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Fustian   Listen
noun
Fustian  n.  
1.
A kind of coarse twilled cotton or cotton and linen stuff, including corduroy, velveteen, etc.
2.
An inflated style of writing; a kind of writing in which high-sounding words are used, above the dignity of the thoughts or subject; bombast. "Claudius... has run his description into the most wretched fustian."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Fustian" Quotes from Famous Books



... addressed were Marty and Tommy, boys of nine and seven, in little fustian tailed coats and knee-breeches, relieved by rosy cheeks and black eyes, looking as much like their father as a very small elephant is like a very large one. Hetty walked between them, and behind came patient Molly, whose task it was to carry Totty ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... Inventor is one who has walked forth upon the industrial world, not from universities, but from hovels; not as clad in silks and decked with honours, but as clad in fustian and grimed with soot ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... considered as intruding into things which she had better not meddle with. But the screams became so fearful that she could no longer restrain herself. She rushed round the corner of the house, and came full against a black woman rinsing some fustian clothes in a tub near the rain-spout. "Do dear tell me," said she, "what they are doing to those people. Who is whipping them? What have they done?" The black woman stopped, and looked round without taking her ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams

... of writer pleased with sound, Whose fustian head with clouds is compassed round— No reason can disperse them with its light; Learn then to think, ere you pretend to write As your idea's clear, or else obscure, The expression follows, perfect or impure; What ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... him now. He answered in some degree to his friend's description of him, but was more gaunt and Don Quixote-like. He was quaintly dressed (according to the costume of that unconstrained period) in a brown fustian jacket and striped pantaloons. There was something of a roll, a lounge in his gait, not unlike his own Peter Bell. There was a severe, worn pressure of thought about his temples, a fire in his eye (as if he saw ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... And then came Turpin to filch his glory! Nor need Turpin have stooped to a vicarious notoriety, for he possessed a certain rough, half conscious humour, which was not despicable. He purchased a new fustian coat and a pair of pumps, in which to be hanged, and he hired five poor men at ten shillings the day, that his death might not go unmourned. Above all, he was distinguished in prison. A crowd thronged his cell to identify him, and one there was who offered to bet the keeper ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley

... sound. Joshua Halborough had finished his ascetic lunch, and had gone into the library, where he stood for a few moments looking out of the large window facing the green. He saw walking slowly across it a man in a fustian coat and a battered white hat with a much-ruffled nap, having upon his arm a tall gipsy-woman wearing long brass earrings. The man was staring quizzically at the west front of the cathedral, and Halborough recognized in him the form and features of his father. Who the woman was ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy

... omissions in the KING's Speech than with its contents. His best sayings were imported from America, but he would have done better to content himself with LINCOLN and abjure BRYAN, whose "cross-of-gold" fustian will not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various

... His ordinary rate of speech In loftiness of sound was rich; A Babylonish dialect, Which learned pedants much affect. It was a parti-colour'd dress 95 Of patch'd and pie-bald languages; 'Twas English cut on Greek and Latin, Like fustian heretofore on satin; It had an odd promiscuous tone, As if h' had talk'd three parts in one; 100 Which made some think, when he did gabble, Th' had heard three labourers of Babel; Or CERBERUS himself pronounce A leash of languages at once. ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler

... actable, but also no longer readable. The brothers de Goncourt, for example, wrote an account of Clairon which is a book of the first interest, while I defy any one to get through two pages of most of the fustian she was compelled to act! The reason for this is very easily formulated. Great acting is human and universal. It is eternal in its appeal and its memory is easily kept alive while playwrighting is largely a matter of fashion, ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten

... qualities she has bestowed upon you, there is not one that I hold in half so much esteem, as that docility, which has ever induced you to receive my instructions with implicit veneration. It is true, my coat is fustian, and my whole accoutrement plebeian. My shoes are clouted, and it is long since the wig that defends this penetrating brain, could boast a crooked hair. But you, my lord, have been able to discover the fruit through the ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin

... said the word, when a brawny Porter in a fustian jacket, with his knot slung across his shoulder, manifested dislike to the manner in which the Irish jontleman was ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... frontmost German defenses. I knew that stretching away to the southeast of us and to the northwest was a line some two hundred miles long, measuring it from tip to tip, where sundry millions of men in English khaki and French fustian and German shoddy- wools were fighting the biggest fight and the most prolonged fight and the most stubborn fight that historians probably will write down as having been fought in this war or any lesser war. I knew this fight ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... hervor Einer, anzusehen wie die Sternen Nacht.' Good! good!" she exclaimed, while her dark and deep eye sparkled. "There you have a dim and mighty archangel fitly set before you! The line is worth a hundred pages of fustian. 'Ich wage die Gedanken in der Schale meines Zornes und die Werke mit dem Gewichte meines Grimms.' ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... Lady Booby's cast-off livery, is, I think, to the full as polite as Tom Jones in his fustian suit, or Captain Booth in regimentals. He has, like those heroes, large calves, broad shoulders, a high courage, and a handsome face. The accounts of Joseph's bravery and good qualities; his voice, too musical to halloo ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... ready-made clothes, and other furnishings, for seamen, by Maydman, in 1691. In Chaucer's time, sloppe meant a sort of breeches. In a MS. account of the wardrobe of Queen Elizabeth, is an order to John Fortescue for the delivery of some Naples fustian for "Sloppe for Jack Greene, ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... in all our fiscal legislation gives him an unequaled knowledge both of principles and details, and he is remarkably successful in making them clear to the simplest intelligence. The contrast between his candid, sober and weighty treatment of questions, and the froth and fustian which supply the lack of knowledge with epithets of 'fraud' and 'robbery' and 'cheat,' ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... yeoman, who, early in the 18th century, removed to Coventry, where his descendants remained, and where, in 1775, Jacob Bright was born. Jacob Bright was educated at the Ackworth school of the Society of Friends, and was apprenticed to a fustian manufacturer at New Mills. He married his employer's daughter, and settled with his two brothers-in-law at Rochdale in 1802, going into business for himself seven years later. His first wife died without children, and in 1809 he married Martha Wood, daughter ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... is, would that every woman-child born into this world were trained to be a lady, and every man-child a gentleman! But then I do not use those much-abused words by way of distinguishing people who wear fine clothes, and live in fine houses, and talk aristocratic slang, from those who go about in fustian, and live in back slums, and talk gutter slang. Some inborn plebeian blindness, in fact, prevents me from understanding what advantage the former have over the latter. I have never even been able to understand ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley

... parts of the house; in the boxes and stalls particularly, they were composed of persons of very decent appearance, who had many children with them. Among our dresses there were most kinds of shabby and greasy wear, and much fustian and corduroy that was neither sound nor fragrant. The caps of our young men were mostly of a limp character, and we who wore them, slouched, high-shouldered, into our places with our hands in our pockets, and ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... penknife, on a pine chip, which he was essaying to shape into a human profile, that of his mistress, it might be surmised from the sly glances with which he seemed occasionally to scan her features. Though now dressed in his smartest fustian, he yet appeared awkward and ill at ease; while the timid and hesitating air, with which he seemed to regard his fair companion, indicated much conscious uncertainty respecting the place he might hold in her affections. She, on the contrary, seemed quite self-possessed, and wore the air ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson

... at his said age of 24 years. Item. I give and bequeath to my said son Gregory of such household stuff as God hath lent me, three of my best featherbeds with their bolsters; 2d., the best pair of blankets of fustian, my best coverlet of tapestry, and my quilt of yellow Turkey satin; one pair of my best sheets, four pillows of down, with four pair of the best pillowberes, four of my best table-cloths, four of my best towels, two dozen ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude

... saw Will standing at the corner of the Cribserth, just where the rocky rampart edged the hillside. She turned at once and slowly retraced her footsteps, Will coming to meet her with more speedy progress. He had changed his clothes, and in his work-a-day fustian looked far better than he had in the black cloth suit which he ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine

... thing in the very heart of the very life in which she moved. And here he sat, this Jadwin, quiet, in evening dress, listening good-naturedly to this beautiful music, for which he did not care, to this rant and fustian, watching quietly all this posing and attitudinising. How small and petty it must ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris

... nothing to do with devotion. And the impertinent patronage of worshippers in "fustian" is at least as offensive as the older-fashioned vulgarity of pride in congregations who "come in their own carriages." And I do protest against the flippant inference that good clothes for the body must lower the assumptions of the spirit, or make repentance insincere; which I no more believe ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... Smith is one of the happily diminishing class of amphibious editors, one-third journalist, two-thirds 'worker,' who consult with the Bosses in hotels all over the State about 'fixing things,' draw fustian platforms for State conventions, embody the Boss view of the nation and the world in 'editorials,' and supply the pure milk of the word to local committees and henchmen, and 'make it hot' for the Democrats during the canvass."—The Nation, March ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... No man could be less the romantic, blubbering over the sorrows of his own Werthers. No novelist could have smaller likeness to the brummagem emotion-squeezers of the Kipling type, with their playhouse fustian and their naive ethical cocksureness. The thing that sets off Conrad from these facile fellows, and from the shallow pseudo-realists who so often coalesce with them and become indistinguishable from them, is precisely his quality ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken

... must not think that he is a navvy in fustian and corduroys. He seems a sensible man: his address is really remarkably good, considering what he is. As to his being savage, he is quite the reverse. His head is full of figures and machinery; and I ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw

... warder gallantly leading along the stout old lady in the mob-cap. The larger number of the patients of course were paired with their fellow-prisoners, and at the top of the room the officials danced with some of the swells. Yes, there were swells here, ball-room coxcombs in fustian and felt. One in particular was pointed out to me as an University graduate of high family, and on my inquiring how such a man became an inmate of a pauper asylum the official said, "You see, sir, when the mind goes ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... an ear was Dairyman Jinks, an old gnarled character who wore a white fustian coat and yellow leggings; the only man in the room who never dressed up in dark clothes for marketing. He now asked, 'Married abroad, was they? And how long will a wedding abroad stand good ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy

... slightly pitted with the smallpox, and the malaria of many summers had left him with a complexion of the colour of cheap leather; he had eyes like a hawk, matted black hair, and jagged white teeth. He and his fustian clothes smelt of earth, burnt gunpowder, goat's cheese, garlic, and bad tobacco. He was no great talker, but his language was picturesque and to the point; and he feared neither man nor beast, neither ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford

... interspersed with feasting and drinking. An extravagant fancy sought expression in the excitement, of grotesque actions and brilliant costumes. The Morris dancers executed their curious movements, clad in "gilt leather and silver paper, and sometimes in coats of white spangled fustian,"[46] or in "greene, yellow, or some other light wanton collour," bedecked with "scarfs, ribbons and laces hanged all over with golde ringes, precious stones and other jewells," and "aboute either legge twentie or fourtie belles."[47] Robin Hood's Day, Christmas, Twelfth ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... courteously greeting her, again mounted his vehicle, without being one moment eclipsed from the eyes of the surrounding multitude.—Oh! mercy on me! I am out of breath—pray let me descend from my stilts, or I shall send you as fustian and tedious a History as that of [Lyttelton's] Henry II. Well, then, this great King is a very little one; not ugly, nor ill-made. He has the sublime strut of his grandfather, or of a cock-sparrow; and the divine ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole

... Tussaud's, the real Temple of Fame, and let such doubts vanish for ever; convince yourselves that the mighty attribute not more survives from good than evil deeds, though, like poverty, it makes its votaries acquainted with the strangest of strange bedfellows! The regal ermine and the murderer's fustian alike ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various

... no knight of romance or fairy tale, but a good honest English gentleman who had fought for his King. His coat was of fustian and was stained with rust from his armor, for he had just come back from fighting, and was still clad in his war-worn clothes. "His horse was good, but he ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... which he enjoyed greatly, and which is really excellent. All these preparations ended, I put on him light flannel or cashmere slippers, white silk stockings, the only kind he ever wore, and very fine linen or fustian drawers, sometimes knee-breeches of white cassimere, with soft riding-boots, sometimes pantaloons of the same stuff and color, with little English half-boots which came to the middle of the leg, and were ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... surrounded by circumstances which preclude him from putting forth the best that is in him and showing his full possibilities to the world. The philosopher is often hidden in the ploughman and many a poor laborer toiling in corduroys and fustian at the docks, in the mills, or sweeping the streets may have as good a brain as Edison, but has not the opportunity to develop it and show its capabilities. The same analogy is applicable to plant life. Under adverse conditions a plant or vegetable cannot put forth its best ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing

... another; and even in that focus of aristocracy, Friar's Gate, the houses would not have seemed very imposing to the hasty and superficial glance of a passenger. You might still less have suspected that the figure in light fustian and large grey whiskers, leaning against the grocer's door-post in High Street, was no less a person than Mr. Lowme, one of the most aristocratic men in Milby, said to have been 'brought up a gentleman', and to have had the gay habits accordant ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot

... as early as 1589, but not printed till 1594, is a strange performance, and nearly as worthless as strange; full of tearing rant and fustian; while the action, if such it may be called, goes it with prodigious license, jumping to and fro between Portugal and Africa without remorse. I have some difficulty in believing the piece to be Peele's: ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... Stephens's ability should have dealt in fustian like this in the most dreadful moment of Confederate history is a psychological problem that is not easily solved. To be sure, Stephens was an extreme instance of the martinet of constitutionalism. He reminds us of those old-fashioned generals of whom Macaulay ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson

... stationer complains they are seldom asked for in his shop. The poet who flourished in the scene is damned in the ruelle; nay, more, he is not esteemed a good poet by those who see and hear his extravagances with delight. They are a sort of stately fustian and lofty childishness. Nothing but nature can give a sincere pleasure; where that is not imitated, it is grotesque painting; the fine woman ends ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden

... of woman's labour tends to fall below man's, although in some cases superior deftness or lightness of hand related to physical fragility may compensate. Even in modern textile factories the superior force of man's muscles often gives him a great advantage. In fustian and velvet cutting, where the same piece-wages are paid to men and women, the actual takings of the men are about double. "Every person has two long frames upon which the cloth is stretched ready for cutting, and while women are unable to cut more ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson

... had equalled the Don in the fulness of his equipments, being attired cap-a-pie for the enterprise. He wore a broad-skirted fustian coat, perplexed with half a hundred pockets; a pair of stout shoes and leathern gaiters; a basket slung on one side for fish; a patent rod, a landing net, and a score of other inconveniences only to be found in the true angler's armory. Thus harnessed for the field, ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving

... every German household where English is read at all, and no one seems to have found out what fustian most of his poetry really was. Ruskin and Oscar Wilde are the two popular modern authors, and the novel-reading public chooses, so several booksellers assured me, Marion Crawford and Mrs. Croker. I could not hear a word anywhere of Stevenson or Rudyard Kipling, ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick

... Here persons in fustian who claimed to be connected with the steamship line in a pseudo-official capacity sought to relieve me of a part of my baggage, but despite all such assurances of good faith I declined their proffered aid. For how many travellers—thus I inwardly reasoned—how many travellers in ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

... impressions Of Sonnets, since the fall of Lucifer, And made some scurvy quaint collections Of fustian phrases, and ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown

... himself studied the art of verse-making in a collection of songs. He says: "I pored over them, driving my cart or walking to labor, song by song, carefully noting the true tender or sublime from affectation or fustian. I am convinced that I owe to this practice much of my critic-craft, such as it is!" His first song, composed when he was fifteen, was inspired by a young girl who worked at his ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various

... destination and cargo. Upon being answered, they came on board. After some conversation with the captain, they were about to depart, when I inquired whether I could accompany them on shore. The person I addressed was a tall young man, with a fustian frock coat. He had a long face, long nose, and wide mouth, with large restless eyes. There was a grin on his countenance which seemed permanent, and had it not been for his bronzed complexion, I should have declared him to be a cockney, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... is as warm in fustian as a king in velvet, and a truth is as comfortable in homely language as in fine speech. As to the way of dishing up the meat, hungry men leave that to the cook, only let the meat be ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou

... smacks of fustian! Workmen's "bags" Are very "polished" where the "sags" From salient joints protuberant, Grow shiny with continual friction; But "polished knees" in poet's diction ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 13, 1893 • Various

... the narrative is epic, its treatment is frequently dramatic. The "Usage of Europe" in the opening pages is not so much a record as a personification of unwritten Law: the Great Eltchi tramps the stage with a majesty sometimes bordering on fustian. Dramatic is the story of the sleeping Cabinet. "It was evening—a summer evening"—one thinks of a world-famous passage in the "De Corona"—when the Duke of Newcastle carried to Richmond Lodge the ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell

... dog, and examining the prize, when I heard a crackling among the low bushes near me; and on looking up, perceived, about twenty paces distant, a short, thick-set man, whose fustian jacket and leathern gaiters at once pronounced him the gamekeeper; he stood leaning upon his gun, quietly awaiting, as it seemed, for any movement on my part, before he interfered. With one glance I detected how matters stood, and immediately adopting ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever

... Beaconsfieldian fustian," said Sidney laughing, yet astonished. "One would think you were anxious to assert yourself against the ancient peerage of this ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... one, but many of them, in the cities, churches that help men to grapple with the stern actualities of everyday life, churches that preach by works as well as by word, churches in which the man in fustian is as welcome as the one in broadcloth, churches whose influence reaches into the highways and byways and compels people to come in by the very cordiality and kindness of the invitation, churches that help people to live better and more happily in this world, while at the same time preparing ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr

... I as lazy as a Turk; but while I am constitutionally and habitually opposed to labor, I swear I should prefer to plough or break stones till sundown, sooner than listen to all the rant and fustian that spectators will be called on to endure this morning. I have not sufficient courage to remain and witness what would certainly recall 'the manner of Bombastes Furioso making love to Distaffina!' Will you have a cigar? ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans

... at the passage. The gin-shop was flaring through the fog. A man in a fustian jacket came out of it, and walked slowly down before us, with the clay of the brick-field clinging to him as high as the leather straps with which his trousers were confined, garter-wise, under the knee. The place was quiet. We and the brickmaker seemed the only ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald

... of course, paid much court to by a society of natural philosophers, Quakers, and I do not know who besides. Being tempted to become one of their members, he is elected, and in order to ridicule these would-be philosophers, but real knaves, a fine flowery fustian speech is put into his mouth, which he delivers with prodigious pomp and importance, and is listened to by the philosophers with infinite complacency. The two scenes of the Quakers and philosophers, who, with countenances full of imaginary importance, were seated ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz

... would spring to his feet, as if full to the muzzle, and the entire inconsequence and futility of his words, ending in apparent abject paralysis of speech. We dealt liberally in jeers at any exhibition of bathos or fustian; in laughter and applause at any touch of eloquence or wit. What better training was there than this? I have always had a fond lingering desire to be an orator, but when before an audience found myself ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee

... exasperating and alienating everybody; a hardness which grows until the man can at last scarcely take pleasure in anything, outside the service of his goddess, except cupidity and greed, and cannot be touched with emotion by any language except Fustian. Such are the fruits of the worship of the great ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell

... this, but he had not prepared for coursing fields, and had left Charlie Purdie's troop for Sir Walter's on a sudden thought; and his fisherman's costume—a brown hat with flexible brim, surrounded with line upon line, and innumerable fly-hooks, jack-boots worthy of a Dutch smuggler, and a fustian surtout dabbled with the blood of salmon,—made a fine contrast with the smart jackets, white cord breeches, and well-polished jockey-boots of the less distinguished cavaliers about him. Dr. Wollaston ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton

... and on the chest, through which appeared the rich furs and satins with which it was lined.... The ordinary material of the surcoat for the rich was cloth, either scarlet, blue, or reddish brown, or two or more of these colours mixed together; and for the poor, linsey-woolsey or fustian. The nobles, princes, or barons, when holding a court, wore surcoats of a colour to match their arms, which were embroidered upon them, but the lesser nobles who frequented the houses of the great spoke of themselves as in the robes of such and such a noble, because he whose ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix

... a lover of Mary's? And (strange stinging thought) could he be beloved by her, and so have caused her obstinate rejection of himself? He looked at Jem from head to foot, a black, grimy mechanic, in dirty fustian clothes, strongly built, and awkward (according to the dancing-master); then he glanced at himself, and recalled the reflection he had so lately quitted in his bedroom. It was impossible. No woman with eyes could choose the one when the other ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell

... of a Grecian statue is anatomically true in proportion and in pose, while the whole figure is none the less of an ideal beauty which could rarely have existed outside the imagination. To the French the word emphase has come to mean, not emphasis, but fustian. To the Greeks, with their love of measure, their instinctive avoidance of the "too much," emphase in letters or other arts was irritating and distressful. Mr. Andrew Lang selects a sentence of Macaulay: "Even the wretched ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker

... London was really short, it took them fully two hours to reach their destination. And two hours on a raw drizzly November morning is quite a long enough time to spend in a third-class carriage, shivering if the windows are down, and suffering on the other hand from the odours of damp fustian and bad tobacco if ...
— Great Uncle Hoot-Toot • Mrs. Molesworth

... sitters' throne. I love his honest moustache, and jaunty velvet jacket; his queer figure, his queer vanities, and his kind heart. Why should he not suffer his ruddy ringlets to fall over his shirt-collar? Why should he deny himself his velvet? it is but a kind of fustian which costs him eighteenpence a yard. He is naturally what he is, and breaks out into costume as spontaneously as a bird sings, or a bulb bears a tulip. And as Dick, under yonder terrific appearance of waving cloak, bristling ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... and took an active part on the platform, and became known as "the boy lecturer". Though he was dressed in fustian, and wore a workman's apron, he spoke effectively, and his words went to the hearts of his hearers. His originality of style, too, pleased the audiences of working people ...
— Beneath the Banner • F. J. Cross

... Mr. Ramakrishna's writing is the absence of pretence and fustian. Space is not wasted on ambitious and worthless descriptions of scenery, or on vague disquisitions of a sentimental character. Everywhere he is simple, straightforward, and effective.... Writing in excellent English, ...
— Tales of Ind - And Other Poems • T. Ramakrishna

... could achieve no more than a stutter. He was an extremely little man, dressed in the Sunday garb of a civilian—fustian breeches, moleskin waistcoat, and a frock of blue broadcloth, very shiny at the seams. His hat had fallen off in the struggle, and his eyes, timorous as a hare's, seemed to plead for mercy while he ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... turned round the corner into St Mary's Street North. Here we found a clean-looking young working man standing shivering by a cottage door, with his hands in his pockets. He was dressed in well-mended fustian, and he had a cloth cap on his head. His face had a healthy hunger-nipt look. "Hollo," said my friend, "I thought you was working on the moor." "Ay," replied the young man, "Aw have bin, but we'n bin rain't off this afternoon." "Is there nobody in?" said my friend. "Naw, my wife's gone ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh

... abandon my right, which they have transmitted to me? My first enterprise; and to be given up lightly?'"—With more of the like sort; which Friedrich, in writing of it long after, seems rather ashamed of; and would fain consider to have been mock fustian, provoked by the real fustian of Sir Thomas Robinson, "who negotiated in a wordy high-droning way, as if he were speaking in Parliament," says Friedrich (a Friedrich not taken with that style of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... assured, by the clatter of the breakfast things, that Archer had again stolen a march upon me; and the next moment my bed-room door, driven open by the thick boot of that worthy, gave me a full view of his person—arrayed in a stout fustian jacket—with half a dozen pockets in full view, and Heaven only knows how many more lying perdu in the broad skirts. Knee-breeches of the same material, with laced half-boots and leather leggins, set off his stout calf and ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)

... he needs not all this sound of trumpets; if he have it not, he is only rendered the more contemptible by it. I have some of the play-bills of John Kemble's last performances before me, and there is none of this fustian: the fact, the performance, and the name are simply announced. If our taste improves in some respects, it does not in this; it is a retrogression—a royal theatre sinking back into the booth of a fair. Shakspeare's and Byron's texts have been converted into the showman's explanations ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various

... produced by the novels of Flaubert is that of solidity. This is particularly the case with his historical books. The bric-a-brac and fustian of the Romantics has disappeared, to be replaced by a clear, detailed, profound presentment of the life of the past. In Salammbo, ancient Carthage rises up before us, no crazy vision of a picturesque and disordered imagination, but in all the solidity of truth; coloured, ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey

... waiting at the bar for the glass of warm mixture in which Mr. Pickwick had requested him to drown the fatigues of his morning's walks, when a young boy of about three feet high, or thereabouts, in a hairy cap and fustian overalls, whose garb bespoke a laudable ambition to attain in time the elevation of an hostler, entered the passage of the George and Vulture, and looked first up the stairs, and then along the passage, and then into ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... peculiar to one language childishly transferred to an other."—Iid. cor. "TAUTOLOGY is a disagreeable repetition, either of the same words, or of the same sense in different words."—Iid. cor. "BOMBAST, or FUSTIAN, is an inflated or ambitious style, in which high-sounding words are used, with little or no meaning, or upon a trifling occasion."—Iid. cor. "AMPHIBOLOGY is ambiguity of construction, phraseology ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... O foolish men! Could a man in nature cast a wench down, and disdain in nature to lift her up again? Could he take away her dishonesty without bouncing up the banns of matrimony? O learned poet, well didst thou write fustian verse. ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various

... coat, with buttons on the cuffs, First Modern Pride your ear with fustian stuffs; 'Welcome, blest age, by holy seers foretold, By ancient bards proclaimed the age ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall

... a venerable Hawthorn; a brown fustian coat, a scarlet waistcoat edged with narrow gold, a pair of woollen spatter-dashes, and a gold-laced hat, formed the dress he generally wore. He always rode a small Welsh pony, and was seldom in the house, except at eating-time, from sunrise to the ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson

... midnight,—supernatural singing, Maggie always felt, in spite of Tom's contemptuous insistence that the singers were old Patch, the parish clerk, and the rest of the church choir; she trembled with awe when their carolling broke in upon her dreams, and the image of men in fustian clothes was always thrust away by the vision of angels resting on the parted cloud. The midnight chant had helped as usual to lift the morning above the level of common days; and then there were the smell of hot toast and ale from the kitchen, ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot

... be Roy in his white fustian jacket. Roy had never had the privilege of hearing a dozen women shriek in concert before; at least, like this. His loud derisive laugh was excessively aggravating. What with that, what with the fright his appearance had really ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood

... courteous, lowly, lovely, glad to teach, desirous to learn, and was well travelled; having on him for his habit or clothing never but a mantle or frieze gown to the shoes, a black Millian [i.e. Milan] fustian doublet, and plain black hosen, coarse new canvas for his shirts, and white falling bands and cuffs at his hands,—all the which apparel he gave to the poor, some weekly, some monthly, some quarterly, as he liked, saving his French cap, ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell

... my attention was directed to the, to me, unwonted spectacle of one of those female colliers returning homewards from her daily labor. It was difficult to believe that the unwomanly-looking being who passed before me was actually a female; yet such was the case. Clad in coarse, greasy, and patched fustian unmentionables and jacket, thick canvas shirt, great heavy hob-nailed boots, her features completely begrimed with coal-dust, her hard and horny hands carrying the spade, pick, drinking-tin, sieve, and other paraphernalia of her occupation, her not irregular features wearing a bold, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various

... Colonel Everard; "I know verses written by a friend of the Commonwealth, and those, too, of a dramatic character, which, weighed in an impartial scale, might equal even the poetry of Shakspeare, and which are free from the fustian and indelicacy with which that great bard was sometimes content to feed the coarse appetites ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... Ann was suggested to me by the fifteenth century Dutch morality called Everyman, which Mr William Poel has lately resuscitated so triumphantly. I trust he will work that vein further, and recognize that Elizabethan Renascence fustian is no more bearable after medieval poesy than Scribe after Ibsen. As I sat watching Everyman at the Charterhouse, I said to myself Why not Everywoman? Ann was the result: every woman is not ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw

... knew better, would quite revel in a stagey bombast; Dickens, with his pathos and his humour, was capable of sinking into a theatrical mannerism and cockney vulgarities of wretched taste; Disraeli, with all his wit and savoir faire, has printed some rank fustian, and much slip-slop gossip; and George Meredith at times can be as jerky and mysterious as a prose Browning. Charlotte Bronte and Kingsley could both descend to blue fire and demoniac incoherences. Macaulay ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison

... sickening revulsion to his reader's feelings; and he does it generally with a power which makes it at once as painful to the calmer reader as alluring to those who are struggling with the same temptations as the poet. Now and then, his trick drags him down into sheer fustian and bombast; but not always. There is a terrible Dantean vividness of imagination about him, perhaps unequalled in England, in his generation. His poems are like his countenance, coarse and ungoverned, yet with an ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... ale-house which they had just quitted. The second personage whom we shall introduce was not of a corresponding height with the other: he was broad, square-chested, and short-dressed in knee-breeches, leggings, and laced boots—his coat being of a thick fustian, and cut short like a shooting-jacket: his profession was that of ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat

... hard-bound brains, eight lines a year; 180 He, who still wanting, tho' he lives on theft, Steals much, spends little, yet has nothing left: And He, who now to sense, now nonsense leaning, Means not, but blunders round about a meaning: And He, whose fustian's so sublimely bad, 185 It is not Poetry, but prose run mad: All these, my modest Satire bade translate, And own'd that nine such Poets made a Tate. How did they fume, and stamp, and roar, and chafe! And swear, not ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope

... parlance, confab; dialogue, interlocution; soliloquy, monologue; palaver, buncombe, blarney, blandishment, flattery, flummery; chaff, banter, raillery, persiflage, badinage, asteistn; chatter, babble, chit chat, gibberish, jargon, twaddle, fustian, moonshine, hanky-panky, jabbering, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... assumed an air of so much dignity, that I was like to fall under the fatal error of supposing she should only be addressed with something very clever; and in the hasty raking which my brains underwent in this persuasion, not a single idea occurred that common sense did not reject as fustian on the one hand, or weary, flat, and stale triticism on the other. I felt as if my understanding were no longer my own, but was alternately under the dominion of Aldeborontiphoscophornio, and that of his facetious friend Rigdum-Funnidos. How did I envy at that moment our friend ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott

... great opposition to the introduction of cotton goods into England by manufacturers and others interested in the wool and fustian trade, and matters even got so bad that the British Parliament was foolish enough to actually pass an Act in 1720, prohibiting "the use or wear in Great Britain, in any garment or apparel whatsoever, ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson

... said. "When you gits straight an' square, it'll be a round 'ole ye'll 'ave to drop into, mark my wurrd! An' no Dook o' Duncy 'ull pull ye out! This 'ere old friend o' mine don't unnerstand ye wi' yer fustian an' yer galligaskins. 'E's kinder eddicated—got a bit o' larnin' as I ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli

... But the fustian of the preface, that medley of Socialism and Catholicism, disgusted them; and the excessive accumulation of details prevented them ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert

... dainties—have been grateful for the wing of a chicken or a glass of Canary: but this was not to be. John a'Nokes or John a'Styles were now more considered than I was, and I was pushed and bandied about by fustian knaves and base mechanics, and made to wait for full half an hour in the hall, as though I had been the by-blow of a Running Footman promoted ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... Why therefore fire, for I haue caught extreme cold. Where's the Cooke, is supper ready, the house trim'd, rushes strew'd, cobwebs swept, the seruingmen in their new fustian, the white stockings, and euery officer his wedding garment on? Be the Iackes faire within, the Gils faire without, the Carpets laide, and euerie thing in order? Cur. All readie: and therefore I pray ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... had not gone to the altar, and once in the course of the sermon, Captain Carbonel was impelled to stand up and look over the edge of the pew, when he beheld a battle royal going on over a length of string, between a boy in a blue petticoat and one in a fustian jacket. At the unwonted sight, the fustian-clad let go, and blue petticoat tumbled over backwards, kicking up a great pair of red legs, grey socks, and imperfect but elephantine boots, and howling at the same time. The preacher stopped short, the clerk had by this time worked his ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge

... theology. There were three battles of men. In black with red hats, horns branching above them and in the centre a great devil with a triple tiara, who danced holding up an enormous key. These stood on the right. On the left were priests in fustian, holding enormous flagons of Rhenish wine and dancing in a drunken measure with their arms round more drunken doxies dressed like German women. In the centre stood grave and reverend men wearing horsehair beards and the long gowns of English ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford

... history so completely captivated the active mind of the boy, that his teacher advised him seriously to devote himself to philological studies. As he had played music by imitation so he now tried to imitate poetry. A poem, dedicated to a dead schoolmate, even won a prize, although considerable fustian had to be eliminated. His richness of imagination and feeling displayed itself in early youth. In his eleventh year he would be a poet! A Saxon poet, Apel, imitated the Greek tragedies, why should he not do the same? He had already translated the first twelve books ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl

... but the poet, who had lately taken holy orders, withdrew it at the last moment. These tragedies, which are full of sound and fury, are destitute of tragic power. The Revenge, in which Zanga acts the part of an Iago, has some forcible scenes, and so, despite much rant and fustian, has Busiris. Plenty of blood is shed, of course, and the heroines of the plays die by their own hands. Tragedy is supposed to exercise an elevating influence, but to counteract this happy result, Busiris and The Revenge are followed by indecent epilogues, in which the ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis

... affecting the whole of the European stage. What did we do in his honor and for the honor of our dramatic literature? We chose a play of sixty years ago—our worst period—a piece of clever bombastic fustian mildewed with age; and we chose it merely because it contained the greatest possible number of small 'effective' parts in which 'star' actors could strut across the stage, make their bow before an extremely distinguished audience, and speak their lines in the ears of royalty as the accepted ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... larger than that of her own expediency. This is no question of the selfish interests either of the United States or of Great Britain. There is no people more responsive than the American to high ideals. Englishmen often find it hard to believe that an American is not talking mere fustian when he gives honest expression to his sentiments; but from the foundation of the Republic certain large ideas—Liberty, Freedom of Conscience, Equality—have somehow been made to seem very real ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson

... would credit the evidence of her own senses. She began to fear in good earnest that love had produced a disorder in her lover's understanding; but after a thousand conjectures by which she attempted to account for this extraordinary fustian of style, she concluded that it was the effect of mere levity, calculated to ridicule the passion he had formerly professed. Irritated by this supposition, she resolved to balk his triumph with affected ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... there is a strange mixture of fustian and maudlin in all these things," answered De Montaigne; "but they are but the windfalls of trees that may bear rich fruit in due season; meanwhile, any new school is better than eternal imitations of the old. As for critical vindications ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... jackets, infantry shell-jackets, cavalry stable-jackets, foresters' boots, dragoon jack-boots, stage piratical boots with wide tops to fit the thigh that drooped about the ankles,—trousers of every sort, from blue broadcloth, gold-striped, to the homely fustian,—and a rare show they made. They went fours right or fours left with a fine military jangle, and sometimes went fours right and fours left at the same time, with results disastrous to military order. Then it was good to see and ...
— Schwartz: A History - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray

... of corduroys, bed-ticking, fustian, jeans, and cotton-yarn had been started. Iron ore and iron ware of nearly all sorts was produced. Syracuse was manufacturing salt. Lynn already made morocco leather, and Dedham, straw braid for hats. Cotton ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews

... fustian, and can talk better to it than to any amount of gauze and Saxony; and to a fustian audience (but to that only) I would willingly give some ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... samite and scarlet silk, with mantles of ermine and vair; then the weavers richly bedight, and the ten master tailors in white with crimson stars. Then the master clothworkers passed, carrying boughs of olive and wearing crowns of olive on their heads; then the fustian makers in furred robes of their own weaving, and the quilt makers with garlands of gilt beads and white cloaks sewn with fleurs-de-lis, marching two by two, with little children singing chansonettes and cobles before them. Then came the makers of cloth of gold, all in cloth of gold, ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power

... have seemed frightful in the condition she was in, for all the dress she had on was a scanty old petticoat, with a night jacket of plain fustian, and turned back at the top of her head a yellow cap, which let her hair fall in disorder on her shoulders; and yet dressed even thus she shone with a thousand attractions, and all her person was ...
— The Impostures of Scapin • Moliere

... wears a lively aspect. You see a thousand boatmen, raftmen, and millmen, some warping dingy scows, others loading huge square-sided ships; busy gangs of men in fustian jackets, engaged in running off the newly sawed timber; and the streets bustling with storekeepers, lumber- merchants, and market-men; all combining to produce a chaos of activity very uncommon in the towns of our North American colonies. But too often, murky-looking wharfs, storehouses, ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... pre-telegraph days, used to hammer out a few solid opinions of his own on matters political and otherwise. He no longer employs his brain for that purpose. He need only open his morning paper and in it pours—the oracle of the press, that manufactory of synthetic fustian, whose main object consists in accustoming humanity to attach importance to the wrong things. It furnishes him with opinions ready made, overnight, by some Fleet Street hack at so much a column, after a little talk with his fellows over a pint of bad beer at the Press Club. ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... disdain to leave by specification to his daughter Pacy a "ffeather beed & boulster." In 1666 Nicholas Upsall, of Boston, left a "Bedstead fitted with a Rope Matt & Curtains to it." In March, 1687, Sewall wrote to London for "White Fustian Drawn enough for curtains, vallen counterpaine for a bed & half a duz chaires with four threeded green worsted to work it." In 1691 we find him writing for "Fringe for the Fustian bed & half a duz Chairs. ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle

... Nature had her say. The sexes came out—the men sat in the carriages in their dirty fustian and their checkered shirts and no jacket; their inamoritas beside them glittered in silk and satin. And some fiend told these poor women it was genteel to be short-sighted; so they all bought gold spy-glasses, and spied ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... fustian brain Of this redoubted Captain Vain. I had at hand but few ingredients, And so was forced to use expedients. I put therein some small discerning, A grain of sense, a grain of learning; And when I saw the void behind, I filled it up ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... of corduroy or velveteen, was originally woven at Fustat on the Nile. The warp was stout linen, the woof of cotton so twilled and cut that it gave a low thick pile. Chaucer's knight in the fourteenth century wore fustian. In the fifteenth century Naples was famous for the ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson

... o' fustian clooas He'd worn sin aw wor bred; An' th' same owd booits, wi' cappel'd tooas, An' th' same hat for his yed; His cot wor lowly, yet he'd sing Throo braik o' day till neet; His conscience niver felt a sting, For he did the ...
— Yorkshire Ditties, First Series - To Which Is Added The Cream Of Wit And Humour From His Popular Writings • John Hartley

... of the stream into the river, and hence marked for ever with the trace of ripples, two old men were sitting with their backs to me. One, a rather stout and tall man in a neat dark-green coat and lined cap, was fishing; the other was thin and little; he wore a patched fustian coat and no cap; he held a little pot full of worms on his knees, and sometimes lifted his hand up to his grizzled little head, as though he wanted to protect it from the sun. I looked at him more attentively, and recognised in him Styopushka of Shumihino. ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev

... from Yozhov that Smolin, too, was rich, being the son of a tan-yard proprietor, and that Yozhov himself was the son of a guard at the Court of Exchequer, and very poor. The last was clearly evident by the adroit boy's costume, made of gray fustian and adorned with patches on the knees and elbows; by his pale, hungry-looking face; and, by his small, angular and bony figure. This boy spoke in a metallic alto, elucidating his words with grimaces and gesticulations, and he often used words whose meaning ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky

... perfidious manner. He tried to disturb her conscience. One night he went to her bed with a crucifix in his hand, and made her swear, swear on the life of her child, that she would never deceive him. He used all manner of threats and unctuous fustian. She ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... the truth; and that whereas Christianity was only eighteen hundred years old, that metempsychosis had been believed for twenty-nine centuries, and at this day numbers more followers, by millions, than any other religion in the world. I inquired how she learned all this foolish fustian, and with an indescribable mixture of pride, pity, and triumph, as if she realized that she was throwing Mont Blanc at my head, she mentioned you two eminently evangelical guides, from whose infallible lips she had gleaned her knowledge. As for you, Douglass, I suggest ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... And give out 'tis a spirit; besides these, Such a whole ream of almanac-makers, figure-flingers, Fellows, indeed that only live by stealth, Since they do merely lie about stol'n goods, They 'd make men think the devil were fast and loose, With speaking fustian Latin. Pray, sit down; Put on this nightcap, sir, 'tis charmed; and now I 'll show you, by my strong commanding art, The circumstance ...
— The White Devil • John Webster

... when they get into the churchyard, for already they see the field thronged with country folk; the men in clean, white smocks or velveteen or fustian coats, with rough plush waistcoats of many colours, and the women in the beautiful, long scarlet cloak—the usual out-door dress of west-country women in those days, and which often descended in ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes

... hoop-petticoats are not; but the men have doublets of fustian, under which lie multiple ruffs of cloth, pasted together with batter (mit Teig zusammengekleistert), which create protuberance enough. Thus do the two sexes vie with each other in the art of Decoration; and as usual the ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... striped, linen, wool-birdseye, cotton filled with wool, linsey, M's and O's, cotton Indian dimity, cotton jump stripe, linen filled with tow, cotton striped with silk, Roman M., janes twilled, huccabac, broadcloth, counter-pain, birdseye diaper, Kirsey wool, barragon, fustian, bed-ticking, herring-box, ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth

... done, he was free to follow his spirit and give outlet to the feelings which, as a strong man and a Puritan, he was wont to restrain. He had begun to write poetry in childhood, when his father had taught him the value of brevity or compression and "the difference between poetic enthusiasm and fustian." Therefore he wrote slowly, carefully, and allowed ample time for change of thought or diction. So his early "Thanatopsis" was hidden away for years till his father found and published it, and made Bryant famous in a day. All ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... to put on an old fustian shooting jacket, and Squeers, arming himself with his cane, led the way across a yard, to a door in the rear of ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... a letter for you." So saying, the woman pulled up her dirty apron, then her gown, and at last arrived at a queer fustian pocket, out of which she produced the missive, which had been jumbled in company with a bit of wax, a ball of blue worsted, some halfpence, a copper thimble, and a lump of Turkey rhubarb, from all of which companions it had received a variety of hues and colours. Vanslyperken seized ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat

... But the landscape I; Half the charms to me it yieldeth, Money cannot buy. Cleon harbors sloth and dullness, Freshening vigor I; He in velvet, I in fustian, Richer man ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various

... the proverb about the woman who talks of her virtue. South Carolina, in particular, if she has hitherto failed in the application of her enterprise to manufacturing purposes of a more practical kind, has always been able to match every yard of printed cotton from the North with a yard of printed fustian, the product of her own domestic industry. We have thought no harm of this, so long as no Act of Congress required the reading of the "Congressional Globe." We submitted to the general dispensation of long-windedness and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various

... article, rather curious than decisive of any point of history. One entry is thus; "To the lady Brygitt, oon of the daughters of K. Edward ivth, being seeke (sick) in the said wardrobe for to have for her use two long pillows of fustian stuffed with downe, and two pillow beres of Holland cloth." The only conjecture that can be formed from this passage is, that the lady Bridget, being lodged in the great wardrobe, was not then ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole

... our trapper had stumbled thus suddenly might have been styled the wild man of any region—west, north, east, or south,—with perfect propriety. On his legs were a pair of dark grey fustian trousers, which had seen so much service that, from the knee downwards, they were torn into shreds. His feet were covered by a pair of moccasins. Instead of the usual hunting-shirt he wore one of the yellow deerskin coats of a Blackfoot ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne

... and in expeditions with the Thames police. It was from a walk with Leech through Chatham by-streets that he gathered the hint of Charley Hexam and his father, for Our Mutual Friend, from the sight of "the uneducated father in fustian and the ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin

... very And though that he was worthy he was wise, high esteem.* And of his port as meek as is a maid. He never yet no villainy ne said In all his life, unto no manner wight. He was a very perfect gentle knight. But for to telle you of his array, His horse was good, but yet he was not gay. Of fustian he weared a gipon*, *short doublet Alle *besmotter'd with his habergeon,* *soiled by his coat of mail.* For he was late y-come from his voyage, And wente for to ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer

... but blunders round about a meaning; And he whose fustian 's so sublimely bad, It is not poetry, but prose ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... tell you. Candidate signifies a man dressed in fustian; it comes from candidus, which is partly Greek, partly Latin, and partly Hebrew. It was the learned designation for Irish linen, too, which in the time of the Romans was in great request at Home; ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton

... these articles is countless: cloth, as fine as a spider's web, and coarse fustian, here finest batiste, and there, strong drill for overalls. Each finished article requires its own particular raw material, low qualities cannot produce fine goods, and it is also impossible to utilise high qualities for low grade goods. The very arbitrary law for economic production, makes ...
— Bremen Cotton Exchange - 1872/1922 • Andreas Wilhelm Cramer

... modern fashionable way To-night our author begs your leave to stray. No fustian hero rages here to-night, No armies fall to fix a tyrant's right: From lower life we draw our scenes' distress: —Let not your equals move your pity less! Virtue distrest in humble state support; Nor think she ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden

... reading. The collection of songs was my companion, day and night. I pored over them driving my cart, or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse; carefully noting the true, tender, or sublime, from affectation and fustian. I am convinced I owe to this practice much of my ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various

... left in the keeping of the wardens nowe beinge, a fryers cote of russet, and a kyrtle of a worstyde weltyd with red cloth, a mouren's cote of buckram, and 4 morres dawnsars cotes of white fustian spangelyd, and two gryne saten cotes, and a dysardd's cote of cotton, and 6 payre of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 544, April 28, 1832 • Various

... him awhile in mute awe" and then "weep aloud in a wild ecstasy," endangers the reader's gravity not so much by extravagance of diction as by over-effusiveness of sentiment. The former of these two offences differs from the latter by the difference between "fustian" and "gush." And there is, in fact, more frequent exception to be taken to the character of the thought in these poems than to that of the style. The remarkable gift of eloquence, which seems to have belonged to Coleridge from boyhood, tended naturally ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill

... himself with lewd Comedies? Has he a mind to discharge his Priestcraft, and flesh himself up for a Poet? Yes, this is the consequence, by using to see these smutty things, he'll learn to write 'em. What need I mention the Sham-Oaths, and looseness of Farce, or the Fustian raving against the Gods in Tragedy, were these things really unconcern'd with Idolatry, a Parson, of all Mankind, should not be known to ogle them, for were they not highly Criminal, the foolery of them is Egregious, and unbecoming the gravity of all ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet

... evil of him, and we could expose many of his tricks effectually. We also hate Dean Swift, and upon what we think substantial arguments. Some of our own contemporaries we hate particularly; Cobbett, for instance, and other bad fellows in fustian and corduroys. But for that very reason we will not write their lives. Or, if we should do so, only because they might happen to stand as individuals in a series, and after warning the reader of our own bias. For it ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... BY A BOY WITH WINE. CAR. Come, come, leave these fustian protestations; away, come, I cannot abide these grey-headed ceremonies. Boy, fetch me a glass quickly, I may bid these gentlemen welcome; give them a health here. [EXIT BOY.] I mar'le whose wit it was to put a prologue in yond' sackbut's mouth; they might well think he'd be out ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson

... reputation of an adventurer, he one day chanced to be at the ordinary, when the company was surprised by the entrance of such a figure as had never appeared before in that place. This was no other than a person habited in the exact uniform of an English jockey. His leathern cap, cut bob, fustian frock, flannel waistcoat, buff breeches, hunting-boots and whip, were sufficient of themselves to furnish out a phenomenon for the admiration of all Paris. But these peculiarities were rendered still more conspicuous by the behaviour of the man who owned them. When he crossed ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett

... as they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning amongst them was brought; that this was it which had damped the glory of Italian wits; that nothing had been there written now these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought. And though I knew ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton

... absent) is Here, our best haymaker (forgive me this, It is our country's style) in this warm shine I lie, and dream of your full Mermaid wine. Oh, we have water mix'd with claret lees, Brink apt to bring in drier heresies Than beer, good only for the sonnet's strain, With fustian metaphors to stuff the brain, So mix'd, that, given to the thirstiest one, 'Twill not prove alms, unless he have the stone. I think, with one draught man's invention fades: Two cups had quite spoil'd Homer's Iliades. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... Ballaarat sympathised with those of Bendigo in their common grievances, and prayed the governor that the gold licence be reduced to thirty shillings a month. There was further a great waste of yabber-yabber about the diggers not being represented in the Legislative Council, and a deal of fustian was spun against the squatters. I understood very little of those matters at the time: the shoe had not pinched ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello

... swarmed about his waggon! How their oily fustian filled The summer air with fragrance that his fine olfactories thrilled! How very loud their shouts were, and how very rude their jeers, And how very strong the bouquet of ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Volume 103, July 16, 1892 • Various

... selected a fustian coat of extremely ragged appearance, with trousers to match, also a sealskin vest of a mangy complexion, likewise a soiled and battered billycock hat so shockingly bad that it was difficult to imagine it to have ever ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne

... Haim brightly, seizing gratefully on the fustian phrase, eager to hall-mark it as genuine and put it among his treasures. Without doubt he was flattered. "Yes," he proceeded, as it were reflectively, "I have asked Mrs. Lobley to be my wife, and she has done me ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... Indeed, it was stupid of me not to recognise their faces at first sight, having observed both of them loitering about our back bounds the afternoon before; and one of them, the tall one with the red head and fustian jacket, having been in my shop in the fore part of the night, about the gloaming like, asking me as a favour for a yard or two of spare runds, ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir

... fine cloth of Ypre and Curtike, fine cloth of all colours, fustian, linen cloth; for which England returns ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston

... miscellaneous, ignoble manufacturing individuals, ye have produced too much! We accuse you of making above two-hundred thousand shirts for the bare backs of mankind. Your trousers too, which you have made, of fustian, of cassimere, of Scotch-plaid, of jane, nankeen and woollen broadcloth, are they not manifold? Of hats for the human head, of shoes for the human foot, of stools to sit on, spoons to eat with—Nay, what say we hats or shoes? You produce gold-watches, jewelries, silver-forks, and epergnes, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... For man to dress and polish his uncourtly mind, In what mock habits have they put her since the fall! More oft in fools' and madmen's hands than sages', She seems a medley of all ages, With a huge farthingale to swell her fustian stuff, A new commode, a topknot, and a ruff, Her face patch'd o'er with modern pedantry, With a long sweeping train Of comments and disputes, ridiculous and vain, All of old cut with a new dye: How soon have you restored her charms, And ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... and delivering commands to this and that and the other constable or jailer, and calling them Grand Chamberlain, and Prince This and Prince That, and Admiral of the Fleet, Field Marshal in Command, and all such fustian, and was as happy as a bird. ...
— The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain

... of perfect liberty! Away! away! I'd rather hold my neck By doubtful tenure from a Sultan's beck, In climes where liberty has scarce been nam'd, Nor any right but that of ruling claim'd, Than thus to live where boasted Freedom waves Her fustian flag in ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison

... of disappointment followed the reply. Then, after a pause, 'Is the assistant within?' This was followed by a heavy tread in the passage and, next moment; an enormous man, in very ragged fustian, with a bronzed hairy face, and a reaping-hook under his arm, stood in the surgery, his head ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne

... puppy!" snarled out old Growling to his neighbour: "he's going to measure us out some yards of his own fustian, I'm ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover

... written about fifty years ago by a Welsh gentleman of Cambridge. His name, as I remember, Vaughan, as appears by the answer to it by the learned Dr. Henry More. It is a piece of the most unintelligible fustian that perhaps was ever published in any language.—S. This piece was by the brother of Henry Vaughan, ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift

... hast thou seen In all thy travel round the earth Ever a morn of calmer birth? But Morning's eye alone serene Can gaze across yon village-green To where the trooping British run Through Lexington. Good men in fustian, stand ye still; The men in red come o'er the hill, Lay down your arms, damned rebels! cry The men in red full haughtily. But never a grounding gun is heard; The men in fustian stand unstirred; Dead ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)

... alone, it would be a revelation of the power of Ossian, and of the aptitudes of a people who could enjoy it. It is not within our scope to quote from the veritable Ossian, or to expose the bombast and fustian, tumid diction and swelling sound of Macpherson, of which ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... passed, but they, also, were of the night, gaudily bedecked in tinsel and glittering finery that would have been fustian by day to the least discriminating eye. Respectability was not abroad in Ascalon by night. With the last gleam of day it left the stage ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden

... tread, there was caution in it, as in that of one who mentally feels his way; and despite the fact that it was not a black coat nor a dark garment of any sort that he wore, there was something about him which suggested that he naturally belonged to the black-coated tribes of men. His clothes were of fustian, and his boots hobnailed, yet in his progress he showed not the mud-accustomed bearing of ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy

... has it that we are all kings and queens, possessing realms and treasuries. However this may be, it is certain that there are souls born to reign over the hearts of their fellows, kings walking about the world in broad-cloth and fustian, shooting-jackets, ulsters, and what not—swaying hearts at will, though it may be all unconscious of their power; and only the existence of some such psychological fact as this will account for the incident which ...
— Wikkey - A Scrap • YAM

... surplus profits that may remain after 5 per cent. has been paid on capital between custom and labor, one pound of purchase counting for as much in the division as one pound of wage, let me refer to the well-known Hebden Bridge Fustian Works. I commend to all interested in co-partnership questions a close study of this industry. Started by working men in 1870, it has built up on lines of permanent success a flourishing business, and ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House

... barely sufficient to maintain him decently, and as soon as he graduated, he was taken into his father's counting-house, to do small drudgery on a proportionate salary. For three years he earned his living as regularly as the obscure functionary in fustian who swept the office. Mr. Mallet was consistent, but the perfection of his consistency was known only on his death. He left but a third of his property to his son, and devoted the remainder to various public institutions and local charities. Rowland's third was an easy ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James

... his master to put on an old fustian shooting jacket, which he took down from a peg in the passage; and Squeers, arming himself with his cane, led the way across a yard to a door in the ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... like "Bussy D'Ambois," we find some difficulty in recognizing the features of the same nature. "Bussy D'Ambois" represents a mind not so much in creation as in eruption, belching forth smoke, ashes, and stones, no less than flame. Pope speaks of it as full of fustian; but fustian is rant in the words when there is no corresponding rant in the soul; whilst Chapman's tragedy, like Marlowe's "Tamburlaine," indicates a greater swell in the thoughts and passions of his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various

... up the bundle which he had brought and untied it. This bundle contained a little woollen gown, an apron, a fustian bodice, a kerchief, a petticoat, woollen stockings, shoes—a complete outfit for a girl of seven years. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... from morning till night, living in an atmosphere that for months had been vitiated by the germs arising from the half-crazed mob. He read the newspapers and was an assiduous frequenter of public meetings, where he would often smile and shrug his shoulders at the rant and fustian of the speakers, but nevertheless would go away with the most ultra notions teeming in his brain, ready to engage in any desperate undertaking in the defense of what he considered truth and justice. And sitting by the window in his little bedroom, and looking out over the ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola



Words linked to "Fustian" :   rhetoric, grandiosity, rant, material, cloth, blah, claptrap, bombast, textile, magniloquence, fabric



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