"Bumptious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bumptious fellow, fond of quoting the classics, etc. One day a learned classic scholar attended his service, and was heard to say, after each quotation, "That's Horace," "That's Plato," and such-like, until the preacher ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... their eyes they saw her spirit leap into ineffable pride. "My Father gave it to me," she announced briskly. "And my Father said that, when I came home in June, if I could honestly say that I'd never once been bumptious—all my three years ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... state committee uttered the colonel's rising fears. The chairman had lost his sneer and his bumptious confidence. His face was red, he was sweating, he was staring out over the convention and ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... nature, and in spite of his manner. Henry Vizetelly, who evidently bore him no particular goodwill, wrote to me his recollections of the man in these words: "He was not the amiable person depicted by Yates in his 'Recollections.' He was vulgar and bumptious in manner until he became polished by concerting with 'swells' after the success of his entertainments. He always had a keen eye for the main chance, and never neglected an opportunity for self-advertisement. ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... who seldom or never voted before will vote now, and the greater part of the new voters will in the main be wiser as to their electoral responsibilities and more seriously desirous to discharge them for the common good than the bumptious singers of "Rule Britannia," "Our dear old Church of England," and ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... Wagner's aims at this period, and we shall presently see how far he was able to attain them, and to what extent they refused to be, and could not be, attained. The most valuable of his writings are those on conducting and on Beethoven. The latter has some bumptious and comical allusions to "world conquerors," the Germans suffering badly at the time from an attack of swelled head, subsequent to their defeat of the ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... in a way, that the rule might be proved, the greater part of this bumptious paragraph was true. Furthermore, as had not been said, Ivan's name was to appear twice on the programme of the first orchestral concert of the season, over which the two Rubinsteins were now working busily. ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... continued Karl to Anton, "this man will be as obsequious as possible. He has grown bumptious ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... Mtesa's, who had orders to bring on my party and Dr K'yengo's. Mtesa, he said, was so mad to see us, that the instant he arrived at the palace and told him we wished to visit him, the king caused "fifty big men and four hundred small ones" to be executed, because, he said, his subjects were so bumptious they would not allow any visitors to come near him, else he would have ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... was his schoolmate, who said that "America was discovered by British Columbia." There was old Mullinger of Earl Soham, who thought it "wrong of fooks to go up in a ballune, as that fare {33} so bumptious to the Almighty." There was the actual balloon, which had gone up somewhere in the West of England, and which came down in (I think) the neighbouring parish of Bedfield. As it floated over Monk Soham, the aeronaut shouted, "Where am I?" to some harvesters, who, ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... friends, or launching her on the waters of their little world. Now, as they chatted, she said to herself again that if Mrs. Hawthorne's homeliness of phrase were not a simple thing of playfulness, a disclaimer of the affectation of elegance in talk as stilted, bumptious, unsuited to a proper modesty, it could very well pass for that. Mrs. Hawthorne seldom expressed herself quite seriously. As she seldom looked serious either, one could hardly hear her say it was the loveliest party she ever was to without suspecting ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... named, Tom's thoughts had turned to Hardy. Now was the time—he had such confidence in the man, that the idea of getting him in for next race entirely changed the aspect of affairs to him, and made him feel as "bumptious" again as he had done in the morning. So with this idea in his head, he hung about till the Captain had made his toilet, and joined himself to him and Miller as ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... different Alfred Burton indeed who, an hour or two later, issued forth into the streets. Gone was the Cockney young man with the sandy moustache, the cheap silk hat worn at various angles to give himself a rakish air, the flashy clothes, cheap and pretentious, the assured, not to say bumptious air so sedulously copied from the deportment of his employer. Enter a new and completely transformed Alfred Burton, an inoffensive-looking young man in a neat gray suit, a lilac-colored tie of delicate shade, a flannel ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... I am sure, in spite of the bouleversement of the bachelor regime, it is a great pleasure to the men we are here. Our Winnipeg acquaintances tell us that A—— is quite a changed man, so cheery and even bumptious, and that everything is now "What we do at ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall
... is). HE was not going to be turned from the door—not he; and presently I heard him and Deb at it hammer and tongs in the drawing-room, and she came up to me afterwards simply in flames. She WAS wild. My dear, she has left off crying and started to fight. Papa Breen (I am afraid he is a bit bumptious for what she calls his class in life) turned the scale, and now she is as implacable as Francie. She says she will NOT have the house of Pennycuick disgraced (or words to that effect) while she is alive to prevent it; and when I ask her to be just to Peter, who is no more answerable for ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... kindly came to the rescue, and explained that I had merely answered his question and had not offered any opinion of my own: Colonel Napier, however, was not to be appeased, and I could plainly see that I had incurred his displeasure, and that he thought me a very bumptious youngster. I do not know whether the Chief of the Staff[1] ever heard of it, but it was some satisfaction to me to find afterwards that I was right in my estimation of the size of those apertures, some of ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... saw the work done by the Japanese Army throughout the various incidents of the Russian War was lost in admiration. To me the most pleasing feature of that war was the ease with which the soldier, on coming back to Japan, returned to the peaceful pursuits of civil life. The bumptious braggadocio that European military nations have developed has no counterpart in Japan. The war was, in the estimation of the people, a sacred duty. The burdens which it entailed were cheerfully borne. The Japanese soldier bore ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... finding the sparrows here. The seed of these birds shall possess the earth. Is there even now a spot into which the bumptious, mannerless, ubiquitous little pleb has not pushed himself? If you look for him in the rain-pipes of the Fifth Avenue mansions, he is there; if you search for him in the middle of the wide, silent salt-marsh, he is ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... the inevitabilities of close, though temporary, daily contact), while admitting that her manner and manners were beautiful, had to admit also that she was an extremely difficult young person "to get to know". A gilt-edged, bumptious young subalternknut, who commenced the voyage apoplectically full of self-admiration, self-confidence, and admiring wonder at his enormous attractiveness, importance, and value, finished the same in a ludicrously deflated condition—and ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... the least bumptious. He began very nervously with a carefully prepared Shakespearean quotation—"'I am no orator as Brutus is,'" in compliment to Jenkinson. Then he gave me a lift. He said that my presence there was a proof, if proof were needed, of the solidarity—he would repeat the word—of the solidarity existing ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Inn," said Grosvenor, "and you can argue it out there. Old England likes to see this healthy rivalry among her children. She doesn't mind your being bumptious." ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... a bit of a joke to make off with his lantern and ropes,' said the policeman to himself; 'it might teach him not to be so bumptious about his light sleeping.' ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... and giving the captain a chance to practice command, for fear he'll not get a show in battle." The roar that saluted this retort subdued the bumptious cavalier, and he affected deep interest in the whispered questions of one of the young women in the rear of ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... bumptious young owl, it is, and that too;" and a tolerably smart slap on the face followed—leaving a red mark on a cheek already aflame with, anger and indignation,—"should you like ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... improving their minds. If this had been his method, he might in one sense have been more difficult to handle, as Palford had seen the thing result in a bumptiousness most objectionable. He was markedly not bumptious, at all events. ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... determine whether he will accept. My whole efforts have been directed to preserve the Cantonese from the evils of a military occupation; but their stupid apathetic arrogance makes it almost impossible to effect this object. Yeh's tone when he was taken was to be rather bumptious. The Admiral asked him about an old man of the name of Cooper, who was kidnapped. At first he pretended that he knew nothing about him. When pressed he said, 'Oh! he was a prisoner of war. I took him when I drove you away from the city ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... which gave such striking freshness, such compelling strength, to the simple, forthright directness, the unaffected earnestness and modesty of the Message brought us by the Canadian preachers. The most bumptious and self-satisfied Cockney who ever heard the ringing of Bow Bells, would have found resentment impossible after George Stairs's little account of his leaving Dorset as a boy of twelve, and picking up such education ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... mean by opening your eyes so wide at me, but you needn't take the trouble, because I don't care for it. I've been telling you for how many years that you're one of the most opinionated and obstinate of women. That's what YOU are. You call yourself humble and sinful, but you are the most Bumptious of your sex. That's what YOU are. I have told you, over and over again when we have had a tiff, that you wanted to make everything go down before you, but I wouldn't go down before you—that you wanted to swallow up everybody alive, but I wouldn't ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... Mac, you're merely bumptious. I was like that when I first came to London. I had noble ideals, but I very soon discovered that the other high-minded men were not quite so idealistic as I was. I know one high-souled fellow who went into a newspaper office and asked to be allowed to review a novel with the ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... like most little men, he is as vain as he can stick, bumptious, and fidgety," said ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... attack were the brothers Stolberg, for their narrow religiosity; Friedrich Schlegel, for his bumptious self-conceit; and various small fry for this and ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... back to Hampshire, worn out by my ordeal and feeling as though I'd aged ten years, there was a message from Miss Francis on my desk. Even her bumptious rudeness could not conceal the jubilation ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... am artificial. I cringe or am bumptious or immobile. I am intellectually dishonest, art-blind, and I ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... He had begun the adventure in the strength of the desire born of his visit to the scene of his father's work at Hankow to do a little good. True, it was an impulse of which he was more than half ashamed. Its mere formulation in words rendered it bumptious and presumptuous. Beyond the confession made to Rodney Temple on the night of his arrival no force could have induced him to avow it. Better any imputation of craft than the suspicion of wanting to confer benefits on his fellow-men. ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... A bumptious colored person wearing a derby tipped over one eye, and a cigar in his mouth pointing to the northwest, walked into a hardware-store and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... his best to be civil, and to listen to all the bumptious talk of his visitor patiently, and Sam rattled away greatly to his own satisfaction, fully believing he was impressing his hearer with a sense of his importance, and cheering his heart by the promise of his favours ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... fall Upon the works of men! Nothing they did that's worth recall, With sword, or spade, or pen. Their bumptious bunglings bring not back! Man always was a noisy quack Who thought himself a god; But when he fancied he had scored Prodigiously, the Sex he bored Subdued him with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 11, 1893 • Various
... disappointed. Fate had one crumb of consolation for me, for I saw at last a chat baby. He was a quiet, well-behaved little fellow, with streaks on throat and breast, and dull yellow underparts. His manners were subdued, and gave no hint of the bumptious acrobat he ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... sagacious a statesman as Cobden says that the blockade is a terrible thing for a commercial people? Take the estimate of his authority, and imagine the supply of food from this country into England stopped, and the bumptious little island necklaced with Monitors to cut off the Continental supply. Do we not hold one of her hands with our grain, and the other with our cotton? The grain she gets, but the cotton is substantially stopped; what is the consequence? Listen to Mr. Cobden. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... bumptious as I was a few years ago," he commented. "I'd have said 'yes' then undoubtedly. Now—I ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... high-mettled[obs3], high-handed, high-plumed, high-flown, high-toned. haughty lofty, high, mighty, swollen, puffed up, flushed, blown; vainglorious; purse-proud, fine; proud as a peacock, proud as Lucifer; bloated with pride. supercilious, disdainful, bumptious, magisterial, imperious, high and mighty, overweening, consequential; arrogant &c. 885; unblushing &c. 880. stiff, stiff-necked; starch; perked stuck-up; in buckram, strait- laced; prim &c. (affected) 855. on one's dignity, on one's ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... mightily; but when I reflected that he could neither lay eggs nor occupy much space in a frying-pan, I demoted him, in my thinking, from major rank to a low minor, and awarded the palm to one of the less bumptious but more useful fowls. Our little professor had degrees, of course, and has them yet, I suspect; but no one ever discovered that he put them to any good use. For that reason we boys lost interest in the man ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... public opinion" of Europe thought Copernicus, and Bruno, and Galileo, and Luther very bumptious sorts of persons. With "an intelligent public opinion," such as existed in England and America thirty years ago, on the subject of the origin of species, what would have become of Darwin—provided that, at that time, the governing power had assumed and exercised the right to put him ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... Much annoyed at his bumptious manner, I was resolved now, come what would, to pay him off. I wanted to show him he was not everybody, even at Hertford Sessions. So when the case came on and the policeman was in the box, I rose to cross-examine him, which I ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... unconscious of anything peculiar in his appearance and was so bumptious and offensive that most of the men were almost glad when Nimrod came back. They said that if Crass ever got the job he would be a dam' sight worse than Hunter. As for the latter, for a little while after his return to work it was said that his illness had improved ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... be seen in actual service in the camp of the Egyptian viceroy. Above all, they did us good by showing how thoroughly happy the whole party had been rendered by our coming. We were only afraid that they might become a little too bumptious on the strength of it, and be after giving us another job. But they did more than simply bear us company; they bore us to the cool grove, which I have said we could descry from the deck of our ship, there to be introduced to certain worthies, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... trades-unions of the world file past, one with the odd word 'Russia' on its banner; another boasting itself 'Germany'—this with a particularly bumptious and self-important young man walking backward in front of it, in the manner of a Salvation Army captain, and imperiously waving an iron wand; still another 'nation' calling itself 'France'; and yet another boasting the biggest brass band, and called ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... 'Bumptious,' breaks in Sir Hugh; 'exactly, not a bit of it. They're better behaved. Besides, there was Mrs Jonathan to support the honour of the family, and ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... man in London had the right to be bumptious and didactic, Henry had. And yet he remained simple, unaffected, and fundamentally kind. But he was very serious. His mother and aunt strained every nerve, in their idolatrous treatment of him, to turn him into a conceited and unbearable ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... old, second-hand pianos, some with rattling keys and tinny sound, on which we were supposed to play our scales and exercises for an hour, though we often slyly indulged in the 'Russian March,' 'Napoleon Crossing the Rhine,' or our national airs, when, as slyly, Mr. Powell, our music teacher, a bumptious Englishman, would softly open the door and say in a stern voice, 'Please practice the ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... speech, we should be in a far more wise and tolerant temper. A child has a knack of making experiments in life, generally healthy in motive, but often intolerable in a domestic commonwealth. If we only treated all commercial buccaneers and bumptious tyrants on the same terms, if we gently chided their brutalities as rather quaint mistakes in the conduct of life, if we simply told them that they would 'understand when they were older,' we should probably be adopting the best and most crushing ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... where Oliver Twist was born and brought up. A stout, consequential, hard-hearted, fussy official, with mighty ideas of his own importance. This character has given to the language the word bumbledom, the officious arrogance and bumptious conceit of a parish authority or petty dignitary. After marriage the high-and-mighty beadle was sadly henpecked and reduced to a Jerry Sneak.—C. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... come his way ever since he entered High School," growled Phin. "And now the mucker is going off to West Point, and the government is going to stamp him 'gentleman.' A gentleman? Pooh! I'd like to show him up, as a bumptious upstart. Phin scowled fiercely for ...
— The High School Captain of the Team - Dick & Co. Leading the Athletic Vanguard • H. Irving Hancock
... public school, the repulsive impress of our aesthetic journalism is stamped upon the still unformed minds of youths. Here, too, the teacher sows the seeds of that crude and wilful misinterpretation of the classics, which later on disports itself as art-criticism, and which is nothing but bumptious barbarity. Here the pupils learn to speak of our unique Schiller with the superciliousness of prigs; here they are taught to smile at the noblest and most German of his works—at the Marquis of Posa, at Max and Thekla—at these smiles German genius ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... have dreamed of accomplishing a universal revolution in a country possessing the most perfect secret service system in the world?... a country with eyes in the back of its head? True, the Socialists in her confidence had been noisy and bumptious of late in order to concentrate attention upon their sex, and at the same time careful to refrain from definite statements or overt acts.... It would never enter the stupid official head that German women could conceive, much less precipitate, ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... of the creature are such as to establish the delusion that it is not altogether amicable in its attitude towards even such a bumptious and authoritative product of Nature as man. Its agitated demonstrations—whatever their vital purpose may be—to the superficial observer are danger signals, a means of self-preservation, as a substitute for the hard calcareous armour bestowed upon other molluscs. The fussy red rays may impose ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... Junker. Mr. Winston Churchill is an odd and not disagreeable compound of Junker and Yankee: his frank anti-German pugnacity is enormously more popular than the moral babble (Milton's phrase) of his sanctimonious colleagues. He is a bumptious and jolly Junker, just as Lord Curzon is an uppish Junker. I need not string out the list. In these islands the Junker is literally all ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... bumptious actors," said Handy to a friend, "are always looking for what they call big money. Their seasons, therefore, are short. They learn nothing from experience. They know it all. Yet they will hang on the ragged edge of starvation for weeks rather ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... angrily. "Why, you're worse than I am. Look at him, Gnat! There, I will own it. I felt sick as soon as I knew what was going to happen, but I won't be such a bumptious, bragging sneak as he is. Look at his face. It's green and yellow. He wants to go worse ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... fine company in which he found himself at Portsmouth, his visits home, with their gaiety and greatness of life, his visits to Mrs. Buckner (soon a widow) at Windsor, where he had a pony kept for him, and visited at Lord Melville's and Lord Harcourt's and the Leveson-Gowers, he began to have 'bumptious notions,' and his head was 'somewhat turned with fine people'; as to some extent it remained throughout ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... detectives who arrived in response to the Examiner's call, one almost literally fulfilled Eunice's prophecy of a rude, unkempt, common man. His name was Shane and he strode into the room with a bumptious, self-important air, his burly frame looking especially awkward and unwieldy in the ...
— Raspberry Jam • Carolyn Wells
... origin, villain (farm servant), churl (farm laborer), and boor (peasant) have all gathered unto themselves opprobrium; villain now involves a scoundrelly spirit, churl a contumelious manner, boor a bumptious ill-breeding; not one of these words is any longer confined in its application to a particular social rank. Terms for womankind are soon tainted. Wench meant at first nothing worse than girl or ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... such as not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed in. I closed the door behind me before I began to speak. He listened, at first amazed, then disconcerted, then angry, and then cowering down like a whipped hound. I felt that it was a case for speaking out. A bumptious ass like him, who deliberately insulted everyone he came across—for if all or any of his efforts in that way were due to mere elemental ignorance he was not fit to live, but should be silenced on sight as a modern Caliban—deserved neither ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... There's a difference, Jack,—eh? Do I really seem as ready to bounce out of my chair and tackle somebody as that picture makes me look? If I do I need to have a tourniquet applied somewhere about my neck to stop the flow of blood to my bumptious head." ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... him afterward on various occasions, and could not but admire him. At a dinner-party he was vexatiously badgered by a very bumptious professor, who allowed himself to speak in a rather offensive manner of ideas which Mr. Blaine represented; and the quiet but decisive way in which the latter disposed of his pestering interlocutor was worthy ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... therefore alluring to the versifier. 17. "Don't I, just?" A question for a strong affirmation, as, "Oh, yes, indeed I do;" a piece of popular rhetoric, pithy and forcible and consequently almost sure to be adopted—especially by the pathetic writers. 18. "Bolt," ran away. Syn. 19. "Bumptious," fearless, bold, and spirited; a very energetic expression such as those rejoice in who would fair "DENHAM'S strength with Waller's sweetness join." 20. "That won't pay," that plan will never answer. Metaph. 21. "Come down," disburse; also rendered in the vernacular by "fork ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... had been a man of the world he would have divined that the present was a rare opportunity for catching his bumptious young friend by the ear, and making him carry out his threat then and there. But, being a simple-minded new boy, unlearned in the ways of the world, he merely said "Pooh!" and walked on, leaving his assailant in possession of the ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... said to Dad, uttering my reflections aloud. "What could have made him act so foolishly as to go up there only to be turned away by that bumptious porter? How very shabby he is, Dad; and with such a noble face, too! May I give him that shilling you made me a present of this morning to buy himself some more snuff? He must have exhausted all he had in his waistcoat pocket by now; he does ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... recognition, changes in the graces and amenities of life." Making all allowances for that greater charity, tolerance, and kindliness of judgment which comes with the riper years—nobody ever could have remained as Britishly bumptious, or as bumptiously British as Dickens was in his younger days when he first came to pay us a visit—taking also into consideration the fact that a certain explanatory softening of earlier criticisms was politic, that the ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... were contested by three chiefs—Kofi Blay-chi, Kwako Bukari, who brought an acute advocate, Ebba of Axim, and Kwako Jum, a fine specimen of the sea-lawyer; this bumptious black had pulled down the board which marked the Abeseba reef, and had worked the pits to his own profit. After many meetings, of which the present was our last, the litigants decided that hire and 'dashes' should be shared by only two, Sensense and Kofi Blay-chi. Energetic Jum, ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... big as all out-of-doors, and e'en BUMBLE was hardly as bumptious. He'd make my London a Paradise, which is a prospect that's perfectly scrumptious. But oh! he is big, with the funniest rig; a Titan who, if he should tumble, Might squelch me as flat as an opera-hat, and make me ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various
... can be of anything that comes from the streets. He is an excitable, bumptious, quarrelsome man; but he has a certain influence with those beneath him, although it seems hard to realise that ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... partisans of Bulgaria. English people naturally like the Bulgars at first sight. The Bulgar is a good fighting man, and that makes a strong appeal to the man of the world. He is simple, not bumptious, gives himself no airs of traditional culture or modern education, and therefore recommends himself. The cynical and false opinion of 1914-15 regarding Bulgaria—that she would come in to the war on the side that bid most money—is forgotten. And the disloyalties of Bulgaria, ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... surprise, and his mother chuckled. She was devoted to her son, and more or less overshadowed by his prerogative as "menfolks" born to absorb the cream of things; but the elderly good sense in her was alive to the certainty that if Amarita had not been so yielding, Elihu would never have been so bumptious. ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... Honduras, Guatemala, and Salvador had been engaged was soon renewed between the first two belligerents. Since diplomatic interposition no longer availed, American marines were landed in Nicaragua, and the bumptious Zelaya was induced to have his country meet its neighbors in a conference at Washington. Under the auspices of the United States and Mexico, in December, 1907, representatives of the five republics signed a series of conventions providing for peace and cooperation. An arbitral court of justice, ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... and sleepy that I was hardly half-roused even by all this uproar. Indeed, I was just dropping off again, when Dick Andrews, one of my fellow cadets from the training-ship, who had joined the Candahar the same time as myself and was rather a bumptious and overbearing sort ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... thin as his wife was fat, and as quiet and unassuming as she was bumptious and talkative. On the occasion of this memorable supper he very nearly drove his better half into fits by his ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... of the great Master Beckmesser," Sachs answered, smiling a little at the thought of the bumptious old fellow. ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... championship of the various basket-ball teams of the academies. But just before they played their last triumphant game in the League, and when they were feeling their oats and acting as rambunctious and as bumptious as a crowd of almost undefeated boys sometimes chooses to be, they received a challenge that caused them to laugh long and loud. At first it looked like a huge joke for the high-and-mighty Kingston ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... plenty of accommodation at once. This did away with the necessity of writing to the landlord, and in a short time we were once more upon the road, maids and children inside as usual, and a natty postilion cocking his white hat and flicking his little whip, in the most bumptious manner imaginable. Through Crickhowell we went without drawing bridle, and went almost too fast to observe sufficiently its very beautiful situation; past noble country-seats, bower and hall, we ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... emphasis—too much, or too continued heat, too much speed, especially in speaking against time, a loss of poise in the bearing, a halting or jumbling in speech, nervous tenseness in action, an overcontentious or bumptious spirit. Bodily control, restraint, good temper, balance, are the saving qualities. A debater must remember that he need not be always in a heat. Urbanity and graciousness have their place, and the relief afforded by humor ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... sorts of persons and subjects connected with the king and his court. But in Holland, Rembrandt and Frans Hals and Vermeer painted the barnyard of the merchant's house, and they painted his rather dowdy wife and his healthy but bumptious children and the ships which had brought him his wealth. In Italy on the other hand, where the Pope remained the largest patron of the arts, Michelangelo and Correggio continued to paint Madonnas and Saints, while in England, where the aristocracy was very rich and powerful ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... doctor. "Dear me, how bumptious we are, young fellow. There, I believe you, but that's more than I'd do for some of your tribe. There's Mr Bob Howlett, for instance. If he had to take a dose, I should not only stop till he had emptied the glass, but I should pinch his nose till I was sure he had swallowed it. There, ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... shoulders of a Mr. John P. Skinner, who fitted into his niche in the business as naturally as the kernel of a healthy walnut fits its shell. Mr. Skinner was a man still on the sunny side of middle life, smart, capable, cold-blooded, a little bumptious, and, like the late ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... absolute. Modern culture, we all know, consists largely in the most refined method of finding fault. But this his ideal family had not reached. An essentially coarse method of finding fault was the only one to which it had attained. Never, indeed, was a more bumptious, conceited, and disagreeable set of personages created by an author, under the impression that they were the reverse. The simple-minded, (p. 153) thoughtful, and upright Mr. Effingham can speedily be dismissed as merely a mild type of bore. Not ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... it was not his business, and that, after all, passing a "stiff 'un" on to a new chum was no great crime as compared to stealing gold or robbing a camp. In this I think they showed sound judgment. The prize-fighting gent, however, became too bumptious, and was eventually hustled out of ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... there was a bumptious-looking man, with a bald head, whom I remember. He took up his position just over the clock in the gallery. He listened critically, talked a good deal, and made remarks. I began to speak straight at him, without looking at him, and quite suddenly ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... him to have his letters to the trade copied by carbon paper instead of having them blurred by the wet tissue-paper of a copy-book. The manager did grant the request, but he was justly indignant at the curt manner of the rascal, whereupon our bumptious revolutionist, our friend to anarchists and red-headed artists, demanded a "raise" and said that he didn't care a hang if the [qualified] letters never went out. The kindness of chiefs! For Mr. Guilfogle apologized and raised ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... because they are so unlike the broad-smiling Santals with their cheerful johar? There are four trees before this bungalow, and at present two vultures are perching on each—horrible creatures, with long, scraggy necks. I pointed them out to Boggley, who was immediately reminded of a tale of a bumptious young civilian, new to the country, who was told, by one who had suffered many things at his hands, that the birds were wild turkeys, a much-valued delicacy; hearing which the youth promptly shot some and sent them round to the ladies of the station. Do ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... there was no Indian nearer than the cave. It was his own horse that had made the noise which first alarmed him. While the equine was stretched upon the ground, peacefully sleeping, his bumptious owner, in charging over his body, had ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... upstairs to the members' smoking room, in a comfortable corner of which they were lazily continuing their conversation. It turned by chance on a certain barrister of Sydney's inn, a Mr. Barrington Baynes, whom one of the party not incorrectly described as "that beautiful, bumptious, and briefless barrister, ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... could be called somewhat martial. Hydraulics was his branch, and his frequent absences on missions about which he assumed an important and mystifying air, such as is, for that matter, usual in bumptious young men, never caused any comment or visible interest on the part of the others. He gave himself out to be close to the militaire, familiar with its secrets, as he freely blew his cigarette smoke across the meal table; and to him the family deferred on these subjects. ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... Gnat," cried Barkins in a sleepy voice; "old Tom Jecks'll be more chuckle-bumptious ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... with trembling steps along the slimy pathway between the Falls and the rock, to gaze on the sun through the roaring and rolling flood; nor will I draw upon your nerves by a detail of the hair-breadth escapes of Mr. Bumptious and Mrs. Positive, who, when they got half-way along the said path, were seized with panic, and only escaped a header into the boiling caldron by lying flat on their stomachs until the rest of the party had lionized the whole ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... bumptious member on our board of judges. "My dear madam!" he exclaimed to an aspirant for the prizes, the underpinning of whose dwelling stood out unconcealed by any sprig of floral growth, "your house is barefooted! Nobody wants to see ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... was the end of the rhinoceros. That bumptious animal retained its unamiable spirit to the last. Fortunately it did not possess the powers or sagacity of the elephant. It could not untie knots or pick its cage to pieces, so that it was effectually restrained during the greater part of the voyage; but there came a tempest at last, ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... bunk in invitation. "Can you tell me what is known?" He was still somewhat at a loss, his old secret awe of Ashe tempering his outward show of eagerness. Ross still feared one of those snubs the other so well knew how to deliver to the bumptious. But Ashe did come in and sit down, none of his old formality now ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... at the door of anything met which interests, and ask, 'Who lives here?' The process is to look, then close the eyes, then look within." The blundering inanity of this kind of writing is equaled only by its bumptious grandiloquence. On p. 137 Dr. Townsend quotes this wholesome admonition from Coleridge: "If men would only say what they have to say in plain terms, how much more eloquent they would be!" As an example of reportorial highfalutin, I submit the following: "The spirit of ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... A bumptious stranger came into the store one day and tried to pick a quarrel with the tall clerk. To this end he used language offensive to several women who were there trading. Lincoln quietly asked the fellow to desist ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... arrogant cat," and "An attractive cat," will follow. A is kept up until no one can think of any more; or—if you play in that way—until no one can think of any more while ten is being counted. Then B: "A bushy cat," "A bruised cat," "A bellicose cat," "A bumptious cat," and so on. ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... to answer for. Of course we refer to phrenological bumps, from which, possibly, the powerful adjective "bumptious" is derived, it being applicable to a person whose conflicting bumps keep ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... ally of the Dutchman in fixing up the charges. I don't believe he would manufacture a story out of whole cloth, but once his mind was set in a certain direction he could build up a good one on very shaky foundations. Perhaps he had an animus against these bumptious, undeferential, overcritical Americans, and thought it was time to give one of them a lesson. Perhaps he was tired of trapping ordinary garden variety spies of the Belgian brand. It would be a pleasing variation in the monotony of convicting defenseless, helpless ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... book which is extremely pleasant. Mr. Quilter is entirely free from affectation of any kind. He rollicks through art with the recklessness of the tourist and describes its beauties with the enthusiasm of the auctioneer. To many, no doubt, he will seem to be somewhat blatant and bumptious, but we prefer to regard him as being simply British. Mr. Quilter is the apostle of the middle classes, and we are glad to welcome his gospel. After listening so long to the Don Quixote of art, to listen once to Sancho Panza is ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Beg House, they found the company more mixed than Dan had anticipated. Dr. and Mrs. Carne were there, Mr. and Mrs. Jeffreys, and Mr., Mrs., and Miss Petterick. Mr. Petterick was a solicitor of bumptious manners and doubtful reputation, whom the whole county hated, but tolerated because of his wealth and shrewdness, either of which they liked to be in a position to draw upon if necessary. But besides these townspeople, there were Sir George and Lady Galbraith, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... had met and become friends. Both were at the lowest ebb possible to their fortunes; both had fallen from at least an intermediate Heaven of respectability and importance, and both were typical products of the monstrous and peculiar social curriculum of their overweening and bumptious civic alma mater. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... of the Scotland Yard official (for he tells his stories in propria persona) is not to some extent justified. "Dora" is very sensitive and six months ago would never have permitted Mr. COPPLESTONE to reveal to our enemies either the bumptious egoism of a nameless First Lord or the platitudinous vacillations of an anonymous Premier, even in the interests of popular fiction. Though we concede his audacity in allowing his superlative sleuth to stop a general strike of engineers by threatening ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... suitable'—patronizing enough! I know just what kind of an old man B. P. T. is. I know he would want K. D. B. to warm his slippers, and would be fretful and grumpy. B. P. T., just an abbreviation of bumptious. No, he ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... 'He's a bumptious noisy blackguard too,' said Charley; 'he doesn't know how to speak to a gentleman, when ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... announcement of his death. "My actions," he wrote, "have been so inconsiderable in the world, that the most durable monument will not perpetuate my folly while it lasts." It is evident that Gouverneur did not inherit from him the almost bumptious self-confidence which was to mar more than help him. That inherent defect came from his mother, who gave him, also, a brilliancy and versatility that other members of the family did not share, making him more conspicuously active in high ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... the rich and great. If you treat them as the rest of the world does, you are a tuft-hunter; if you treat them as the rest of the world pretends to, you are a hypocrite; whereas, if you deal with them truly, it is hard not to seem, even to yourself, a bumptious person. I remember trying to tell myself on the launch-trip that I was not in the least excited; and then, standing on the platform of the railroad station, saying: "How can you expect not to be excited, when even the railroad is ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair |
