"Pompous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Court about him, of vast expense and luxury, masques and revels, to the debauching of our prime gentry both male and female,—nor at his own cost, but on the public revenue,—and all this to do nothing but bestow the eating and drinking of excessive dainties, to set a pompous face upon the superficial actings of State, to pageant himself up and down in progress among the perpetual bowings and cringings ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... of other tribes, who were great warriors, living to the south,—these were the Sioux. But the two Frenchmen had not gone beyond the Great Lakes.[2] These Algonquins were received at Chateau St. Louis, Quebec, with pompous firing of cannon and other demonstrations of welcome. So eager were the French to take possession of the new land that thirty young men equipped themselves to go back with the Indians; and the Jesuits sent out two priests, Leonard ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... were the painted forms of other times— 'Twas all they left of virtues or of crimes, Save vague tradition; and the gloomy vaults That hid their dust, their foibles, and their faults, And half a column of the pompous page, That speeds the spacious tale from age to age; Where history's pen its praise or blame supplies And lies like truth, and still most truly lies; He wand'ring mused, and as the moonbeam shone Through the dim lattice o'er the floor ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... he succeeded in seating them at the table. Thenceforward there was no difficulty. The ample and diversified cold supper began to disappear steadily, and the wine with it. And as the wine disappeared so did Mr Cotterill (who had been pompous and taciturn) grow talkative, offering to the company the exact figures of the cost of the house, and so forth. But ultimately the sheer joy of ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... was pompous and patronizing the next evening when he met Richard at dinner; but Mr. Harley was no less kind. Richard submitted himself to Mr. Harley's patronage, for in it he recognized the inalienable right of a father-in-law. Mrs. Hanway-Harley on that dinner occasion did not pretend ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... not persuade himself to seek rest until he had got it down in black-and-white; for, though he wrote letters instead of sonnets, he was nevertheless a sort of a poet by temperament. You behold him calm now, master once more of his emotions, and not that agitated, pompous, and slightly ridiculous person who lately stamped over Oxford Street and stormed the Alhambra Theatre. And in order to help the excellent father of my hero back into your esteem, let me point out that the imminence and the actuality of fatherhood constitute a somewhat disturbing experience, ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... trees once grew beside a running brook: An Alder, one, of unassuming mien: His mate, a Poplar, who, with lofty look, Wore, with a rustling flirt, his robe of green. With pompous front the Poplar mounted high, And curried converse with each swelling breeze; While Alder seemed content to live and die A lowly shrub ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... amused Hadria to note the contrast between him and Mr. Gordon, who was a typical father of a family; limited in his interests to that circle; an amiable ruler of a tiny, somewhat absurd little world, pompous ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader! Many a bitter smile passed over Pen's face as he read his novel, and recalled the time and feelings which gave it birth. How pompous some of the grand passages appeared; and how weak others were in which he thought he had expressed his full heart! This page was imitated from a then favorite author, as he could now clearly see and confess, though he had believed himself to be writing originally then. As he mused over ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the Italy of the first years of the Fifteenth Century. Gentile was also pleased to add to the "superb chargers" mentioned by Lattuda, all kinds of animals, especially the apes that the Milanese loved to include in their pompous processions. Finally, in the background of this picture he has painted the embattled walls of a Guelph city with two massive gates; the one through which the Magi have entered, the other through which they will take their departure. Is there anything here, either in the foreground or the background ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... kilometres, which I had overheard from Bhme's lips at Memmert, and which Davies had attributed to the outside channels—did they refer to a canal? I remembered seeing barges in Bensersiel harbour. I remembered conversations with the natives in the inn, scraps of the post-master's pompous loquacity, talks of growing trade, of bricks and grain passing from the interior to the islands: from another source—was it the grocer of Wangeroog?—of expansion of business in the islands themselves as bathing resorts; from another source again—von Brning himself, surely—of Dollmann's personal ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... spiritual and temporal. Miss Jacky stood unrivalled as the sensible woman of Glenfern. She had attained this eminence partly from having a little more understanding than her sisters, but principally from her dictatorial manner, and the pompous, decisive tone in which she delivered the most commonplace truths. At home her supremacy in all matters of sense was perfectly established; and thence the infection, like other superstitions, had spread ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... center of all eyes, made pompous preparation; he pulled down his vest, arranged his sleeves and, in sonorous, cadenced voice began to recite his ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... Had not the magistrate seen him give the wretched man money to run away with? His first care was to disengage Margari's hands from his coat tail and next to hold him at arm's length so that he should not clutch his collar. Then with pompous impertinence he pretended ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... so pompous and costly—but it is the shop of a poor man. The whole Lake-frontage, as I have told you, cost no more than a city lot; and with sand on the beach, and stone on the shore and nearby fields, it all came to be as cheaply as a wooden cabin—indeed, it had to. That winter ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... was susceptible to what Elise chose to call wasted emotion, and she found herself again on the verge of tears when they entered the Chapel. Though she did not know enough of architecture to survey intelligently the somewhat pompous apartment, she was delightfully impressed by the rich adornments and the ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... conduct pours the utmost contempt upon all the will-worship, and doctrines, and superstition of carnal men-(Mason). With such, traditions, human inventions, forms, and externals, appear venerable and sacred; and they are mistaken with pertinaceous ignorance for the substance of religion. What is pompous and burdensome appears to such men meritorious; and the excitement of mere natural passions, as at a tragedy, is falsely deemed a needful help to true devotion. Their zeal hardens their hearts, and causes bitter rage, enmity, and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... out without making excuses. When he returned, Dr. Lindsay had dried his face and was calmer. But his aspect was sufficiently ominous; he was both pompous and severe. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... made A grand parade, With marching train-band, guild, and trade: The burgomaster in robes arrayed, Gold chain, and mace, and gay cockade, Great keys carried, and flags displayed, Pompous marshal and spruce young aide, Carriage and foot and cavalcade; While big drums thundered and trumpets brayed, And all the bands of the canton played; The fountain spouted lemonade, Children drank of the bright cascade; Spectators of every rank and grade, The young and merry, the grave ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... with faded frescoes on their plastered walls and with dim, echoing arcades. And so into the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele—there is no more charming little square in Italy—with its fountain and its two stone giants and the pompous statue of an incredibly ugly King astride a prancing horse and a monument to Peace set up by Napoleon to commemorate a treaty which was the cause of many wars. At the back of the piazza, like the back-drop on a stage, rises a towering sugar-loaf mound, thrown up, ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... a very pompous and stately man. He had not been honoured with his true title since he left school, and was therefore a good deal taken aback by the plain-speaking of his friend. He attributed the words, however, to the weak condition of Mr Stuart's mind, ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... course towards the tops of the Rocky Mountains. At the bottom of the valley flows an immense river, into which the various streams issuing from the mountains fall from all parts. In memory of their native land, the French formerly called this river the St. Louis. The Indians, in their pompous language, have named it the Father ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... had no charms for them; and, while her cousins had lovers, or danglers, by the dozen, Isabella found herself, to her infinite satisfaction, completely deserted and neglected, by all the starched and pompous fools that visited her uncle, during a stay of some months in ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... silence his subordinate by the tacit might of his superior dignity. He says: "I do not think there is much in all that. Many errors were committed at the time you refer to which we need not now discuss." A pompous man easily sweeps away the suggestions of those beneath him. But though a minister may so deal with his subordinate, he cannot so deal with his king. The social force of admitted superiority by which he overturned his under-secretary is ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... manfully as he blew his great horn; and in that pompous engine of sound, the boy beheld a spectacle of huge forces under human control. To Penrod, the horn meant power, and the musician meant mastery over power, though, of course, Penrod did not know that this was how he really felt about ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... the beloved of all in the town, never knew, never to her dying day, that on a certain memorable occasion, good-humored, fat, pompous Mrs. Bell would have given half a sovereign to box her ears. The astute captain, however, guessed her feelings, and chuckled inwardly. He had also found out during his brief morning's conversation that Mrs. Meadowsweet was going to ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... not to go there unless one is French or in some way connected with or interested in French life and character, yet the cuisine is excellent and the rooms clean and neat. The occasional presence of pompous Senators from the provinces on their way to the legislative halls of the capital ensures a certain average of cooking and attendance; at other times prevail the naturally comfortable instincts of ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... nearly all of Corneille's that now appears on the stage. His later works are, without exception, merely treatises or reasons of state in certain difficult conjunctures, dressed out in a pompous dialogical form. We might as well make a tragedy out ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... lady, was twice enlightened, and saw poor Anais de Negrepelisse as she really was, as Parisians saw her—a tall, lean, withered woman, with a pimpled face and faded complexion; angular, stiff, affected in her manner; pompous and provincial in her speech; and, and above all these things, dowdily dressed. As a matter of fact, the creases in an old dress from Paris still bear witness to good taste, you can tell what the gown was meant for; but an ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... kinds, to become a country gentleman, patriot, reformer, financier, and what not, always good-looking (he had been very handsome), pleasing, intelligent, cultivated, agreeable as a man can be who is not witty and who is rather pompous and slow, after many years of retirement, in the course of which he gave to the world his lucubrations on corn and currency. Time and the hour made him master of a large but encumbered estate and member for his county. Armed with the importance of representing ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... about eight-and-forty years of age; Son about eight-and-forty minutes. Dombey was rather bald, rather red, and though a handsome, well-made man, too stern and pompous in appearance to be prepossessing. Son was very bald, and very red, and somewhat crushed and spotted in his general effect, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... her by surprise, that she had been weeping. Some secret sorrow evidently oppressed her mind, and, at times, I have seen her beautiful face suffused with scarlet and her eyes become wet with tears, when my pompous landlady spoke of the ladies of Europe and "the true white-blooded females of America." I dreamed not at this time of the cause; but the truth dawned upon ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... of Richardson's writing. But to paint perfection, rather than to study nature, was his object in "Sir Charles Grandison," and therefore that novel was less powerful in the author's day, and is less interesting in ours than "Pamela" and "Clarissa." We no longer need the example of the pompous Sir Charles to dissuade us from indecent language and drunkenness in a lady's drawing-room, and we can only laugh at the studied propriety of his faultless ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... well that the prize should go to different localities, for in that way its sphere of usefulness is extended," remarked pompous Mr. Gloag, who could be impartial, as there was no candidate from Noran Side. He was a minister much in request for church soirees, where he amused the congregations so greatly with personal anecdote about himself that they never thought much ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... Taney lingered, while the horn and hounds were loud, To behold the pompous Pinkney scattering learning to the crowd; And old men great Wirt remembered, while their minds he strove to win, As a little German urchin drumming at ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... blasphemous and sometimes erotic. A devoted country clergyman doing his simple duty—trying to lift his congregation to better views of life, partaking their joys and alleviating their sorrows, often a martyr to meddlesome deacons or to pompous trustees, and his wife a prey to the whimsical wives of opinionated pew-owners—such a man I deeply revere; but the longer I live the more I am convinced that the professional revivalist and the sensation preacher are necessarily and ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... each side by numerous sarcophagi; as along the Roman Appian Way; passed the well of Shaikh el Bakkar, and a sarcophagus with a long inscription in Greek, which I regretted not having discovered yesterday, so as to allow of copying it. From an eminence we took the last view of the pompous colonnades ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... then the Honourable Sidney Lorraine, prospered in his political career. He was servile, and pompous, and indefatigable, and loquacious, so whispered the world: his friends hailed him as, at once, a courtier and a sage, a man of business and an orator. After revelling in his fair proportion of commissionerships, and under-secretaryships, and the rest of the milk and honey ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... treasures of earth, jewels and gold and dignities, and scenes of sensuous delights, and everything that holds to the visible and the temporal, and piles them into one scale, and then He puts into the other the one name, God; and the pompous nothings fly up and are nought, and have no weight at all. Is that not true? Does it need any demonstration, any ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... haughty gesture marks his gait, No pompous tone his word; No studied attitude is seen, No palling nonsense heard; He'll suit his bearing to the hour, Laugh, listen, learn, or teach. With joyous freedom in his mirth, And ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... out into the great living room, where a large, pompous, vividly colored gentleman was laying down the law to the triplets—three very attractive young girls, dressed precisely alike, who said, "Yes, pa-pah!" and "No pa-pah!" in a grave and silvery-voiced chorus whenever filial ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... eyes again to his wife's face. He saw it calm, her attitude reposeful. Till then his tone had been resentful, dull, without sarcasm. But now he became slightly pompous. ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... weaklings. She drew a lesson from the recent victory. Her white hands pointed him to glory that lay beyond a prolonged martyrdom; she spoke of stakes and flaming pyres; she spread the adjectives thickly on her finest tartines, and decorated them with a variety of her most pompous epithets. It was an infringement of the copyright of the passages of declamation that disfigure Corinne; but Louise grew so much the greater in her own eyes as she talked, that she loved the Benjamin who inspired her eloquence the more for it. She counseled him ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... ridicules those who reject without examination still more than those who believe with docile credulity. Jean Baptiste Rousseau (1670- 1741), the lyric poet of this age, displayed in his odes considerable energy, and a kind of pompous harmony, which no other had imparted to the language, yet he fails to excite the sympathy. In his writings we find that free commingling of licentious morals with a taste for religious sublimities which characterized the last years of Louis XIV. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... he seemed to feel for my situation. I did not know M. Barthes; however I perceived in what he said the warmth and zeal of friendship, and that he had it at heart to persuade me to fix my residence at Bienne. He made the most pompous eulogium of the city and its inhabitants, with whom he showed himself so intimately connected as to call them several times in my ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... arraying himself in a damask-satin or velvet, and wearing on his neck a chain of gold. Of a far other kind were the tastes of Wolsey's successor, who, in the warmest sunshine of his power, preferred a quiet dinner with Erasmus to the pompous display of state banquets, and who wore a gleeful light in his countenance when, after his fall, he called his children and grandchildren about him, and said: "I have been brought up at Oxford, at an Inn of Chancery, at Lincoln's Inn, and in the King's Court—from ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... an ass merely, he is a pompous and a stupid ass. (Laughs again to himself.) Now there is something very important that he ought to know, and he wouldn't let me tell him. ...
— The Great Adventure • Arnold Bennett
... alone, in wistful idleness, there came a knock at the door—a pompous rat-tat-tat, with a stout tap-tap or two added, once and for all to put the quality of the visitor beyond doubt. The door was then cautiously pushed ajar to admit the head of the personage thus impressively heralded. And a most extraordinary ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... of the Robins, too, is a continuous delight; and from its pompous and high-sounding dialogue a skilful adapter may glean not only one story, but one story with two versions; for the infant of eighteen months can follow the narrative of the joys and troubles, errors ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... six, the first man made his appearance. He was a thick-set, pompous individual, with a gold-headed cane and gold spectacles, and climbed up the stairs with dignity and difficulty. He was followed by a pale little woman, four small children, and a stout, red-haired nurse, bearing in her arms a baby, which was laboring under an attack of the intermittent ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... with the alien and warring races were conjured up, the splendid viceregal circle, the pompous headquarter military, the fast set, staid luxury-loving civilians, and all the fierce eddies and undercurrents of the graded social life, in which the cold English heart learns to burn as madly under "dew of the lawn" muslin as ever Lesbian ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... the Pacific coast between Mount St Elias and the Columbia river are worked out by Boas; the transformation from the hunting to the agricultural mode of life was accompanied by changes in belief and worship quite as radical. These have been carefully studied by Cushing, Stevenson and Fewkes. The pompous ceremonials of the civilized tribes of Mexico and the Cordilleras in South America, when analysed, reveal only a higher grade of the prevailing idea. Im Thurn says of the Carib: "All objects, animate and inanimate, seem exactly of the same ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... night, And chased the Stygian shades with rosy smile That spread from Error's home, the land of Nile. No more with harp and sistrum Music calls To wanton rites within Astarte's halls, The priests forget to mourn their Apis slain, And bear Osiris' ark with pompous train; Gone is Serapis, and Anubis fled, And Neitha's unraised vail shrouds Isis' prostrate head. Where Jove shook heaven when the red bolt was hurled, Neptune the sea—and Phoebus lit the world; Where fair-haired naiads held each silver ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... the last time I was in Paris, his head—a declaration of righteousness, a cross between a Caesar by Gerome, and an archbishop of a provincial town, set all my natural antipathy instantly on edge. Hugo is often pompous, shallow, empty, unreal, but he is at least an artist, and when he thinks of the artist and forgets the prophet, as in "Les Chansons des Rues et des Bois," his juggling with the ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... thoughts, or words in quiet. I despise the world yet, I assure you, more than either Gay or you, and the court more than all the rest of the world. As for those scribblers for whom you apprehend I would suppress my Dulness (which, by the way, for the future you are to call by a more pompous name, the Dunciad), how much that nest of hornets are my regard will easily appear to you when you read the ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... external trappings of his rank,—those gorgeous adjuncts and pompous circumstances which excite the wonder and envy of mankind,—no man could have shown himself more indifferent to them. He recognized indeed the necessity of maintaining the dignity of his high position. "Every moment," ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... command were mine, And every boast Ambition could desire, The pompous Gifts, sweet Bard, I would resign For the aft ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... dignities should regard Rome and Italy not as an inn to put up at in travelling, but as their home." And Pliny the Elder, going as a philosophical observer to the very root of the evil, says, in his pompous manner, "In former times our generals tilled their fields with their own hands; the earth, we may suppose, opened graciously beneath a plough crowned with laurels and held by triumphal hands, maybe because those great men gave to tillage ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... an 'igh 'ole time in 'ere, young gentlemen," and Mr. McGuffie's English groom looked down on the boys; "but you're missin' the Derby, that's what you are. Hold Pompous has come 'isself, and if he ain't been hexplainin' to the master 'ow he 'appened to knock Speug down. He's out o' breath now, and the master he's took up the runnin', and—my eye and Betty Martin—ain't he talkin'! Not cussin'—no, ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... actors in the day's doings the affair was an unmitigated annoyance, and even their own great and true happiness could not lighten the excessive fatigue of the pompous ceremony and of the still more pompous reception which followed it. To describe that day would be to make out a catalogue of gorgeous equipages, gorgeous costumes, gorgeous decorations. Many pages would not suffice to enumerate the cardinals, the dignitaries, the ambassadors, ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... with a tall, haggard man who had the eyes of a chained and starving dog. They joined a conspicuous party whose principal members were a fat woman massaged to the teeth, a dark girl who had evidently a sharp eye to the main chance as well as to the picturesque, and a hook-nosed, appallingly pompous man who would strut on the ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... and practice, reason and action from each other. It was by the instructions of my friend, that I learned to rise superior to the power of prejudice, to reject no truth because it was novel, to refuse my ear to no arguments because they were not backed by pompous and venerable names. In pursuance of this system, I have ventured in my last to suggest some reasons in favour of a moderate indulgence of youthful pleasures. Perhaps however my dear count will think, that I am going beyond what even these reasons would authorize ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... in society; it was more than I could bear for a length of time. On one occasion I met a party of my critics—seven of them; some of them had been very bitter foes in print, but they were prodigiously civil face to face. These gentlemen seemed infinitely grander, more pompous, dashing, showy, than the few authors I saw. Mr. Thackeray, for instance, is a man of quiet, simple demeanour; he is however looked upon with some awe and even distrust. His conversation is very peculiar, too perverse to be pleasant. It was proposed to me to see Charles Dickens, Lady Morgan, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... A pompous mulatto man in white cotton gloves and with a cluster of tuberoses in his buttonhole ushered the party down the aisle to the seats of honor reserved for the white folks. There were seventeen in the ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... side with the village idiot there was the pompous person who could not only read a book, but could put whole sentences together and even make rhymes, and who on these grounds took an important part in the life of the community. He was not only adviser and letter-writer to his ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... awning. One could see indistinctly through the mist half a score of carriages in a line, and the silhouettes of English grooms leading the duke's saddle-horse up and down an avenue of acacias, all leafless at that season and standing naked in their bark. Everything revealed well-ordered, pompous, ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... Her nose was relatively small, but too thick and broad at the nostrils, although it departed but little from the straight line of the classic model. Altogether the Signora Pandolfi, christened Maria Luisa, and wife to Marzio the silver-chiseller, was a portly and pompous-looking person, who wore an air of knowing her position, and of being sure to maintain it. Nevertheless, there was a kindly expression in her fat face, and if her eyes looked sleepy they did ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... care of them, generous diet, but principally to the fact of the elimination of all the roosters among the flock during the season between the "first of May and December first," with one exception. "Brigham," an immensely large, old, red Shanghai rooster, a most pompous and dignified old chap. A special pet of Aunt Sarah's, she having raised him from a valuable "setting" of eggs given her, and as the egg from which "Brigham," as he was called, emerged, was the only one of the lot which proved fertile, he was valued accordingly and given a longer lease of life ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... Humphry Ward's statement, he took very great pains with it; indeed, internal evidence would be sufficient to establish this if we had no positive external testimony whatsoever. He came at a fortunate time, when the stately yet not pompous or over-elaborated model of the latest Georgian prose, raised from early Georgian "drabness" by the efforts of Johnson, Gibbon, and Burke, but not proceeding to the extremes of any of the three, was still the academic standard; but when a certain ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... sense to see that the real Michael was speaking. When people were being unreal, when they were pompous or adopting attitudes, she could attend to nothing but their absurdity, which engrossed her altogether. But she never laughed at real things; real things were ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... French stage," said she, "always look over their right shoulders, to express magnanimous disdain; and a lover, whether he be Grecian or Roman, Turk, Israelite, or American, must regularly show his passion by the pompous emphasis with which he pronounces the word MADAME!—a word which must certainly have, for a French audience, some magical charm, incomprehensible ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... I forget the suddenly changing seasons of the northern clime. There is no long and lingering spring, unfolding leaf and blossom one by one; no long and lingering autumn, pompous with many-colored leaves and the glow of Indian summer. But winter and summer are wonderful, and pass into each other. The quail has hardly ceased piping in the corn when winter, from the folds of trailing clouds, sows broadcast over ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... who was born in 1757, was a son of Thomas Douce, one of the Six Clerks of the Court of Chancery. He was first sent to a school at Richmond, conducted by a Mr. Lawton, author of a work on Egypt, and afterwards to 'a French academy, kept by a pompous and ignorant Life-Guardsman, with a view to his learning merchants' accounts, which were his aversion.' On leaving school he studied for the bar, and for some time held an appointment, under his father, in the Six Clerks' Office, but the post was not very congenial to ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... hardly have recognised him had she met him in the street. He was thin, and pale, and haggard, and mean. And as he stalked up and down the room, it seemed to her that the very character of the man was changed. She had not previously known him to be pompous, unreasonable, and absurd. She did not answer him at once, as she perceived that he had not finished his address;—and, after a moment's pause, he continued. "Lady Rowley, there is nothing I would not have done for ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... &c.] The Indian women, richly attired, are carried in a splendid and pompous machine to the funeral pile where the bodies of their deceased husbands are to be consumed, and there voluntarily throw themselves into it, and expire; and such as refuse, their virtue is ever after suspected, and they live in ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... follow, the Little Big Horn is a combination of letters, the marking sunflowers exist no more. We destroyed, we preempted; we are destroyed and we have been thrust out. Illinois admitted to the Union on suchandsuch a date, the Little Giant rubbed stubby fingers through pompous hair heavy with beargrease, the Honorable Abe in Springfield's most expensive broadcloth, necktie in the latest mode but pulled aside to free an eager adamsapple; the drunken tanner, punctual with the small man's virtues, betrayed and dying painfully with so much blood upon his hands; and the ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... to partake of a lukewarm dinner in an overheated room is as imperative as it is detestable. For the rest, at Tours there is a certain Rue Royale which has pretensions to the monumental; it was constructed a hundred years ago, and the houses, all alike, have on a moderate scale a pompous eighteenth-century look. It connects the Palais de Justice, the most important secular building in the town, with the long bridge which spans the Loire—the spacious, solid bridge pronounced by Balzac, in "Le Cure de Tours," "one of the finest ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... to have a perfect costume, and another to understand the role. Master Crewe not only looks his part, but he acts it as well. He has not failed to take in all the points of the portrait, and imitates the pompous attitude to perfection. He stands with feet wide apart, grasping his gloves in the right hand and supporting the ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... Ireland, in the year 1731, it appeared that a great number of ecclesiastics had, in defiance of the laws, flocked into that kingdom: that several convents had been opened by jesuits, monks, and friars; that many new and pompous mass-houses had been erected in some of the most conspicuous parts of their great cities, where there had not been any before; and that such swarms of vagrant, immoral Romish priests had appeared, that the very papists themselves ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... time. It is a scene which might be put upon the stage, quite conceivably, without any loss of the main impression it is made to convey in the book—an impression of ironic contrast, of the bustle and jostle round the oration of the pompous dignitary, of the commonplace little romance that is being broached unobserved. To receive the force of the contrast the reader has only to see and hear, to be present while the hour passes; and the author places him there accordingly, in front of the visible and audible facts ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... it is true, that M. Taine is not professing to write a history in the ordinary sense. His book lies, if we may use two very pompous but indispensable words, partly in the region of historiography, but much more in the region of sociology. The study of the French Revolution cannot yet be a history of the past, for the French still walk per ignes suppositos, and the Revolution is still ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley
... port were either burnt or disabled. And the rain which immediately fell, served not so much to extinguish the flames, as the violent wind which then arose contributed to kindle them. Those of Achen, proud of that action, appeared next morning on their decks, letting fly their pompous streamers, and shouting, as if already they were victorious. But their insolence was soon checked; the cannon from the fortress forced them to retire as far off as the isle of Upe. In the mean time, seven poor ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... Pastorals, corrupt himself with foreign manners; for if he hath once vitiated the healthful habit, as I may say, of Expression, which Bucolicks necessarily require, 'tis impossible he should be fit for that task. Yet let him not affect pompous or dazling Expressions, for such belong to Epicks, or Tragedians. Let his words sometimes tast of the Country, not that I mean, of which Volusius's Annals, upon which Catullus hath made that biting Epigram, are full; for though the Thought ought ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... vexed that de Batz was sitting there. He felt he could have told this dainty little lady quite a good deal about England if only his pompous, fat friend would have had the ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... night and day, buried in a hopeless mass of diplomatic papers. But he soon became weary of this, and leaving all the ordinary affairs of the State in the hands of agents, amused himself with his violin and in chasing rabbits. As more serious employment, he gave pompous receptions, and enveloped himself in imperial ceremony and the most approved courtly etiquette. He still, however, insisted upon giving his approval to all measures adopted by his ministers, before ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... and resigned himself to his fate. At that instant the sound of hammering ceased, and the door opened. It was six o'clock, and Pine had come to have a last look at his patients before dinner. It seemed that there was somebody with him, for a kind, though somewhat pompous, voice remarked upon the scantiness of accommodation, and the "necessity—the absolute necessity" of complying ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... from that awful board, and Honeyman likewise interceded for him, and Mr. Bagshot promised that, as soon as his party came in, he would ask the Minister for a tide-waitership for him; for everybody liked the solemn, soft-hearted, willing little lad, and no one knew him less than his pompous and stupid and ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hollowed by ambition, he was the very type of a second-rate personage on the lookout for something to turn up, and ready to do anything if so he might get on in the world, while keeping within the limitations of the possible and the forms of law. His pompous expression was an admirable indication of the time-serving eloquence to be expected of him. Chesnel's successor had discovered the young Count's hiding place to him, and he took great credit to himself ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... of William's birth. The window is shown from which Duke Robert first beheld the tanner's daughter, and the room in which William first saw what, if it really be the spot, must certainly have been light of an artificial kind. A pompous inscription in the modern French style calls on us to reverence the spot where the "legislator of ancient England" "fut engendre et naquit." The odd notion of William being the legislator of England calls forth a passing smile, and another somewhat longer ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... spite of his affectations, Don Pedro was a man of culture, fond of literature, and endowed with a taste for poetry. He had been known occasionally to celebrate events pertaining to the kingdom, or the royal family in several stanzas of a classic, somewhat pompous, style. But although people had tried to persuade him to publish them, he never ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... one of these toboggan slides down the hill of fortune which sometimes happen to the most deserving. His father, old General Orlando Swain, had, all his life, put up a pompous front and was supposed to have inherited a fortune from somewhere; but, when he died, this edifice was found to be all facade and no foundation, and Freddie inherited nothing but debts. He had been expensively educated for a career as an Ornament of ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... had always been the seat of government, though it consisted of but a few buildings. But, since the revolution of 1836, it has expanded into a population of about seven hundred souls. The town occupies a plain, bounded by a lofty ridge. The dwellings are the reverse of pompous, being all built of mud bricks. The houses are remarkable for a paucity of windows, glass being inordinately dear; even parchment almost unattainable, and the artists in window-making charging three ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... This was an age of remarkable literary and artistic activity, pompous and pedantic in many of its manifestations, but distinguished also by productions of a very high order. Although contemporary with the Italian Baroque—Bernini having been the guest of Louis XIV.—the architecture of ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... you are a reformer, I beg your pardon. I never quarrel about what I have heard certain pompous gentlemen ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... have been here I have seen a great deal of Sir Mathew Tierney, who accompanied the King to Ireland, and who is of course pompous of his station, and glad to communicate all he knows. I am quite astonished to hear the language he holds, so highly favourable to the Catholics, and he does not scruple to say that their demands must be granted; that it is injustice to ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... I am safe till next summer; but last evening I met a lady who had been taken in to dinner by the American a few days ago. "A little bit pompous, perhaps," she said, "but he told me such a delightful story about MARK TWAIN that I should like to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various
... prisoners, nominally to Mexico. Whether any of these stories had a basis of fact, we cannot say, but from remarks the prisoners themselves made to us, we feel sure that the centre of their trouble was Merida, and that, in some way, they had offended the pompous governor. At all events, it is likely that, long before these words are written, both have met their death upon the road. It is a common thing for prisoners, passing along the Cordillera, to be shot "while attempting to ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... eighteenth century. She was standing beside a table, near a vase of flowers, holding in her bloodless right hand a rose as large as a tomato, looking straight before her with the little porcelain-like eyes of a doll. This woman had been styled "La Latina." In the pompous style of the epoch the lettering on the canvas told of her knowledge and wisdom, and lamented her death at the tender age of eleven years. The women were as dry shoots upon the vigorous trunk of the soldierly and exuberant Febrer stock. Scholarship quickly withered ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... strutted in a pompous and stately manner before them; then she turned and courtesied before ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... you speak, remember every cause Stands not on eloquence, but stands on laws— Pregnant in matter, in expression brief, Let every sentence stand in bold relief; On trifling points nor time nor talents waste, A sad offence to learning and to taste; Nor deal with pompous phrase; nor e'er suppose Poetic flights belong to reasoning prose, Loose declamation may deceive the crowd, And seem more striking as it grows more loud; But sober sense rejects it with disdain, As nought but empty noise, and weak as vain. The froth of words, the school-boy's vain ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... ruddy firelight throwing up her face like a painting. Miss Recompense went out to see about the supper. There was a good-natured black woman in the kitchen to do the cooking, and Cato, who did the outside work and waited on Dinah and Miss Recompense—a tall, sedate, rather pompous colored man. ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... on through the sand-wastes of Fact, Long level of gritty aridity; With pompous conceit make a pact, Be bondsman to bald insipidity; Be slab as a black Irish bog, Slow, somnolent, stupid, and stodgy; Plunge into sophistical fog, And the realms of the dumpishly dodgy. With trump elephantine and slow, Tread on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... is an inventor already. I shall have one of those cards attached to the door of my private office at once. I tell you, Belinda, our son will be a great man one of these days," said Mr. Joslyn, walking up and down with pompous strides and almost bursting with the pride he took in his ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... catching a glimpse of the front walk, hastened out into the hallway. Then she came in, smiling eagerly, a well-dressed, pompous-looking young man ...
— Dick Prescott's Third Year at West Point - Standing Firm for Flag and Honor • H. Irving Hancock
... think that the truth was best. She wanted to know why you did not go to the Duke. I told her that the Duke was not my father; but that as far as I was concerned the Duke might speak to you or not as he pleased. I had nothing to conceal. I am very glad he did not, because he is pompous, and you would have been bored. If there is one thing I desire more than another it is that nothing belonging to me shall ever be a bore to you. I hope I may never stand in the way of anything that will gratify you,—as I said when you lit that cigar. ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... words, than for their structures or formations; and the words that most want explanation are generally terms of art; which, therefore, experience has taught my predecessors to spread with a kind of pompous luxuriance over their productions. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... righteousness design'd His florid genius, and capacious mind: Oft have I heard, amidst th' adoring throng, Celestial truths devolving from his tongue; High o'er the list'ning audience seen him stand, Divinely speak, and graceful stretch his hand: With such becoming grace and pompous sound, With long-rob'd senators encircled round, Before the Roman bar, while Rome was free, Nor bow'd to Caesar's throne the servile knee; Immortal Tully pleads the patriot cause, While ev'ry tongue resounded his applause. Next round my board should candid ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... waiting for the safest opportunity, and when you hear not so often as you wish, remember our silence means our safety. Acquainted as we are, with the situation and condition of the enemy, we well know, that the pompous paragraphs in the London papers are not the news, which the Ministry hear from their army; but the ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... had assembled in the amphitheater enclosing the lists. All the gentry and populace of the surrounding country were gathered there in eager expectancy. The central box contained the lean but pompous Sheriff, his bejeweled wife, and their daughter, a supercilious young woman enough, who, it was openly hinted, was hoping to receive the golden arrow from the victor and thus be crowned queen ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... unmolested amongst the beeches till the ruddy gold of the setting sun ceased to glow on their foliage; then taking the nearest path, I suffered myself, though not without regret, to be conducted out of this fresh sylvan scene to the dusty, pompous parterres of the Greffier Fagel. Every flower that wealth can purchase diffuses its perfume on one side; whilst every stench a canal can exhale, poisons the air on the other. These sluggish puddles defy all the power of the United Provinces, ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... condemn his race to Hell, Unless they bend in pompous form? Tell us that all, for one who fell, Must perish in the ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... on in "calm peace and quiet," but now and again it was stirred into special activity, when Haydn had to put forth his efforts in various new directions. Such an occasion came very early in his service of Prince Nicolaus, when that pompous person made triumphant entry into Eisenstadt. The festivities were on a regal scale and continued for a whole month. A company of foreign players had been engaged to perform on a stage erected in the large conservatory, ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... his retinue and table, or by the magnificence of his guests; though the military commander-in-chief and the temporary admiral on the station did their utmost to entertain her, and some of the local big-wigs were pompous. Lord Mallow had ability and knew how to use it; and he was never so brilliant as on this afternoon, for they dined while it was still daylight and hardly evening. He told her of the customs of the country, of the people; and slyly and effectively he satirized ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... "Of all the pompous, stuck-up letters, it's the worst I ever imagined! And you say you're going? Oh, but look here! ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... his fortunes of yesterday, and looked at them from a distance he began to see something fine there. He had license to be pompous and veteranlike. ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... butler opened the door—a pompous, tall and awful butler in serious black and with side-whiskers. He approached; came down the walk swinging a bunch of keys, looking me over as he came, to see what sort of wares ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... am sorry for these noblemen Whose gallant zeal hath brought them over sea To visit these our shores, that they, with us, Must miss the splendor of St. Germain's court. Such pompous festivals of godlike state I cannot furnish as the royal court Of France. A sober and contented people, Which crowd around me with a thousand blessings Whene'er in public I present myself: This is the spectacle which I can show, And not without some pride, to foreign eyes. The splendor ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... boastful, so overbearing, so childishly important, it seemed to her that it would be easy to make them look ridiculous, and she often found herself framing replies for the Opposition. But of course there was a wide gulf between the pompous gentlemen who lolled and smoked their black cigars in the mahogany chairs on the redcarpeted floor of the House, and the bright-eyed little girl who sat on the edge of her seat in the gallery and looked ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... door, Austin flew to open it, and admitted Mr. Pitt, the governor, a tall pompous personage, who, in his turn, ushered in four other individuals. The first of these, whom he addressed as Mr. Gay, was a stout, good-looking, good-humoured man, about thirty-six, with a dark complexion, an oval face, fine black eyes, full of fire and sensibility, and twinkling with roguish humour—an ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the imperial court had undergone a great change since the death of Charles VI. It had been pre-eminent for pompous ceremony, which was thought to become the dignity of the sovereign who boasted of being the representative of the Roman Caesars. But the Lorraine princes had been bred up in a simpler fashion; and Francis had an innate dislike ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge |
