"Maudlin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... go home, Judge!" said Montgomery, fingering his cap with clumsy hands. He took a step nearer the slight figure on the hearth-rug and dropped his voice to a husky half maudlin whisper. "He won't let me—see—I'm a nigger slave to him! I know I got a wife—I know I got a family, but he says—no! He says—'Joe, you damned old sot, you'll go home with a few drinks inside your freckled hide and begin to shoot off your mouth, and there'll be hell to pay ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... firmer by conflict with evil and by victory over self. Those whom he puts into his poems are still the humble, the forgotten, the neglected, the unknown; and it is the feelings and the struggles of these that he tells us, with no maudlin sentimentality, and with no dead set at our sensibilities. The sub-title Mrs. Stowe gave to Uncle Tom's Cabin would serve to cover most of M. Coppee's contes either in prose or verse; they are nearly ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... intoxicating liquors; that he was even inordinately drunk at the time referred to; that he had voluntarily complicated himself in the concealment of the arms by John H. Surratt and his friends; that he was in a state of maudlin terror when arrested and when forced to confess; that for two days he maintained denial of all knowledge that Booth and Herold had been at his house; and that at last, and in the condition referred to, he was coerced by threats to confess, and into a weak and common effort to exculpate himself ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... hadn't quite made up its mind yet, to be good company. Now it was, that after two or three such vain attempts to stifle its convivial sentiments, it threw off all moroseness, all reserve, and burst into a stream of song so cosy and hilarious as never maudlin nightingale yet formed the least ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... wert early in the field, How doughtily small Jeffrey ran at thee A-tilt, and broke a bulrush on thy shield. And now, a veteran in the lists of fame, I ween, old Friend! thou art not worse bested When with a maudlin eye and drunken aim, Dulness hath thrown ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the full his share of that vein of maudlin sentiment which is typical of one side of the Irish character. He appears to have had little ambition, and was content throughout his career to fit his saccharine melodies to whatever words the librettists of the day chose to supply. No one can deny him the possession of fluent and commonplace ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... many other couples about them were squeezing hands and cuddling waists that no one took any notice of their affability or thought it odd. A drunken sailor behind them kept asking the company with maudlin reiteration what time the last train left for Plymouth, but beyond crying "hush" nobody rebuked him. In truth, the young people had come there to make love, and when the lights were turned down and the curtain of ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... Borderer to his kinsman said:- "Hist, Ringan! seest thou there! Canst guess which road they'll homeward ride? Oh! could we but on Border side, By Eusedale glen, or Liddell's tide, Beset a prize so fair! That fangless Lion, too, their guide, Might chance to lose his glistering hide; Brown Maudlin, of that doublet pied Could ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... read "Notre Dame" can deny the presence of a certain savage delight in scenes of grotesque and exaggerated terror. No one who has read "Les Miserables" can deny the existence in him of a vein of lovely tenderness that, with a little tiny push over the edge, would degenerate into maudlin sentiment ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... them, half tipsy as they were, so forcibly, that they became sobered down—some of them into a full perception of her firmness and high religious feelings; and those who were more affected by drink into a maudlin gravity of deportment still more honorable to the admirable principles of the woman who ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... he had enough sense to appreciate the abilities of Catharine; and a sort of maudlin idea of justice, if it were not, perhaps, utter stupidity, dissuaded him from resenting her freedom in the choice of favorites. Upon commencing his reign, he yielded himself to the guidance of her imperial mind, hoping to obtain some dignity ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... of it," said the cobbler, with a maudlin wink at his visitor. "I don't know when I'll have it finished, if I keep on feelin' as I do now. It's pretty tough, too, bekase that shoe belongs to Mrs. Judge Prency, an' she's comin' for it this afternoon; but I'm that sleepy ...
— All He Knew - A Story • John Habberton
... wanted to fight Jim, or Jim wanted to fight me—I don't remember which. We were old chums, and we nearly always wanted to fight each other when we got a bit on, and we'd fight if we weren't stopped. I remember once Jim got maudlin drunk and begged and prayed of me to fight him, as if he was praying for his life. Tom Tarrant, the coach-driver, used to say that Jim and me must be related, else we wouldn't hate each other so much when we were tight ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... the late James Collinson, whose principal picture, "St. Elizabeth of Hungary," finished in 1851, produced a sort of crisis in Rossetti's career. This painting out-mystified the mystic himself; it was simply maudlin and hysterical, though drawn with some feeling for grace, and in a very earnest spirit. Rossetti, with his strong good sense, recognized that it would be impossible ever to reach the public with art of this unmanly character, and from this time forth ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... can't you see how it happened? I saw the poor woman's pride and happiness hung on her faith in that picture. I tried to make her understand that it was worthless—but she wouldn't; I tried to tell her so—but I couldn't. I behaved like a maudlin ass, but you shan't pay for my infernal bungling—you mustn't buy ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... O Boy! O Innocent of the innocent! Go to, for a bookish fool! Learn that lovely ladies yield themselves but to those who are masterful in their wooing, who have wooed often, and triumphed as often. O Innocent of the innocent! Forget the maudlin sentiment of thy books and old romances—thy pure Sir Galahads, thy "vary parfait gentil knightes," thy meek and lowly lovers serving their ladies on bended knee; open thine eyes, learn that women to-day love only the strong hand, ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... my marriage, I used to see a brother-in-law of mine, now dead, mad with drink—beating his wife in his frenzy, and then sobbing and howling in maudlin repentance, vowing never to touch liquor again, and yet, the very same evening, sitting down to drink and drink—it would fill me with disgust. But my intoxication today is still more fearful. The stuff has not to be procured ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... He's a regular efficiency expert in sport. Take fall and spring, when the wild geese come through, he'll soak grain in alcohol and put it out for 'em over on the big marsh. First thing you know he'll have a drunken old goose by the legs, all maudlin and helpless. Puts him in a coop till he ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... description. There were many females among them, mostly girls of the town, who were swallowing undiluted drams of gin and peppermint. Pallid mechanics and their wives, the latter sometimes bearing young children in their arms, exhibited varying degrees of drunkenness, from the hilarious or maudlin state to that of rolling intoxication. Even children, whose size was so diminutive that they had to stand on tiptoe to elevate their heads above the counter, demanded and received their liquor, imbibing the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... upon the coming of the Queen the night before, all misdemeanants had been cast loose again. Culpepper had been kept by the guards from entering the palace, where he had no place. But he had fallen in with the Magister Udal in the courtyard. Being maudlin and friendly at the time, he had cast his arms round the magister's neck claiming him for a loved acquaintance. They had drunk together and had started, towards midnight, to find the chamber of Katharine Howard, Culpepper seeking his cousin, and the magister, Margot Poins. ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... sense of reconciliation which characterizes the 'maudlin' stage of alcoholic drunkenness,—a stage which seems silly to lookers-on, but the subjective rapture of which probably constitutes a chief part of the temptation to the vice,—is well known. The centre and periphery of things seem to come together. The ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... sought was the only daughter of a ruined Florentine noble of dissolute character, who gained a bare subsistence by frequenting the gaming-tables. His child had been brought up in a convent renowned for strict discipline—she knew nothing of the world. She was, he assured me, with maudlin tears in his eyes, "as innocent as a flower on the altar of the Madonna." I believed him—for what could this lovely, youthful, low-voiced maiden know of even the shadow of evil? I was eager to gather so fair ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... exterior of the cranium and is nourished by a transudation of the blood through the coronal suture. This pellicle is also said to have a connection with the heart, which arrangement furnishes a decidedly curious explanation of the mechanism of sympathetic and maudlin lachrymation. For, as Gilbert tells us, when the heart is compressed this pellicle is also compressed, and if any moisture is found beneath the pellicle it is expressed into the substance of the lachrymal gland ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... be moved by strong imaginative work may be abused until it becomes a maudlin and quite disordered sentiment. Keats was too well balanced to be carried into appreciative excesses. He knew that mere yearning could not make a poet of one any more than mere ambition could. He understood the limits of ambition as a force in literature. Keats's ambition ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... it portends, to send forth in this form a world-thought, as a harbinger of sympathy—a foreword which may set in motion the thought-waves of pity. For of all living creatures born into this world of pompous ignorance and maudlin solicitude to struggle for precarious existence from the cradle to the grave, by reason of the unnatural conditions of our vaunted hygienic and educational systems—generously termed "civilization"—there is surely nothing quite so "poor," so woefully ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... but absorbing the wasted liquor through every pore. A dead citizen, his head crushed in by a single blow, sprawled hideously in the middle of the street; while his murderer, a gigantic Gaul, was embracing the corpse with maudlin affection and whispering in its ear to arise and guide him back to camp. Those who passed, from time to time, paused to join the soldier's comrades in laughter and rude jests and suggestions of new methods of awakening ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... crying, that she was suffering cruelly, but he offered her courage rather than maudlin sympathy. Hope seemed to flow through her veins at the meeting of the eyes. Whatever a man could do for her would be done ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... gin-laden breath. Her eyes were blue and bleared, and looked in kindly fashion through a pair of large-rimmed and much-mended spectacles, from which one of the glasses had totally disappeared. She was affable, and responded to my questions with almost maudlin tenderness, calling me "dearie" throughout the interview. Her little parlor was hung with chromo reproductions of great religious paintings, and the close atmosphere was redolent of the heavy perfume of lilies and stale ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... amusing. The spectacle of the faces wilting into maudlin abstractions under the caress of the music brought a grin to him. The sounds had drugged the polite little masks and left them poised morosely in a sleepy dream. The lavender stocking crept tenderly into evidence. The owlish glasses focused ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... signified the feelings of the singer with barbaric fitness. He took it first in the time and manner of a rant; presently this ill-favoured gleefulness abated, he began to dwell upon the notes more feelingly, and sank at last into a degree of maudlin pathos that was to me scarce bearable. By equal steps, the original briskness of his acts declined; and when he was stripped to his breeches, he sat on the bedside and fell to whimpering. I know nothing less respectable than the tears of drunkenness, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... against starvation. Again and again, her streets filled with her gaunt dead, she stubbornly held her gates against the enemies of Spain who assaulted her in the name of religion, only at last to weaken with terror and throw them open in disgraceful welcome to the French de Pontis and his maudlin, rag-tag followers, who drained her of her last drop of life blood. As her gates swung wide and this nondescript band of marauders streamed in with curses and shouts of exultation, the glory of this royal mediaeval ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... God should take it away." Such a statement is plausible but not capable of proof. In the main religious people believe in capital punishment. The advocates of capital punishment dispose of the question by saying that it is the "sentimentalist" or, rather, the "maudlin sentimentalist" who is against it. Sentimentalist ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... he asked, and Medill answered, "Seemlich!" When it was apparent that two of us understood German he opened up. He had to talk slowly, but he was willing to make any sacrifice to get conversation going. He rambled along in a maudlin way, and finally picked up an illustrated paper containing an account of the Turin riots, which angered him, and then and there being, that Italian soldier told us in German the story of what he called der grosser rebellion! To talk German in ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... chamber-candlestick to-night, remind me to be more than usually particular in praying for Mr. Anthony Chuzzlewit, who has done me an injustice." No amount of self-indulgence weakens or lowers his pious and reflective tone. "Those are her daughters," he remarks, making maudlin overtures to Mrs. Todgers in memory of his deceased wife. "Mercy and Charity, Charity and Mercy, not unholy names I hope. She was beautiful. She had a small property." When his condition has fallen into something so much ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... told, he is a warm-hearted, generous, plucky fellow, with boundless vanity and a romantic vein of maudlin sentiment that seduces him from time to time into the gin-and-water corner of an Indian newspaper. Under the heading of "The Forest Ranger's Lament," or "The Old Shikarry's Tale of Woe," he hiccoughs his column of sickly lines ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... had yielded to a natural impulse—true! That moment of temptation threatened painful consequences—still true! What then? Nothing! Was the dead fruit to hang about his neck forever? Tut!—all natural law was against it. Had he not said that he was above prejudice? So was he above the maudlin sentiment of the "great lovers of noble histories." The sophistry grew apace with Greta's beautiful countenance before him. Catching at her last word, ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... to fade on St. Mary Magdalene's Day (July 20), to whom we find numerous flowers dedicated, such as the maudlin, a nickname of the costmary, either in allusion to her love of scented ointment, or to its use in uterine affections, over which she presided as the patroness of unchaste women, and maudlin-wort, another name for the moon-daisy. But, as Dr. Prior remarks, it should, "be observed that the monks in ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... to the group before them, "look, yon wretched mother, whose voice an instant ago uttered the coarsest accents of maudlin and intoxicated prostitution, is now fostering her infant, with a fondness stamped upon her worn cheek and hollow eye, which might shame the nice maternity of nobles; and there, too, yon wretch whom, in the reckless effrontery of ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... this emergency stood them in place of food, fuel, rest, and prescience. In spite of his remonstrances, it was not long before they were more or less under its influence. Uncle Billy passed rapidly from a bellicose state into one of stupor, the Duchess became maudlin, and Mother Shipton snored. Mr. Oakhurst alone remained erect, leaning against a rock, calmly ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... in We are seven? These are very popular, apparently, as poems for children to recite; yet in the one case it is beyond any teacher's power to show children the unearthly flaming beauty which alone gives the poem its peculiar quality and undefinable power; and in the other the maudlin sentimentalism and almost priggish piety of the verses are positively dangerous to the child's health of mind. Both types of recitation work out in the end to this—that when the child attains adolescence, and the great world of literature dawns ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... came out staggering, choking, falling down and getting up again. You see, their nerves were gone. The fumes, the gases, the shock, the fire, what they had endured and what they had escaped—all these had distracted them. They danced, sang, wept, laughed, shouted in a sort of maudlin frenzy, spun about deliriously until they dropped. They were deafened, and some of them could not see but had to grope their way. I remember one man who sat down and pulled off his boots and socks and threw them away and then hobbled on in his bare ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... all I know," answered Mr. Edwards. "Some three or four weeks before I heard of this robbery, Newton was at my house, and was intoxicated. He boasted in his maudlin way that he had an opportunity to rob a bank, and that the cashier was a party to the affair; but I attributed all this to the wild utterances of a drunken man, and paid no further attention to it. On the Saturday night before the robbery took place, however, he came to my house during my absence, ...
— The Burglar's Fate And The Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... wake from their trance and come to gaze on him reproachfully; he sees that fortune (and mayhap fame) have passed him by, and all through his own fault; he may whine about imaginary wrongs during the day when he is maudlin, but the night fairly throttles him if he attempts to turn away from the stark truth, and he remains pinned face to face with his beautiful, dead self. Then, with a start, he remembers that he has ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... be you gittin' up at this blessed moment? Don't talk to me about cuttin' up! It is you that is allus cuttin' up, and never tellin' your peaceful, sufferin' wife what you are doin'," replied Mrs. Boomsby; and I was confident she had been drinking to some extent, from her maudlin tones. ...
— Down South - or, Yacht Adventure in Florida • Oliver Optic
... poor maudlin creature cursed louder than ever. The wicked urchins laughed and hooted in turn, until she rose in a fit of ...
— Jessie Carlton - The Story of a Girl who Fought with Little Impulse, the - Wizard, and Conquered Him • Francis Forrester
... story of three little children, barely out of infancy, awaking, playing, eating, wondering, slumbering, in solitude through a summer day in an old tower. As a rule the attempt to make infancy interesting in literature ends in maudlin failure. But at length the painters have found an equal, or more than an equal, in an artist whose medium lends itself less easily than colour and form to the reproduction of the beauty and life of childhood. In his poetry Victor Hugo had already ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... of them, perhaps, lounging upon spread mats, and smoking their pipes. On floating so near, and hearing the maudlin cries of our crew, and beholding their antics, they must have taken us for a pirate; at any rate, they got out their sweeps, and pulled away as fast as they could; the sight of our two six-pounders, which, by way of a joke, were now run out of the side-ports, giving a fresh impetus ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... Esther was tugging at my coat. Matilda shrieked, for my prick went up her cunt, and out again before I knew where it was,—another furious shriek. Frightened I had let go of her, she rolled off the bed, and sat on the chair maudlin, ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... with a maudlin laugh, and springing from his seat with unsteady steps, he crossed the room and stood by the couch, looking down eagerly into the beautiful white face upon the pillow. As if impelled by that steady, serpentine, fiery ...
— Mischievous Maid Faynie • Laura Jean Libbey
... Lancastrian ladies had succeeded at length in collecting and carrying off such among the hiccupping husbands, and maudlin sons, who were able to move, Sir Thomas re-entering the hall, after speeding the last departing chariot, and prudently leaning upon his tall son—for though he had a seasoned head the night's potations had been deep and fiery—was startled ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... which gave him much trouble. The fact is that when the British author tells his own story he tries to make himself respectable, and the more respectable a man is the less interesting does he become. Rousseau may prove himself a maudlin degenerate. Cellini may stand self-convicted as an amorous ruffian. If they are not respectable they are thoroughly human and ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sleeping heavily, curiously, irregularly, his breath coming in jerky little snorts. "Oh," she wailed in her guilt heart, "he is, he is! Poor dear old Joey, drunk! And it's all, all my fault!" Swiftly she undressed in the dark. If he were to awaken, to begin saying awful maudlin things—- ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... a couch and, sitting beside him, bade him be a man and not a fool. He tried to rouse Bigot by irritating him, thinking, in his coarse way, that that was better than to be maudlin over him, as he considered it, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... me,' said Monks, rising boldly, 'what then? Fraud and robbery are high-sounding words—justified, you think, by a fancied resemblance in some young imp to an idle daub of a dead man's Brother! You don't even know that a child was born of this maudlin pair; you don't ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... of Hinduism for absorbing the faiths that come into contact with it, and the maudlin tendency of the people of India to yield to pressure and to sacrifice all in behalf of peace, has been the grave of many a noble endeavour and many an impassioned attempt for new ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... there were many in San Francisco, he treated them and was treated in turn, as of old, but he ordered for himself root beer or ginger ale and good-naturedly endured their chaffing. And as they waxed maudlin he studied them, watching the beast rise and master them and thanking God that he was no longer as they. They had their limitations to forget, and when they were drunk, their dim, stupid spirits were even as gods, and each ruled in his heaven of intoxicated desire. With ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... barricade yourself in your hut as evening approaches, strengthen the weak points, study the best positions, look to your arms; the day seems as if it would never close,—nothing is left for you to do but to muse in the interval, and think of the poor maudlin lovers, who at this very hour are squatting under a wall like so many young apes; or of him who, half concealed, stands on the watch at the angle of a dirty street, waiting with a fluttering heart the arrival of some sentimental little chit ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... 'don't spread your feet so vulgarly. Mrs. Turkey, I have long sighed for the honour of your patronage: the charming little poults, I hope, will gain new beauties from our exertions. Mrs. Barn-fowl, your chickens are too timid; we shall soon teach them to hop with grace. As for these awkward maudlin rabbits, I fear we cannot do any thing with them; and these ill-bred creatures, Mrs. Sow's progeny, we cannot attempt to teach.' A sturdy mastiff, who had followed the group of gazers, now barked furiously; dispersed the poultry, pushed Mrs. ...
— The Boarding School • Unknown
... no such honeymoon as yours. A few brief days of happiness, and then The dream was over. I had married one Who was the sport of vagrant impulses. We had not been a fortnight wed, when he Came home to me with brandy in his brain— A maudlin fool—for love like mine to hide As if he were an unclean beast. O Grace! I cannot paint the horrors of that night. My heart, till then serene, and safely kept In Trust's strong citadel, quaked all night long, As tower and bastion fell before the rush Of fierce ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... with more haste than discretion. One heel slipped on a cobble time-worn to glassy smoothness; he lurched, caught himself up in time to save a fall, lost his hat, recovered it, and was discovered. A voice, maudlin with drink, hailed and called upon him to stand and give an account of himself, "like a goo' feller." Another tempted him with offers of drink and sociable confabulation. He yielded not; adamantine to the seductive lure, he picked up ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... back the sobs that arose in his throat; "don't think that I have been drinking; when a fellow like me is grieved almost to madness, you call him maudlin, but I never cry in my cups, Con. And I have been perfectly sober since Saturday night, or if you like, yesterday morning. I drank hard all that day after they told me, Con., but not one drop since; not one. Con., tell me what ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... to them who say In stanzas they adore thee; Oh, rather sleep in church-yard clay, With maudlin cherubs o'er thee!" ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... a minor chord of sentiment, but are usually free from the sentimentality which mars some of Harte's sketches. He is not ashamed to employ pathos, but his tragic situations are rarely overstrained and maudlin. He has all the tenderness of Dickens; his Christmas Eve at Topmast Tickle may well be compared with A Christmas Carol. Norman Duncan never married, but few Canadian or American authors have understood women ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... possess life: a variant of a theme from Euryanthe, and a theme distinctly suggestive of the Wagner of Tristan. Then Rienzi goes off, ostensibly to prepare for battle, but in reality to leave the scene clear for Adriano and Irene to sing a rather maudlin love-duet. A trumpet-call is heard; people rush in from all sides; Rienzi addresses them; and after choruses, partly double-choruses, all go off to fight the patricians. There is plenty of bustle; there is tremendous vigour; ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... settled the mood of the piece and made the good appear the better line and the ordinary line good. Mr. SYDNEY VALENTINE had a Valentine part ready made. It would take more than an indisposition, which he pluckily ignored, to put him off his stroke. Mr. TOM REYNOLDS was effective as a maudlin serving-man who had once butled a real gentleman and could never forget it. Miss ANNIE ESMOND gave a depressingly clever rendering of a quite ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... his health." "Why let us," says the King. Then he fell on his knees and drank it; and having done, the King began to drink it. "Nay, Sir," says Armerer, by God you must do it on your knees!" So he did, and then all the company: and having done it, all fell a-crying for joy, being all maudlin and kissing one another, the King the Duke of York, and the Duke of York the King; and in such a maudlin pickle as never people were: and so passed the day. But Sir H. Cholmly tells me, that the King hath this good luck: that ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... with his simple straightforward notions of right and wrong worth, much maudlin unmerciful indulgence which we hear in these days: and yet not going to the bottom of the matter either, as we shall see in the next war. But, rambling on, he told me how he had come home, war-worn and crippled, to marry a wife and get tall sons, and lay his bones in his native village; ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... pretend to. I say that Comrade Gregory is unfit to be Thursday for all his amiable qualities. He is unfit to be Thursday because of his amiable qualities. We do not want the Supreme Council of Anarchy infected with a maudlin mercy (hear, hear). This is no time for ceremonial politeness, neither is it a time for ceremonial modesty. I set myself against Comrade Gregory as I would set myself against all the Governments of Europe, because ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... mail. Stationing himself near the door, the man from Windy Cove blocked the way for everyone who wanted to pass either in or out of the building. For the women and young girls he stepped aside with elaborate, drunken politeness and maudlin, complimentary remarks. For the men who brushed him he had a scowling curse and a muttered threat. Meanwhile, his followers nearby looked on in tipsy admiration and "'lowed that there was bound to be somethin' doin', for Jud was ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... our selues vniust, Destroy our friends, and after weepe their dust: Our owne loue waking, cries to see what's done, While shamefull hate sleepes out the afternoone. Be this sweet Helens knell, and now forget her. Send forth your amorous token for faire Maudlin, The maine consents are had, and heere wee'l stay To see our widdowers second marriage day: Which better then the first, O deere heauen blesse, Or, ere they meete ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... see this great humorist's works put forward in a popular form, and at a price exceedingly low. A man may be very much injured by perusing maudlin sentimental tales, but cannot be hurt, though he may be shocked every now and then, by reading works of sound sterling humor, like the greater part of these, full of benevolence, practical wisdom, and generous sympathy ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... not lost Professor Casimir Wieniawski from sight a moment since the hour of ten, and that "distinguished noble refugee" was now in a maudlin way, murmuring perfunctory endearments in the ear of the ex-prima donna, who tenderly gazed upon him in a proprietary manner. Alan Hawke had judged it well to ply the champagne, and, at the witching hour of midnight, he critically inspected Casimir's condition. "He is probably about tipsy enough ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... pipes; "see Santa Claus!" And they clap their hands in glee. The woman at the table wakes out of her stupor, gazes around her, and bursts into a fit of maudlin weeping. ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... for me to try to escape from my false position. The nearer the Philosophers approached, the more maudlin and effusive these unprincipled young females became, flinging their arms tragically round my neck, and bedaubing my face with ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... prevent him from doing it. He said you told him to carry them up, and that up they must go, if he had to break down the front door to do it. I think he must have been drinking, Tom, he used such awful language, and at last he got quite maudlin about it and sat down on one of the trunks and cried, actually cried! He said that for years and years he had refused to carry trunks upstairs, and that now, just when he had joined the Salvation Army, and was trying to lead a better life, and be kind and helpful and earn an extra dollar for his ...
— The Cheerful Smugglers • Ellis Parker Butler
... earnest buffo humour here and there. But there did not seem much likelihood of it. Two or three apple and gingerbread stalls, from which draggled children were turning slowly and wistfully away to go home; a booth full of trumpery fairings, in front of which tawdry girls were coaxing maudlin youths, with faded southernwood in their button-holes; another long low booth, from every crevice of which reeked odours of stale beer and smoke, by courtesy denominated tobacco, to the treble accompaniment of a jigging fiddle and a tambourine, and the bass one of ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... organs and gramaphones and suchlike horrors, but then unless you chance to pass their open windows you need not endure their strains. In England, even if we are fond of music, and therefore sensitive to jarring sounds and maudlin melodies, yet in the street we cannot escape the barrel-organ nor in the house the drawing-room songs. As if these were not enough, we now invite each other to listen to the pianotist ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... show his heart was not of human decency bereft, Peter paid the undertaker. He got drunk on what was left; Then he shed some tears, half-maudlin, on the grave where lay the Co., And he drifted to a township where the city failures go. Where, though haunted by the man he was, the wreck he yet might be, Or the man he might have been, or by each ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... "Matilda, you're getting maudlin," she said, "you are getting romantic, too. You are reading too many sensational novels and seeing ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... towards the end, got up like comic military characters in a musical comedy—just as, in mediaeval miracle plays, the comic character was Satan. The play's intention was to show a typical Russian working-class family. There were the old father, constantly drunk on vodka, alternately maudlin and scolding; the old mother; two sons, the one a Communist and the other an Anarchist; the wife of the Communist, who did dressmaking; her sister, a prostitute; and a young girl of bourgeois family, also a Communist, involved in a plot with the Communist son, who was ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... leaving Philip to become at his leisure the master of every city so far south at least as the northern confines of Sparta. He might have realized his wish at once but for his excesses. He drank himself drunk, dancing over his slain foes, and beating time in maudlin song to the caption of the Athenian decree which Demosthenes had procured against him. But it is said that when sober again he trembled to remember "the prodigious power of that orator who had obliged him to put both empire and life on the cast of a day." Two years after ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... Aulycomis, Eurycomis, Artycomis, &c. In all these works, the outline is the same; the lovers undergo endless buffetings by sea and land, imaginary deaths, and escapes from marauders; but not a spark of genius or fancy enlivens these dull productions, which, sometimes maudlin and bombastic, often indecent, would defy the patience of the most determined novel reader. One of these writers, Xenophon of Ephesus, the author of the "Ephesiacs, or Habrocomas and Anthia," is commended by Politian for the classical purity ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... like to this The hot Grecian did miss, Of whom histories keep such a pother; To the bottom he sunk, And when he had drunk, Grew maudlin, and ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... is genre again, and is as repulsive as the last example is charming. It is a drunken old woman, lean and wrinkled, seated on the ground and clasping her wine-jar between her knees, in a state of maudlin ecstasy. The head is modern, but another copy of the statue has the original head, which is of the same character as this. Ignobility of subject could go no further ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... intemperate, and the wages taken home are small in proportion to their thirst. And as an evening solace, the father, who had once been footman in a good family, and married the lady's maid (which fact accounted for the unusual quality of Nelly's English), beat them all around, weeping maudlin tears over them in the morning, and returning at night to duplicate ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... came back at him in the Intelligencer, declaring that he was not the eulogist of the Russian Empire, but setting forth at great length the good-will of Russia toward the United States, and especially announcing that "in Russia the maudlin, mock philanthropy of Uncle Tom's Cabin is an unknown disease." It was the general belief in Washington that Mr. Pryor had been inspired by some one connected ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... work. Men must stand on their own feet in Canada, and keep those feet hustling in winter—or die. It is not a land for people who think; the world owes them a living. They have to earn the living and earn it hard, and if they don't earn it, there are neither free soup kitchens nor maudlin charities to fill idle stomachs ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... said Westcott in a maudlin tone. "How'd 'e get out? How'd 'e like it fur's he went? Always liked ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... of the past century, far greater than any revelation of science or knowledge of past ages, revealed by modern research is the discovery of a God of Love. Not of that sentimental expression of maudlin emotion that soon evaporates in hypocritical make-believe; but the profound recognition of the rightful consideration of every human being, regardless of race, ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... profane that the most vicious would cross the street to avoid him. The gospel made him one of the holiest of men. His Pilgrim's Progress has been translated into hundreds of languages, and read by millions. John G. Woolley was a maudlin drunkard, intent on taking his own life,—friends, money, character, and reputation lost,—but was converted and preached, with burning eloquence, the gospel of temperance and prohibition ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... risers which skimmed palely along the street like blown bits of paper on a gray lake. They were agreed on all things, from the absurdity of the bouncer in Childs' to the absurdity of the business of life. They were dizzy with the extreme maudlin happiness that the morning had awakened in their glowing souls. Indeed, so fresh and vigorous was their pleasure in living that they felt it should be expressed by ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... type. Only, whereas among the French he is a thing of the savage past, among the Germans he is a product of the kultured present. And to turn from the field note-book of the German soldier with its swaggering tale of loot, lust, and maudlin cups, its memoranda of stolen toys for Felix and of ravished lingerie for Bertha, all viewed in the rosy light of the writer's egotism as a laudable enterprise, to the plain depositions of the Justice de Paix, and see the reverse side of the ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... am your superior in force of mind and force of body. Don't you like to hear that? Doesn't it do you good—when you think of the maudlin humbug generally talked by men to women? We can't afford to disguise that truth. All the same, we are friends, because each has the other's interest at heart, and each would be ashamed to doubt the ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... Belcour touch'd all hearts with rapture, Whose honest Major charm'd with native humour, Whose Charlotte, pleasant, frank and open hearted, Call'd forth our tears of pleasure—April showers! His pages now, stuff'd with false maudlin sentiment, Scarce please our ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... taking off his shoes and singing, "There were three lovely girls." He had probably had a good day, for he seemed even more maudlin than usual. ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... years in London burnt it out of me! Oh, my friend, what have you and I to do with all these curious triflings, which lead men oftener to rebellion than to worship? Is this a time for wholesale trust, for a maudlin universal sympathy? Nay, rather a day of suspicion, a day of repression!—a time for trampling on the lusts of the mind no less than the lusts of the body, a time when it is better to believe than to know, to ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... after midnight, with my drunken father talking maudlin conceited nonsense beside me, I developed curious ideas on the fifth commandment. Those journeys in the spring-cart through the soft faint starlight were conducive to thought. My father, like most men when under the influence of liquor, would allow no one but himself to handle the reins, ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... lurked after her for weeks, in town, at Mildenham, followed them even to Scotland, where Winton had carried her off. But she had not weakened in her resolution a second time, and suddenly he had given up pursuit, and gone abroad. Since then—nothing had come from him, save a few wild or maudlin letters, written evidently during drinking-bouts. Even they had ceased, and for four months she had heard no word. He had "got over" her, it seemed, wherever he was—Russia, Sweden—who ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... not in weakness, in virility and not in tears, in majesty, the majesty truly of meekness, but not of a maudlin, mooning etherealism. The revelation of the perfect man cannot come in a form that a child will pity; it will be admirable from all points of view. It is the heroic rather than the esthetic we ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... most of them the Misfortune to be troubled with the Cholick, they have a noble Celler of Cordials and strong Waters. When they grow Maudlin, they are very apt to commemorate their former Partners with a Tear. But ask them which of their Husbands they Condole, they are not able to tell you, and discover plainly that they do not Weep so much for the Loss of a Husband, as for the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... heard more maudlin piffle in my life!" was his frank comment when she had finished. "If you can't do better than that, you'd better shut the ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... emotion, acting together, were making the man almost maudlin. Nicholas knew well what climax ten minutes would bring. So, with a word or two of friendly thanks and farewell, he left the house, and sought a familiar hotel, where he was too well known to be refused even at this ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... respectable, all agreed; no doubt about her marriage lines; and the register confirmed it, with the right spelling—the marriage and, ten months later, the boy's christening. Arthur Miles was the name. That is all, or almost all. It seems that towards the end of his time there her father became maudlin in his wits; and the woman—her maiden name had been Reynolds, Helen Reynolds—relied for help and advice upon an old shipmate of his, also a coast-guard, called Ned Commins. It was Ned Commins they ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... mournfully looked on: once only she attempted to expostulate, but was met—not with fierce oaths, nor coarse chidings, nor even with idiotic drivelling—oh no! worse than that she felt: he replied to her with the maudlin drunken promise, "If she'd only be a good girl, and let him bide, he'd give her a big Church-bible, bound in solid gold—that 'ud make the book o' some real value, Grace." Poor broken-hearted daughter—she rushed to her closet in a torrent ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... her room, and there his maudlin manner changed. He roused himself and smiled at her fatuously; into his eyes flamed a desire, into his cheeks came a deeper flush. He pawed at her caressingly; he voiced thick, passionate protestations. Hilda had expected nothing less; it was for this that she had bled her flesh ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... disposed. Upon his right was seated no less a personage that "Sow Nance," the hideous girl who had that day entrapped poor Fanny Aubry into the power of Mr. Tickels; she was much intoxicated, and by the maudlin fondness which she displayed for Jew Mike, it was easy to surmise the nature of the relation existing between her and him. Included in the company were several other "apple girls," whose proficiency as thieves entitled them to the distinction of being considered as competent "Grabbers;" each one ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... in silence for a moment; maudlin sniffles of self-pity arose from the corner by the fire, alternating with more hysterical and more ominous ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... Sympathy, else the emotions will become maudlin and pity may be wasted on a poodle instead of a child; on a field-mouse instead of a human soul. Knowledge in use is wisdom, and wisdom implies a sense of values—you know a big thing from a little one, a valuable fact from a trivial one. Tragedy and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... non sequitur which the restraint, consciously or unconsciously inculcated by the Gaelic League, is likely to make more apparent, for it is killing that conception of the Irishman as typically a boisterous buffoon with intervals of maudlin sentimentality which the stage and the popular song have so long been content to depict without protest from us, and which left Englishmen with feelings not more exalted than those of their sixteenth ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... did despise Anarchists and Nihilists," sighed Ray, "since I was trapped into reading some of those maudlin Russian novels, with their eighth-century ideas grafted on nineteenth-century conditions. Baby brains ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... turn the man out yourself without using unnecessary violence.' 'The man' was six feet high and as stout as a beer-barrel. I could no more have moved him than Skiddaw, and he knew it. 'I stays here,' he chanted in his maudlin way, 'till I gets my board wages.' Fortunately, two Oxford undergraduates happened to be in the house, to whom I mentioned my difficulty, and I shall not easily forget the delighted promptitude with which they seized ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn |
