"Meretricious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... intermittent business in the gilding of small idols, to be shipped overseas and traded as objects of worship among the negroes of the American plantations. Jewellery, however, was his stand-by. In the manufacture of meretricious ware he had a plausibility amounting to genius, in the disposing of it a talent for hard bargains; and the two together had landed him in affluence. Well, sir, being headed off my boyhood's dream by the geographical inconvenience of Warwickshire—for ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... had admonished him not to think of effect when composing, and to avoid everything that might prove meretriciously impressive. Now, this was very pleasant and soothing advice; and those pupils who adopted it, and remained true to the master, have indeed produced neither "impression nor meretricious effect;" only, the advice seemed to me rather too negative, and I failed to see the value of that which was positively acquired under it. I believe the entire teaching of the Leipzig Conservatorium was based upon some such negative advice, and I understand that young people there have ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... length she knows To a hair's point, their high arch when to close Half o'er the swimming orb, and when to raise, Disclosing all the artificial blaze Of unfelt passion, which alone can move Him whom the genuine eloquence of love Affected never, won with wanton wiles, With soulless sighs, and meretricious smiles; By nature unimpress'd, uncharm'd by thee, Sweet goddess of my ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... perhaps, were attached to the neck and shoulders, tiny lace tuckers were inserted, and gorgeous jewellery was simulated by wretched bits of tinsel trimming. The realism of the Stuart stump picture was never so atrocious as this baleful invention, which was as meretricious ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... Trocadero has nothing meretricious about it. It is, like the building of which it is the finest ornament, of Jura marble, while much of the adjacent work is of artificial stone so admirably made that one cannot tell the difference, and is disposed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... during the period of the classical mania, is too small for its present surroundings, since the removal of the Palace. The north wing, visible to your right, is purely modern, of the age of the First and Second Empire and the Third Republic. The meretricious character of the reliefs in its extreme west portion, erected under the Emperor Napoleon III., and restored after the Commune, is redolent of the spirit of that gaudy period. The south wing, to your left, forms part of the connecting gallery ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... of composition. That which he had he gathered with a catholicity of taste from all the renowned masters. Not one of his immediate ancestors had stirred beyond the confines of their simple home. Well for him was it so. No late meretricious Neapolitan tinsel could exist in the quiet, calm beauty of his Thuringian dwelling-place. Nature lay before him. "Come," she said, "seek to understand me. I have treasures that ye know not of, treasures that can only be gathered by ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... crapulous financiers for whom it was invented, and was, in fact, a sort of Byzantine of the boudoir, which succeeded the nobler and simpler manner of the age of Louis XIV., and tormenting every straight line into meretricious curves, ended with over-loading ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... notes sufficient but not pedantic; (3) Because they are well printed on paper of fair quality by printers who give wages liberally to careful press readers; (4) Because each work being a work of the first or classic order, it is bound in a simple and unaffected style, without meretricious gold or tawdry ornament. Now the 'Globe' editions are fitting in their place as types of right editions of the cheap kind. I will now take right editions of the more liberal and expensive kind. The 'Cambridge' ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... foundations let your fabric rise, And with attractive majesty surprise; Not by affected meretricious arts, But strict harmonious symmetry of parts; Which through the whole insensibly must pass, With vital heat to animate the mass: A pure, an active, an auspicious flame; And bright as heaven, from whence the blessing came: But few, oh! few souls, preordained by fate, The race of gods, have ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... very remarkable, but its painted windows are quite as fine as those of Strasbourg; and, in one point, it excels all the cathedrals I have seen, which is the choir, handsomely carved in oak, and with good pictures let into the panels. It is in better taste, more solid, and less meretricious in its ornaments, than any I know of. It has also a very fine pulpit, the whole of which, as well as the steps and balustrade leading up to it, is of fine marble. At Colmar, the eye will be struck with the peculiarity of architecture in some of the old buildings; ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... second and larger object is to direct the reader's steps through a country exhaustless in variety and interest. If once a passion be awakened for the study of our noble literature the student will learn to reject what is meretricious, and will turn instinctively to what is worthiest. In the pursuit he may leave his guide far behind him; but none the less will he be grateful to the pioneer who started him ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... sake of a breath of fresh air. At the top of the steps she paused and filled her lungs. It was a still, moonless night, and the stars hung low down, like diamonds on a canopy of black velvet. They made the flaring lights of the terrace of the Hotel and Cafe de Paris look tawdry and meretricious. ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... heightened by the character of the, locality where the gloomy show was to be presented. The great square of Brussels had always a striking and theatrical aspect. Its architectural effects, suggesting in some degree the meretricious union between Oriental and a corrupt Grecian art, accomplished in the medieval midnight, have amazed the eyes of many generations. The splendid Hotel de Ville, with its daring spire and elaborate front, ornamented one side of the place; directly opposite was the graceful ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... rare comfort to the Eubanks ladies that Eustace was a bass instead of a tenor. They had observed that most tenor songs are of a suggestive and meretricious character. Arthur Updyke, for example, who clerked in the city drug store, was a tenor, and nearly all of his songs were distressingly sentimental; indeed, fairly indelicate at times in their lack of reserve about kisses and embraces and sighs ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... firm chin, Carmela De Sylva did not contemn the meretricious aid of dress. Iris looked fresh and cool in soft muslin, whereas the newcomer was travel-stained and disheveled. The pack-mules were lagging on the road, but a wash and general tidying of dust-covered garments would help the President's daughter ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... when they say "God." They intend a personality exterior to them and limited, and they will instantly conclude I mean the same thing. To permit that misconception is, I feel, the first step on the slippery slope of meretricious complaisance, is to become in some small measure a successor of those who cried, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians." Occasionally we may best serve the God ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... consummate work is a sort of hotch-potch of the pure and the impure, the graceful and the grotesque. Its prime duty is to amuse, to puzzle, to fascinate, to savor of a complex imagination. Gloriani's statues were florid and meretricious; they looked like magnified goldsmith's work. They were extremely elegant, but they had no charm for Rowland. He never bought one, but Gloriani was such an honest fellow, and withal was so deluged with orders, that this made no difference ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... It is so absurd for the old man to have left instructions for all this meretricious romance to surround his end. As for old Girtle, he seems to delight in it, and goes about the house rubbing ...
— The Dark House - A Knot Unravelled • George Manville Fenn
... lesser clergy, were greatly appreciated. Some of the furniture did not wholly commend itself to Rosamund. There were certain settees and back-to-backs, certain whatnots and occasional tables, which seemed to stamp the character of the Dean's widow as meretricious. But these could easily be "managed." Rosamund was enchanted with the house, and went from room to room with Canon Wilton radiantly curious, and almost as excited as a ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... himself, whose very opposition to poetry because it is poetry makes him a difficult person to write for. Commercialized minds, given over to convention, denying their sentiment and idealism, or wasting them upon cheap and meretricious literature, do not make a good audience. Our few poets in English who have possessed some universality of appeal have had to make concessions. Kipling has been the most popular among good English poets in our time; but he has had to put journalism into ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... characterized, as claiming to be poetical for no better reason, than that it would be intolerable in conversation or in prose. Though alas! even our prose writings, nay even the style of our more set discourses, strive to be in the fashion, and trick themselves out in the soiled and over-worn finery of the meretricious muse. It is true that of late a great improvement in this respect is observable in our most popular writers. But it is equally true, that this recurrence to plain sense and genuine mother English is far from being general; and that the composition of our novels, magazines, public harangues, and ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... to bed by the light of a single candle on the deserted top floor of a "business house," dark under the roof and scintillating exceedingly with lights and cut glass at the level of the street like a fairy palace. That meretricious splendour was the only one to be met in Mrs Verloc's visions. She remembered brushing the boy's hair and tying his pinafores—herself in a pinafore still; the consolations administered to a small and badly scared creature by another creature nearly as small but ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... orb, and when to raise, Disclosing all the artificial blaze Of unfelt passion, which alone can move Him, whom the genuine eloquence of love Affected never, won with wanton wiles, With soulless sighs and meretricious smiles, By nature unimpress'd, uncharm'd by thee. Sweet goddess ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... out of Handel's life, wrote in November: "The concerts begin next Saturday at the Haymarket. Carestini sings, Pescetti composes; the house is made up into little boxes, like the playhouses abroad." Dr. Burney gives a comic account of the undertaking. "The opera, a tawdry, expensive and meretricious lady, who had been accustomed to high keeping, was now reduced to a very humble state. Her establishment was not only diminished, but her servants reduced to half-pay. Pescetti seems to have been her ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... assembly like some blood-curdling ghost. The ladies would have huddled together in a circle round the wearer and gazed at him open-mouthed. He would subsequently have had to pay for the ball's liquid refreshment. The Bal Jasmin did not employ meretricious ornament to attract custom. A low gallery containing tables ran around the bare hall, the balustrade being of convenient elbow height from the floor, so that the dancers during intervals of rest could lounge ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... the complex works of man, Heaven's easy, artless, unencumbered plan, No meretricious graces to beguile, No clustering ornaments to clay the pile. From ostentation as from weakness free, It stands like the cerulean arch we see, Majestic in its own simplicity. Inscribed above the portal from afar, Conspicuous as the brightness ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... aside the chamber of the Paulownia for their use. These performers, whatever their origin, received the treatment of samurai, and their dainty posturing in the dance became a model for the lords of the Bakufu Court, so that the simple demeanour of military canons was replaced by a mincing and meretricious mien. Another favourite dance in Yedo Castle was the furyu. A book of the period describes the latter performance in these terms: "Sixteen youths made their appearance; they all wore wide-sleeved robes and purple ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... of the early part of last century misappreciated the spirit of the ancient ballad, preferring the dross to the fine gold, and tricking out the 'terrific old Scottish tale,' as Sir Walter Scott calls it, in meretricious ornament, may be seen by comparing the original copies with that 'elegant' composition of David Mallet, William and Margaret, so praised and popular in its day, in which every change made is a disfigurement of the nature of an outrage. Read the summons of the ghost, still 'naked ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... as to require to be read "off the reel." As a book in two volumes I think it would have good claims to success, and good chances of obtaining success. But I suppose the polishing I have hinted at (not a meretricious adornment, but positively necessary to good work and good art) to ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... he met with an obscure death in the trenches. He was one of the foremost French biologists, an unpretending scholar and hard worker, a patient spirit. But celebrity was assured to him before long, though he was in no haste to welcome the meretricious charmer, as her favours have to be shared with too many wire-pullers. The silent joys that intimacy with science bestows on her elect were sufficient for him, with only one heart on earth to taste them with him. His wife shared all his thoughts. ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... supposititious, so-called, pretended, feigned, trumped up, bogus, scamped, fraudulent, tricky, factitious;bastard; surreptitious, illegitimate, contraband, adulterated, sophisticated; unsound, rotten at the core; colorable; disguised; meretricious, tinsel, pinchbeck, plated; catchpenny; Brummagem. artificial, synthetic, ersatz[&German]; simulated &c 544. Adv. under false colors, under the garb of, under cover of; over the left. Phr. "keep the word of promise to the ear and break it to the hope" [Macbeth]; fronti nulla fides[Lat]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... spite of herself, in spite of her consciousness of the melodrama and meretricious glitter of the scene, her heart was beating. She was more deeply moved, even now, than she had ever been by all the services ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... certain meretricious beauty," I admitted. "Those red cushions and all that bright metal work give ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... art to have so much judgment as to apparel a lie well, to give it a good dressing; that though the nakedness would show deformed and odious, the suiting of it might draw their readers. Some love any strumpet, be she never so shop- like or meretricious, in good clothes. But these, nature could not have formed them better to destroy their own testimony ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... of Memory'," he said (Lady Blessington's 'Conversations', p. 153), "is a very beautiful poem, harmonious, finished, and chaste; it contains not a single meretricious ornament. If Rogers has not fixed himself in the higher fields of Parnassus, he has, at least, cultivated a very pretty flower-garden at its base." But he goes on to speak of the poem (p. 354) as "a 'hortus siccus' of pretty flowers," and an illustration of "the difference ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... further; for had not Dryden stooped to call to the aid of his poetry the auxiliaries of scenery, gilded truncheons, and verse of more noise than meaning, it is impossible his plays could have been drawn into comparison with those of Settle. But the meretricious ornaments which he himself had introduced were within the reach of the meanest capacity; and, having been among the first to debauch the taste of the public, it was retributive justice that he should ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... Somerset was left alone, more incensed than ever against the object of their invectives, whom he now considered in the light of an adventurer, concealing his poverty, and perhaps his crimes beneath a garb of lies. That such a character, by means of a fine person and a few meretricious talents, could work himself into the confidence of Mary Beaufort, pierced her cousin to the soul; and as he mounted the stairs with an intent to seek her in her dressing-room, he almost resolved to refuse ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... vast amphitheatre, filled with racers, with charioteers, with eager competitors; surrounded by an unseen and awful array of witnesses? And here, daily, the lists are opened, and men contend for success, for station, for power. But these are meretricious and perishable awards. The real prize is a spiritual gain, a crown that "fadeth not away." And, if we comprehend the great purpose of existence at all—if we look with any eagerness to its intrinsic issues and its final result; we shall ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... against the author, and tasked his managerial arts to thwart him in his theatrical enterprise. For this purpose he undertook to build up Hugh Kelly, Goldsmith's boon companion of the Wednesday Club, as a kind of rival. Kelly had written a comedy called False Delicacy, in which were embodied all the meretricious qualities of the sentimental school. Garrick, though he had decried that school, and had brought out his comedy of The Clandestine Marriage in opposition to it, now lauded False Delicacy to the skies, and prepared to bring ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... big rooms downstairs before we got to his own particular quarters above. The furnishing of these rooms impressed me at the time; but I know, now, that they were heavy and clumsy when they were meant to be rich and massive, and were meretricious when they were meant to be elegant. It was all of the Second Empire, qualified by an erratic, exaggerated touch that was natively American. I am afraid I found it rather superb and was made uncomfortable—was even intimidated by it; all the more so that Raymond took it completely ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... dullness and primness. This fortunate chance has protected the little town from the vulgarizing influences of the unlettered hordes let loose upon the coast in summer-time, and we find a sea-front without the flimsy meretricious buildings of the popular resorts. Instead of imitating Blackpool and Margate, this sensible place has retained a quiet and semi-rural front to the sea, and, as already stated, has not marred its appearance ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... parties incapable of forming any contract at all: they do not put asunder those who are joined together, but they previously hinder the junction. And, if any persons under these legal incapacities come together, it is a meretricious, and not a ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... the paltry compound of ignorance, false taste, and pretension, which assumes the dignity of classical feeling, that it may be able to abuse whatever is above the level of its understanding, but bursts into genuine rapture with all that is meretricious, if sufficiently adapted to the ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... those who are supposed to be past the age of blushing not also enjoy humour unspiced by even a suggestion of lubricity? The "Mikado" and "Pinafore" have done yeoman's service in displacing the meretricious delights of Offenbach and Lecocq; and Howells' little pieces yield an exquisite, though innocent, enjoyment to those whose taste in farces has not been fashioned and spoiled by clumsy English adaptations or imitations of intriguing levers-de-rideau, and to those who do not ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... of the art of the past has one chief object; namely, to train them to understand the works of the masters in order that they may discriminate between what is beautiful and what is meretricious in the art of the present day; to learn the lessons of art from the monoliths of Egypt, the tawny marbles of ancient Greece, the balanced thrusts of the Gothic cathedral, the gracious and reverent harmonies of the primitives, the delicate handicrafts of the Orient, ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... him a certain importance. He vacillated between a number of suggestions, and the last he came to was the most remarkable, at the same time that it revealed more clearly than any other the vain and meretricious character of the man. In his second interview with Major Gordon he proposed that that officer should join him, and combining the whole force of the Europeans and the disciplined Chinese, seize Soochow, and establish ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... and don't keep a sharp look-out, your children, brought up upon harp and guitar playing, will be abandoning their parents, and running away secretly. Depend upon it, from all that is licentious and meretricious something monstrous will come forth. The poet who wrote the "Four Sleeves" regarded it as the right path of instruction to convey a warning against vice. But the theatre and dramas and fashionable songs, if the moral that they convey is missed, are a very great mistake. Although you may think it ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... that the morning is more favourable to dramatic excellence than the evening. The daylight accords with the truth and sobriety of nature, and it is the season of cool judgment: the gilded, the painted, the tawdry, the meretricious—spangles and tinsel, and tarnished and glittering trumpery—demand the glare of candle-light and the shades of night. It is certain, that the best pieces were written for the day; and it is probable, that the best actors were those who performed whilst the sun was above the horizon. ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... transformation a promise, an enigmatical promise flashed up the river reach in letters of fire. London was indeed very beautiful that night. Without hope she would have seemed not only as beautiful but as terrible as a black panther crouching on her prey. Our hope redeemed her. Beyond her dark and meretricious splendours, beyond her throned presence jewelled with links and points and cressets of fire, crowned with stars, robed in the night, hiding cruelties, I caught a moment's vision of the coming City of Mankind, of a city more wonderful than all my dreaming, ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... our civilization—and these evils shared with the working woman the first right to her attention—she attributed to the fact that the former generations of women had had either no education at all, or worse even than that, had had the meretricious brand of education which was supplied by an army of Miss Priscillas. For Miss Priscilla herself, entirely apart from the Academy, which she described frankly, to Virginia's horror, as "a menace," she entertained a sincere devotion, and this ability to detach ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... scolding-match between the rivals, in which they come sweeping up to each other from opposite sides of the stage, with their respective trains, like two pea-hens in a passion. Shakspeare would no more have brought his captivating, brilliant, but meretricious Cleopatra into immediate comparison with the noble and chaste simplicity of Octavia, than a connoisseur in art would have placed Canova's Dansatrice, beautiful as it is, beside the Athenian Melpomene, or the ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... case of love at first sight. The girl was barely seventeen, and her girlishness attracted him quite as much as her beauty, which was exceptional. There was nothing meretricious about it, for as yet she owed nothing to art—brown hair, warm lips, soft blue eyes, and a complexion like the leaf of a white rose—a woman blossom. Then, too, she was a happy creature, full of life and ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... entered, with several of her ladies in her train, and the whole assembly rose to do her honour. The Empress was dressed in an evening gown of rose-coloured tulle, spangled with silver stars—an effect which might have seemed meretricious and theatrical in another woman, but which she carried off with great grace and dignity. A little sheaf of diamond wheat-ears rose above her head, and swayed gently as she walked. No one could entertain more charmingly than she, for she moved about ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... defence. I think great injustice has been done to both in the repeated interviews in which the sentimentalist perceives nothing but a harsh priest upbraiding a lovely woman and making her weep; and the sage of sterner mettle sees an almost sublime sight, a prophet unmoved by the meretricious charms of a queen of hearts. Neither of these exaggerated views will survive, we believe, a simple reading of the interviews themselves, especially in Knox's account of them. He is not merciless nor Mary silly. One would almost fancy that she liked the encounter which matched her own quick wit ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though possibly a meretricious, effect. Now, it was not really difficult, by an inspection of the groove between your left forefinger and thumb, to feel sure that you did NOT propose to invest your small ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to satisfy myself that I had not been imposed upon by meretricious counterfeits, I emerged with a beaming and joyful countenance, stowing the needful away carefully in an interior pocket, and, on descending the bank step, was accosted by a polite, agreeable stranger, who, begging ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... weather was so hot that had rouge been used it would have inevitably been detected; but the island damsels trusted to their good figures and features, and their lively manners and conversation, rather than to any meretricious charms, to win admiration. Stella was generally considered the most charming of the maidens present, as undoubtedly she was the most blooming, and she seemed to enjoy the ball as much as any one. She ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... work which may be noted here, and which are illustrated in Fig. 10. The student is advised, however, to resort to them as little as possible, not only because he is liable to make injudicious use of them, but because it is wiser for him to cultivate the less meretricious possibilities ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... took form in the plain light of every-day common-sense. I knew the wonderfully gorgeous spectacle these two young people were going to see at the play that night, with its lights, its music, its splendidly meretricious Orientalism. And I knew Auriccio's,—not a disreputable place at all, perhaps; but free-and-easy, and distinctly Bohemian. I wished that this little girl, so arrogantly and ignorantly disdainful (as Alice would have been under the same circumstances) of such ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... despairingly to lift up their voices, and so strenuously to bewail the condition of the literature of the time. The literature of the time is very well, as they would see could they but turn their fascinated gaze from the meretricious and spectacular elements of that literature to the work of Thomas Hardy and George Meredith. With such men among the most influential in modern letters, and with Barrie and Stevenson among the idols of the reading world, it would seem that ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... vice, should urge to their sons the necessity of keeping aloof from the allurements of the theatre. If at that time the costume of the stage differed essentially from that of private life, and was the reverse of modest, or if the actresses indulged in meretricious airs which dared not be shown in domestic society, there was a very just pretence, or rather indeed there was the most cogent reason for preaching against the theatre. But at this day, no hypothesis of the kind can be allowed. That beautiful ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... find it difficult to ply their trade unless under the influence of alcohol. Turning to the man's point of view, there is quite a considerable proportion of young men who, however strong their sexual impulse, object to meretricious intercourse at once on ethical and aesthetic grounds. The ethical ground is that intercourse with a prostitute infringes the elementary principle of civilised morals, that one human being should not use another as a mere means to the ends of the former, but that each of us must ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... of its darkest ingredients, and dressed up, in their theological works, in false and meretricious pretentions to truth and purity, it exhibited a dogma only calculated to exert a beneficial influence on mankind, and to prove a source of morality and usefulness. But oh, as with all ideals, how unlike was ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... most of the others, furnished in large part by the previously existing writings of Watts and Doddridge, has been greatly improved, in at least the composition, by the emendations of Morrison and Logan. With all its faults, we know of no other collection equal to it as a whole. The meretricious stanzas of Brady and Tate are inanity itself in comparison. True, the later Blair, though always sensible, was ofttimes quite heavy enough in the pieces given to him to render—more so than in his prose; though, even when first introduced to that, Cowper could ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... are perfect in the arts of blandishment and dalliance, which they accompany with expressions adapted to every description of person, insomuch that strangers who have once tasted of their charms, remain in a state of fascination, and become so enchanted by their meretricious arts, that they can never divest themselves of the impression. Thus intoxicated with sensual pleasures, when they return to their homes they report that they have been in Kinsai, or the celestial city, and pant for the time ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... her father's roof for the house of her mother's brother, Morley Brown; has preferred the fleshpots of Egypt to the virtuous frugalities of her own home, and has discarded the humble friends of her youth, and the associates of her father, for the meretricious and slavish sympathy of wealth and position. In lieu thereof, and as compensation therefor, I do hereby give and bequeath to her my full and free permission to gratify her frequently expressed wish for another guardian in place of myself, and to become the adopted daughter of the said ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... description, to justness and aptitude of sentiment, and in an air of majesty (162) pervading the whole composition, this author may be regarded as one of the best models extant of historical narrative. His style is splendid without meretricious ornament, and copious without being redundant; a fluency to which Quintilian gives the expressive appellation of "lactea ubertas." Amongst the beauties which we admire in his writings, besides the animated speeches frequently interspersed, are those concise and peculiarly ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... and the devout intuition of psalmists, we have the praise of Wisdom. But that noble portrait is no copy of the Greek conception, but contains features peculiar to itself. She stands opposed to blatant, meretricious Folly, and seeks to draw men to herself by lofty motives and offering pure delights. She is not a person, but she is a personification of an aspect of the divine nature, and seeing that she is held forth ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... that he felt it a sort of privilege to have been admitted to them. And yet he clearly perceived the shortcomings of each person in this little world of which the totality was so delightful. He knew that Ethel was languidly futile, Rose cantankerous, Milly inane, Stanway himself crafty and meretricious, and Leonora often supine when she should not be. He dwelt specially on the more odious aspects of Stanway's character, and swore that, had Stanway forty womenfolk instead of four, he, Arthur Twemlow, should still do his obvious ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... surely they may—the task could hardly be executed with a chaster and less offensive pencil. De Bernard paints immorality—it would be unjust to say that he encourages it. He neither deals in highly-coloured and meretricious scenes a la Sue and Dumas; nor supports, with the diabolical talent and ingenuity of a Sand, the most subversive and anti-social doctrines. His works are not befouled with filth and obscenity, such as that impure old reprobate Paul de Kock delights and wallows in—or disgraced by the irreligion, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... profound respect for his companion. Aunt Chloe showed them effusively into her parlor, a small but scrupulously neat and sweet-smelling apartment, inordinately furnished with a huge mahogany centre-table and chairs, and the most fragile and meretricious china and glass ornaments on the mantel. But the three jasmine-edged lattice windows opened upon a homely garden of old-fashioned herbs and flowers, and their fragrance filled the room. The cleanest and starchiest of curtains, the most dazzling and whitest of tidies ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... milk-white vellum, lighting up the delicate gold of the tooling, glowing in the blood-red splashes of the lettering pieces; it fell slant-wise on the black chimney piece, chiselling afresh the Harden motto: Invictus. There was nothing meretricious, nothing flagrantly modern there, as in that place of books he had just left; its bloom was the bloom of time, the beauty of a world already passing away. Yet how he had loved it; how he had given himself up to it; how it had soothed him ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... delivery were severely simple. What Lowell called 'the grand simplicities of the Bible,' with which he was so familiar, were reflected in his discourse. . . . It was marvellous to see how this untutored man, by mere self-discipline and the chastening of his own spirit, had outgrown all meretricious arts, and found his way to the grandeur and ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... was the Controller-General of Finances under Louis XVI., and a man worthy of honor and long remembrance, although he was called during those perilous times to a work he was unable to do, and which perhaps no man could have done. The corrupt and meretricious court had brought France, financially as well as morally, to a point where no one man, had he been ever so great and so noble, could save her—could even retard the period of her ruin. Necker made a noble struggle, but was overborne by fate; and had his genius been even ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... offender; petty and great malefactors were preached at when sentenced, and after condemnation were made public examples—were brought into church and made the subject of discourse and even of objurgation from the pulpit. Judge Sewall frequently refers to this meretricious custom. Under date March 11, 1685, he says: "Persons crowd much into the old Meeting House by reason of James Morgan (who was a condemned murderer) and a very exciting and riotous scene took place." This was at a Thursday lecture, and in the gloomy winter twilight ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... composition, and the unforgettable felicity of those brutally red lips as the one ringing note of color. As for life-likeness, what's the old dame talking about! I never saw such eyes! Not a hint of meretricious emphasis on their luster and ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... virtuous was the world when—she and it were young. Or rather for these thirty years has moralizing told, How this good deed and that she'll do, before she grows old: Four-and-twenty sighs a-day, that our rude English sky Is not precise as she—and may wash off the dye Meretricious of her cheeks, which are then like gold, (Though less tempting;) sweet and yellow as a marigold![2] Four-and-twenty wailings o'er the wedded state, Yet twice as many every day 'tis not her fate; Pretending to the world ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 287, December 15, 1827 • Various
... presented no appearance of defence; and the present edifice had never been designed for more than the accommodation of a peaceful family, having a low, heavy front, loaded with some of that meretricious ornament, which, uniting, or rather confounding, the Gothic and Grecian architecture, was much used during the reigns of James VI. of Scotland, and his unfortunate son. The court formed a small square, two sides of which were occupied by such buildings ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... freshness of her complexion; hard lines are perceptible in her very soul, and crowsfeet contract her very fancy. No longer pure and fair as the statue of alabaster, her beauty, like that of some painted waxen effigy, is tawdry and meretricious. It is not alone the rouge upon the cheek and the false tresses adorning the forehead, which repel the ardour of admiration; it is the artificiality of mind with which such efforts are connected that breaks the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... poetry—merely meretricious glitter; there is no heart in it. That a man should like to have a nice mistress, a girl he is really fond of, is simple enough, but lamentation over the limbo of unborn loveliness is, to my mind, ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... complex works of man Heaven's easy, artless, unencumber'd plan, No meretricious graces to beguile, No clustering ornaments to clog the pile; From ostentation as from weakness free, It stands like the cerulean arch we see, Majestic in its own simplicity. Inscribed above the portal from afar, Conspicuous as the brightness of a star, ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... the flower-boxes which were outside nearly all the windows, and did not talk any nonsense about them; even the creepers seemed to be greener than usual in the sunlight of the afternoon. In the chapel somebody was playing the organ, which may have been a meretricious effect, but it pleased Nina, and that was all I cared about. The whole college was most wonderfully peaceful, no one could imagine that the quadrangle had ever been made hideous by Bacchanalian ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... she went on, "from the clamour of diners, that babel of voices, the smell of cooking, the meretricious music. We look over the house-tops. Soon, just behind that tall building there, you ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... eldest born, th' Eternal gave Dominion o'er the heart; and taught to touch Its varied stops in sweetest unison; And strike the string that from a kindred breast Responsive vibrates! from the noisy haunts Of mercantile confusion, where thy voice Is heard not; from the meretricious glare Of crowded theatres, where in thy place Sits Sensibility, with wat'ry eye, Dropping o'er fancied woes her useless tear; Come thou, and weep with me substantial ills; And execrate the wrongs that Afric's ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... alliteration, play upon words, the acrostic arrangement, and epigrammatic effects. These literary tricks find little place in our serious verse, and the finer Latin poets rarely indulge in them. They seem to be especially out of place in an epitaph, which should avoid studied effects and meretricious devices. But writers in the early stages of a literature and common people of all periods find a pleasure in them. Alliteration, onomatopoeia, the pun, and the play on words are to be found in all the ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... churches, with a piece of lighted candle inside, which the Italian image-boys display at times for sale in the streets. Nothing in the course of the evening pleased Artemus more than to notice the satisfaction with which this meretricious piece of absurdity was received ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 6 • Charles Farrar Browne
... the "high commandment,"—now against this enemy, now against that one,—first hate of English, then hate of Italians, now hate of Americans—it is natural that a high government functionary should despise all popular effervescence and misread its manifestations as merely the meretricious, bought noise of the mob, quickly roused in the Southern temperament and badly controlled by a weak, and probably corrupt, government. The elements in the piazza have no power in the close organization of Germany, no political expression ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... strange that a young matron who had led, for some four years out of the eight years her married life had lasted, so wholly womanly and domestic an existence as had fallen to the lot of Flossy, should have been led astray by the meretricious allurements of unlawful love?—Maud's ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... senses. There was not even the mystery which shrouds and softens, for the sunshine streamed in through the white glass of the windows, revealing, even emphasising, as if with deliberate cruelty, the cheap finery, the tarnished velvet, the crude colours, the meretricious gestures and poses of the plaster saints. Yet as Domini touched her forehead and breast with holy water, and knelt for a moment on the stone floor, she was conscious that this rather pitiful house of God moved her to an emotion she had not felt ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... society of Europe. In nearly all countries they have till very recently been excluded from the kind of society and from the kind of education in which the best manners are formed. The exaggerations of bad taste; the love of the loud, the gaudy, the ostentatious, and the meretricious; the awkwardness of men who are ill at ease in an unaccustomed sphere, who have not yet mastered the happy mean between arrogance and obsequiousness and who are therefore somewhat prone to both extremes, still frequently characterise them. Few persons who know Germany will doubt that the ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... wealth and dignity, and providing for the greatness of his house, and, as often happens in such marriages, he forgot to ask for a certificate of character, forgot to ask what sort of mother he was providing for his children. She came with all her meretricious splendour covering one of the most fiendish natures that ever wore a woman's form. She developed, if she did not bring with her, all imaginable vices—her vindictive passion revelled in blood; her religion was the filthiest licentiousness; ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... quietly at his side, saying little and looking less, get nigher his heart. I have seen in his face a far different expression from that which hardens it now while she is so vivaciously accosting him; but then it came of itself: it was not elicited by meretricious arts and calculated manoeuvres; and one had but to accept it—to answer what he asked without pretension, to address him when needful without grimace—and it increased and grew kinder and more genial, and warmed one like a fostering sunbeam. How will she manage to please him when ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... detected lapses into other moods, into some other state of being; they gave me the impression as of two different individuals addressing me. The man did not ring true, altogether; he was mentally disorganized, disharmonious; those meretricious reasonings about justice, ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... Her heart, perhaps, helped to instruct her understanding; for by a kind of intuition she could appreciate all that was beautiful and elevated. Her unvitiated and guileless taste had a logic of its own: no schoolman had ever a quicker penetration into truth, no critic ever more readily detected the meretricious and the false. The book that Evelyn could admire was sure to be stamped with the impress of the noble, ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book II • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... expressively given. Somehow or other he did not take in this country, and quitted it, leaving behind him very beautiful studies strangely undervalued, and sold for little. The fact is, he was too true to the solemnity and sobriety of nature to please a public led away by gaudy display and meretricious colouring. Yet was he a man of more genius—in landscape—than any nine out of ten of our best artists that have, these last ten years, attempted to show nature or art upon our academical walls. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... free-trade. None but those immediately cognizant of his efforts could conceive his herculean labours to promote the repeal of the corn laws. His eloquence was characterised by intelligence, directness, the absence of all meretricious ornament, and an eagerness to convince and carry his hearers with him, which was singularly effective. His addresses were not only free from all ambition as to ornate or attractive language, but also as to original or characteristic thought. There was such an entire absence of all self-seeking about ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... prejudices of the English gentleman, that truly national ideal of character. . . . A love of order, seemliness, and good taste has led the Anglican Church along a middle path between what a seventeenth century divine called 'the meretricious gaudiness of the Church of Rome and the squalid ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... worship, and that few things more weaken the power of the Gospel that Paul preached than the lowering of the flag in conformity with desires of men of sense, and substituting for the simple glory of the preached Word the meretricious, and in time impotent, and always corrupting, attractions of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... faithless. Faugh! that playhouse! He would never enter one again. Be an actor! Lubin was a cleaner gentleman than any painted Buskin on the stage. Here, in the clear, pure splendour of the sunlit air, the place where he had been last night loomed up in his consciousness as something meretricious and unwholesome. Yet he was glad he had been, for it made everything so much purer and sweeter by contrast. Never had the garden looked more meetly set, never had the sun shone more genially, and the air impelled the blood and sent it coursing more joyously through his veins, than ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... wasn't without provocation, nor against her will; she had got no more than she asked for. The trouble was, she no longer wanted it. She had been the dupe of her own folly, by her own romantic bent and the magnetism of the man blinded to the essentially meretricious spirit clothed in the flesh of ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... gave place to whitewash and stucco. In the Ducal Palace, side by side with the masterpieces of the Renaissance, are to be found the overcrowded canvases of Vicentino, Giovanni Contarini, Pietro Liberi, Celesti, and others like them. Some of the poor and meretricious mosaics in St. Mark's are from designs by Palma Giovine and Fumiani. Carlo Ridolfi, who was a painter himself, as well as the painter's chronicler, has an "Adoration of the Magi" in S. Giovanni Elemosinario, poor enough in invention and execution. Two pictures by obscure artists disfigure ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation—as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she that it must be Jim's. It was like him. Quietness and value—the description applied to both. Twenty-one ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... and dog's eared pages. She noticed that the chairs were all large and solid, with deep arms and backs upholstered in red leather, which looked as if it would never wear out, that the rug was good, and that, except for a few meretricious oil paintings on the greenish walls, the room was agreeably bare of decoration. After her first hesitating glance, she surmised that a certain expensive comfort was the end sought for and achieved, and that in the furnishing beauty ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... opportunity for instructing the Italians was not thrown away. False liberty was already strewing their path with its meretricious allurements. "As true liberty diffuses around it peace and grace and calm, so does false liberty disseminate, wherever it is implanted, terror, dismay and horror. The brows of one are illuminated with the splendid halo of order, and those of the other are covered with the red cap of anarchy. ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... his "bad" real estate in the Pure Water Move days. But now and then youth had its way—she could not always resist the present pleasure. And it was amusing, too, to be "talked about" with Peter Van Degen, who was noted for not caring for "nice women." She enjoyed the thought of triumphing over meretricious charms: it ennobled her in her own eyes to influence such ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... it, it is purity and life and sympathy and vigour. Its perfect freshness and perpetual fount of youth keep your age from withering. It crimsons the sunset and lives in the afterglow. If these delights thy mind may move, leave, oh, leave the meretricious town, and come to the airy peaks. Such joy is ours, unknown to the squalid village which spreads its swamps where the poet's silver Thames runs ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... fashionable world was undisputed. No doubt the Scottish painter would be attracted by the technical accomplishment of Lawrence's work; but he was between fifty and sixty years of age and little likely to be influenced by an art, which, for all its brilliance, was meretricious in many respects. Yet it is possible that the adulation lavished by society upon his contemporary's style may have induced him to consider if something of the elegance for which it was esteemed so highly could not be added with advantage to his own. On the other hand, Scottish society ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw
... metropolis, like a devouring monster, exhibited its equivocal and meretricious beauties, its extensive manufactories, its aspiring churches and towers, and other innumerable edifices. Westminster Abbey stood prominent, at once reviving the recollection of its superstitious origin, and exciting deep veneration as the depository of the ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... mine existed. I walked through the village, and I must say it seemed less damaged than I had expected. Most of its buildings were quite recognisable. The house formerly Battalion Headquarters might, with labour, have been made to serve again. The line of small plane trees, which gave Laventie the meretricious semblance of a garden city, was standing yet. In the war's passage over it Laventie suffered less ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... Dick says in "The Light That Failed" that an old device for an unskilful artist is to stick a superfluous bunch of flowers somewhere in a picture where it will cover up bad drawing. I'm afraid writers are apt to use stock phrases in the same meretricious fashion. ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... sins against good taste and propriety. One wishes that he had allayed the heat of his fancy with some cooling drops of discretion. Even his colouring so admired in general, has something florid and meretricious ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... the reflections of poor Hodgkinson when he learned that the very person to whom he had said "D—n you, you cowardly rascal, and all your d——d breed," was no other than that very duke who has since cut so conspicuous a figure in the annals of gallantry with Mrs. CLARK, of meretricious notoriety, or in other words the duke of York himself. By means which shall hereafter be related, the interest of the royal family had been engaged for Hodgkinson, and even the first personage of it had agreed to do him a signal favour, on his first appearance ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... of the "National Era" wrote: "'Uncle Tom's Cabin' is denounced by time-serving preachers as a meretricious work. Will you not come out in defense of it and roll back ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... part of Romeo. This remarkable woman exercised in those days an almost hypnotic influence upon Wagner, and the beauty and force of this particular impersonation impressed him so vividly that he relinquished his admiration of Weber and the Teutonic school and plunged headlong into the meretricious sensuousness of Italy. The libretto of 'Das Liebesverbot' is founded upon Shakespeare's 'Measure for Measure,' It was performed for the first and only time at Magdeburg in 1836, and failed completely; but it is only just to say that ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... many moths out there, passing the beam of light, like little pale spirits crossing a river! Mrs. Ercott smiled, pleased at that image. Moths! Men were like moths; there were women from whom they could not keep away. Yes, there was something about Olive that drew men to her. Not meretricious—to do her justice, not that at all; but something soft, and-fatal; like one of these candle-flames to the poor moths. John's eyes were never quite as she knew them when he was looking at Olive; and Robert ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... single trees spot here and there the glades, to invite the noontide wayfarer. A true artist should keep these ultimate effects always in his eye,—effects that may be greatly impaired, if not utterly sacrificed, by an injudicious multiplication of small and meretricious beauties, which in no way conspire to the grand and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... the head here. Business! Standing in a buggy at street-corners, jauntily urging a crowd to buy the magic grease-eradicator, toothache remedy, meretricious jewelry, what not! first playing a fiddle and rollicking out some ribald song to fetch them. Business indeed! ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... poetry; what, bedizen history, like her sister, with tale and eulogy and their attendant exaggerations? as well take some mighty athlete with muscles of steel, rig him up with purple drapery and meretricious ornament, rouge and powder his cheeks; faugh, what an object would one make of him ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... as if one were to lend "Robinson Crusoe" to a boy, and warn him not to think of running away to sea. Still, I must even add my voice to the orthodox chorus, and affirm that warfare is bad, brutal, fraudful, a thing of meretricious gauds, a clay idol, fetish of humbug and havoc, whose feet are soaking in muddy gore and salt tears; yet in the privacy of my own study I might sadly admit that the Millennium is remote, that the Parliament of Nations exists but in the dreams of the poet, and that Longfellow's forecast ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... representations at our metropolitan theatres. Immense is the influence of lofty and ennobling dramatic pieces when supported by able and impassioned actors. As deleterious is the sway of questionable or immoral pieces when decked out in the meretricious garb of fancy, or aided by the transient attractions of beauty. Who can tell how much the heart-stirring appeals of Shakspeare have done to string to lofty purposes the British heart; how powerfully the dignified sentiments of Corneille have contributed to sustain the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... a thing. Marriage concerns the race and a man's whole future. If the children of the marriage are likely to be unsatisfactory, the marriage will certainly be so. We moderns bedeck and bedrape us in all sorts of meretricious togas, till a pair of fine eyes and a dashing manner pass for beauty; but when life tries the metal—when nature applies her inevitable test—the degenerate or neurotic type goes ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... the pieces was one simple little poem that struck a true note, said its little say, and quit—without a superfluous word. Its author set no store by it at all compared with his more pretentious and meretricious work; yet it was the one poem in the whole mass. It described the writing of a letter to his father; he had spent all he had in prospecting and working a small claim, and had just realised that ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... himself by painting Madelon more than once; and she made a famous little model, sitting still and patiently for hours to him and to her father, who had a knack of producing any number of little, affected, meretricious pictures, in the worst possible style and taste. Years afterwards, Madelon revisited the studio, where the black- bearded friendly American, grown a little bent and a little grey, was still stepping backwards and forwards before the same easel standing in the old place; ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... one can see the elevated trains, like luminous winged serpents, skimming through the air.[D] The great restaurants are crowded with gaily-dressed merry-makers; and altogether there is a sense of festivity in the air, without any flagrantly meretricious element in it, which I plead guilty to finding very enjoyable. From the moral, and even from the loftily aesthetic point of view, this gaudy, glittering Vanity Fair is no doubt open to criticism. What reconciles me to it aesthetically ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... the historical personages who are made to speak. The diction belongs in each case to the period of the ballad in which it is employed, and yet there is no wanton use of archaisms, or any disposition manifested to resort to meretricious artifices by which to impart an appearance of probability to the story other than that which comes legitimately of sheer narrative excellence. The characterisation is that of history with the features softened that constituted the prose of real life, and with ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... I had a mind to keep to my reformed creed; the more I saw of Popery the closer I clung to Protestantism; doubtless there were errors in every church, but I now perceived by contrast how severely pure was my own, compared with her whose painted and meretricious face had been unveiled for my admiration. I told him how we kept fewer forms between us and God; retaining, indeed, no more than, perhaps, the nature of mankind in the mass rendered necessary for due observance. I told him I could not look on flowers and tinsel, on wax- lights and embroidery, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... consider it as a most contemptible piece of nonsense[90]. The moral is uniformly good; the vices and follies of the day are attacked with much force and keenness; there is in it much display of the manners of the times; and though as a composition it is very meretricious and sometimes absurd in point of ornament, yet the construction of its sentences is frequently turned with peculiar neatness and spirit, though with much monotony of cadence." "So greatly," adds the same writer, "was the style of Euphues admired in the court ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... thought of the earnestness and variety of the Scripture a word about the simplicity of its literary expression. There is nothing meretricious in its style. There is no effort to say a thing finely. The translators have avoided all temptation to grow dramatic in reproducing the original. Contrast the actual English Bible with the narratives or other ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... him, looked like formidable hammers capable of striking a man down dead at one blow; his whole aspect was repulsive and terrible—there was no redeeming point about him—for even the apparent fortitude he assumed was mere bravado—meretricious courage—which the first week of the galleys would crush out of him as easily as one crushes the juice out of a ripe grape. He wore a nondescript costume of vari-colored linen, arranged in folds that would have been the admiration of an artist. It was gathered about him by means of a brilliant scarlet ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... building, the south transept, or Blandamer aisle, is constantly in clear daylight. Moreover, while the nave is of the Norman style, and the transepts and choir of the Early English, this window is of the latest Perpendicular, complicated in its scheme, and meretricious in the elaboration of its detail. The difference is so great as to force itself upon the attention even of those entirely unacquainted with architecture, and it has naturally more significance for the professional ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... turns woman from the real to the unreal, from the substantial to the superficial, which smothers all originality of thought, and makes her a simple reproduction in appearance, if not in disposition, of the "Anonyma," with her meretricious beauty and dashing toilets. Is it well for woman to subject herself to be criticised as follows? "The girl of the period is a creature who dyes her hair and paints her face, whose sole idea of life is a plenty of fun and luxury, and ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... just ear. Mrs. P—— a friend of maine says I've got a very quick ear." Every now and then Sally was betrayed into Nosey-like refinement. She fought against it from an instinctive feeling that it was meretricious. But at the same time she was speaking with instinctive care, so as to avoid Cockney phrases, and pronunciations, and tones. She wanted him to think her—something that she called "nice." They walked the length of Regent Street, chatting thus; and at last ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... is one of the specious appeals which this meretricious concern sent to the ailing women ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... about Rose in the man's mind. He had known for years that he had not loved miladi as a man could love, but he also questioned whether such a light, frivolous nature could have appreciated the strong, earnest affection. Her great effort to keep herself young had led to a meretricious childishness. She had a vain, narrow soul, and this had dwarfed it still more. Many a night he had watched over her, pained by her passionate beseeching that he would not let her die, her awesome terror of death. He felt God had been merciful not to allow ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... Horace shew us what he might have made of a complete translation. What a brilliant thing a version of Lucretius, in the style of the "Essay on Man," would have been! And his "Rape of the Lock" proves that he had considerable sympathy with the elaborate fancy, although not with the meretricious graces of Ovid. But with Homer, the severely grand, the simple, the warlike, the lover and painter of all Nature's old original forms—the ocean, the mountains, and the stars—what thorough sympathy ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... life-companions!" answered Mrs. Denison. "Worth is too retiring or too proud. Either diffidence or self-esteem holds it back in shadow. I confess myself to be sorely puzzled at times with the phenomenon. Why should the real man shrink away, and let the meretricious fop and the man 'made of money' win the beautiful and the best? Women are not such fools as to prefer tinsel to gold—the outside making up to the inner manhood! Neither are they so dim-sighted that they cannot perceive who is the ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... a wholesome effort for honesty: "I really don't know a single thing about forestry, Mr. Page. You'll have to start in at the very beginning, and explain everything. I hope I've sense enough to take an intelligent interest." Very different, this, from the meretricious sparkle of her, "Oh yes, do show me, Mr. Page." She felt that to be rather cheap, as she remembered it. She wondered if he had seen its significance, had seen through her. From a three weeks' intensive acquaintance with him, she rather thought he had. His eyes were clear, formidably so. ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... days perhaps both the artist and the philosopher had been poets. But (with regard to the latter) at that time poetry was not the customary vent for deep thought or passionate feeling. Gray, it is true, though unjustly condemned as artificial and meretricious in his style, had infused into the scanty works which he has bequeathed to immortality a pathos and a richness foreign to the literature of the age; and, subsequently, Goldsmith, in the affecting yet ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Years' Musical Recollections," rebukes the bigotry which sees nothing good but in its own kind: "I have never been able to understand why this [referring to the Rossinian richness of melody] should be contemned as necessarily false and meretricious—why the poet may not be allowed the benefit of his own period and time—why a lover of architecture is to be compelled to swear by the Dom at Bamberg, or by the Cathedral at Monreale—that he must abhor and denounce ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... degrees to appreciate the beauty and delicacy of a style which to our eighteenth century ancestors was mere barbaric mediaevalism; has taught us to admire its exquisite purity, and to dislike the obstrusive introduction into its midst of incongruous and meretricious ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... distorted the facts respecting this country, and particularly respecting the great province of New Netherlands, as will be perceived by any who will take the trouble to compare their romantic effusions, tricked out in the meretricious gauds of fable, with ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... from the fault she determines to avoid, as the very sentence in which she announces this determination proves. Despite her sincerity, she is affected, and her arguments are often weakened by meretricious forms of expression. No one can for a moment doubt that her feelings are real, but neither can the turgidity and bombast of her language be denied. She borrows, unconsciously perhaps, the "flowery diction" which she so heartily condemns. Her style, instead of being clear and simple, as would have ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... no, but they remain still as a very affront to marriage. The haunting of those dissolute places, or resort to courtezans, are no more punished in married men than in bachelors. And the depraved custom of change, and the delight in meretricious embracements (where sin is turned into art), maketh marriage a dull thing, and a kind of imposition or tax. They hear you defend these things, as done to avoid greater evils; as advoutries, deflowering ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... own generation rather than a patriotic pride and thought for future ages. If the nineteenth century has made great advances in the industries, science, and thought, it has also introduced a taste for meretricious imitation in every department of manufacture and art. This is essentially the century for contracts. Everything is done by contract, and not only is the matter of cost, but also that of time, made a strong point in the bargain. When St. Peter's was built, estimates of cost ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... nation. It is this same taste, which, in that solemn commemoration of the death of their king, the service solennel for Louis XVI. contrived to introduce a species of affected parade,—a detailed and theatrical sort of grief,—a kind of meretricious mummery of sorrow, which banished all the feelings, and almost completely destroyed the impression which such a scene in any other country would inevitably have produced. Any thing, it may be easily imagined, which gratifies this general taste for public exhibitions, ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... comprehension of a sympathetic spectator. 'He,' speaking of the Divine Child, 'is lying in simple nakedness on a rich red carpet, and is supported by a white pillar, over which the carpet passes. Of these accessories every thread is most delicately and carefully painted; no slovenly washes of meretricious colour where He is to be served, before whom all things are open; no perfunctory sparing of toil in serving Him who has given us all that is best. On his right hand kneels the Virgin Mother in adoration, her very face a magnificat—praise, ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... thou not inspire Raphael? "How different," said Mr. Beckford, "is that lovely creature from Mr. Etty's beauties. They are for the most part of a meretricious character, would do well enough for a mistress; but there," pointing to the St. Catherine, "there are personified the modesty and purity a man would wish to have in a wife, and yet Frenchmen find fault with it. C'est un assez joli tableau, say they, ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... Athens who saved her people by singing to the Tyrant; and Ian had made her sing to him, in a voice quite in keeping with her personality, delicate and fine and wonderfully high in its range, bird-like in its quality, with trills like a lark—a little meretricious but captivating. He had also written for her two verses which were as sharp and clear in her mind as the letter he wrote when she had thrown him over ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a tedious performance; it is a tissue of far-fetched, heavy, lumbering conceits, and in the worst style of what has been denominated metaphysical poetry. His Odes in general are of the same stamp; they are the hard-strained offspring of a meagre, meretricious fancy. The famous Ode on St. Cecilia deserves its reputation; for, as piece of poetical mechanism to be set to music, or recited in alternate strophe and antistrophe, with classical allusions, and flowing verse, nothing can be better. It is equally fit to be said ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... the sounding string; On wings of gossamer soft Whispers fly, And the sly Glance steals side-long from the eye. —As round his shrine the gaudy circles bow, 480 And seal with muttering lips the faithless vow, Licentious Hymen joins their mingled hands, And loosely twines the meretricious bands.— Thus where pleased VENUS, in the southern main, Sheds all her smiles on ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... pompous; garish, gaudy, meretricious, gorgeous, flashy, bedizened, gay, conspicuous, tinsel. Antonyms: inconspicuous, modest, unostentatious, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... cooking pot; the whitewashing, as I believe it is termed with us, also shows, only it is not the debtor who is whitewashed, but the creditors doing themselves over with white clay to celebrate the removal of their enemy from his sphere of meretricious activity. This inversion may arise from the fact that whitewashing a creditor who was about to be cooked would be unwise, as the stuff would boil off the bits and spoil the gravy. There is always some fragment of sound sense underlying African institutions. Kiva was, when I got out, tied ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... kind. You may get valuable hints from them as to mixture of colours; and here and there you will find a useful artifice or process explained; but nearly all such books are written only to help idle amateurs to a meretricious skill, and they are full of precepts and principles which may, for the most part, be interpreted by their precise negatives, and then acted upon, with advantage. Most of them praise boldness, when the only safe attendant spirit ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... of our natures. It can be no dispute, supposing both these means put in practice with equal abilities, to which we ought to give the preference: to him who represents the heroic arts and more dignified passions of man, or to him who, by the help of meretricious ornaments, however elegant and graceful, captivates the sensuality, as it may be called, of our taste. Thus the Roman and Bolognian schools are reasonably preferred to the Venetian, Flemish, or Dutch schools, as they address themselves to our best ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... Hamlets, and was not only there, but listened to when it suited him to speak. But when he did speak, he spoke only as a lawyer. He never allowed himself to be enticed away from his own profession by the meretricious allurements of general politics. On points of law reform, he had an energetic opinion; on matters connected with justice, he had ideas which were very much his own—or which at least were stated in language which was so; being a denizen of the common law, he was loud against ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... aspect of the church gradually began to change. As, slowly and insensibly, ambitious man heaped the garbage of his mysteries, his doctrines, and his disputes, about the pristine purity of the structure given him by God, so, one by one, gaudy adornments and meretricious alterations arose to sully the once majestic basilica, until the threatening and reproving apparition of the pagan Julian, when both Church and churchmen received in their corrupt progress ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... were tolerated only for necessity? No, but they remain still as a very affront to marriage. The haunting of those dissolute places, or resort to courtesans, are no more punished in married men than in bachelors. And the depraved custom of change, and the delight in meretricious embracements, (where sin is turned into art,) maketh marriage a dull thing, and a kind of imposition or tax. They hear you defend these things, as done to avoid greater evils; as advoutries, deflowering of virgins, unnatural lust, and the like. But they ...
— The New Atlantis • Francis Bacon
... in the brilliant glare of the boulevards and up the gloomy, narrow streets that lead to Montmartre. They visit the Moulin Rouge and the Bal Tabarin, and they see the Oriental Dances and the Cafe of Hell and the hundred and one other glittering fakes and false appearances that poor old meretricious Paris works overtime to prepare for such people as themselves. And the Lady from Georgia, having seen it all, thanks Heaven that she at least is pure—which is a beginning—and they go home more enthusiastic than ever in the Social ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock |
