active kind of darkness;—if, abdicating the measuring reed of modesty for scepter, and ceasing to measure with it, we dip it in such unctuous and inflammable refuse as we can find, and make our soul's light into a tallow candle, and thenceforward take our guttering, sputtering, ill-smelling illumination about with us, holding it out in fetid fingers—encumbered ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... foam to M. Fortunat's lips, and any one seeing him then would subsequently have had but little confidence in his customary good-natured air and unctuous politeness. "And yet the marquis is as much to be pitied as I am," he continued. "He loses as much, even more! And such a sure thing it seemed, too! What speculation can a fellow engage in after this? And a man must put his money somewhere; he can't ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... agreed with unctuous righteousness in his plump face. "And to think of that scalawag, making a loan right in your face, ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... the source of all beauty,—that small and light body, capable of being suspended for a great length of time in the air by those broad wings, so that, as a bird of prey, it should watch for its food without the aid of a perch; the feathers, supplied by an unctuous substance, to enable them to throw off the water and keep the body dry; the web-feet for swimming; and the long legs, which it uses as a kind of stay, by turning them towards the head when it bends the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... would appear with an unusually good cup of chocolate, just right in warmth, sweetly smelling, and with the play of light on watered silk upon its unctuous surface, and with succulent grilled steak flavored with anise-seed, which would set Sancho-Tartarin off on the broad grin, and into a laugh that drowned the shouts ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... many others, which we might produce to this purpose, we may gather, that, when we grind and stir the Cacao, the divers parts, which Nature hath given it, doe artificially, and intimately mixe themselves one with another; and so the unctuous, warme, and moist parts, mingled with the earthy (as we have said of the steele) represses, and leaves them not so binding, as they were before; but rather with a mediocritie, more inclining to the warme, and moist temper of the Aire, then to the cold and dry of the Earth; ...
— Chocolate: or, An Indian Drinke • Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma
... flour spilled upon her biscuit board. Her gingham cuffs were always starched and stiff, her colourless hair smooth. She was a silent, dun-coloured creature, whose most violent expression was an occasional deep, unctuous laugh ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... well if they be stamped, heal stinging of bees and of wasps, and do away all swellings, and keep books and clothes there it is among from moths and other worms, and save them fro fretting and gnawing. The fruit of laurel trees are called bays, and are brown or red without, and white within and unctuous. ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... breathe across the daffadown dillies from the warm chambers of the south. A cloud crosses His Honour's face, a summer cloud dissolving into sunshine. "It is the pomade of Saul:—but it is our own glorious David whose unctuous curls carry the Elysian fragrance." Then taking up his harp and dancing ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... well as tyrants of sword. Prayers were uttered that were fitter for hearing in hell than in Heaven. Good men could deceive themselves into crime cloaking spiritual malice, sect jealousy, race hatred with an unctuous text. Here, in New England, where men had come for freedom, was tyranny masking in the guise of religion. Preachers as jealous of the power slipping from their hands as ever was primate of England! A poor gentleman ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... consuming them, with only the warm and impure river water to drink, and little even of this; with but a small supply of medicines, and no food or delicacies suitable for the sick, the bean soup, unctuous with rancid pork fat, forming the principal article of low diet; uncheered by kind words or tender sympathy, it is hardly matter of surprise that hundreds of as gallant men as ever entered ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... sleep then I.... I keep my couch till ten, then walk awhile, Or having read or writ what may beguile A quiet after-hour, anoint my limbs With oil, not such as filthy Natta skims From lamps defrauded of their unctuous fare. And when the sunbeams, grown too hot to bear, Warn me to quit the field, and hand-ball play, The bath takes all my weariness away. Then, having lightly dined, just to appease The sense of emptiness, I take mine ease, Enjoying all home's simple luxury. This is the life of bard unclogged, ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... crisis enables us to know the real man. For a few days he kept aloof, unapproachable, overcome by the ruin of his work. He made no attempt to conciliate opinion: in moments of bitterness he scoffed at the 'unctuous rectitude' of certain politicians who were improving the occasion. But he spoke frankly to those who had the right to question him. He went to London in February and saw Mr. Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, and ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... came after her. He wore a black Vandyke beard, and his special forte was a carefully trained and extremely long nail on the little finger. It was said that this nail demanded a goodly portion of his leisure hours. His voice told its own story of bonhommie and unctuous Rhine wine. ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... They ain' nuffin' to be skeered of 'bout Marse Wes. Eve'ything all right ef you got patience, an' ef you got sense, an' ef you got haht enough. Sperrit an' sense go far, but the haht gwine carry you froo. Now I said my say"—her tone mellowed into unctuous kindness—"what you want, Missy? Som'n Aun' Dolcey c'n fotch you? Temme what it is, f'r I got to be up an' erbout my wuk. I got er weddin' cake to mek yit this ebenin'. Yes, ma'am—I gwi' mek you weddin' cake fill de bigges' ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... multitude—by Horatius Bonar; naughtily refusing to read Bonar's 'I heard the voice of Jesus say' to my Mother in our Pimlico lodgings. A secret hostility to this particular form of effusion was already, at the age of seven, beginning to define itself in my brain, side by side with an unctuous ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... facts?" Charles was getting smoother, more unctuous, more happy, all the time. It was the little curl of his lip, so hateful, so familiar, with which he said these words, which seemed to snap something in Henry's brain. He pushed back his chair and sprang to his feet, breathless and dizzy and hot. He regarded not the cries of "Order," from the ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... Query was, Whether the dissolution or mixing of several bodies, whether fluid or solid, with saline or other Liquors, might not partly be attributed to this Principle of the congruity of those bodies and their dissolvents? As of Salt in Water, Metals in several Menstruums, Unctuous Gums in Oyls, the mixing of Wine and Water, &c. And whether precipitation be not partly made from the same Principle of Incongruity? I say partly, because there are in some Dissolutions, some ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... from a glass, standing, and began to talk in a thick voice; yet it was a feminine voice, unctuous, disagreeable, and he emphasized his words with mimicked wonder, fright, and ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... "Might I suggest"—the unctuous tones of Captain Monk issued from under mildly wounded eyebrows—"if any one of us were unappreciative of Monsieur Lanyard's undoubted talents, he would ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... with the gift of understanding the language of birds. [96] He attributes a multitude of virtues to the limbs of a dead camelion: among others that, if the left foot of this animal be grilled, and there be added certain herbs, and a particular unctuous preparation, it will have the quality to render the person who carries it about him invisible. [97] But all this is wholly irreconcileable with the known character of Democritus, who distinguished himself by the hypothesis ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... blackest I have ever seen. He wore gold-rimmed pince-nez, and had a curious impassivity of feature. It struck me that he might look natural on a stage, but was strangely out of place in real life. His voice was rather deep and unctuous. He placed a wooden hand ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... So-and-so, Who is Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca, Saint Jerome, and Cicero; "And, moreover" (the sonnet goes rhyming), "the skirts of Saint Paul has reached, Having preached us those six Lent-lectures more unctuous than 50 ever he preached." Noon strikes—here sweeps the procession! our Lady borne smiling and smart With a pink gauze gown all spangles, and seven swords stuck in her heart! Bang-whang-whang goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the fife; ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... have no rationale of sauces, or theory of mixed flavors: as to show why cabbage is reprehensible with roast beef, laudable with bacon; why the haunch of mutton seeks the alliance of currant-jelly, the shoulder civilly declineth it; why loin of veal, (a pretty problem,) being itself unctuous, seeketh the adventitious lubricity of melted butter,—and why the same part in pork, not more oleaginous, abhorreth from it; why the French bean sympathizes with the flesh of deer; why salt fish points to parsnip, brawn makes a dead-set at mustard; why cats prefer valerian to heart's-ease, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... expression, in the meshes of some antiquated law, was doomed to administer in some measure to their need by the payment of a penalty and costs. The fat old fellow who presided as judge, and beneath whose robe of office an unctuous leathery surtout was all too visible, peered in vain through a pair of massive horn-spectacles into a huge timber-swathed volume in search of the act, the provisions of which I had violated. At length, the schoolmaster—a meagre, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... attention, and that should be done by using water as the medium of ablution. It is a well-known physiological law that it is necessary, in order to enable the skin to carry on its healthful action, to have washed off with water the constant cast of scales which become mingled with the unctuous and saline products, together with particles of dirt which coat over the pores, and thus interfere with the development of the hairs. Water for ablution can be of any temperature that may be acceptable and agreeable, according to the custom and condition of the bather's ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... his engine with an unctuous glee. He was boyishly happy because he and the Home Secretary had done them out of the Car of Victory ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... was holding, Trotty made no pause in his attack upon the savory meat before him, but cut and ate, and cut and drank, and cut and chewed, and dodged about, from tripe to hot potato, and from hot potato back again to tripe, with an unctuous and unflagging relish. But happening now to look all round the street—in case anybody should be beckoning from any door or window, for a porter—his eyes, in coming back again, encountered Meg: sitting opposite to him, with her arms folded; and only busy in watching ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... necktie or collar has all the effect of an indecent exposure. The Hon. Mr. Gashwiler, in his trousers and shirt, was a sight to be avoided by the modest eye. There were such palpable suggestions of vast extents of unctuous flesh in the slight glimpse offered by his open throat that his dishabille should have been as private as his business. Nevertheless, when there was a knock at his door he unhesitatingly said, "Come in!"—pushing away a goblet crowned with a certain ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... himself regarded with unctuous condescension by a man wearing glittering thick eyeglasses—and a man's eyes have to be very bad if he can't wear contacts—and a uniform with a caduceus at his collar. He was plump. He was beaming. He was the only man Calhoun had ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... an Amen that lasted five minutes; and the priest, in an unctuous voice, murmured some Latin words, of which one could hear only the sonorous endings. He then walked round the boat, sprinkling it with holy water, and next began to murmur the "Oremus," standing alongside the boat opposite the sponsors, who remained ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... decorous response, and bowed in silence; but his wife resented the unctuous beaming of content on the other's wide countenance, and could ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... about her husband which had the effect of destroying any remnant of respect she may still have felt for him. She found that he was in the habit of examining her private papers in her absence, and that he had opened her letters and resealed them. His manner to her was unctuous as a rule; but she knew he lied to her without hesitation if it suited his purpose—and that alone would have been enough to destroy her liking for him, for it is not in the nature of such a woman to love a man who has looked her in the face and ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... you to adopt the habit against which Matthew Arnold directed one of his witty essays, the habit of expressing a too unctuous satisfaction with the age and time in which we are living. That was the intellectual error of the Eighteenth Century. There are problems of poverty, injustice, disease, and unhappiness, which should make the most prosperous and most selfish of us chafe; but I do urge that ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... not far from Orator Henley's chapel. The shirt manoeuvre we tried over and over again with varying success; but we found it in the end impossible to preserve order among our Patrons, the greater part of whom were Butchers; and I am fain to admit that many of these unctuous sky-blue jerkins could fight as well as we. Then Mr. O'Teague was much given to drinking, and in his potations quarrelsome. 'Twas all very well fighting on a stage for profit, and with the chance of applause, a clean shirt, and perchance a Right Good Supper ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... Myrrh and Balme; if thou accept My conduct, I can bring thee thither soon. 630 Lead then, said Eve. Hee leading swiftly rowld In tangles, and make intricate seem strait, To mischief swift. Hope elevates, and joy Bright'ns his Crest, as when a wandring Fire Compact of unctuous vapor, which the Night Condenses, and the cold invirons round, Kindl'd through agitation to a Flame, Which oft, they say, some evil Spirit attends, Hovering and blazing with delusive Light, Misleads th' amaz'd Night-wanderer ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... did you? Glad to hear it. Can't keep a good man down, as the whale said to Jonah," said Mitchell heartily. "'But with all thy getting, get understanding,'" he quoted with unctuous benevolence. "The city is full of traps for the unwary. You can't be too careful, young man. Don't be drawn into gambling, or drinking, or fast company, or you'll be robbed before you know it. Watch out for pickpockets, ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... financial difficulties," said the poet, lifting his plump white hand and waving it in unctuous waves about the veranda, "let me show you our home, Mr. ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... the linden tree of England, to which it is closely allied, are the favourite building woods of the natives, and the latter is used for carts, casks, and all household purposes, as well as for the hulls of their boats, from the belief that It resists the attack of the marine worms, and that some unctuous property in the wood preserves ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... the dank and dreary streets of the once dazzling Ville Lumiere. I seemed to see the shabby bottle-green coat, the nankeen pantaloons, the down-at-heel shoes of this "confidant of Kings"; I could hear his unctuous, self-satisfied laugh, and sensed his furtive footstep whene'er a gendarme came into view. I saw his ruddy, shiny face beaming at me through the sleet and the rain as, like a veritable squire of dames, he minced his steps ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the rest scattered in all directions, being only bound to appear again when the usher had completed his round, and accompany him home. They were forbidden, however, to go anywhere except on the down and into the woods; the village had been especially prohibited, where huge bull's-eyes and unctuous toffy might be procured in exchange for coin ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... torpid hum Escapes the eater's unctuous nose, Turn up the light and let it come Full on his innocent repose; Then pour your shot between his eyes, And go on ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... Underhill, whose unctuous piety and profligate life have an important place in Winthrop and other New England historians. With Captain John Mason he had the leading part in the crushing of the Pequots in 1637. Banished from Massachusetts and restored, this amusing reprobate had gone to the Dutch, "having good ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various
... Moreover, the colonel does not deny that the Expedition achieved all possible success. But he considers most objectionable that self-asserting propensity to boast about it associated as it so often is with an unctuous piety. "Of course," he said, "it's only one of the signs of the times; and it is just these times that don't please me. All this outward show in religion is detestable. It was just so in Berlin and Potsdam in the ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... epilepsy); And I will eat these broths with spoons of amber Headed with diamant and carbuncle. My footboy shall eat pheasants, calvered salmons, Knots, goodwits, lampreys. I myself will have The beards of barbels served; instead of salads, Oiled mushrooms, and the swelling unctuous paps Of a fat pregnant sow, newly cut off, Dressed with an exquisite and poignant sauce, For which I'll say unto my cook, 'There's gold: Go ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... most diverting of Ibsen's works; it is certainly the most impertinent. If there was one class in Norwegian society which was held to be above criticism it was the clerical. A prominent character in Ibsen's comedy is the Rev. Mr. Strawman, a gross, unctuous and uxorious priest, blameless and dull, upon whose inert body the arrows of satire converge. This was never forgotten and long was unforgiven. As late as 1866 the Storthing refused a grant to Ibsen definitely on the ground of the scandal ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... part like an old hand. The proper thing here is some scripture, repeated earnestly in unctuous tones. Was it from this tempter that all of us religious folks and everybody else have gotten into the inveterate habit of quoting verse and sentence entirely out of connection? Any devil's lie can be proven from the Scriptures ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... cremating ovens in which the bodies of the departed priests are disposed of, and also the crude cells and the large refectory of the order. But somehow these priests, who pretend to lead such lives of self-denial, are wonderfully round and unctuous in personal appearance. Our visit to the Temple of Honan was a very curious and not uninteresting experience, made up of a strange conglomerate of swine, priests, fat idols, flower gardens, human roasting ovens, and ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... not denuded, are conformably covered by a considerable thickness of the fine-grained pumiceous mudstone, divided into two masses: the lower half is very fine-grained, slightly unctuous, and so compact as to break with a semi-conchoidal fracture, though yielding to the nail; it includes laminae of selenite: the upper half precisely resembles the one layer at the Rio Negro, and with the exception of being whiter, the upper ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... presence carried with it a sacred authority. He was very fond of the Voltairean chevalier. Those two majestic relics of the nobility and clergy, though of very different habits and morals, recognized each other by their generous traits. Besides, the chevalier was as unctuous with the abbe as he was ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... the rector's foot on the resounding steps of the portico. He bowed respectfully to the three occupants of the room, and addressed them in phrases of that unctuous civility which priests are accustomed to use. To the rather absent-minded greeting of the mistress of the house, he replied by ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... seldom that Turgenev reminds us of Dickens; but Sipyagin and his wife might belong to the great Dickens gallery, though drawn with a restraint unknown to the Englishman. Sipyagin himself is a miniature Pecksniff, unctuous, polished, and hollow. The dinner-table scenes at his house are pictured with a subdued but implacable irony. How the natural-born aristocrat Turgenev hated the Russian aristocracy! When Solomin appears in this household, he seems like a giant among manikins, so truly do the ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... A Swami, unctuous and fat, and furious at the lack of feminine attention, said something suavely outrageous about modern women. He was immediately surrounded by several mature examples who adored to be safely smitten by the ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... hand upon his heart and shout to the enemy that noble war-cry, 'I believe!'" How well that was turned! What grandeur in this holy eloquence! A thrill ran through the assembly. But that was not all. His Lordship then addressed Georges in a voice as soft and unctuous as it had before been ringing ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... mass; while in another stratum the quartz drew its atoms apart in masses that assumed one especial form, the feldspar drew its atoms apart into masses that assumed another and different form, and the glittering mica built up its multitudinous layers between. Here the unctuous chlorite constructed its soft felt; there the micaceous schist arranged its undulating layers; yonder the dull clay hardened amid the intense heat, but, when all else was changing, retained its structure unchanged. ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... their unctuous tones the Hebrew and his wife did their business rapidly, with sharpness and decision. Either one of them would have undertaken to name the precise pawning value of anything on earth and, possibly, of most things in heaven, provided that the universe ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... senses in thoughtless people; but a man knows how to distinguish them, however little time he may have bestowed in studying the anatomy of sentiments and the affairs of human life. Thus the hand has a thousand ways of becoming dry, moist, hot, cold, soft, rough, unctuous. The hand palpitates, becomes supple, grows hard and again is softened. In fine it presents a phenomenon which is inexplicable so that one is tempted to call it the incarnation of thought. It causes the despair of the sculptor and the painter when they wish to express ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... and unctuous voice, on the heels of Tess' declaration. "Wha's all dis erbout—heh! Glo-ree! Who done let dat goat intuh disher yard? Ain' dat Sam ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... write about Tolstoy as old women talk about a crazy saint, all sorts of unctuous nonsense; it's a mistake for him ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... in modifying and fixing the tints and shades which the dyes impart. The best thing for the purpose, in the writer's opinion, is clear ox-gall, which, besides being useful as a mordant, will destroy all unctuous matter. ...
— French Polishing and Enamelling - A Practical Work of Instruction • Richard Bitmead
... meant, which is an indigenous animal of the warmer parts of America, and is found in one of the West India islands. It has no tail, and is particularly distinguished by an open glandular orifice on the hinder part of the back, which discharges a fetid unctuous liquid; and which orifice has been vulgarly mistaken ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... from other sources, was resorted to, of course, by Roswell's orders. Lamps were burned with great freedom; not little vessels invented to give light, but such torches as one sees at the lighting up of a princely court-yard on the occasion of a fete, in which wicks are made by the pound, and unctuous matter is used by the gallon. Old canvass and elephants' oil supplied the materials; and the spare camboose, which had been brought over to the house to be set up there, while the other galley was being placed on board, very well answered the ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... taking root there; the roof torn into shapeless rents; the shutters hanging about the windows in rags of rotten wood; before its gate, the stream which had gladdened it now soaking slowly by, black as ebony, and thick with curdling scum; the bank above it trodden into unctuous, sooty slime: far in front of it, between it and the old hills, the furnaces of the city foaming forth perpetual plague of sulphurous darkness; the volumes of their storm clouds coiling low over a waste of grassless ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... They wanted to please the Royal Cat, but somehow none of them did, except, possibly, the big, fat cook that Kitty discovered on wandering into the kitchen. This unctuous person smelt more like a slum than anything she had met for months, and the Royal Analostan was proportionately attracted. The cook, when she learned that fears were entertained about the Cat staying, said: "Shure, she'd 'tind to thot; ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... of the mineral called talc, unctuous to the touch, of greenish color, glossy, soft, and easily scratched, and leaving a silvery line when drawn on paper. It is used for marking on cloth, ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the floor was wet. (His daughter Verona eccentrically took baths in the morning, now and then.) He slipped on the mat, and slid against the tub. He said "Damn!" Furiously he snatched up his tube of shaving-cream, furiously he lathered, with a belligerent slapping of the unctuous brush, furiously he raked his plump cheeks with a safety-razor. It pulled. The blade was ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... lilies, their orchards of orange and lemon, and the distant snow-clad peaks glittering in the gentle sunshine, combine to form a perfect picture. There are detailed descriptions from the pens of those who feel an unctuous joy in painting the lily, kalsomining the calla, and adding perfumes to the violet, the ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... to take place about eleven; perfect unanimity, with some haziness and dimness, before twelve. N. B.—My single affection is not so singly wedded to snipes; but the curious and epicurean eye would also take a pleasure in beholding a delicate and well-chosen assortment of teals, ortolans, the unctuous and palate-soothing flesh, of geese wild and tame, nightingales' brains, the sensorium of a young sucking-pig, or any other Christmas dish, which I leave to the judgment of you and the cook ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... in the scanty shade. In a deep cleft below the outer wall women and girls, very scantily clad, were washing clothes in a pool that is reserved apparently for the use of the stricken village. I was glad to leave the place behind me, after giving the unctuous keeper a gift for the sufferers that doubtless never reached them. They tell me that no sustained attempt is made to deal medically with the disease, though many nasty concoctions are taken by a few True Believers, whose faith, I fear, has not ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... small thicket past Of blowing myrrh and balm: if thou accept My conduct, I can bring thee thither soon Lead then, said Eve. He, leading, swiftly rolled In tangles, and made intricate seem straight, To mischief swift. Hope elevates, and joy Brightens his crest; as when a wandering fire, Compact of unctuous vapour, which the night Condenses, and the cold environs round, Kindled through agitation to a flame, Which oft, they say, some evil Spirit attends, Hovering and blazing with delusive light, Misleads the amazed night-wanderer ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... bank account down to the irreducible minimum and borrowed on his securities up to the insurmountable maximum. It was a bad time for his children to tap him. But here they were—Jno. P., Jerry, and Julia—all very unctuous over the home-coming, and yet all of them evidently cherishing ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... were smitten by an uplifting thought. Surely this test would eliminate Vesey from the contest. He, with his unctuous flattery, would be driven from the lists. Well we remembered Ileen's love of frankness and honesty—how she treasured truth and candor above vain ...
— Options • O. Henry
... would like more circumstantiality in the account of this dinner, which united many perfections. It was handsome, but not splendid,—orderly, but, not stately,—succulent, but not unctuous. It kept the word of promise to the smell and did not break it to the taste. It was a dinner such as we shall wish only to our best friends, not to those acquaintances who ask how we do when they meet us, and wish we were dead before we part. As for particulars, we ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... the first rehearsal of "The Beggar's Opera." Hippisley with his rich, unctuous humour was Peachum, and not less well suited to Lockit was Jack Hall's quaint face and naive manner. James Spiller, the favourite of the gods, was Mat o' the Mint, and the solemn visaged Quin essayed Macheath. Lavinia as Polly was both excited and nervous, and Lucy (Mrs. Egleton) ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... the mountain which buried Goldau was composed of a hard but brittle conglomerate, called nagelflue, resting on unctuous clay, and inclining rapidly towards the village. Much earth remained upon the rock, in irregular masses, but the woods had been felled, and the water had free access to the surface, and to the crevices which sun and frost had already produced in the rock, ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... exposure, was open and full, though it vanished almost immediately, and the pointed beard so characteristic of the reign of King Charles was perfect. The shape of the face was a long oval; many of the teeth remained; and the left ear, in consequence of the interposition of some unctuous matter between it and the cere-cloth, was found entire. The hair was thick at the back part of the head, and in appearance nearly black. A portion of it, which has since been cleaned and dried, is of a beautiful dark-brown color. That of the beard was a reddish-brown. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... period of profound introspection followed, and then he broke forth: "Well, I 'll be hanged!" emphasizing each word with a slow nod. Then he began to laugh,—not noisily; scarcely audibly, indeed; but with the deep, unctuous chuckle of one who gloats over some exquisitely absurd situation, some jest of many facets, each ...
— A Love Story Reversed - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... watchful diplomacy, as the damper preferred to dip in a rolling valley between my extended arms, or hang over them like a tablecloth, rather than keep its desired form. But with patience, and the loan of one of Dan's huge palms, it finally fell with an unctuous, dusty "whouf" into the ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... Atonement," is perhaps the most flagrant violation of historical verisimilitude in the whole epic. A hoary priest of Balder actually performs the wedding ceremony in the restored temple, and pronounces a somewhat unctuous wedding oration, which differs from those which Tegner himself had frequently delivered chiefly in the substitution of pagan for the Christian deities. As a matter of fact, marriage was a purely civil contract among the ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... and Joy Brightens his Crest; as when a wandering Fire, Compact of unctuous Vapour, which the Night Condenses, and the Cold invirons round, Kindled through Agitation to a Flame, (Which oft, they say, some evil Spirit attends) Hovering and blazing with delusive Light, Misleads th' amaz'd ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... manure, as regards dryness or moistness, can readily be known by handling it. Take a handful of the manure and squeeze it tight; it should be unctuous enough to hold together in a lump, and so dry that you can not squeeze a drop of ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer
... Penzance chapel. Tom, who had taken care to set himself on his other hand, kept a careful eye for his plate and glass, being particularly liberal with the cider. The lawyer spoke little; when he did his voice was rich and unctuous—the sort of voice that Ishmael always described to himself as "porky." He was as attentive to Mrs. Ruan's wants as Tom to his, and she, never a great talker save in her outbursts, still kept up a spasmodic flow of low-toned remarks ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... penitentiary. He was a demoralizing influence there, already a socialist with anarchical tendencies, and with the gift of influencing men. A fluent, sneering youth, who lashed the guards to fury with his unctuous, ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... difficult to say whether he was more absurd than cruel or more cruel than absurd. Mrs Fyne, with the fine ear of a woman, seemed to detect a jeering intention in his meanly unctuous tone, something more vile than mere cruelty. She glanced quickly over her shoulder and saw the girl raise her two hands to her head, then let them fall again on her lap. Fyne in front of the fire was like the victim of an unholy spell—bereft of motion and speech but ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... developed only in the male and in the female is rudimentary. In adult males a valvular longitudinal opening occupies the upper surface of the membrane leading into a small pouch, the interior of which is lined with a glandular membrane secreting an unctuous reddish substance with a strong ammoniacal odour. Allied genera are the tropical American Peropteryx and the Brazilian Cormura. The various species of tomb-bats (Taphozous) inhabit the tropical and subtropical parts of all the eastern hemisphere except Polynesia, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... prejudice into which the generality of mankind have fallen, owing to their ignorance of the laws of life and health. Agility and constant vigor of body are the effect of health, which is much better preserved by a herbaceous, aqueous, and sparing tender diet, than by one which is fleshy, vinous, unctuous, ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... — N. unctuousness &c adj.; unctuosity^, lubricity; ointment &c (oil) 356; anointment; lubrication &c 332. V. oil &c (lubricate) 332. Adj. unctuous, oily, oleaginous, adipose, sebaceous; unguinous^; fat, fatty, greasy; waxy, butyraceous, soapy, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... wolves, and bears; Teem with new monsters, whom thy upward face Hath to the marbled mansion all above Never presented! O! a root; dear thanks: Dry up thy marrows, vines and plough-torn leas; Whereof ingrateful man, with liquorish draughts And morsels unctuous, greases his pure mind, That from it ...
— The Life of Timon of Athens • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... study—the most interesting in the world. The genuineness of the courtesy, the real kindness and the hospitality of the English are beyond praise and without limit. In this they show a strange contradiction to their dickering habits in trade and their "unctuous rectitude" in stealing continents. I know a place in the world now where they are steadily moving their boundary line into other people's territory. I guess they really believe that the earth belongs ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... as they were, had been almost exclusively confined to the dull, staid world of Philadelphia, with its sweet refinement in sections, its pretensions to American social supremacy, its cool arrogation of traditional leadership in commercial life, its history, conservative wealth, unctuous respectability, and all the tastes and avocations which these imply. He had, as he recalled, almost mastered that pretty world and made its sacred precincts his own when the crash came. Practically he had been admitted. Now he was an Ishmael, an ex-convict, albeit a millionaire. But wait! ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... apprehension of having been spotted by another capper, if not Bill Brady himself (for the voice was not Colonel Sunderson's unctuous tones) I saw Jim of the Sidney station platform and ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... of the first and second stories are flanked by huge figures of saints, standing forth in strangely contorted attitudes, black with the dust of ages, black as all old Prague is black, with the smoke of the brown Bohemian coal, with the dark and unctuous mists of many autumns, with the cruel, petrifying frosts ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... at night, Clitheroe stole guiltily in through the private entrance, and sought succor of his uncle: this was an unctuous uncle, who was as sympathetic and emotional as an undertaker. Paul exhibited his watch; not for worlds would he part with it forever; money he must have at once, and surely some good angel would come to his assistance before many days; this state of affairs ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... relics of mortality with which the old man had heaped his fireplace, began by degrees to send forth a thick unctuous vapour, which at length leaped to light, and blazing up the aperture, gave a degree of liveliness to the gloomy scene. The blazonry of the huge escutcheon met and returned the rays with as brilliant a reflection as that lugubrious ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... vulgar cordiality. Suddenly Dickson was conscious of a resemblance, a resemblance to somebody whom he had recently seen. It was Loudon. There was the same thrusting of the chin forward, the same odd cheek-bones, the same unctuous heartiness of speech. The innkeeper, well washed and polished and dressed, would be no bad copy of the factor. They must ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... commandant. It was evident that they had been hauled over the coals for the way they had behaved when Jack was there, for I never saw such politeness in any headquarters. I was preceded by bowing and unctuous soldiers and non-commissioned officers, all the way from the door to the Presence, and was received by the old man standing. He was most solicitous for my comfort and offered me everything but the freedom of the city. He said that he had not received a word of instructions until a few minutes before ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... and blended with unctuous matters, forms a sort of ointment, which is useful in the curing of different diseases of the skin, as well as in destroying lice and other vermin that infest animals of different kinds, which form the live stock of the farmer. It has also been found useful in its crude state in ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... person, who by the mere force of impudence has made his way in the world. Most English girls in their teens fall in love with a curate and a cavalry officer. Monseigneur Bauer, who combines in himself the unctuous curate and the dashing dragoon, is adored by the fair sex in Paris. He knows how to adapt his conversation to the most opposite kind of persons, and I should not be surprised if he becomes a Cardinal before ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... as he said, fit to break his jaws. And he was no longer the timid little unctuous and obsequious provincial usher, but a well-set-up fellow, who, after reciting and mimicking the whole scene with impressive ardour, was now laughing with a shrill laughter the sound of which made ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... a fit of laughter. The innkeeper was in a high fever. Just then Grimaud showed himself behind his master, his carbine on his shoulder, and his head shaking like that of the drunken satyr in some of Rubens' pictures. His clothes were smeared with an unctuous liquid, which the host immediately recognized as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... and for an hour I discoursed to them in a moral and unctuous manner. I had taken care to provide myself with some excellent wine, which did not fail to take effect on the three girls, who were not accustomed to a dinner that lasted two hours. They were not exactly inebriated, but their ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... when half the prospect seemed to be seen through palisades of rain; when the slight incline between the terraces became a tumultuous cascade, and the surest hoofs slipped on trails of unctuous mud; when cattle were bogged a few yards from the highway, and the crossing of the turnpike road was a dangerous ford. There were days of gale and tempest, when the shriveled stalks of giant oats were ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... any other that they had ever seen. His name was Cornelius Heemskerk. Holland was his birthplace, but America was his nation. He was short and extremely fat, but he had an agility that amazed the five when they first saw it displayed. He talked much, and his words sounded like grumbles, but the unctuous tone and the smile that accompanied them indicated to the contrary. He formed for Shif'less Sol an inexhaustible and ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Fire:—"Fire is the purest and noblest of all Elements, full of adhesive unctuous corrosiveness, penetrant, digestive, inwardly fixed, hot and dry, outwardly visible, and tempered by the earth.... This Element is the most passive of all, and resembles a chariot; when it is drawn, it moves; when it is not drawn, ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... to think just here of the injunction against throwing pearls before swine, and so turned to Humphreys, who made his heart glad by witnessing a good confession, in soft and unctuous tones, and couched in the regulation phrases which have worn ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... concern about the body of the boat, Walter moving slowly from stem to stern, and stern to stem, laying on the magic oil, (unctuous of victory to our noses), with steady sweeps, and the bent figure of black old Clump beside the caldron, from which rose a curling smoke, we must have made a tableau of heathen offering sacrifice, ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... rather suggest that it is a highly moral proceeding, for their ministers pray to their Deity for the success of their country's arms, and sing their Te Deums over the mangled corpses of the vanquished. An archbishop in Spain offered to guarantee the harmlessness of every American bullet, and unctuous prayers were reported in the newspapers of last spring as emanating from Transatlantic pulpits. Indeed, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to imagine what the supreme court of their heaven must be, the perplexities of patron saints ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... poured a few drops of wine into one of the tumblers, shook it about, turned it into the other, shook it again, and finally poured it on the unctuous stone floor beside him. Then he filled both glasses to the brim, and ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Reverend Don So-and-so Who is Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca, St. Jerome, and Cicero, "And moreover" (the sonnet goes rhyming), "the skirts of St. Paul has reached, Having preached us those six Lent-lectures more unctuous than ever he preached." Noon strikes,—here sweeps the procession! our Lady borne smiling and smart, With a pink gauze gown all spangles, and seven swords stuck in her heart! Bang-whang-whang goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the fife; No keeping one's haunches still: it's the greatest pleasure ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... themselves and soon kindle and create a transformation. The manner, however, of the production of naphtha admits of a diversity of opinion on whether this liquid substance that feeds the flame does not rather proceed from a soil that is unctuous and productive of fire, as that of the province of Babylon is, where the ground is so very hot, that oftentimes the grains of barley leap up, and are thrown out, as if the violent inflammation had made the earth ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... beside the gate he made no sign. His fat shoulders, commonly so erect, were bowed as if he had suddenly grown old. His face had lost its unctuous smile and was haggard with care; and for once he paid no heed to George Fox's un-Quakerlike gambols, fraught with danger to the open buggy he drew. A pale-faced woman in the orthodox attire of the birthright Friends sat beside the ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... an interesting narrative. On removing the black pall which Herbert described, a plain leaden coffin was found, with the inscription 'King Charles, 1648.' Within this was a wooden coffin, much decayed, and the body carefully wrapped in cerecloth, into the folds of which an unctuous matter mixed with resin had been melted, to exclude the external air. The skin was dark and discoloured—the pointed beard perfect—the shape of the face was a long oval—many of the teeth remained—the hair was thick at ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 558, July 21, 1832 • Various
... want of proficiency, the pious Sweater would attribute it to idleness or incapacity, and as the people were generally poor he seldom or never had any trouble with them. This was how he fulfilled the unctuous promise made to the confiding parents at the time the girl was handed over to his tender mercy—that he would 'make ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... forests, except where the red rocks catch the fierce beams of the blazing sun, bowery valleys, broad lakes, gigantic trees, and gushing rivers bursting from rocky gorges, are crowned with a purple and ever cloudless sky. Summer, in its most unctuous state and most mellow majesty, is here perpetual. So intense and overpowering, in the daytime, is the rich union of heat and perfume, that living animal or creature is never visible; and were you and I to pluck, before sunset, the huge fruit from yonder teeming ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... the shop when some one came bustling in. Berry was between Ingolby and the door, and for an instant he did not see who it was. Presently he heard an unctuous voice: "Ah, good day, good day, Mr. Berry. I want to have my hair cut, if you please," ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... wilted collar, held a half-dozen listeners with his eyes, while he plied them with emphatic sentences in which the name of Crutchfield sounded like a refrain. Moving from group to group, portly, unctuous, insinuating, a man with an oily voice was doing battle in the ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... man, benign and full-favored, not to say unctuous; and his manner in delivering an opinion was blandly impressive, and convincing to many. Yet Tom ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... into a silence, partly the effect of the strangely enervating air. The fog had completely risen from the landscape, and hung high in mid-air, through which an intense sun, shorn of its fierceness, diffused a lambent warmth, and a yellowish, unctuous light, as if it had passed through amber. The bay gleamed clearly and distinctly; not a shadow flecked its surface to the gray impenetrable rampart of fog that stretched like a granite wall before its entrance. ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... Deuser paused to settle her sables preliminary to recognizing with an expansive smile an acquaintance who flashed by them in a victoria; after which she adjusted the diamonds in her large, pink ears, and proceeded with unctuous tranquillity. "On this occasion, my dear Philura, you will have the pleasure of listening to an address by Mrs. B. Isabelle Smart, one of our most advanced thinkers along this line. You will, I trust, be able to derive from her words aliment which ...
— The Transfiguration of Miss Philura • Florence Morse Kingsley
... never heard another word upon the subject from that day to this proves conclusively that the authorities, although doubtless profuse in their apologies and regrets to the Ambassador over the delay, and unctuous in their promises to settle the issue immediately, never really intended to stir another finger in this direction. No one disturbed the official serenity and forthwith the whole question was permitted to slide and to be forgotten ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
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