"Cumbrous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Had England rallied all round him,—why, then, England might have been a Christian land! As it is, vulpine knowingness sits yet at its hopeless problem, 'Given a world of Knaves, to educe an Honesty from their united action;'—how cumbrous a problem, you may see in Chancery Law-Courts, and some other places! Till at length, by Heaven's just anger, but also by Heaven's great grace, the matter begins to stagnate; and this problem is becoming to all ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... his head, He quiver'd with his feet, and lay for dead. Black was his countenance in a little space, For all the blood was gather'd in his face. Help was at hand: they rear'd him from the ground, And from his cumbrous arms his limbs unbound; Then lanced a vein, and watch'd returning breath; It came, but clogg'd with symptoms of his death. 710 The saddle-bow the noble parts had press'd, All bruised and mortified his manly breast. Him ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... before been despised by the farmer and the trader as fit only "for women in childbed," were now in general use. Carpets superseded the filthy flooring of rushes. The loftier houses of the wealthier merchants, their parapeted fronts and costly wainscoting, their cumbrous but elaborate beds, their carved staircases, their quaintly-figured gables, not only contrasted with the squalor which had till then characterized English towns, but marked the rise of a new middle class which was to play its ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... worker, and every one a serious politician. There are no drones, and none who spend their lives in the pleasures, refinements, luxuries, vices, the idle amusements of the great cities of Europe. The buildings represent utility, means fairly adapted to ends, but with no cumbrous decoration or ponderous display. These capitals are bureaucratic settlements, devoted to the deliberate ends of national government with a minimum of waste, strictly appropriated to use alone, rendering their service to the nation as a counting-house ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... devil's caps, woollen sashes of great length for winding around the body, and, after long search, leather Russian boots lined with sheepskin and reaching half-way up the thigh. When rigged out in this costume, my diameter was about equal to half my height, and I found locomotion rather cumbrous; while Braisted, whose stature is some seven inches shorter, waddled ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... male, These Feminine. For Spirits when they please Can either Sex assume, or both; so soft And uncompounded is their Essence pure, Not ti'd or manacl'd with joynt or limb, Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones, Like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose Dilated or condens't, bright or obscure, Can execute their aerie purposes, 430 And works of love or enmity fulfill. For those the Race of Israel oft forsook Their living strength, and unfrequented left His righteous Altar, bowing lowly down To bestial Gods; ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... Urn Burial, 1658, a discourse upon rites of burial and incremation, suggested by some Roman funeral urns, dug up in Norfolk. Browne's style, though too highly Latinized, is a good example of Commonwealth prose, that stately, cumbrous, brocaded prose, which had something of the flow and measure of verse, rather than the quicker, colloquial movement of modern writing. Browne stood aloof from the disputes of his time, and in his very subjects there is a calm and meditative remoteness from the daily interests of men. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... with his cumbrous brood, That scared the world?—By this sharp scythe they fell, And half the sky was curdled with their blood: So have all primal giants sigh'd farewell. No wardens now by sedgy fountains dwell, Nor pearly Naiads. All their days are done That strove with Time, untimely, to excel; Wherefore ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... invited to inspect Hogarth's painting-room—a mere loft, of most limited dimensions, over the stable, which the imagination could easily furnish with the necessary easel, or still less cumbrous graver's implements. It is situated at the furthest part of the garden from the house; a small door in the garden-wall leads into a little inclosure, one side of which is occupied by the stable. The painting-room is over the stable, and ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... a few others among the provincials, the whole, from general to drummer-boy, were total strangers to that insidious warfare of the forest in which their enemies, red and white, had no rival. Instead of marching, like Braddock, at one stretch for Fort Duquesne, burdened with a long and cumbrous baggage-train, it was the plan of Forbes to push on by slow stages, establishing fortified magazines as he went, and at last, when within easy distance of the fort, to advance upon it with all his force, as little impeded as possible with wagons and packhorses. ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... hundred years, (i. e. since the close of Edward II., or beginning of Edward III., A. D. 1327;) and its venerable but tortuous fiction has been scarcely even touched by the "amending hand," which lately (1834) cut away so many cumbrous, complicated, and quasi obsolete portions of the law of action, (see Stat. 3 and 4 Will. 4, c. 27, Sec. 36.) The progress of this action is calculated to throw much light on some of our early history and jurisprudence. See an interesting sketch of it in the first chapter ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... strengthened by several iron bolts or rods which passed through just under some of the rungs. One side of the ladder had an iron band or ribbon twisted and nailed round it spirally. It was not at all suitable for painters' work, being altogether too heavy and cumbrous. However, as none of the others were long enough to reach the high gable at the Refuge, they managed, with a struggle, to get it down from the hooks and put it on one of the handcarts and soon passed through the streets of mean and dingy houses in the ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... complex 'body corporate' founded in the old days of 'purveyance.' There was the mysterious 'Board of Green Cloth' formed by the great officers and supposed to have judicial as well as administrative functions. Cumbrous mediaeval machinery thus remained which had been formed in the time when the distinction between a public trust and private property was not definitely drawn or which had been allowed to remain for the sake of patronage, when its functions had been transferred to ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... cumbrous preparations—all these soldiers, the swords and staves, the torches and lanterns, now burning pale in the clear moonlight. Jesus made them feel it. He made them feel what manner of spirit they were of, and how utterly they had mistaken His views and spirit. "Whom seek ye?" ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... and sustained elegance made it a sort of canon of poetical technique. Among much tedious rhetoric and cumbrous mythology there is enough imagination and pathos to make the poem interesting and ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... Further on these protuberances rising sharply, formed the first steps of the great Alps. From this time their course was a continual ascent, as was soon evident in the strain it made on the bullocks to drag along the cumbrous wagon. Their yoke creaked, they breathed heavily, and the muscles of their houghs were stretched as if they would burst. The planks of the vehicle groaned at the unexpected jolts, which Ayrton with all his skill could not ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... have occurred to him to relieve Juliet of a cumbrous piece of baggage, but he instinctively took it from Isabel. "Come on," he said. "We've got to hurry if we don't ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... from the Spaniards (see p. 100 of the Rudimentos del rabe vulgar que se habla en el imperio de Marruccos por El P. Fr. Jos de Lerchundi, Madrid 1872): This lack of the higher numerals, the reverse of the Hindu languages, makes Arabic "arithmology" very primitive and almost as cumbrous as ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... supported by four pairs of wheels, which had been constructed for its reception. A barrel of water, placed on another frame upon wheels, was attached to it as a tender. After a great deal of labour, the cumbrous machine was got upon the road. At first it would not move an inch. Its maker, Tommy Waters, became impatient, and at length enraged, and taking hold of the lever of the safety valve, declared in his desperation, ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... her reward. Betty would offer Molly all sorts of small temptations to neglect Miss Eyre's wishes; Molly steadily resisted, and plodded away at her task of sewing or her difficult sum. Betty made cumbrous jokes at Miss Eyre's expense. Molly looked up with the utmost gravity, as if requesting the explanation of an unintelligible speech; and there is nothing so quenching to a wag as to be asked to translate his jest into plain matter-of-fact ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Chinese had been tumbling down all sorts of missiles; but when the Allies were once upon the walls, the great body of them retired. They poured down into the city, and fired from the streets; they dodged behind the buildings on the ramparts, and thence took aim with their cumbrous matchlocks. A few single encounters occurred, and Major Luard's revolver disposed of one lingerer; but the Allies generally fired right and left, and pushed on to the right, so as to sweep the wall upwards ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... simple arithmetical examples and several geometrical problems. The workings out of these prove that the Egyptian spared himself no trouble in making his calculations, and that he worked out both his arithmetical examples and problems in the most cumbrous and laborious way possible. He never studied mathematics in order to make progress in his knowledge of the science, but simply for purely practical everyday work; as long as his knowledge enabled him to obtain results which he knew from experience ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... in pursuit numbered just ten persona including the king, Ziffak, Waggaman, and the very pick of the tribe. They were all splendid fellows, fit to be the body-guard of a king, who, when he laid aside the robes of cumbrous dress he was accustomed to wear, and arrayed himself similarly to the warriors, proved himself no mean leader ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... cushioned, always within call, and governed by a beneficently trifling tariff. These vinaigrettes, as they are called, would be appreciated at home, if habit took kindly to novelties. How greatly they might simplify problems of calling and shopping! Our conveyances are all cumbrous. We must have the huge barouche, the coach, the close-shut coupe. Even the phaeton yields to the high T-cart. But convention is autocratic, and would frown on these vinaigrettes as it frowns on many useful ideas. Another unfortunate victim of its taboo is the ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... longing for the polar night, for the everlasting wonderland of the stars with the spectral northern lights, and the moon sailing through the profound silence. It is like a dream, like a glimpse into the realms of fantasy. There are no forms, no cumbrous reality—only a vision woven of silver and violet ether, rising up from earth and floating out into infinity.... But this eternal day, with its oppressive actuality, interests me no longer—does not entice me out of my lair. Life is one incessant ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... upon seals, think it sufficient to catch and bring them on shore; and would rather submit to starve than assist their women in skinning, dressing, or dragging home the cumbrous ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... slow or cumbrous about Annie. These thoughts had flashed through her mind during the brief moment in which her eyes softened from surprise into sympathy as they caught the expression of Gregory's face. Then, fearing to disturb him, with silent tread she passed out ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... indescribably absurd use of Law-Latin in records, writs, and written pleadings, was finally put an end to by statute 4 George II. c. 26; but this bill, which discarded for legal processes a cumbrous and harsh language, that was alike unmusical and inexact, and would have been utterly unintelligible to a Roman gentleman of the Augustan period, did not become law without much opposition from some of the authorities of Westminster Hall. Lord Raymond, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... tenderness. As to style, the American far exceeds the Englishman. A certain conventional artifice and dainty affectation clouded the clear and beautiful nature of Sidney, when he wrote. The elaborate embroidery of thought, the stiff and cumbrous Elizabethan dress of language, with all its ruffles and laces, make the "Arcadia" an imperfect exponent of Sidney's nature. His intense thoughts, delicate emotions, and burning passions are half concealed in the form he adopts for their expression. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... methodize, regulate, systematize, coordinate, organize, settle, fix. unravel, disentangle, ravel, card; disembroil[obs3]; feaze[obs3]. Adj. arranged &c. v.; embattled, in battle array; cut and dried; methodical, orderly, regular, systematic. Phr. "In vast cumbrous array" [Churchill]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the stately thoroughfare had given place to a meaner street, its princely shops had degenerated into blank walls or grimy yards, on either hand rose tall chimney stacks belching smoke; instead of dashing motor cars, heavy wains and cumbrous wagons jogged by; in place of the well-dressed throng were figures rough-clad and grimy that hurried along the narrow sidewalks—but these rough-clad people walked fast and purposefully. So we hummed along streets wide or narrow but always grimy, until ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... is still more cumbrous. It consists of the days of the week written in succession from 1 to 13, underneath these the 20 signs of days, and underneath these again another series of 9 signs; so that each day was distinguished by a combination of a number and two ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... those insects open and close their wings no less than two hundred times in a second. It is amazing. And is it not suggestive of the capacity of motion with which this body may easily be endowed when the cumbrous flesh is changed into the immortal, ethereal body? Since those tiny insects are so wonderfully endowed for their little life here, so aimless as it might seem, what glorious capacities may not be in reserve for us, God's redeemed children, who are to live ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... observed something like a black cloud against the dark sky. Being always on the alert for squalls, I ran to the bow. There could be no doubt it was a squall, and as I listened I thought I heard the murmur of the coming gale. Instantly I began to work might and main at my cumbrous tackle for shortening sail, and in the course of an hour and a half had the most of it reduced—the topsail yards down on the caps, the topsails clewed up, the sheets hauled in, the main and fore peaks lowered, and the flying-jib down. While thus engaged, the ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... whole affair quite comfortably. The gendarme shut the carriage door with a bang, and at my request gave the order to the driver to proceed. The latter once again cracked his whip, and once again the cumbrous vehicle, after an awkward lurch, rattled on its way along the cobblestones ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... statement. Some have not scrupled to argue that it covers the entire cost of the war; for, they point out, the entire cost of the war has to be met by taxation, and such taxation is "damaging to the civilian population." They admit that the phrase is cumbrous, and that it would have been simpler to have said "all loss and expenditure of whatever description"; and they allow that the apparent emphasis of damage to the persons and property of civilians ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... they were light cars, on two wheels, constructed to carry only one person; invented, it is supposed, by the Belgians, and by them introduced into Britain, where they were used in war. The Romans, after their expeditions in Gaul and Britain, adopted this useful vehicle instead of their more cumbrous RHEDA, not only for journeys where dispatch was required, but in solemn processions, and for ordinary purposes. They seem to have become the fashion, for Ovid tells us that these little carriages were driven by young ladies, themselves holding ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... up everywhere, opening all roads; travellers pass through the stations from all points of the compass—cattle buyers, drovers, station-owners, telegraph people—all bent on business, and all glad to get moving after the long compulsory inaction of the Wet; and lastly that great yearly cumbrous event takes place: the starting of the "waggons," with ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... the great officers of state, the autos were performed; the giants made sport for the multitude, and the entertainment concluded with music and dancing. Sometimes the procession was headed by the figure of a monster called the Tarasca, half serpent in form, borne by men concealed in its cumbrous bulk, and surmounted by another figure representing the woman of Babylon, —all so managed as to fill with wonder and terror the country people who crowded round it, and whose hats and caps were generally snatched away by the grinning ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Logic most helpful for this purpose, in throwing light upon many of the obscurities with which Formal Logic abounds, and in furnishing a delightfully easy method of testing the results arrived at by the cumbrous processes which Formal Logic enforces upon ...
— Symbolic Logic • Lewis Carroll
... word school, because "little children, especially those under six, do not need to be schooled and taught, what they need is opportunity for development." He had great difficulty in selecting a name. Those originally suggested were somewhat cumbrous, e.g. Institution for the Promotion of Spontaneous Activity in Children; another was Self-Teaching Institution, and there was also the one which Madame Michaelis translated "Nursery School for ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... military conduct of affairs, there is no doubt of the value, or of the unflagging energy, of the naval support given. Sir William Howe alludes to it frequently, both in general and specifically; while the Admiral sums up his always guarded and often cumbrous expressions of opinion in these words: "It is incumbent upon me to represent to your Lordships, and I cannot too pointedly express, the unabating perseverance and alacrity with which the several classes of officers and seamen have supported a long attendance and ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... where the great fleets operated in the later days of William III., and the reign of Anne. Then, too, the heavy ships, like land armies, went into winter quarters. It was by distinguished admirals considered professionally criminal to expose those huge yet cumbrous engines of the nation's power to the buffetings of winter gales, which might unfit them next year to meet the enemy, snugly nursed and restored to vigor in home ports during the same time. The need of periodical refitting and cleaning the bottoms ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... could be recruited among the peasantry. There was, however, an entire absence of any arms save pikes. Harry knew how good a weapon are these when used by steady and well-disciplined men. The matchlocks of those days were cumbrous arms, and it was at the point of the pike that battles were ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... in, a gentlemanly manner for having for a moment deviated from the forma of his imposed situation. All, the gossips of Paris were presently amused with the story, which, of coarse, reached the Court, with every droll particular of the pulling up and clapping down the cumbrous paraphernalia ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... ninth or tenth of July, in the afternoon; and the day being very sultry, the heat had oppressed me with langour, and I was all day as one laden with sleep. But no sooner had Mrs Aird told me this, than I felt the langour depart from me, as if a cumbrous cloak had been taken away, and I rose up a recruited and reanimated man. It was so much the end of my debility of body and sorrowing of mind, that she was loquacious with her surprise when she saw me, ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... yet introduced into most gymnasiums, in spite of the recommendations of the Roxbury Hercules: beside the fear of straining, there is the cumbrous weight and cost of iron apparatus, while, for some reason or other, no cheap and accurate dynamometer has yet come into the market. Running and jumping, also, have as yet been too much neglected in our institutions, or practised spasmodically rather than systematically. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... slight noise and breaking off her reading turned to look. Hamilton made another effort to enter before he recollected that the wooden key, or notched lever, that controlled the cumbrous wooden lock, hung on a peg beside the door. He felt for it along the wall, and soon laid his hand on it. Then again he peeped through to see Alice, who was now standing upright near the swivel. She had thrown her hair back from ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... every few minutes some utterly incongruous and frequently worthless article, and begging her to put it in at once, whatever she might be packing. Any one who has ever packed for a long journey, with an eager and excited child running up every minute with more and more cumbrous toys, dogs, cats, Noah's arks, and so on, to be put in among books and under-clothing, can imagine Mercy's despair at her ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... conical hill, on the summit of which a look-out tower had been erected; this building was in troublesome times occupied by a party of Juzzylchees, who took their station in it, and, fixing their cumbrous pieces on the parapet, watched the approach of any hostile party, and from their commanding and protected position would be enabled to keep in check an enemy attempting to ascend the opposite side of the hill. As the nearest stream of water was full two miles from the fort, the present owner, ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... committee of 17 plenipotentiaries, each of the larger States having one, and several of the smaller being united in the choice of one. The army of the Confederation was fixed, in 1830, at 303,484 men, to be furnished by the States in a fixed proportion. The inconveniences of this cumbrous organization are apparent. One member might be at war with any power, while the others were at peace: thus the Confederation took no part in the Italian and Hungarian warfare against Austria, for it guaranteed to her only the possession ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... reading their Cicero. A rap at the door seemed a rude interruption; yet so unusual was the excitement of an evening visitor that they could not be quite indifferent to the event,—the less so when the visitor proved to be Polly's client of the cumbrous income. ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... one time, they carried a meaning which they have lost. Yet we are not worse than our fathers before us, and are not exceeded in the milk of human kindness. It may be that the old form was such a cumbrous piece of hypocrisy that latter-day people have thrown it off in disgust. Anyway, there is nothing more certain nor more astonishing than that a well man cannot conceive the feelings of a sick man, even though he try, and that those who are sick have to grin and bear it all ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... this place, and I was obliged to go about the streets with my cumbrous equipage in search of a lodging; but as no one would receive a Christian, not from any want of good nature, but in consequence of an erroneous religious opinion that a house which has been visited by an unbeliever is defiled. ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... one sixth of a dollar; in New York to one eighth; in North Carolina to one tenth. It was partly for this reason that in devising a national coinage the more uniform dollar was adopted as the unit. At the same time the decimal system of division was adopted instead of the cumbrous English system, and the result was our present admirably simple currency, which we owe to Gouverneur Morris, aided as to some points by Thomas Jefferson. During the period of the Confederation, the chaotic state of the currency was a serious obstacle to trade, ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... next day, as it chanced, our English companions broke the axle-tree of their wagon, and down came the whole cumbrous machine lumbering into the bed of a brook! Here was a day's work cut out for us. Meanwhile, our emigrant associates kept on their way, and so vigorously did they urge forward their powerful oxen that, with the broken axle-tree and other calamities, ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... there was, I suspect, a whole class of plays then current, and more or less supported by popular favour, of which hardly a sample is now extant, and which cannot be classed with such as these. The poets or rhymesters who supplied them had already seen good to clip the cumbrous and bedraggled skirts of those dreary verses, run all to seed and weed, which jingled their thin bells at the tedious end of fourteen weary syllables; and for this curtailment of the shambling and sprawling lines which had hitherto done duty ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... singular habiliments with much of the curiosity with which an antiquary would survey a suit of chain armour; the long epaulettes of yellow cotton cord, the heavy belt with its brass buckle, the cumbrous boots, plaited and bound with iron like churns were in rather a ludicrous contrast to the equipment of our light and jockey-like boys in nankeen jackets and neat tops, that spin ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... Princes and lords are but the breath of kings, "An honest man's the noblest work of God;" And certes, in fair virtue's heavenly road, The cottage leaves the palace far behind; What is a lordling's pomp? a cumbrous load, Disguising oft the wretch of human kind, Studied in arts of ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Reichel, says that "the use of the Mycenaean shield is inconsistent with that of the metal breastplate; "the shield" covers the wearer in a way which makes a breastplate an useless encumbrance; or rather, it is ignorance of the breastplate which alone can explain the use of such frightfully cumbrous gear as the huge shield." [Footnote: Classical Review, ix. p. ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... trade's unfeeling train Usurp the land, and dispossess the swain; Along the lawn, where scatter'd hamlets rose, Unwieldy wealth and cumbrous pomp repose. 1939 GOLDSMITH: Des. Village, ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... to the proper names involved, I have preferred to use modern forms rather than the cumbrous if more correct spelling of the period. The name of the terrible queen, for example, appears on her coins as "Cynethryth," and varies in the pages of the chroniclers from "Quendred" to the form chosen ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... from on high to direct us, strength commensurate with our task to support us, and the beauty of holiness to adorn and render all our performances acceptable in Thy sight. And when our work is done, and our bodies mingle with the mother earth, may our souls, disengaged from their cumbrous dust, flourish and bloom in eternal day; and enjoy that rest which Thou hast prepared for all good and faithful servants, in that spiritual house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens, through ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh
... to you as now travelling the downward course to dissolution and death. This is very far from my intention. If in some respects it is losing, in others it is gaining. Nor is everything which it lets go, a loss; for this too, the parting with a word in which there is no true help, the dropping of a cumbrous or superfluous form, may itself be sometimes a most real gain. English is undoubtedly becoming different from what it has been; but only different in that it is passing into another stage of its development; only different, as the fruit is different from the flower, and the flower from the bud; ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... way,' he remarked, when the boy told him he was ready. And with his cumbrous and uneasy action he stiffly offered her his arm. Her hand was just within it, when she drew it back. He looked round with a start, as if he thought she had detected something that repelled her, in the ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... family party set forward on their journey. They went in advance of the caravan so as not to be hindered and inconvenienced by its slow and cumbrous movements. A ride of three miles through the old forest brought them to the open, hilly country. Here the road forked. And here the family ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... immediate use. Books in several volumes should have the number of each volume plainly marked in Arabic (not Roman) numerals on the back. The old-fashioned method of expressing numerals by letters, instead of figures, is too cumbrous and time-consuming to be tolerated. You want to letter, we will say, vol. 88 of Blackwood's Magazine. If you follow the title-page of that book, as printed, ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... almost completely replaced the wet cell in this country, and as a result, the general type of wall set as shown in Figs. 142 and 143, has gradually replaced the old wet-cell type, which was more cumbrous and unsightly. It is usual on wall sets to provide some sort of a shelf, as indicated in Fig. 142, for the convenience of the user in ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... and overwhelming popularity of part singing soon, as we have seen, relegated the first suggestions of a manner of setting vocal solos for the stage into a position of comparative obscurity and in the end this possibility was conquered by the cumbrous method of Vecchi. Perhaps the unsuitability of polyphonic composition might have made itself clear earlier than it did, had not the general state of Italian thought and taste moved in a direction making this impossible. The noble ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... positively masculine articles, but were nevertheless made by a man's boot-maker, and there was only one place in London where they could be made sufficiently ugly to suit her; and infinite were the pains she took to procure the heavy, thick, cumbrous, misshapen things that as much as possible concealed and disfigured her finely turned ankles and high, arched, Norman instep. Indeed, her whole attire, peculiar (and very ugly, I thought it) as it was, was so by malice prepense on her part. And whereas the general result would have suggested ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... little farther on we began to come more and more frequently on big colonies of "Seventy-fives." Drawn up nose to nose, usually against a curtain of woodland, in a field at some distance from the road, and always attended by a cumbrous drove of motor-vans, they looked like giant gazelles feeding among elephants; and the stables of woven pine-boughs which stood near by might have been the huge huts of ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... the timbers I could view the country beneath me, far and wide. I saw near at hand the cumbrous gate of the stockade ajar, and at a little distance on the farther side Mr. Gulliver and his half-human servant standing. In front of them was an empty space—a narrow semicircle of which Gulliver was the ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... brood Bay his mild radiance, impotent and fell; Calm in his halls of brightness he shall dwell! 5 For lo! RELIGION at his strong behest Starts with mild anger from the Papal spell, And flings to Earth her tinsel-glittering vest, Her mitred State and cumbrous Pomp unholy; And JUSTICE wakes to bid th' Oppressor wail 10 Insulting aye the wrongs of patient Folly; And from her dark retreat by Wisdom won Meek NATURE slowly lifts her matron veil To smile with fondness on ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... setting sun, like so many burnished mirrors. Then came Cromwell's own carriage, drawn by four strong black horses;—they had need of strength, dragging, as they did, a weight of plated iron, of which the cumbrous machine was composed. The windows were remarkably narrow, and formed of the thickest glass, within which was a layer of horn, that, if it were shattered by any rude assault, would prevent the fragments from flying to the inside. Behind this carriage rode four mounted soldiers; ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... of husbands. Now, although we are inclined to think that these are greatly exaggerated, and that married men are, on the whole, very good—excellent men and citizens, brave men, battling with the world and its difficulties, and carrying forward the cumbrous machine in its path of progress and civilization—although we think that, as a class, their merits are actually not fully appreciated, and that the bachelors (sly fellows!) get very much the best of it—still, we must admit that there is a very large class of thoroughly bad ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... adventurers were too late. Every railway station and post-office within twenty miles was already held by troops. Revolts are conducted scientifically in that region. Their stage management is perfect, and the cumbrous methods of effete civilizations might well take note of the speed, thoroughness, and efficiency with which a change of government ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... possession or the use of anything that can be really called the mathematical faculty, the exercise of which in any broad sense has only been possible since the introduction of the decimal notation. The Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Jews, and the Chinese had all such cumbrous systems, that anything like a science of arithmetic, beyond very simple operations, was impossible; and the Roman system, by which the year 1888 would be written MDCCCLXXXVIII, was that in common use in Europe down to the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, and even much later ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... the Commons unanimously determined to treat the offences which the Committee had brought to light as high crimes against the State, and to employ against a few cunning mercers in Nicholas Lane and the Old Jewry all the gorgeous and cumbrous machinery which ought to be reserved for the delinquencies of great Ministers and Judges. It was resolved, without a division, that several Frenchmen and one Englishman who had been deeply concerned in the contraband trade should be impeached. Managers were appointed; ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... lance. At one end an enormous pair of antlers were inserted in the wall, the branches serving as hooks on which to suspend hats, whips, and spurs, and in the corners of the apartment were fowling-pieces, fishing-rods, and other sporting implements. The furniture was of the cumbrous workmanship of former days, though some articles of modern convenience had been added and the oaken floor had been carpeted, so that the whole presented an odd ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... the wool takes up more room than the gold. No, Sir; I always thought Robertson would be crushed by his own weight,—would be buried under his own ornaments. Goldsmith tells you shortly all you want to know: Robertson detains you a great deal too long. No man will read Robertson's cumbrous detail a second time; but Goldsmith's plain narrative will please again and again. I would say to Robertson what an old tutor of a college said to one of his pupils: "Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... stenographic that the fathers often use it as a rapid way of writing French. It has, however, the disadvantage of ambiguity at times. Any Indian boy can learn it in a week or two; practically all the Indians use it. What a commentary on our own cumbrous and illogical spelling, which takes even a bright child two or three ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... field. By accompanying the soldiers, he was able to gain a variety of advantages. He was at hand to sanction what steps might be necessary, an advance on cumbrous despatch writing. His presence was especially valuable when sea and land forces happened to be co-operating. He could order both, being Governor, Commander-in-Chief, Lord High Admiral, and everything else, in New Zealand. Finally, he could speak, face to face, with the Maoris, friends and enemies ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... case declined at once; but when congregations, in spite of him or without having previously consulted him, took the responsibility of proceeding to a formal call, he never intervened to arrest their action. He had a curious respect for the somewhat cumbrous and slow-moving Presbyterian procedure, and when it had been set in motion he felt that it was his duty to let ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... same way, I have known an illiterate Englishman speak of Aix-la-Chapelle as Hexley Chapel. To the name, thus distorted, our forefathers of course added the generic word for a Roman town, and so made the cumbrous title of Eoforwic-ceaster, which is the almost universal form in the earlier parts of the English Chronicle. This was too much of a mouthful even for the hardy Anglo-Saxon, so we soon find a disposition to shorten it into Ceaster ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... to all strangers, but more so from the novelty and singularity of its construction than from its beauty. Utility rather than elegance was consulted by the builder. This far-famed structure is ugly and cumbrous, and a passenger feels a very unpleasing sensation if he happens to stand upon it when a loaded waggon drives along it at low water, at which time there is a considerable descent from the side of the suburbs. An undulatory motion is then occasioned, which goes on gradually from ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... measures eighty-two feet; to the top of the dome two hundred and ten feet. When completed, the building will be surmounted by a large dome, giving a general resemblance to the main portion of the Capitol at Washington. The dome, viewed from the rear, appears something heavy and cumbrous for the general character of the structure which it crowns; but a front view, from Chambers street, when the eye, in its upward sweep, takes in the broad flight of steps, the grand columns, and the general robustness of the main entrance, dissipates this idea, and attaches grace ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... There must also be quantity, which is necessary in prose as well as in verse: clauses, sentences, paragraphs, must be in due proportion. Metre and even rhyme may be rarely admitted; though neither is a legitimate element of prose writing, they may help to lighten a cumbrous expression (Symp.). The translation should retain as far as possible the characteristic qualities of the ancient writer—his freedom, grace, simplicity, stateliness, weight, precision; or the best ...
— Charmides • Plato
... world he cried, En garde! to the King of Spain. There, ordering out his pinnaces in force, While a great storm, as if he held indeed Heaven's batteries in reserve, growled o'er the sea, He landed. Ere one cumbrous limb of all The monstrous armaments of Spain could move His ships were stored; and ere the sword of Spain Stirred in its crusted sheath, Bayona town Beheld an empty sea; for like a dream The pirate fleet had vanished, none knew whither. But, in its visible stead, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... taking with it a part of the fur on the thorax. The straw produces the same effects as the magnet, in other words, magnetism had nothing to do with what happened. My invention, in both cases alike, is a cumbrous tackle of which the Bee tries to rid herself at once by every possible means. To look to her for normal actions so long as she carries an apparatus, magnetized or not, upon her back is the same as expecting to study the natural habits of a Dog after tying ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... so also for letters the clay tablet was employed. It may seem to us indeed a somewhat cumbrous mode of sending a letter; but it had the advantage of being solid and less likely to be injured or destroyed than other writing materials. The characters upon it could not be obliterated by a shower of rain, and there was no danger of its being torn. Moreover, it must be remembered that the ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... conduct was not fully explained." For, surely, the "one idea or circumstance" of his "having acted in the manner in which he did act," may be quite as forcibly named by the one word conduct, as by all this verbiage, this "substantive phrase," or "entire clause," of such cumbrous length. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... style, where a splendid porter with cocked hat, a silver-headed baton, and gorgeous livery kept guard. Up the white marble stairs, into stately halls overladen with gilding, the walls crowded with paintings in cumbrous but resplendent frames. Prince So-and-So had got into financial difficulties, and wanted to part with some of ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... from his dress: a blue broadcloth coat with yellow gilt buttons; a swan's-down waistcoat with broad stripes of red and white; a pair of dove-coloured corded-velvet pantaloons with three large yellow buttons on the hips; and a neckcloth of fine white cam- bric.His figure was thickset, strong, cumbrous; his hair black, curly, shining. His eyes, bold, vivacious, and now inflamed, were of that rarely beautiful blue which is seen only in members of the Irish race. His complexion was a blending of the lily ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... being scooped out to receive them. And then Clara said, "If you wish me to live, take me from hence. There is something in this scene of transcendent beauty, in these trees, and hills and waves, that for ever whisper to me, leave thy cumbrous flesh, and make a part of us. I earnestly entreat you ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... her sting; the cumbrous weapons of theological warfare are antiquated; the field of politics supplies the alchemists of our times with materials of more fatal explosion, and the butchers of mankind no longer travel to another world for instruments ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... assistance of the former we mould the latter into a thousand shapes of usefulness, neatness, and durability, and so much attached are we to this material, that it is daily superseding the use of the more cumbrous wood and stone, and other substances which were once in great demand. Iron furnishes most of the multifarious instruments required in the mechanical and agricultural arts—it ministers alike to war and to peace, by furnishing the sword and the ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... water-fiend," sneered Sir Bale, as he lay back in his cumbrous arm-chair. "Cheerful place, pleasant people, delicious fate! The place alone has been enough to set that fool out of his little senses, ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... cumbrous fashion, be broken up by law suits. Great business combinations, however, cannot possibly be made useful instead of noxious industrial agencies merely by law suits, and especially by law suits supposed to be carried on for their destruction and not for their ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... With this plan in view, Miss Sirwell collected the specimens from various schools of the State, supervised the erection of the booth, and installed the displays. As a result, the Minnesota exhibit had a distinct system and unity, was free from useless and cumbrous repetition, its main idea was readily grasped, and it stood as a memorable proof of one woman's artistic sense of proportion and adequacy. It was original in conception; it had beauty of color, ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... particularly, need a good, cheap, steam plow that can be made practicable for at least the better grade of farmers. The English plan of moldboards, that overcome all possible traction and necessitate the duplex stationary engines, with the cumbrous "artillery of attachments," may do for sluggish people but will never meet the ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... of my room open on purpose, so that he should know I was back there, and ready for him. I took down a long straight blade, like a rapier, with a basket hilt. It was a cumbrous weapon, and with a blunt edge; still, it had a point, and I was ready to thrust and parry against the world. I called upon my foes. No enemy appeared, and by the light of two candles, with a sword in my hand, I lost myself in the foreshadowings of ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... your scheme for "boycotting" the Government of India under what seems to be the somewhat less offensive (though more cumbrous) name of non-co-operation; but have always given you credit for a genuine desire to carry out revolution by peaceful means and am astonished at the violence of the language you use in describing General Dyer on page 4 of your issue ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... ease; but he was readily circumvented in his design, finding to his cost that the English vessels could sail closer to the wind than his own, and could be manipulated more quickly, while their guns carried further. His cumbrous ships also were too much crowded with men, being fitter for transport than for action; the fighters were impeded by the press, and every effective shot from the enemy's guns found many victims. The English managed to keep at a distance while ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... the different regiments were distinguished by the colour of their sashes, which was the only point of regimental uniformity. When on a campaign doublets were usually worn of thick buff leather; armour was still used, but was far less cumbrous than it had been, consisting for the most part solely of shoulder pieces and cuirass, with plates covering the upper part of the arm, thick buff leather gauntlets being considered sufficient protection below ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty
... and he'll just tak ony thing, but most readily cattle, horse, or live Christians; for sheep are slow of travel, and inside plenishing is cumbrous to carry, and not easy to put away for siller ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... What sort of cumbrous and unmanageable machine, Sam Weller imagined a habeas-corpus to be, does not appear; for Perker, at that moment, walked up and ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... suppose that the system of Copernicus swept away the entire doctrine of epicycles; that doctrine can hardly be said to be swept away even now. As a description of a planet's motion it is not incorrect, though it is geometrically cumbrous. If you describe the motion of a railway train by stating that every point on the rim of each wheel describes a cycloid with reference to the earth, and a circle with reference to the train, and that the motion of the train is compounded of these cycloidal and circular ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... ale, foaming in the goblet; and so the stately banquet went on, with somewhat tedious magnificence; and yet with a fulness of effect and thoroughness of sombre life that made Redclyffe feel that, so much importance being assigned to it,—it being so much believed in,—it was indeed a feast. The cumbrous courses swept by, one after another; and Redclyffe, finding it heavy work, sat idle most of the time, regarding the hall, the old decaying beams, the armor hanging beneath the galleries, and these ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ever blessed, The worlds late wonder, and the heavens new ioy; Live ever there, and leave me here distressed With mortall cares and cumbrous worlds anoy! 305 But, where thou dost that happines enioy, Bid me, O bid me quicklie come to thee, That happie there I ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... after his accession to the kingdom, attended only by some select courtiers, and without the cumbrous appendages of royalty, he left his capital upon a hunting excursion. In the course of the sport, passing over a desert plain, he came to a spot where was the opening of a cave, into which he entered, and observed domestic ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... could remember, or morbidly want to remember, the name unkindly given by Julius Caesar to Noyon, when he had besieged it. I can imagine even Charlemagne waving that cumbrous label impatiently aside, though Noyon mixed with Laon was his first capital. "Noviodunum Belgarum it may have been" (I dare say he said). "But I'm going to call ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... day how we used to peep through the crack of the door, or hold it half ajar and peer in, to watch his motions; and how mightily diverted we were with his deep, slow manner of speaking, his heavy, cumbrous walk, but, above all, with the wonderful faculty of "hemming" which ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... in these pages. As my luck failed me at the last, I will place my loss at the full extent of the law, and claim that nothing less than a ten-pounder was spirited away from my hand that day. I might not have saved him, netless as I was upon my cumbrous raft; but I should at least have had the glory of the fight, and the ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... citizens of all classes had been at work; some upon the cumbrous engines, others carrying water, others levelling houses, but all their endeavours seemed powerless to quell the raging flames. And it was notable when first the pipes in the streets were opened, no water could be found, whereon ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... improve the apparatus and to augment its power, until it was finally able to yield a magneto-electric light comparable to that of the voltaic battery. Judged by later knowledge, this first machine would be considered cumbrous and defective in the extreme; but judged by the light of antecedent events, it marked ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... "The cumbrous and inadequate preparation which is now in vogue can scarcely be spoken of by a person of understanding without the use of language unbefitting one who is a member of (inter alia) the Reformed Church and the highest ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... increase in our architectural proportions. With respect to personal ornaments also, ear-rings must not be so weighty as to tear the lobes of the ears; nor should a bracelet prevent, by its size, the motions of the arm. "Barbaric pomp and gold" is a fine thing; but a medallion, as heavy and as cumbrous as a shield, appended to a lady's bosom, would be any thing but a luxury. So, in the other extreme, a watch should not be so small as to render the dial-plate illegible; nor should a shoe be so tight as to lame its wearer for life. Beauty, it has been said, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... had practically ceased. The name of it last appears upon the statute book in the early years of the reign of Richard II., when the disputes between villains and their liege lords on their relative rights had furnished matter for cumbrous lawsuits, and by general consent the relation had merged of itself into a more liberal form. Thus serfdom had merged or was rapidly merging into free servitude; but it did not so merge that labouring men, if they pleased, were ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... fields precocious grass-blades peep Above the earth so lately wrapt in sleep. What sweet, elusive odor fills the soil, To rouse the farmer to his yearly toil! Though thick the clouds, and bare the maple bough, With what gay song he guides the cumbrous plough! In him there stirs, like sap within the tree, The joyous call to new activity: The outward scene, however dull and drear, Takes on a splendor from the inward cheer. Prophetic month! Would ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... preceding the King's carriage, wound down from the Citadel, groups of people cheered, and waved hats and handkerchiefs,—then, when his Majesty's own escort came into view, the cheering was redoubled,—and at last when the cumbrous, over- gilded, over-painted "Cinderella" State-coach appeared, and the familiar, but somewhat sternly-composed features of the King himself were perceived through the glass windows, a roar of acclamation, like the thundering ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... thundered the afternoon express from Paris, bearing the advance guard of the summer seekers after happiness. But if the cumbrous coaches carried swiftly onward some gay hearts, some young lovers to never-to-be-forgotten scenes, one there was among the throng to whom the world was gray—an English gentleman this, who gazed indifferently upon the bright vistas flitting past his window. The London Times reposed unopened by ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... heard from St. Vincent that a comparatively junior captain, Sir Sidney Smith, had been sent out by the Cabinet, bearing, besides his naval commission from the Admiralty, one from the Foreign Office as envoy to Turkey, conjointly with his brother, Spencer Smith. This unusual and somewhat cumbrous arrangement was adopted with the design that Smith should be senior naval officer in the Levant, where it was thought his hands would be strengthened by the diplomatic functions; but the Government's explanation of its intentions was so obscure, that St. ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... is dependent upon the two gases, hydrogen and oxygen, for its support, these gases are now supplied in large quantities commercially. At first the gas cylinders were made of wrought iron; they were cumbrous and heavy, and the pressure of the inclosed gas was so low that a receptacle to hold only ten feet was a most unwieldy concern. But times have changed, and a cylinder of about the same size, but half the weight, ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... such successively more and more elementary parts. At the first glance this new atomic theory has charms from its apparent simplicity, but the attempt thus to follow it out into its ultimate limits and extreme consequences seems to indicate that it is at once insufficient and cumbrous. ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... read and theorize too exclusively, and are inclined to assert that concentrated fertilizers supersede all others. They scout the muck swamp, the compost heap, and even the barnyard, as old-fashioned, cumbrous methods of bringing to the soil, in tons of useless matter, the essentials which they can deliver in a few sacks or barrels. On paper, they are scientific and accurate. The crop you wish to raise has constituents in certain proportions. Supply these, they say, and you have ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... character of the furniture. But there was no attempt on the part of the present owner, and there had clearly been none on the part of his predecessor, to suit the furniture to the room. The furniture, indeed, was of the heavy, graceless taste of George the First,—cumbrous chairs in walnut-tree, with a worm-eaten mosaic of the heron on their homely backs, and a faded blue worsted on their seats; a marvellously ugly sideboard to match, and on it a couple of black shagreen cases, the lids of which were flung open, and discovered the ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the flatboat assured me that it was not safe to run in the night, at least during high water, when the current was bearing off houses, vessels, and other cumbrous things. Running over a floating log might disable our propeller, and we should be helpless then. There were but few great bends in this part of the river, much as the mighty stream twists about above New Orleans. I ...
— Up the River - or, Yachting on the Mississippi • Oliver Optic
... internal relations, demanded new regulations, which, as before noticed, were attempted to be supplied by the pragmaticas. This was adding, however, to the embarrassments of a jurisprudence already far too cumbrous. The Castilian lawyer might despair of a critical acquaintance with the voluminous mass of legislation, which, in the form of municipal charters, Roman codes, parliamentary statutes, and royal ordinances, were received as authority in the courts. [40] The manifold ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... moon became totally obscured, dark cloud-masses spread over the heavens, the sea grew black, distant thunder rolled, and the sob of an approaching tempest became distinctly audible. Such indications of a westerly gale, were not encouraging to those cumbrous vessels, with the treacherous quicksands of Flanders ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... resumed. For several years our exports did not exceed ten millions. But our merchants were not disheartened; they gradually enlarged their trade and extended their field of adventure; privateers were put into the India trade, and entered into successful rivalry with the more cumbrous ships of the East India Companies. The new Constitution was adopted, the public debt funded, and duties imposed to meet the interest. The war-worn officer, the patriotic merchant, and the humble capitalist, who had relied on the honor and justice of the country, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... training either, for when he came to the "turn," his head and tail came up, his eye brightened, and, with a playful movement of his huge body, and without the least hint from the deacon, he swung himself and the cumbrous old sleigh into line, and began to straighten ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... train which accompanied, him showed by its variety the immense extent of country he had traversed during this first campaign. Among the prisoners were representatives of widely different races;—Khati with long robes and cumbrous head-dresses, following naked mountaineers from Shugunia, who marched with yokes on their necks, and wore those close-fitting helmets with short crests which have such a strangely modern look on the Assyrian bas-reliefs. The actual results of the campaign were, perhaps, hardly commensurate ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... sight never to have been forgotten could we have gazed then on that city of the sea, have watched the cumbrous barks, so unlike our light-winged merchant ships, or our swift steamers, which sailed heavily up and down the blue Adriatic, till they came in sight of the famous city, the resort of all nations, in whose canals, and among whose marts and palaces, might be seen the strange ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous |
