"Mawkish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... progress here. Well then, she ought to appreciate my spirit in coming to her at this time of night, or morning, rather. There's a wild, primitive strain in her; she's not to be wooed and won in the usual silly mawkish way. More like one of the old Sabine women, who liked nothing better than being knocked down and dragged off by their future lords. I suppose that a female of that antique type of mind can be knocked down and taken captive, as it were, with good vigorous words, ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... Terminalia, Coniogeton arborescens, an umbrageous white-gum tree, and Pandanus, together with the luxuriant young grass, gave to the country a most pleasing aspect. But the late thunder-storm had rendered the ground very damp, and that with the mawkish smell of our drying meat, soon made our camp very disagreeable. In the rocky gullies of the table land, we had observed a great number of shrubs, amongst which a species of Pleurandra, a dwarf Calythrix, a prostrate woolly Grevillea, and a red Melaleuca, ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... one can call him insipid or priggish; the heroine, Augustine Luceval, by marriage Jenneville, is in the same way one of his nearest approaches to a lady, and, though not such a madcap as the similarly situated Frederique of Une Gaillarde (v. inf.), by no means mawkish. It is needless to say that these are "l'Amant" and "la Femme," or that they are happily united at the end: it may be more necessary to add that there is no scandal, but at the same time no prunes ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... attitude on the part of the members of the club and its servants was an atmosphere in which a cataleptic fit would scarcely warrant unofficial interference; much less would merely mawkish or absent-minded behavior attract attention. That was the function of the club—to provide sanctuary for personal whims and idiosyncrasies; of course, always within ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... why in spite of all authority, modern readers find it difficult to read Richardson through. We know, at any rate, how it affected one great contemporary. This incessant strain upon the moral in question (a very questionable moral it is) struck Fielding as mawkish and unmanly. Richardson seemed to be a narrow, straitlaced preacher, who could look at human nature only from the conventional point of view, and thought that because he was virtuous there should be no more cakes ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... not the apologist of the godless rake, the defender of the roue; but I have small patience with those mawkish purists who persist in measuring men and women by the same standard of morals. We might as well apply the same code to the fierce Malay who runs amuck and to McAllister's fashionable pismires. We might as wisely bring to the same judgment bar Bengal's ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... it's a very unhealthy sign of any place to have all the girls sighing and groaning about one or two— dying to possess their autographs, and kissing their photographs, and framing them, and putting them up in their rooms. I hate that mawkish kind of nonsense," continued Miss Day, looking very virtuous, "and I think Miss Heath ought to know about it, and put a stop to it. I ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... sloth, in one prevails, That scarce his hanging paunch behind him trails: The people's looks are different as their kings', Some sparkle bright, and glitter in their wings; Others look loathsome and diseased with sloth, Like a faint traveller, whose dusty mouth Grows dry with heat, and spits a mawkish froth. The first are best—— From their o'erflowing combs you'll often press Pure luscious sweets, that mingling in the glass 120 Correct the harshness of the racy juice, And a rich flavour through the wine diffuse. But when ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... so, be so loved, yet so mistaken! What had I on earth to do With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... ones, always the latest is worse than the last. What modern civilization save this of ours could have produced Christian Science, or the New Thought, or Billy Sundayism? What other could have yielded up the mawkish bumptiousness of the Uplift? What other could accept gravely the astounding imbecilities of English philanthropy and American law? The native output of fallacy and sentimentality, in fact, is not enough ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... confined only to the half-wits of the sex. But once the man is definitely committed, she frequently unbends a bit, if only as a relief from the strain of a fixed purpose, and so, throwing off her customary inhibitions, she, indulges in the luxury of a more or less forced and mawkish sentiment. It is, however, almost unheard of for her to permit herself this relaxation before the sentimental intoxication of the man is assured. To do otherwise—that is, to confess, even post facto, to an anterior descent,—would ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... "if I understand you, that it is a piece of mawkish hypocrisy to shake the head and throw up the eyes at Mr. this or that for being the head of a religious party, while we return thanks for our pure and reformed Church; because purity, reformation, apostolicity, toleration, all these boasts and glories of the Church ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... everything, Anne. Thank you for believing in me." That was all. No word of sympathy, no mawkish mumbling of regret, no allusion to his own loss. He looked again into her eyes, this time in quest of the motive that urged her to make this unnecessary declaration. Was there a deeper significance to be attached to ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... other physical peculiarities, they argue, the problem would be comparatively simple; but what can we say to his ignorance, shiftlessness, poverty, and crime? can a self-respecting group hold anything but the least possible fellowship with such persons and survive? and shall we let a mawkish sentiment sweep away the culture of our fathers or the hope of our children? The argument so put is of great strength, but it is not a whit stronger than the argument of thinking Negroes: granted, they reply, that the condition of our masses is bad; there is certainly on the ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... forbids much indulgence in conceits such as Tennyson sometimes falls into, and the execution is more finished than his volumes always are: there are very few prosaic lines, and few instances of that excess of naturalness which degenerates into the mawkish. The nature of the plan—which, after all, is substantially though not in form a set of sonnets on a single theme—is favorable to those pictures of common landscape and of daily life, redeemed from triviality by genial feeling and a perception ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... barque triumphantly to harbour. To drop metaphor, the captious or the forgetful may call the whole sentimental—as if one could write about boys and leave out what is the greatest common factor of the race. But the sentiment is never mawkish. There is indeed an atmosphere of clean, fresh-smelling youth about the book that is vastly refreshing. Friendship and games make up the matter of it; there is nothing that I could repeat by way of plot; but if you care for a close and sympathetic study of boyhood at its happiest ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 12, 1916 • Various
... Sympathy no doubt he missed, and he used to regard the early death of his brother Robert as the loss of his best friend. For his father's character he had a profound admiration as an embodiment of all the manly virtues, stoical rather than Christian, never mawkish nor effeminate. ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... of the lower classes has been noted, but it is not confined to them. The premarital relations of all but the most cultured and experienced, are marked by a mawkish sweetness which is all the more noticeable in contrast with the dull routine of saving and slaving which follows. She begins by being photographed sitting in her hero's lap, and ends by sitting on ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... and wrong, and a selection of the right; in their studies of the science of evil they had progressed much further than this, and had taught themselves to believe that that which other men called virtue was, on its own account, to be regarded as mawkish, insipid, and useless for such purposes as the acquisition of money or pleasure; whereas vice was, on its own account, to be preferred, as offering the only road to those things which they were desirous ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... fellow who had been second captain of the mizen-top on board of H.M.S. "Vengeance;" but not liking the style of discipline, especially—as he said—the irritating substitutes for flogging which have been introduced of late years into the Navy, to suit the mawkish sensibility of public opinion in England, as well as the clamours of the all-ruling Press, he took the first opportunity of running away, to seek his fortune in the Far West. He observed to me one day, "Those chaps ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... out- and-out capitalist to the most radical of socialists. It was not in him to be radical, for he was steadied by a quietly running balance wheel.... He was stubborn, too. What he wanted was to be fair, to give what was due—and to receive what was HIS due.... He could not be swayed by mawkish sentimental sympathy, nor could he be bullied. Perhaps he was stiff-necked, but he was a man who must judge of the right or wrong of a condition himself. Perhaps he was too much that way, but his ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... quicker they did so the better. If the North cared to recall them, a vigorous policy would react more promptly upon the Republicans. He did not go into this movement with foreboding or half-heartedness. There was no mawkish sentiment—no melancholy in his make-up. His convictions mastered him, and his energy moved him to redoubled effort. On the 22d of December he sent his famous telegram to his "fellow-citizens of Georgia." He recited that his resolutions had been treated with derision and contempt by the Republican ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... actual words. When Scott's version touches on an incident known in history, but not given in the English version, the encounter between Douglas and Percy at Newcastle (Scott, vii., viii.), Colonel Elliot suspects the interpolator (and well he may, for the verses are mawkish and modern, not earlier than the eighteenth century imitations or remaniements which occur in ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... indeed, who deny to Dickens the gift of pathos altogether. Such persons acknowledge, for the most part a little unwillingly, that he was a master of humour of the broader, more obvious kind. But they assert that all his sentiment is mawkish and overstrained, and that his efforts to compel our tears are so obvious as to defeat their own purpose. Now it will be clear, from what I have said about Little Nell, that I am capable of appreciating the force of any criticism of this kind; nay, that I go so far as ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... kindly, forbearing look in them promised that his understanding would not be stiffened by harshness, that it would be accompanied by sympathy so keen that, were it not for the hint of humour which they also held, he might almost have been mawkish, a sentimentalist too easily dissolved in tears. His thick eyebrows clung closely to his eyes, and gave him a look of introspection that mitigated the shrewdness of his pointing nose. There was some weakness, but not much, ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... is generally a married lady who discovers that her husband is not the man she should have married. From this centre-point the web of intrigue is woven. Mawkish sentiment and false pity are aroused. A glamour is thrown over the sins and the sinners. Tears are demanded for libertines and their crimes are gilded. Virtue becomes a tyranny; the marriage bond an intolerable yoke, and the divorce court—which is truly ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... for which the distinguished coadjutors are responsible, reek with mawkish sentimentality, inane vapidity, or vulgar buffoonery. Most of the leading characters are duplicated or triplicated. Miranda has a sister, Dorinda, who is repellently coquettish. This new creation finds a lover in another new character, a brainless youth, Hippolito, who has never before seen ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... and incident, though not enough for the novel. The characters, if not new, are more strongly drawn—their colouring is finer—their humour is richer and broader, and as they are from the last century, so their drawing reminds us forcibly of the writers of the same period. There is none of the mawkish affectation of the writing of the present day, as coinage of words and fantasies of phrases which will scarcely be understood, much less relished, twenty years hence. But the style throughout is plain, sensible, and natural, free from caricature, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various
... mine, I grant you: but only so yours and mine that, to our eternal blessedness, we embrace,—to our eternal loss, we let them slip! We add to them, or we take away from them, under peril of GOD'S curse.... Away too with that mawkish sentimentality which can find no better object for its sympathy than the hardened blasphemer, and the confirmed sceptic! My sympathy shall be reserved for those who have never so offended, but are, on the contrary, full of precious promise;—for the young and as yet inexperienced;—for ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... benign, With candour, care, and judgment thee peruse: Thy faults to kind oblivion he'll consign; Nor to thy merit will his praise refuse. Thou may'st be searched for polish'd words and verse By flippant spouter, emptiest of praters: Tell him to seek them in some mawkish verse: My periods all are rough as nutmeg graters. The doggerel poet, wishing thee to read, Reject not; let him glean thy jests and stories. His brother I, of lowly sembling breed: Apollo grants to few Parnassian glories. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... sufficiently redeems Pope's writings from the charge of a commonplace worldliness. Certainly he is not one of the 'genial' school, whose indiscriminate benevolence exudes over all that they touch. There is nothing mawkish in his philanthropy. Pope was, if anything, too good a hater; 'the portentous cub never forgives,' said Bentley; but kindliness is all the more impressive when not too widely diffused. Add to this his hearty contempt for pomposities, humbugs, and stupidities ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... of such books as will sell rapidly. Novels and light reading of all kinds are thus multiplied, to the exclusion of more valuable books, which sell slowly; and in consequence, an entire nation becomes infected with the depraved appetite of mawkish school-girls. But these novels must be printed at the lowest rate; for being unprotected, some one will bring them out as cheaply as possible, and he who does so command the market. Thus book-making becomes a mean and debased art; and books are crowded upon the public, at prices ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... not lost, there are still peculiarities which pervade the whole, and have, as I think, justly been called a Scripture style. One of their most striking characteristics, by the way, is a severely simple taste; a uniform freedom from the vulgarities of conception, the exaggerated sentiment, the mawkish nonsense and twaddle, which disfigure such an infinitude of volumes of religious biography and fiction which have been written since. Could such men attain this uniform elevation? Could such men have invented those extraordinary fictions,—the miracles and the parables? Could they, ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... will probably be called false, forced or "maudlin sentiment" here in England, where the mawkish sentiment of the music-halls, and the popular applause it receives, is enough to make a healthy man sick, and is only equalled by music-hall vulgarity. So I'll ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... our Englishwomen of the present day. Our daughters should be educated to be wives, but, forsooth, they should never wish to be wooed! The very idea is but a remnant of the tawdry sentimentality of an age in which the mawkish insipidity of the women was the reaction from the vice of that preceding it. That our girls are in quest of husbands, and know well in what way their lines in life should be laid, is a fact which none can dispute. Let men be taught to recognise ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... very little of poetic impulse or of dramatic verve. His best scenes interest us more for their good sense than for any more stirring qualities. His nearest approach to a strong character is the paterfamilias himself, who is certainly much less "woolly and mawkish"[52] than his pendant in Diderot. Next one may place the artist Wehrmann. Karl is a poor stick, Amaldi is rather colorless, and Lotte would be quite insipid but for her impending motherhood, on which everything is made to turn. Such as it was, however, the play excited the cordial ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... crust velvety with white flour, and an iced cake that any other nation would have thought prodigious save for a wedding or a christening, while she smiled deprecatingly at him, as though she felt these were mawkish foods to be buying in the company of a friend of bruisers. But in the butcher's shop the Saturday night fever seized her, and presently Yaverland, who had been staring at a bullock's carcase and liking the lovely springing ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... hurting her—and my tongue, horrified, tastes the slimy mawkish stuff. I choke and spit, my poor face is convulsed and the end of this torture is long in coming.... You've seen me afterwards dragging myself around, melancholy, my head hanging, listening to the unwholesome glouglou the ...
— Barks and Purrs • Colette Willy, aka Colette
... was next examined. The general air of gloom—hopeless gloom—was depressing. Such mawkish sentimentality and despair; such inane and mortifying confessions; such longings for a lover to come; such sighings over a lover departed; such cravings for "only"—"only" a grave in some dark, dank solitude. As Mrs. Dodge puts it, "Pegasus generally feels inclined to pace ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... give him the credit of the fact—from no mawkish feeling of his own, but from force of public opinion, resorted to this secret manner of eking out his daily bread, and acting out his part of the fictitious gentleman. During one of his morning lounges—accidentally, ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... and honest history of any country the historian should, that he may avoid overpraise and silly and mawkish sentiment, reside in a foreign country, or be so situated that he may put on a false moustache and get away as soon as the advance copies have been sent ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... soft heart and romantic spirit lead him to exaggerate. In such passages as the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop and the interviews between Dora and David in David Copperfield, Dickens becomes mawkish and sentimental. While his power of portraiture is amazing, he often overleaps the line of character drawing and makes side-splitting caricatures of his men and women. They are remembered too often by a limp or a mannerism of speech, or by ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... Restraint in such matters was the rule. If you said, "It is a fine day," or "The night is as clear as a bell," you had gone quite as far as the proprieties permitted. Love was also a forbidden word. You might say, "I love pie," but to say "I love Bettie," was mawkish if not actually improper. ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... Of course one cannot tell it all down to each mawkish word of humbugging sentiment. There are her letters, and what I want you to remember is that I never asked her to be my wife, and that no consideration on earth shall induce me to become her husband. Though all the duchesses in England ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... tastes like chestnuts, looks like cocoa-nut, and cuts like old cheese. Whale-blubber tastes like raw bacon and it cannot very easily be cooked, as it would liquify too soon. It is a good deal better than seal-oil, which to a southern palate is sweet, mawkish, and sickly. Seal-oil tastes as lamp-oil smells. But you can approach without a qualm boiled beluga-skin, which is the skin of the white whale. In its soft and gelatinous form it ranks among northern delicacies with beaver-tail and moose-nose, being exceedingly tasty and ever ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... mislead him. Could they have been real, the effusions of her mind, the breathings of her heart, directed to an actual O. B., and that O. B., his brother? They had not been meant for him. He had read enough of the mawkish lines to be sure of that. None of the allusions fitted in with the facts of their mutual intercourse. But they might with those of another man; they might with the possible acts and affections of Oswald whose temperament ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... that primarily moves us. We are urged to action by a beautiful ideal. The motive force must be likewise true and beautiful. It is love of country that inspires us; not hate of the enemy and desire for full satisfaction for the past. Pause awhile. We are all irritated now and then by some mawkish interpretation of our motive force that makes it seem a weakly thing, invoked to help us in evading difficulties instead of conquering them. Love in any genuine form is strong, vital and warm-blooded. Let it not be confused ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... not compliment their pass-time, or rather kill-time, with the name of reading. Call it rather a sort of beggarly day-dreaming, during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness, and a little mawkish sensibility; while the whole materiel and imagery of the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera obscura manufactured at the printing office, which pro tempore fixes, reflects, and transmits the moving phantasms of one mans delirium, so as to people the barrenness of a hundred ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... pears, and, of all things in the world, parsnips. I have lately been given of this wine to taste. It is a cordial rather than a wine and on the good rather than the bad side. The addition of spices is admitted; nevertheless out of a particularly mawkish vegetable is made a palatable drink. "Out of the strong come forth sweetness." After it I shall be prepared to find a potable in the banana, which is favoured by many people, of whom I am not one. But I don't find it nastier than the parsnip, and it is evident that fermentation ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... and dancing with all his might; and finally, the "Venus de Medici," a slender young girl with a small delicate head, not a goddess like her sister of Milo, but a perfect mortal and the work of some Praxiteles fond of "hetairae," at ease in a nude state and free from that somewhat mawkish delicacy and bashful coquetry which its copies, and the restored arms with their thin fingers by Bernini, seem to impose ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... Podophyllum peltatum. In the wilds of Simcoe this fruit may have seemed tolerable from the absence of others more desirable. Gray says, "It is slightly acid, mawkish, eaten by pigs and boys." Cf. Florula Bostioniensis, by Jacob Bigelow, M.D. Boston, 1824, pp. ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain V3 • Samuel de Champlain
... stop him in his headlong course of wickedness. Arrest, whether by the agents of the law or in some other way, is the first step. The most spiritual concern for a degraded and demoralized fellow-being does not exclude the sharp intervention implied in arrest, for the spiritual attitude is not mawkish or incompatible with the ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... pool never dry—and the thirst and the water are both blessed." It was in the Greeks particularly that he found this blessed water; he loved "a fresh air" which he found "about the Greek things even in translations"; he loved their freedom from the mawkish and the rancid. The tale of David in the Bible, the "Odyssey," Sophocles, AEschylus, Shakespeare, Scott; old Dumas in his chivalrous note; Dickens rather than Thackeray, and the "Tale of Two Cities" out ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... walk. All day, he had been "on pins and needles," and now, although it was nine o'clock, he could not remain in the house any longer. He felt that his head would burst if he stayed indoors. The house seemed to be unusually stuffy, and the spectacle of Lizzie gazing at him with mawkish interest, made him wish to rise up and assault her. He had fidgetted about the room, taking a book from its shelf and then, without reading in it, replacing it, until his mother, observing him with cautious eyes, proposed that he should ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... however, that there are those whose lives are denials of this divinity. They are incapable of true friendship, and they, in prosperous days, deride the sentiment involved and consider any reference to such matters as silly and mawkish. These blustering heroes, however, are the ones who shriek the loudest when fate places ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... have had good times together," she said. "We were never mawkish; we were just good citizens of Little Rivers, weren't we? And, Jack, every mortal of us is partly what he is born and the rest is what he can do to bend inheritance to his will. But we can never quite transform our inheritance and if ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... wrong as that poor child did. The Rev. Hartzell, D. D., is the cause; and if you go down on Fourth Street, or East Third you can see the effect; egotism, bigotry, selfishness, man-made doctrines and creeds in the pulpit; saloons and brothels on the street; church doors closed over a mawkish sentimentality, and men and women dying without shelter and without God. Truly we need a preacher, with a wilderness training like John the Baptist who will show us the way of the Lord, rather than ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... the fistic art From mawkish softness guards the British heart." The study of the betting British curse From swift depletion guards the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 29, 1891 • Various
... he has contrived where there was an opening to introduce some probable details. But as he proceeds further in his work, his talent becoming duller—his extravagancies are worse sustained and scarcely ever original. Sometimes he writes mere mawkish nonsense, and at others he simply copies Lucian, as in the case of his making a voyage to the moon, and then sailing into a ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... will that she should marry the young Irish nobleman, the Chevalier Redmond de Balibari. The notification was made in my presence; and though the young Countess said 'Never!' and fell down in a swoon at her lady's feet, I was, you may be sure, entirely unconcerned at this little display of mawkish sensibility, and felt, indeed, now that ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... when he chooses, a human goodness, not offensively perfect, not preaching, not mawkish, but high-minded and engaging. There are two such types in "Kings in Exile," the Queen and Elysee Meraut, essentially honest both of them, thinking little of self, and sustained by lofty purpose. Naturalistic novelists generally (and M. Zola in particular), ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... psychological moment; and being everywhere read during the months from January to July, 1776, it was precisely suited to convince men, not so much that they ought to declare independence, as that they ought to declare it gladly, ought to cast off lightly their former false and mawkish affection for the "mother country" and once for all to make an end of backward yearning looks over the shoulder at this ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... sacred should not have gone by the board—things such as filial respect, gentle manners, chivalry, obedience. We are undoubtedly in an unpleasant state of incompletion as a nation to-day, but by no means in one of decadence. And if only the two great dangers do not swamp us—a mawkish and hysterical humanitarianism, and the heedless pursuit of pleasure as the only end—the upward tendency of progress is bound to go on. Inventions, aided by science in all its ramifications, have made life pleasant, and all these benefits have come too quickly for the recipients to be prepared ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... who intends to marry without love. As she dissected him it occurred to her that Sprudell exemplified every petty feminine prejudice she had. She disliked his small, red mouth, which had a way of fixing itself in an expression of mawkish sentimentality when he looked at her, and there was that in the amorous, significant light in his infantile blue eyes which sickened her very soul. She disapproved of his toddling walk, his fat, stooped shoulders, his spats and general ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... best for the average individual to avoid literature that deals with the morbid and pathological, that depicts and analyzes abnormal psychological conditions. Such studies are better left for alienists. Literature of mawkish sentimentality should also be avoided. Within the range of sound literature there is a wide choice of abundant material affording ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... like thine inspirer, beer, Tho' stale, not ripe; tho' thin, yet never clear; So sweetly mawkish, and so smoothly dull; Heady, not strong; and ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... of virtue and decency. There is in him absolutely nothing loose or obscene, and yet he is entirely free from the milk-and-water propriety which sometimes irritates the reader in such books as Habington's Castara. Wither is never mawkish, though he is never loose, and the swing of his verse at its best is only equalled by the rush of thought and feeling which animates it. As it is perhaps necessary to justify this high opinion, we may as well give the "Alresford Pool" above noted. It is like Browne, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... cannot say. The thoughts of Youth are long, long thoughts. What George was thinking was that the late King Herod had been unjustly blamed for a policy which had been both statesmanlike and in the interests of the public. He was blaming the mawkish sentimentality of the modern legal system which ranks the evisceration and secret burial of small boys ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... 'Complete Duty of Man' would, if nothing else did, prevent his name from sinking into oblivion. It deserves to live for its intrinsic merits. It is one of the few instances of a devotional book which is not unreadable. It is not, like some of the class, full of mawkish sentimentality; nor, like others, so high-flown that it cannot be used for practical purposes by ordinary mortals without a painful sense of unreality; nor, like others, so intolerably dull as to disgust the reader with the subject which it designs to recommend. It is written in a fine, manly, ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... trembling on the verge of summer? It seemed so to the curate, who was not given to sad, still less to sentimental moralizing over the graves. From such moods his heart recoiled. To him they were weak and mawkish, and in him they would have been treacherous. No grave was to him the place where a friend was lying; it was but a cenotaph—the place where the ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... Mr. Hannaway Wells reflected, "whether the present generation is not inclined to be mawkish with regard to human life. History has shown us the marvellous benefits which have accrued to the greatest nations through the lessening of population ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the hour. They fondle and kiss until beholders are fairly nauseated, and in a few weeks, perhaps, they do not speak as they pass each other, and their caresses are lavished on others. Such friendships are not only silly, they are even dangerous. They are a weakening of moral fiber, a waste of mawkish sentimentality. They may be even worse. Such friendship may degenerate even into a species of ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... prepared from my house. I neede no allurement nor sawce, my stomacke is good enough to digest raw meat: And whereas with these preparatives and flourishes, or preambles, they thinke to sharpen my taste or stir my stomacke, they cloy and make it wallowish. [Footnote: Mawkish.] Shall the privilege of times excuse me from this sacrilegious boldnesse, to deem Platoes Dialogismes to be as languishing, by over-filling and stuffing his matter? And to bewaile the time that a man who had so many thousands ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... its leaves a resemblance to a duck's foot (Anapodophyllum); but equally imaginative American children call them green umbrellas, and declare they unfurl only during April showers. In July, a sweetly mawkish many-seeded fruit, resembling a yellow egg-tomato, delights the uncritical palates of the little people, who should be warned, however, against putting any other part of this poisonous, drastic plant in their ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... ages, this system formed the great incentive to martial daring, whereas when idealized in Beatrice it became almost undistinguishable from the ferveurs of religion, we find it with Tasso sinking into a weak and mawkish sensuality. More than any other sentimentalist Tasso justified his title by 'fiddling harmonics on the strings of sensualism,' and it may be added that the ear is constantly catching ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... may mention the leara, a species of Anacardium or cashew nut (the lurgala of Port Essington) which, after being well roasted to destroy its acridity has somewhat the taste of a filbert—the elari (a species of Wallrothia) the size of an apricot, soft and mealy, with a nearly insipid but slightly mawkish taste—wobar, the small, red, mealy fruit of Mimusops kaukii—and the apiga (a species of Eugenia) a red, apple-like fruit, the pericarp of which has a pleasantly acid taste. The fruit of two species of pandanus yields a sweet mucilage when sucked, and imparts it to ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... the world, in which boys take a prominent part. It is one of the fruits of the author's extended travels, and is manly, simple, and healthy—a very good sort of book for those for whom it is intended, which, in these days of mawkish or feverish "juvenile" literature, is saying ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... overcoming man's distaste for repulsive kinds of labor. Meanwhile men at large still live as they always have lived, under a pain-and-fear economy—for those of us who live in an ease-economy are but an island in the stormy ocean—and the whole atmosphere of present-day Utopian literature tastes mawkish and dishwatery to people who still keep a sense for life's more bitter flavors. It suggests, in truth, ubiquitous inferiority. Inferiority is always with us, and merciless scorn of it is the keynote of ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... myself just strong enough to dislike sentiment, to turn faint in the sickly, mawkish air. But I am not strong enough to charge it with vivid life. Moreover, the danger of a strong character taking up the anti-ascetic position is that he is apt to degenerate into a man like Goethe, who plucked the ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... imagine that he was overhearing a human being in conversation. After two or three minutes' silence the voice spoke again, and at some length, apparently repeating several times an affectionate series of ejaculations with a cooing emphasis that was unutterably mawkish and offensive. The sickliness of the voice, its falling intonations and its strange indelicacy, combined with a die-away softness and meretricious refinement, made the Father's flesh creep. Yet he could not distinguish any words, nor could ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... to say,' Shubin continued passionately, 'that I am not worthy of other society, that I am her equal; that I am as vain, and silly and petty as that mawkish German girl? Is ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... frail stripling, with cheeks smooth as a girl's and candid and charming eyes, Lupin was losing his ordinary self-assurance. Several times over, I observed traces of embarrassment in him. He hesitated, did not attack frankly, wasted time in mawkish ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... richest part of our stock are the Scottish and Border ballads. Beside them, most of our mawkish English ballads look pale and withered. The reason, perhaps, may be traced to the effect of natural surroundings on literature. The English ballads were printed or written down at a period which is early compared with the date of collection of the Scottish ballads. In fact, it is only ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... woman's expense to save his life. With a man of his sort, the girl is to blame nine times out of ten. I wouldn't give a fippenny bit for a man no other girl wanted. There is a large class of women you don't know yet, Rita. You are too young. The world has a batch of mawkish theories about them, but there are also a few very cold facts kept in the dark,—lodge secrets among the sex. Dic is modest, and modesty in an attractive man is dangerous—the most dangerous thing in the world, Rita. Deliver me from a shy, attractive ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... Wells, almost never; now and then he glances at it ironically, in an episodic manner. Hale White (Mark Rutherford), never. Rudyard Kipling, rarely; when he touches it, the reason is usually because it happens to embrace the military caste, and the result is usually such mawkish stories as "William the Conqueror" and "The Brushwood Boy." J.M. Barrie, never. W.W. Jacobs, never. Murray Gilchrist, never. Joseph Conrad, never. Leonard Merrick, very slightly. George Moore, in a "Drama in Muslin," wrote a masterpiece about it twenty years ago; "Vain Fortune" ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... missouriensis, and O. basilaris, which are compact and dwarf, and bear numerous large, brightly-coloured flowers. The fruits of Opuntias, or, at least, some of them, are edible, and to some palates they are very agreeable. We have tasted them, and consider they are mawkish and insipid—not much better than very poor gooseberries. Sir Joseph Hooker has compared them to Pumpkins. They are pear-shaped, with a thick, spine-covered rind, containing green, yellow, or red pulp, with small, hard ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... rosy English gentleman, who had just been into Leicestershire for a week's hunting, deliver the opinion that the vulgar Bulgarians had really not been massacred half enough; and this in spite of the fact that one had long since made the observation that for a good plain absence of mawkish sentimentality a certain type of rosy English gentleman is nowhere to be matched. On the other hand, it was not very comfortable to think of the measureless misery in which these interesting populations were actually steeped, and one had to admit that the deliberate ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... lineament. The highest quality of art is to conceal itself: these peasants of Schiller's are what every one imagines he could imitate successfully; yet in the hands of any but a true and strong-minded poet they dwindle into repulsive coarseness or mawkish insipidity. Among our own writers, who have tried such subjects, we remember none that has succeeded equally with Schiller. One potent but ill-fated genius has, in far different circumstances and with far other means, shown that he could have equalled him: the Cotter's Saturday Night of Burns ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... features as he listened to the sounds in the room. In the darkness the blue flames leaped and danced, the raisins were snapped and snatched from hand to hand, scattering fragments of flame hither and thither. The children shouted as the fiery sweetmeats burnt away the mawkish taste of the furmety. Mr. Skratdj cried that they were spoiling the carpet; Mrs. Skratdj complained that he had spilled some brandy on her dress. Mr. Skratdj retorted that she should not wear dresses so susceptible of damage in the ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... nothing fantastic, nothing mawkish, nothing unmanly about this belief, but only the simple faith of a steady soul and a perfectly clear brain. It was good to see how it braced a strong man for life to face Death ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... whatever the present popular mawkish sentimental-mongers may write to the contrary, that these exhibitions, when happening rarely, tend, in a great measure, to restrain the passions of the evil-disposed, although some of them may think it bold, among their hardened associates, to turn ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... the standard of beauty. Of course we cannot deny to human fat and lean an equal superiority over beef, mutton, and pork. It is plain that our meat-eating ancestors would think in this way, and, being unrestrained by the mawkish sentiment attendant upon high civilization, would act habitually upon the obvious suggestion. A priori, therefore, it is ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... small Scotch boy, when he asks leave of his parents to present the pious little book—a gift to himself from an aunt to a little sick friend, hoping probably that the friend's chastened condition will make him more lenient towards this mawkish form of literature. The parents expostulate, pointing out to their son how ungrateful he is, and how ungracious it would be to part with his aunt's gift. Then the boy can contain himself no longer. He bursts out, ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... my only son? (He claps his hands. The slaves hurry in to the table.) No more of this mawkish reveling: away with all this stuff: shut it out of my sight and be off with you. (The slaves begin to remove the table; and the curtains are drawn, shutting in the colonnade.) You understand ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... 1912, in answering the charge that Socialism undermines patriotism, says: "So it does, and is proud of it, if by patriotism is meant that mawkish sentiment which causes a man, for the sum of $15 a month, to go out and get himself killed in defense of a country of which he owns not a single foot and can never hope to own any. If a wage slave is paid only enough to live on, anyhow, ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... found—on the contrary, in every sentence the fool scribbles, a glaring argument is shown in favour of his being put to a lingering and cruel death—the fool who keeps gossiping every week in the year, penny-a-line-wise, with a gawky face and a mawkish mind, about God's creatures to whom reason has been denied, but instinct given, in order that they may be happy on moor and mountain, in the hedge-roots and on the tops of heaven-kissing trees—by the side ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... for I think that the words used relative to him and Laura in Murray's Handbook are not quite just. Speaking of Vaucluse, the author says: "It is more agreeable to contemplate Petrarch in these haunts, as the laborious student retired from the world, than as the mawkish lover sighing for a ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... eye for Nature. His poems are full of disdain of the world and joy in Nature,[3] longings for death and lamentations over sin; he delighted in personifications of abstract ideas, childish playing with words and feelings, and sentimental enthusiasm. But mawkish and canting as he was apt to be, he often shewed a fine appreciation of detail. He was even—a rare ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... all that he had to tell about the journey, and we do not need a repetition of it. Of course there, are touches of genius. No writing of Bunyan's could be wholly without it. But the rough simplicity is gone, and instead of it there is a tone of sentiment which is almost mawkish. Giants, dragons, and angelic champions carry us into a spurious fairy land, where the knight-errant is a preacher in disguise. Fair ladies and love matches, however decorously chastened, suit ill with the sternness of the mortal conflict between ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... forth. The faults are bad enough; but the heavenly virtues carry them all off triumphantly. There is no creation like Arthur in the whole realm of poetry; he is all angelic love and gentleness, and yet neither mawkish nor unnatural; his fears make him real to us, and the horror of his situation allows us to accept his exquisite pleading as possible. We need only think of Tennyson's May Queen, or of his unspeakable Arthur, ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... because we were not allowed to conclude it. Well, if, some years afterwards, the romance fall again in our way, and we open at the page where we left off, we cry, in the maturity of our sober judgment, 'Mawkish stuff!—is this the same thing that I once thought so ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the present occasion and later, more philosophically analytic of his impressions than those of her countrymen she had hitherto encountered in her new home: the latter, in regard to such impressions, usually exhibited either a profane levity or a tendency to mawkish idealism. ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... pleasures of love or wine, is better than his sentimental and romantic vein. His Irish melodies are not free from affectation and a certain sickliness of pretension. His serious descriptions are apt to run into flowery tenderness. His pathos sometimes melts into a mawkish sensibility, or crystallizes into all the prettinesses of allegorical language, and glittering hardness of external imagery. But he has wit at will, and of the first quality. His satirical and burlesque poetry is his best: it is first-rate. His Twopenny ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... This mawkish element unfortunately survives in much of the author's later verse. But even in this volume there are indications of force, and command. The Prayer of Nature, indeed, though previously written, was not included in the edition before the notice of the ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... of "little John of Saintre and the Lady of the Beautiful Cousins"[86] has not struck all judges, even all English judges,[87] in the same way. Some have thought it mawkish, rhetorical, clumsily imitative of the manners of dead chivalry, and the like. Others, admitting it to be a late and "literary" presentation of the stately society it describes, rank it much higher as such. Its author ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... sinners," said Augustine cheerfully. "What did they want?—a present joy: purely and simply that: they sacrificed everything to it—their own and other people's futures: what's that but sin? There is so much mawkish rubbish talked and written about such persons. They were pathetic, of course, most sinners are; that particular sin, of course, may be so associated and bound up with beautiful things;—fidelity, and real love may make such a part of it, that people ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Democratic National Convention as a candidate for the Presidency. Those who recall the way in which "the boy orator of the Platte'' became the Democratic candidate for the Chief Magistracy over seventy millions of people, on account of a few half-mawkish, half- blasphemous phrases in a convention speech, can bear witness to the necessity of a reform in this particular—a reform which will forbid a sensation-seeking city mob to usurp the function of the whole ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... sonnets which he had laboriously copied out of his comic collections. It was considerable trouble, but on the whole he was inclined to think it paid, and it did, especially when he culminated by fitting music to several of the most mawkish effusions, and insisting on her playing and singing them to him. As the poor girl, who felt that out of common politeness she could not refuse, toiled wearily through this martyrdom, writhing with secret disgust at every ...
— Potts's Painless Cure - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... his delineation of the character was highly creditable to his talents. For the love part, little more can be done by a good actor, than by a good reader;—as poetry, it is soft, and sweet, and flowing; as a practical representation of that passion it is mawkish: yet, in the performance of Master Payne, it was not entirely destitute of interest. In all the rest; in every scene with Siffredi, particularly in his warm expostulations with the honest, but mistaken old statesman; in his subsequent indignation and despair; in his lofty bearing and menaces ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... lesson to them, and I hate to think of any more people being killed. But, of course, if Nelson had not had the nerve to fire, just like William Tell, the man would have blown my brains out, and as you know, Mamma, I have always despised mawkish sentiment, and I would rather he was dead than me, so I shan't let myself think a thing more about it, only to be deeply and profoundly grateful to Nelson for saving ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... de coco" still survive in Paris. "Coco" had nothing to do with cocoa, but was a most mawkish beverage compounded principally of liquorice and water. The attraction about it lay in the great tank the vendor carried strapped to his back. This tank was covered with red velvet and gold tinsel, and was surmounted with a number of little ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... observe that I am not Fourier. If you mix me up with that mawkish theoretical twaddler you simply prove that you know nothing of my manuscript, though it has been in your hands. As for your vengeance, let me tell you that it's a mistake to cock your pistol: that's absolutely against your interests at ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... better furniture—but neither to room nor furniture so clean. There was a wholesomeness and purity everywhere about her, very welcome to the lady-eyes with which Alice was born; for it is God that makes ladies, not stupid society and its mawkish distinctions. One brief moment she felt as if she had gained the haven of her rest, for she lay at peace, and nothing gnawed. But suddenly a pang shot through her heart, and she knew that some harassing thought was at hand: pain was her portion, and ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... SHOULD POSSESS A DECIDED CHARACTER; and whether sharp or sweet, savoury or plain, they should carry out their names in a distinct manner, although, of course, not so much flavoured as to make them too piquant on the one hand, or too mawkish on ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... way alone. You won't despise me for being mawkish to-night?" he asked. "I haven't had the chance ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... struck with the author's knowledge of the human heart, and the power he possesses of stirring up its deepest and gentlest sympathies. His prolixity, indeed, it is not so easy to get over. This little story fills about twenty-five quarto pages; and abounds, of course, with mawkish sentiment, and details of preposterous minuteness. When the tale is told, the travellers take their staffs, and end their first day's journey, without further adventure, at ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... be spoiled by too little or too much boiling; if too little, then the Drink will always taste raw, mawkish, and be unwholsome in the Stomach, where, instead of helping to dilute and digest our Food, it will cause Obstructions, Colicks, Head-achs, and other misfortunes; besides, all such underboil'd Drinks ...
— The London and Country Brewer • Anonymous
... had recommended—something tawdry and sentimental, with a cheap accompaniment. He placed the ballad on the rest and started going through it to get himself in the vein. But to-night the air seemed to breathe an ineffable melancholy, the words—no longer mawkish—had grown infinitely pathetic: ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... left the island soon afterwards to wander away back to Eastern Polynesia, but his continued fits of melancholy annoyed the girl so much that she one day quarrelled with and left him, and made a fresh matrimonial engagement with a man less given to mawkish sentiment. ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... incontestable proofs that the negro can be civilised, and a high responsibility rests upon them as the representatives of possible progress. But hitherto the African, as will presently appear, has not had fair play. The petting and pampering process, the spirit of mawkish reparation, and the coddling and high-strung sentimentality so deleterious to the tone of the colony, were errors of English judgment pure and simple. We can easily ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... within the historical period of man's existence. My theme expands, and I am departing from the purposes of this work; yet I cannot forbear the expression of opinion as to the causes of this result. I know I shall incur the deepest censure from the professors of a mawkish philanthropy, and a hypocritical religion which is cursing with its cant the very sources of this unparalleled progress, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... heroine, assiduous guardians of her "graceful ease and sweetness void of pride." Of that admired world likewise are the lovers that Matthew Prior creates, who woo neither with stormy passion nor with mawkish whining, but in a courtly manner; lovers who deem an epigram a finer tribute than a sigh. So the tender fondness of a middle-aged man for an infant is elevated above the commonplace by assuming the tone ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... theatre, or we will treat her to French wine or Cognac in the Aurelius Garden, but the tickets we will not buy. What sayest thou? Yet, another mug of beer?" and one and another successively having buried their blond whiskers in the mawkish draught, curled them and swaggered off ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... they are!" he was accustomed to cry to his best friend, or the printer's devil, or the office cat, whichever happened to be the handiest. "Life is great enough to say things for itself, without having to be helped out by the mawkish sentimentality of an idiot! Permit us to see actual people, living actual lives, in actual houses, and I should hope we have common-sense enough to draw our own morals!" He usually made these chaotic exclamations after ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... "The author does not, in this instance, attempt to copy any of the higher attributes of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry; but has succeeded perfectly in the imitation of his mawkish affectations of childish simplicity and nursery stammering. We hope it will make him ashamed of his Alice Fell, and the greater part of his last volumes—of which it is by no means a parody, but a very fair, and indeed we think a ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... image, he will be cold and repellent, but to those who know him as he really is he will return their love with all the warmth and purity of his childlike nature. Two things are intolerable to a healthy-minded child—rough brutality and mawkish caressing; Wagner was fated to endure a full share of both. It is touching to read of Wagner's simple affection for those who were around him in humble capacities. Every one who has read his life knows of his kindliness to his domestic ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... lodge a thousand miles from human companionship, only the wild orgies of the savages varied the monotony of dull days and long nights. The winter I spent with the Mandanes was my first in the north. I had not yet learned to take events as the rock takes wave-blows, and was still at that mawkish age when a man is easily filled with profound pity for himself. A month after our arrival, Father Holland left the Mandane village. Eric Hamilton had not yet come; so I felt much like the man whom a gloomy poet describes as earth's last habitant. I had accompanied the priest ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... there is not a doubt; but whether the time has come, or ever will come, is another question. At any rate, to so enlightened a body[3] as I have the honor of addressing, suggestions of methods by which the extent of blindness may be limited will neither be misapplied, nor liable to offend a mawkish sensibility. That the blindness of a large proportion of society is a social evil will not be denied, nor will the right which society has to diminish that proportion be questioned. But how? in a very simple way; by preventing the transmission ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... one of their holy brotherhood. "The Bath church," says the satirist, "is filled with croaking ravens, chattering jays, and devouring cormorants; black-headed fanatics and white-headed 'dreamers of dreams;' the aqua-fortis of mob politics, and the mawkish slip-slop of modern divinity; rank cayenne pepper, and genuine powder of post!" Really a very flattering description of our clerical comforters, but one which, I lament to say, will answer quite as well for 1826, with, perhaps, a little less of enthusiasm in the composition, and some ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... hands with Miss Munnion. Ah, mind the parrot! Moore!" raising her voice to call to the gardener, "is it possible I see that odious pink and white stripe amongst the tulips again?—you know I hate it. The most mawkish, foolish thing! It offends the eye. See that it is rooted up without delay. Miss Munnion, we will now go indoors, and you'll perhaps be kind enough to show this young lady her room, and tell her when we dine and so forth. ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... Eliza was thoroughly disgusted. "What do you want to be so mawkish and sentimental for? Just like your father! You like Timothy, don't ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... did I waste in mawkish sentiment, but setting my teeth hard, I turned away from the river, and back to the trampled ground of our recent conflict. There, with no other witness save the moon, I clad myself in the Marquis's doublet of black velvet; I set his mask of silk upon my face, ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... profess himself a believer in God and in Christ, and detect him in no glaring and willful violation of God's law, we speak of him as a Christian; and, on the other hand, if we hear him or see him denying Christ, either in his words or conduct, we tacitly assume him not to be a Christian. A mawkish charity prevents us from outspeaking in this matter, and from earnestly endeavoring to discern who are Christians and who are not; and this I hold[144] to be one of the chief sins of the Church in the present day; for thus wicked men are put to no shame; and better men are ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... at length comes forth the grand specific, the never-failing nostrum of all state physicians from the days of Draco to the present time. After feeling the pulse, and shaking the head over the patient, prescribing the usual course of warm water and bleeding—the warm water of your mawkish police, and the lancets of your military—these convulsions must terminate in death, the sure consummation of the prescriptions of all political Sangrados. Setting aside the palpable injustice and the certain inefficiency of the bill, are there not capital punishments ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... conceiving myself a hero and a martyr, revelling in an agony of mawkish sentiment concerning the post-mortem grief of my friends. From this at length I snatched myself by calling to mind the many simple Highlanders who had preceded me in the past months without any morbid craving for applause. Back harked my mind to Aileen, imagination spanning the future ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... sun," he said. So the boy was taken through Europe and Asia and learned something of many languages. He became his father's daily companion, and nowhere the father went was it thought wrong for the boy to go also. Conventional morality was considered mawkish. The chief aim of home training was to bring children up in total ignorance, if possible, of the most important facts and functions of life. But it was not possible, and hence suppression, dissimulation, lying, and, under the ban of secret sin, one half ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... arguments have never convinced me. But inasmuch as, without hesitation, in the performance of duty, I have again and again sent good and gallant and upright men to die, it seems to me the height of a folly both mischievous and mawkish to contend that criminals who have deserved death should nevertheless be allowed to shirk it. No brave and good man can properly shirk death; and no criminal who has earned death should be ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... it is not that women are weak or that men are inherently vicious. That doesn't account for a case like this. Then, too, some mawkish people to-day are fond of putting the whole evil on low wages as a cause. It isn't that—alone. It isn't even lack of education or of moral training. Human nature is not so bad in the mass as some good people think. No, don't you, as a reporter, see it? ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... even amongst competent judges. They may still be read, and they have scenes, descriptions, and detached thoughts of real charm, and almost of true beauty. They are not, in any sense, works of art; they are ill constructed, full of the mawkish gush of the Byronic fever, and never were really sincere and genuine products of heart and brain. They were show exercises in the Byronic mode. And, though we may still take them up for an hour for the occasional flashes of genius ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... wants in variety of incident or ease of manner. This necessary defect is observable in his best works, and is still more so in Fleetwood and Mandeville; the one of which, compared with his more admired performances, is mawkish, and the other morbid. Mr. Godwin is also an essayist, an historian—in short, what is he not, that belongs to the character of an indefatigable and accomplished author? His Life of Chaucer would have given celebrity to any man of letters possessed of three thousand a year, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... will never do", he begins in a fury; "the case of Mr. Wordsworth is now manifestly hopeless. We give him up as altogether incurable and beyond the power of criticism." The story of Margaret, indeed, though "it abounds, of course, with mawkish sentiment and details of preposterous minuteness, has considerable pathos". But the other passage which one would have thought must have gone home to every heart—that which describes the communing ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... Maid, the "pastourelle" by Henryson's Robene and Makyne. Perhaps there is nothing quite so good as either in the French originals of both; certainly there is nothing like the union of metrical felicity, romantic conduct, sweet but not mawkish sentiment, and never-flagging interest in the anonymous masterpiece which the ever-blessed Arnold preserved for us in his Chronicle. But the diffused merits—the so-to-speak "class-merits"—of the poems in general are very high indeed: and when the best of the other lyrics—aubades, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... come across him. It reminds one afresh how Art is an embalmer, a magician, whom we can never speak too fair. People duly impressed with this truth are sometimes laughed at for their superstitious tone, which is pronounced, according to the fancy of the critic, mawkish, maudlin or hysterical. But it is really difficult to see how any reiteration of the importance of art can overstate the plain facts. It prolongs, it preserves, it consecrates, it raises from the dead. It conciliates, ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... for beauty. He may miss it through stupidity, or misinterpret it, but he is always asking beauty to enter his life, and I believe that in the end it will come. At Heidelberg I met a fat veterinary surgeon whose voice broke with sobs as he repeated some mawkish poetry. So easy for me to laugh—I, who never repeat poetry, good or bad, and cannot remember one fragment of verse to thrill myself with. My blood boils—well, I'm half German, so put it down to patriotism—when I listen to the tasteful contempt of ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... lived with her husband she used from time to time to go to a theatre, to an entertainment, to visit acquaintances. But here with Groholsky it was all quietness and emptiness. . . . Besides, here there was one man, and he with his ailments and his continual mawkish kisses, was like an old grandfather for ever shedding tears ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov |
