"Pomposity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all persons of taste," said the head of the establishment, coming forward with that tradesman's suavity in which pomposity is agreeably blended with subservience. The Englishwoman took up her eyeglass and scanned the manufacturer from head to foot, unwilling to understand that the man before her was eligible for Parliament and dined at ...
— Gaudissart II • Honore de Balzac
... della sua pittura, the idea and conceit of his picture! Salvator bowed a modest acquiescence, and went on with his sketch. The doctor having gone the round of professional questions with his wonted pomposity, rose to write his prescription; when, as he sat before the table with eyes upturned, and pen suspended over the paper, Salvator approached him on tiptoe, and drawing the pen gently through his fingers, with one of his old ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... upon Abrahm Kantor in avoirdupois only. He was himself plus eighteen years, fifty pounds, and a new sleek pomposity that was absolutely oleaginous. It shone roundly in his face, doubling of chin, in the bulge of waistcoat, heavily gold-chained, and in eyes that behind the gold-rimmed glasses gave sparklingly forth his ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... irreligion—(Mr. Howard de Howard is too unsubstantial not to be spiritually inclined)—however he only fidgeted in his chair. They then proceeded to be exceedingly disloyal. Mr. Howard de Howard fidgeted again;—they then passed to vituperations on the aristocracy—this the attenuated pomposity (magni nominis umbra) could brook no longer. He rose up, cast a severe look on the abashed youths, and thus addressed them—'Gentlemen, I have sate by in silence, and heard my King derided, and my God blasphemed; ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... she is, as long as she sets that prodigious value upon herself, upon her name, upon her outward appearance, and indulges in that intolerable pomposity; as long as she goes parading abroad, like Solomon in all his glory; as long as she goes to bed—as I believe she does—with a turban and a bird of paradise in it, and a court train to her night-gown; as long as she is so insufferably virtuous and condescending; as long as she does not ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... ancient and mellow! But this lad has seen how to bowl me out. He has answered me back, vaunt for vaunt, rhetoric for rhetoric. He has lifted the only shield I cannot break, the shield of an impenetrable pomposity. Listen to him. You have come, my ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... without ceremony, madam," said Lord Hurdly, with a slightly old-fashioned pomposity in his polished manner, "and I may therefore ask you to excuse an absence of ceremony in me in alluding to the impression which you have made upon me. You are a stranger to me—an American, I judge from your speech. I hope that I am to be so fortunate as to hear that there is something ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... me, sir," said Mr. Cox, with much pomposity; "you're an eyesore to an honest man, a vulture, ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... stomachs." The last touch made the grand-prior of the cathedral wince a little, but it was welcomed with a roar from the multitude. The song proceeded; but if the prior had frowned at the first stanza, the podesta was doubly angry at the second, which sneered at Venetian pomposity in incomparable style. But the prior and podesta were equally outvoted, for the roar of the multitude was twice as loud as before. Then came other touches on the cavalieri serventi, the ladies, the nuns, and the husbands, till every class had its share: but the satire was so witty, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 340, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... or an affected humility are alike despicable. There is a deficient dignity in Robertson's; but the haughtiness is now to our purpose. This is called by the French, "la morgue litteraire," the surly pomposity of literature. It is sometimes used by writers who have succeeded in their first work, while the failure of their subsequent productions appears to have given them a literary hypochondriasm. Dr. Armstrong, after his classical ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... life, into which he was to be introduced by the patronage of his grandfather, Lord Binkie, by studying the ancient and modern orators with great assiduity, and by speaking unceasingly at the debating societies. But though he had a fine flux of words, and delivered his little voice with great pomposity and pleasure to himself, and never advanced any sentiment or opinion which was not perfectly trite and stale, and supported by a Latin quotation; yet he failed somehow, in spite of a mediocrity which ought to have insured any ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to keep his hand in that he adopted a tone of serious chaff to Mr. Norbury, such as some people think a well-chosen one towards children, to their great embarrassment. He replied to that most responsible of butlers with some pomposity of manner. "The question before the house," said he—and paused to enjoy a perversion of speech—"the question before the house comes down to breakfast I take to be this:—Is it breakfast at all till ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... contents; reading aloud, and commenting earnestly as he read. I can just remember the titles of some of the works. There were the "Ordonnance of Philip le Bel on Single Combat"; the "Theatre of Honor," by Favyn, and a treatise "On the Permission of Duels," by Andiguier. He displayed, also, with much pomposity, Brantome's "Memoirs of Duels,"—published at Cologne, 1666, in the types of Elzevir—a precious and unique vellum-paper volume, with a fine margin, and bound by Derome. But he requested my attention particularly, and with an air of mysterious sagacity, to a thick ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... benefactor to the Church in general, and to the Bishop of Markborough in particular, instinctively he knew that the Bishop's taste ungratefully disapproved of him; and the knowledge contributed an extra shade of pomposity ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... where he owns vast estates, and has been liberal to debtors and tenants, he carries great favor; both parties respect him for his ignorance and pomposity, which they mistake for simplicity and power, as usual. The estates are mortgaged three deep, and will not hold out a year. The shares of the Millionnaire's Hotel and the Poor Man's Bank in the B——y are worthless. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... stones, appeared. She had always been more or less indifferent to public opinion, but it had been a careless thoughtless indifference; it had not possessed the insolent twist of the past fortnight. To receive the cut direct from a man whose pomposity and mental density had excited her wit and amusement, surprised her even if it did not hurt. It had rudely awakened her to the fact that her independence might be leading her into a labyrinth. She was compelled to admit that at home she would have avoided Warrington, no matter ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... "why not arrange to live together, you and we? I hate throwing away money on mere pomposity and grandiosity and show. We always take a little furnished apartment, elle et moi. Then I go and buy provisions, bon marche—and she cooks them—and we have our meals better than at the hotel and at half the price! Join us, unless you like to throw ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... unworthy of the scene to which they had been called. There was the Speaker, LOWTHER, his brow beaming with the good-humour which enabled him to abate pomposity without injuring the feelings even of the pompous, and to calm with a happy phrase the agitated waters of debate. There were ASQUITH, strong in the affection of his friends, and LLOYD GEORGE, braced to action by the invectives of his foes. There were LAW and LANSDOWNE, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 29, 1914 • Various
... BULMER, and has induced him to patronise the inhabited world? I thought so once. Indeed I have lost myself in conjectures on this point. But I now know that BULMER has fallen under your sway, and that you, my dear POMPOSITY, direct his every movement, and inspire his every thought. Now, the other night, when, as I say, I was dining at his table, BULMER was in one of his most glorious and vain-glorious moods. Patronage radiated from him upon my humble ...
— Punch, Volume 101, September 19, 1891 • Francis Burnand
... of the ultra florid or bombastic style which may be said to depend upon the pomposity of verbosity for its effect, the latter is a specimen of simple natural Style. Needless to say it is to be preferred. The other should be avoided. It stamps the writer as a person of shallowness, ignorance and inexperience. It has been eliminated ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... models may have saved him from a base mediaeval vocabulary; but they were not worthy of him, and they must answer for some of his falsities of style. These are apparent. His accumulation of empty and motley phrase, like a garish bunch of coloured bladders; his joy in platitude and pomposity, his proneness to say a little thing in great words, are only too easy to translate. We shall be well content if our version also gives some inkling of his qualities; not only of what Erasmus called his "wonderful vocabulary, his many pithy sayings, and the excellent variety of ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... picking up the ball thrown to him with ineffable complacency and pomposity; 'yes, yes. The Very Reverend the Dean refers to that? Yes. I happened to bring Durdles and Mr. Jasper together. I regard ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... some one to whom he could open his heart, Johnson himself was no less willing to look the matter in the face, and even during the long summer days, when he had begun to live upon his wardrobe, piece by piece, he still kept up; although some of his pomposity went, along with the Prince Albert coat and the shiny hat. He now wore a shiny coat, and less showy head-gear. For a couple of weeks, too, he disappeared, and as he returned with some money, it was fair to presume that he had been at work somewhere, ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... pleasure of saying pretension and pomposity do have a wonderful effect here in New York. I don't know whether it was the missionary or the plenipotentiary that brought my cousin to her oats, but rather think it was the latter—having a foreign twang to it, of ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... curious mixture of humour, pomposity, and business, which made it very hard to know how exactly to take him. If I dared to laugh at a joke, he fired up, and ordered me angrily to get on with my work. And if I did become engrossed in the figures and entries before ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... laws of behaviour which we call modesty, decency, and propriety. They either cause indignation and resentment in the onlooker at the neglect of respect for the taboo, or, on the contrary, the natural man, long oppressed by pomposity or by the fetters of propriety imposed by society, suddenly feels a joyous sense of escape from his bonds, and bursts into laughter—the laughter of a return to vitality and nature—which is enormously encouraged and developed into ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... was sincere) with which her uncle spoke of the duty of raising a gallant name sunk into disrepute, and sacrificing our own inclination for the redecorating the mouldered splendour of those who have gone before us. If the confusion of idea occasioned by a vague pomposity of phrase, or the infant inculcation of a sentiment that is mistaken for a virtue, so often makes fools of the wise on the subject of ancestry; if it clouded even the sarcastic and keen sense of Brandon himself, we may forgive its influence over a girl so little versed in the arts of sound reasoning ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... disappearance, of the excessive "deportment" which is the best known feature of Johnson's style. Of another feature often found in it by hostile critics less need be said because it is not really there at all. Johnson is frequently accused of verbosity. If that word means merely pomposity it has already been discussed. If it means, as it should mean, the use of superfluous words adding nothing to the sense, few authors are so seldom guilty of it as Johnson. There are many good writers, Scott, for instance, and the authors of the Book of Common Prayer, in whom a hurried reader ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... that had been bestowed on him, and my consequent resolution to dislike him, I was pleased and familiar with him before I had been ten minutes in his company. Lord Kilrush introduced him to me, with great pomposity, as a gentleman of talents, for whom he and his brother O'Toole interested themselves much. This air of patronage, I saw, disgusted Mr. Devereux; and instead of suffering himself to be shown off, he turned ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... bore the tray of sandwiches high overhead, for his style in waiting was florid, though polished. He walked with a faint, shuffling suggestion of a prance, a lissome pomposity adopted in obedience to the art-sense within him which bade him harmonize himself with occasions of state and fashion. His manner was the super-supreme expression of graciousness, but the graciousness was innocent, being but an affectation and nothing inward—for ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... with the worst possible grace, having forfeited any regret that might have been felt for his overthrow by the abuse which he lavished on his opponents when he saw that the elections were going against him, and the ridiculous pomposity with which he has told the electors that they were not educated up to appreciating him. As to the cause of his fall, it may partly be attributed to the opposition of the Roman Catholics or denominational-education party, and of the publicans; but it is chiefly ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... last a wise reader would wish to miss. Moreover, where the story is dullest it has things which give, perhaps, the most astonishing proof of Milton's power of style. It is true that he does himself occasionally fall into the empty pomposity which characterized his eighteenth-century imitators who fancied that big words could turn prose into poetry. So he talks of dried fruits as "what by frugal {191} storing firmness gains To nourish, and superfluous moist consumes." But the thing most remarkable about this is its ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... gentleman," was the timid reply. (Juveniles have a pomposity all their own, and exquisitely delicious.*) "We read together because we like one another, and that is why we walk together and play together; if we were to offer him money he would throw it at ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... retaining a sympathy for the scholar's life and temper. Accordingly, his style acquired something of the old elaboration, though the attempt to conform to the canons of a later age renders the structure disagreeably monotonous. His tendency to pomposity is not redeemed by the naivete ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... which was then as now acceptable that side of the Rhine. It was not done with pomposity, but rather with the exuberance of a man whose purse and letter of credit possess an ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... to establish the innocence of Phineas Finn,—not for the love of Phineas, but for the love of innocence;—but not even to do that would he have lied. But he was a bad witness, and by his slowness, and by a certain unsustained pomposity which was natural to him, had already taught the jury to think that he was anxious to convict the prisoner. Two men in the Court, and two only, thoroughly understood his condition. Mr. Chaffanbrass saw it all, and intended without the slightest scruple ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... for the poor, crushed, flabby creature at the desk. In Evan's own phrase George got it coming and going. He was like a pricked bladder; all his pomposity ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... Morris was free; no man of great ability was ever less conceited. You will not find in his work a trace of that tired pomposity which tells us that the great man is showing off, or of that empty pretentious singularity which betrays the vanity of the lonely British artist. Morris was never the self-conscious master calling on ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... simple in structure. When they are in the form of passacaglias they may be huge in design and effect. The grandest pieces are the overtures and choruses. The overtures are often very noble, but without pomposity or grandiloquence; indeed, they move as if unconscious of their own tremendous strength. One may hear half a dozen bars before a stroke reveals, as by a flash of lightning, the artistic purpose with which the parts are moving, and the enormous heat and energy ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... how he is doing his work. If he has other people in mind all the time, and does his work for them, and not to be praised for it, then all is well. But if he is thinking of his credit and his position, then he does not grow at all; that is pomposity—a very youthful thing indeed; but the worst case of all is if a man sees that the world must be helped and made, and that one can win credit thus, and so engages in work of that kind, and deals in all the jargon of it, about using influence and living for others, when he is really thinking ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... it with the same exclusive passion as he had shown for subject after subject in his eager ebullient childhood. His mother found him at thirteen inditing a letter on the subject of The Faerie Queene to a school-friend, in which, with a sincerity which made her forgive the pomposity, he remarked— ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... celebrated Letter to Chesterfield, and the letter in which he tells MacPherson that he will not be 'deterred from detecting what he thinks a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian,' are as good specimens of the smashing repartee as anything in Boswell's reports. Nor, indeed, does his pomposity sink to mere verbiage so often as might be supposed. It is by no means easy to translate his ponderous phrases into simple words without losing some of their meaning. The structure of the sentences is compact, though they are too elaborately balanced and stuffed with ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... though signs of chastening thus outwardly declared themselves, in spirit he had regained tone and returned to his former high estate. Along with the revival of financial security had come a revival of pomposity, an addiction to patronage in manner and platitudes in speech. He had ceased to be humble and human, self-righteous self-complacency again ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... great matters as religion and politics, it may seem trifling to illustrate the subject from little boys. But it is not trifling. The bane of philosophy is pomposity: people will not see that small things are the miniatures of greater, and it seems a loss of abstract dignity to freshen their minds by object lessons from what they know. But every boarding-school changes as a nation changes. Most of us may remember thinking,' How odd it is that this half ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... which seemed to imply a consciousness even in the wood and leather of the dignity of the person within. He, for his own part, though a graceful and very courtly personage, full of high talent, policy, and wit, had nothing about him at all of the pomposity of his vehicle; and at the moment which we refer to, namely, about two hours after nightfall, tired with his long journey, and seated with solitary thought, he had drawn a fur-cap lightly over his head, and, leaning back in the carriage, enjoyed not ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... Big words and pomposity never were designed for the highest types of men. Our great national figures have almost without exception had one quality which was a keynote to their ultimate success—this was their simplicity. Next was their accessibility. ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... flying open, his thumbs stuck into the arm-holes of his waistcoat, so as to throw his shoulders back and increase his horizontal dimensions. He also held his head well aft, which threw his chest and stomach well forward. He was the prototype of pomposity and good-nature, and he strutted like an ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... kind of family name, pronounced 'Ma-rill- yer,'" explained Mrs. Spruce with considerable pomposity; "Many folks never gets it right—it wants knowledge and practice. But if you remember the pictures in the gallery at the Manor, sir, you may call to mind one of the ancestresses of the Vancourts, painted in a vi'let velvet; ridin' dress and holdin' a huntin' crop, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... omission of forms, appeared on deck, where he demanded to be shown the master. An introduction was unnecessary in this instance; for Captain Truck no sooner saw his visitor than he recognized the well-known features and solemn pomposity of a civil officer of Portsmouth, who was often employed to search the American packets, in pursuit of delinquents of all degrees ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... ever saw, and when dressed has much more the air of a lady than her mistress. Well can I believe that Mrs. White has been an exciseman's daughter, and I am convinced also that Mr. White's extraction is very low. Yet Mrs. White talks in an amusing strain of pomposity about his and her family and connections, and affects to look down with wondrous hauteur on the whole race of tradesfolk, as she terms men of business. I was beginning to think Mrs. White a good sort of body in spite of all her bouncing and ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... fat, The offspring of a beggar's brat. As eels delight to creep in mud, To eels we may compare his blood; His blood in mud delights to run; Witness his lazy, lousy son! Puff'd up with pride and insolence, Without a grain of common sense, See with what consequence he stalks, With what pomposity he talks; See how the gaping crowd admire The stupid blockhead and the liar. How long shall vice triumphant reign? How long shall mortals bend to gain? How long shall virtue hide her face, And leave ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... superiors. Unlike our authors, who, on those subjects which address the heart and reason jointly, adopt the style of a treatise on the differential calculus; and when pure science is their topic, lead us to suppose (if it were not for their disgusting pomposity) they had chosen for their model the florid confusion of a tenth-rate novel;—the French write on scientific subjects with simplicity and precision, and on moral, aesthetic, and theoretical questions with spirit, earnestness, and sensibility. Having said so much, we must however add, that a liberal ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... and only Audrey and her father were sitting at breakfast. Mr. Harcourt looked pale and fagged, but there was marvellous content in his whole mien. The slight pomposity that had always jarred on Audrey had wholly vanished, and he wrung her hand with a warmth of feeling ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Why, he has been a ship's carpenter all his life. Him a seaman! If anything ever happens to me, and Joe Wylie is set to navigate this ship, then you may say your prayers. He isn't fit to sail a wash-tub across a duck-pond. But I'll tell you what it is," added this worthy, with more pomposity than neatness of articulation, "here's a respeckable passenger brought me a report; do my duty to m' employers, and—take a look at ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... estimation of the Tory party than Sir Robert Sawyer. He was a man of ample fortune and aristocratical connections, of orthodox opinions and regular life, an able and experienced lawyer, a well read scholar, and, in spite of a little pomposity, a good speaker. He had been Attorney General at the time of the detection of the Rye House Plot; he had been employed for the Crown in the prosecutions which followed; and he had conducted those prosecutions with an eagerness which ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of crime. Personally, I've only got one prejudice: I distrust, on principle, the man who wears a perennial and pompous smirk—which isn't, of course, strictly speaking, physiognomy at all. You see, a man can't help his eyes being beady or his nose pronounced, but pomposity and a smirk, now—" ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... restraint, the people looked at one another. Finally their uneasiness and unspoken question were answered by an edict from the mouth of a small upright Frenchman, who mounted a stump and declaimed with a great flourish of graceful pomposity: ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... speculatively up at the projection of logs and earth which made them a partial roof—"along with a lot of other bright ideas, by a gentleman named Charles Fort, who took a lot of pleasure in pricking what he considered to be vastly over-inflated scientific pomposity. He gathered together four book loads of reported incidents of unexplainable happenings which he dared the scientists of his day to explain. And one of his bright suggestions was that such phenomena as the vast artificial earthworks ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... know it was an act of the greatest temerity for me to venture upon a controversy with him." Referring to a comparison which had been made of Conkling to Henry Winter Davis, Blaine continued: "The gentleman took it seriously, and it has given his strut additional pomposity. The resemblance is great; it is striking. Hyperion to a Satyr, Thersites to Hercules, mud to marble, dunghill to diamond, a singed cat to a Bengal tiger, a whining puppy to a roaring lion."—Congressional Globe, April 20, 1866, Vol. 37, Part ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... them!" rejoined the good-natured Sham Rao, with a touch of pomposity. "And so I hope I may be allowed to say that I have understood and duly appreciated their most recent developments. I have just finished studying the magnificent Anthropogenesis of Haeckel, and have carefully discussed in my own mind his logical, ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... with a touch of asperity ill disguised. "Might one be allowed to enquire...?" Scared perhaps by his pomposity, he broke off: "No, that won't do. I'll ask you simply, what has happened? You liked me—to say no more. Now you don't. No, no, don't protest yet. Leave it at that. Well, and then there's Macartney. Macartney didn't know you existed. Now he doesn't ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... and the solicitor were old cronies, and their greeting was most friendly. When the old gentlewoman had seated herself and taken her cup of tea, Mr. Copleston said to Stephen, with a sort of pomposity: ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... antithesis. He blames Xenophon for a poor pun, and Plato, less justly, for mere figurative badinage. It would be an easy task to ransack contemporaries, even great contemporaries, for similar failings, for pomposity, for the florid, for sentences like processions of intoxicated torch-bearers, for pedantic display of cheap erudition, for misplaced flippancy, for nice derangement of epitaphs wherein no adjective is used which is appropriate. With ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... character, though here a little softened, prevails a good deal, as the continued boasting about their town proves, and a certain pomposity in their demeanour, which, however, is harmless and amusing. We were in the habit of employing a baker, who made what was called English bread, and the magnificent manner in which he paid his visits to our domicile was very comic. Our maid, Jeannotte, being out of the way, we were one day disturbed ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... and every wrinkle on his brown visage was swelling with wrath; when my better genius prevailed, He probably recollected that he was sent as my protector, and that the office would not have been fulfilled according to his instructions, by running me through the midriff. But, with all his pomposity, he had the national good-nature; and when we sat down to our chicken and bottle of Tinto in one of those delicious valleys, he was full of remorse for his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... century without insensibly acquiring an education and a store of knowledge far excelling the ordinary. His manner was gentle, and perhaps somewhat pompous, as is common with very big men; but you could never be sure whether an extremely subdued humour did not underlie his pomposity. He was a bachelor, aged forty-five, and lived quietly with a married sister at the bottom of Woodisun Bank, near the National Schools. The wonder was that, with all his advantages, he had not more ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... his gold-topped cane between his legs, which he held very much apart, rest his large white hands on the head, and enunciate the principles of spiritual art, as he hoisted them one by one, as you might say, out of the depths of his moral consciousness. His benignant and imperturbable pomposity gave Roderick the sense of suffocating beneath a large fluffy bolster, and the worst of the matter was that the good gentleman's placid vanity had an integument whose toughness no sarcastic shaft could pierce. Roderick admitted that in thinking over the tribulations of struggling ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... wearing off, and the irritating pomposity of Faltonius was producing its usual effect of arousing antagonism, as it generally did in those he talked to. Brinnaria felt all her wild self ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... confoundedly surprised when he found Black Dillon there. Though bent on meeting him with hauteur and proper reserve, on account of his damnable character, he was yet cowed by his superior knowledge, so that Tom Toole's address was strangely chequered with pomposity and alarm. ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... in a shoemaker's shop, and whose boyish games were played in the street of a Welsh hamlet remote from all the refinements of civilization and all the clangours of industrialism, announced to a breathless Europe without any pomposity of phrase and with but a brief and contemptuous gesture of dismissal the passing away from the world's stage of the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns—those ancient, long glorious, and most puissant houses whose history for an aeon was the ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... of Rhode Island, but "by adoption a westerner," as she explains in her introduction. If it were a question of which had the less poetic merit it would be hard indeed to decide between them, but as to the sincerity of the one and the pomposity of the other, there can be no doubt. The Sweet Singer plays upon the strings of her own heart in a way that makes your eyes grow dim. She has moments of modesty, too, about her work that are very gratifying. But Mrs. L. is cold and egotistical; lifted so high above the ordinary plane of ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... Alexandre Dumas. The name of the hotel is unusual. There may be others similar, but the writer does not recall them at this moment. It was not bad, and, though entitled to be called a grand establishment, it was not given to pomposity or pretence, and we parted with regret, for we had been treated most genially by the proprietor and his wife, and served by a charming young maid, who, we learned, was the daughter of the house. It was all in the family, and ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... whiskers these were! So soft, so fleecy, so purely white, that at times they almost seemed like the wings of cherubim, striving to soar away and bear Mr. Brimberly into a higher and purer sphere. Again, what Protean whiskers were these, whose fleecy pomposity could overawe the most superior young footmen and reduce page-boys, tradesmen, and the lower orders generally, to a state of perspiring humility; to his equals how calmly aloof, how blandly dignified; and to those a misguided fate had set above him, how demurely deferential, how obligingly obsequious! ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... an institution: aristocracy is a sin; generally a very venial one. It is merely the drift or slide of men into a sort of natural pomposity and praise of the powerful, which is the most easy and ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... time Nell would have found it difficult to refrain from laughing at the stilted phraseology of the letter, at the pomposity with which the proposal was made, and the meanness which strove to hide itself in a postscript; but a Punch and Judy show would have seemed a funereal performance at that moment, and she stared as blankly at the letter when she had finished it as if she had been reading some language ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... heart. He hated a plug-hat. He disliked Col. Crockett Shaw, for Shaw was a man who employed politics as a business. Colonel Shaw was carrying his shoulders well back and seemed to be taller than usual, his new air of pomposity making him a head thrust above the horde. Colonel Shaw offensively banged the door behind himself. Mac Tavish removed a package of time-sheets that covered a pile of paper-weights. Colonel Shaw came stamping across the room, clapping his gloved hands together, as if he were ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... With pomposity. A troupe of skull-faced witch-men came Through the agate doorway in suits of flame, Yea, long-tailed coats with a gold-leaf crust And hats that were covered with diamond-dust. And the crowd in the court gave a whoop and a call And danced the juba from wall to wall. With a great deliberation ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... ill with laughing. This Mr. B—y half convulses me ; yet I cannot make you laugh by writing his speeches, because it is the manner which accompanies them, that, more than the matter, renders them so peculiarly ridiculous. His extreme pomposity, the solemn stiffness of his person, the conceited twinkling of his little old eyes, and the quaint importance of his delivery, are so much more like some pragmatical old coxcomb represented on the stage, than like anything in real and common life, that I think, were I a man, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... on her hat. Mr. Gilwyn came down the stairs and marched straight to the dining-room where Cicely, divested of her cap and encased in a gingham apron, was busy clearing the table. In his hand was a book, and his face had suddenly lost all its pomposity ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... fortunes, which they had brought back to their native land. It was natural that, not having had much opportunity of mixing with the best society, they should exhibit some of the awkwardness and some of the pomposity of upstarts. It was natural that, during their sojourn in Asia, they should have acquired some tastes and habits surprising, if not disgusting, to persons who never had quitted Europe. It was natural that, having enjoyed ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... tremendous pomposity," Tom would say, "and he is in no end of societies for molly-coddling art. He goes on, too, about the plaster casts at that hospital for decrepit gods, the Art Museum, as if his whole soul was in the plaster barrels of the Greeks. But bless your soul! It's only his little ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... Lord Wetherby seemed somewhat confused, but, pulling himself together, he covered his embarrassment with a pomposity that blended poorly ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... brother. Adrian was dressed in the uniform of a Spanish officer, with a breast-plate over his quilted doublet, and a steel cap, from the front of which rose a frayed and weather-worn plume of feathers. The face had changed; there was none of the old pomposity about those handsome features; it looked worn and cowed, like that of an animal which has been trained to do tricks by hunger and the use of the whip. Yet, through all the shame and degradation, Foy seemed to catch the glint of some kind of light, a light of good desire ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... said the doctor, that night, concluding his narrative of busy days in the city, "but I have been appointed," with a great affectation of pomposity, "the magistrate for ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... a piquant humour that tickled Green. The constable was strictly within his duty, as he had been called in, but the pomposity of his manner betokened that he was very, very young in the service. In a deliberate silence the detective felt in his pocket for a warrant-card that would clear up the mistake. A moment later he was wildly searching in all his pockets without success. For the first ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... of Moscow are not an attractive class of men, considering them in the light of guardians of the law. With a good deal of pomposity and laziness, they mingle much filth and rascality. The emperor may have great confidence in them, based upon some knowledge of their talents and virtues not shared by casual tourists; but if he would trust one of them with ten kopeks, or agree to place the ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... life of the city. He was, as I remember him, the very embodiment of dignity and aristocracy. He had a diffuse and rather inflated style, both in public speaking and in private conversation. His dignity had a bare suspicion of pomposity in it. He looked with great disdain upon the simplicity of behavior of some of his successors, and their familiarity with all classes of the people. He came into my office one morning full of an intense disgust with something Governor Briggs had been doing. ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... Mr. Collins, heir-presumptive to Longbourn, came on a visit to the Bennets. He was a tall, heavy-looking young man of five-and-twenty. His air was grave and stately, and his manners were very formal. He was a strange mixture of pomposity, servility, and self-importance, a creature most abjectly, yet most amusingly, devoid of anything like ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... saying nothing and sawing wood," said Miss Jones, knowingly. "He's too foxy to quit the firm as old Pomposity did! Probably he thinks it won't last, and he's willing to wait ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... say," said Peter, with a touch of his father's pomposity. "Surely a bride has a right to look forward to arranging her home as she chooses. And Sarah is mad about old French furniture—Louis Seize, I think it is—but I know nothing about such things. I think a man should leave the choice of furniture, and all that, to his wife—especially ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... stalked in and shook hands gravely and with much dignity, especially with Mr. Kennedy, whose career as a statesman he had always greatly admired. St. George often said, in speaking of this manner of the Scotchman's, that Prim's precise pomposity was entirely due to the fact that he had swallowed himself and couldn't digest the meal; that if he would once in a while let out a big, hearty laugh it might split his skin wide enough for him ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... literati [Inclusion], one a Frenchman the other an Englishman [Exclusion], well-known for the pomposity and sonority of their style of writing [Inclusion], were born in the same year, 1709, and died the same year 1784, a double Concurrence—Lefranc de Pompignan—[pompous In. by ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... full of it—stay on the ship like sensible people. There's nothing worth seeing in Guatemala. I hate to be bothered with passengers going off—" and the Captain walks to the railing to wave his hand with stiff pomposity to a Mexican ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... Fulkerson. "That thing is going to attract attention. It's well written—you can take the pomposity out of it, here and there and it's novel. Our people like a bold strike, and it's going to shake them up tremendously to have serfdom advocated on high moral grounds as the only solution of the labor problem. You see, in the first place, he goes for their sympathies by the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Laisangy, with some pomposity, "you have, doubtless, ere this discovered that matters of finance are composed of a thousand details more ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... chances were that the burden would lie on the other side. Cardan seems to have inherited Fazio's contempt for wealth, or at least to have made a profession thereof; for, in chronicling the event of his marriage, he sets down, with a certain degree of pomposity, that he took a wife without a dower on account of a certain vow he had sworn.[53] If the bride was penniless the father-in-law was wealthy, and the last-named fact might well have proved a powerful argument to induce Cardan to remain at Sacco, albeit he had little scope ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... room!" The Senator was beginning to pull himself together. It was the first time he had ever been ragged in such a way, and his composure had suffered; he spoke now with more than his usual pomposity. ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... interests. We are terribly afraid in England of what we call priggishness. It is on the whole a wholesome tendency, but it is the result of a lack of flexibility of mind. What we ought to be afraid of is not seriousness and earnestness, but of solemnity and pomposity. We ought to be ready to vary our mood swiftly, and even to see the humorous side of sacred and beautiful things. The oppressiveness of people who hold a great many things sacred, and cannot bear that they should be jested ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... "What pomposity of expression!" exclaimed Darvid, with a slight smile. "I observe more and more that exaggeration is a disease in my family. I should prefer ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... officer entered with one or two subordinates and a squad of soldiers. Certain formalities had to be gone through in which I played a prominent part. These completed the officer stood before me with all the pomposity he could command and delivered a harangue at high speed in a worrying monotone. To me it was gibberish, but one of the men who could speak English informed me that the gist of his wail was the intimation that "if I moved a pace to the right, or a pace to the left, or fell back a pace, or ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... wants to be a bore. I cannot imagine any man consciously incurring the execration of his fellow-men. And yet there exist innumerable bores scattered through the length and breadth of our happy country, and carrying on their dismal business with an almost malignant persistency. Longwindedness, pomposity, the exaggeration of petty trivialities, the irresistible desire to magnify one's own wretched little achievements, to pose as the little hero of insignificant adventures, and to relate them to the whole world ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various
... with a sigh. The temptation had been hard to resist. A democratic girl, pomposity was a quality which she thoroughly disliked; and though she loved him, she could not disguise from herself that, ever since affluence had descended upon him some months ago, her brother Fillmore had become insufferably pompous. If there are any young men whom ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... conversant with Milton not to catch at times his master's manner, and he has fine Miltonic lines; but he has no assured poetic style of his own, like Milton. When he seeks to have a style he falls into ponderosity and pomposity. In the Excursion we have his style, as an artistic product of his own creation; and although Jeffrey completely failed to recognize Wordsworth's real greatness, he was yet not wrong in saying of the Excursion, as a work of poetic style: "This will never ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... Leaf would not send her away into the terra incognita of a London hotel. Ascott, at first considerably annoyed at the presence of what he called a "skeleton at the feast," had afterward got over it; and run on with a mixture of childish glee and mannish pomposity about his plans and intentions—how he meant to take a house, he thought, in one of the squares, or a street leading out of them: how he would put up the biggest of brass plates, with "Mr. Leaf, surgeon." ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... daughter of the retired senior partner of his firm: "that dear little girl of old Marvin's," as he described the lady of his choice, "his only child and a good child, too." He bore his surprise and honors with a courteous pomposity. Miss Knowles bore the situation with restraint and decorum. But that "dear little girl of old Marvin's" could not bring herself to bear it at all and wept away her modest claims to prettiness and ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... most refined of cockneys presume to find fault with Yorkshire manners. Taken as they ought to be, the majority of the lads and lasses of the West Riding are gentlemen and ladies, every inch of them. It is only against the weak affectation and futile pomposity of a would-be aristocrat ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... was no new access of official pomposity, but the man's natural bearing, that maintained a lofty reserve at these public receptions. Possibly, too, he may have felt the necessity of maintaining the prerogative of the Federal head of all these independent, but now ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... "All the pomposity went out of Mr. Campbell, he became flurried, then excited, then he lost his temper. After that he was allowed to leave the court, and Sir James Fenwick resumed his seat, and waited like a vulture ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... in face of the standards of the Crescent, "numerous as the ears in a grain-field," tender and devoted as is their character. Such traits caught a singular and imposing hue from the grave deportment of these men, so dignified that they might almost be accused of pomposity. It was next to impossible that they should not contract a taste for this stateliness, when we consider that they had almost always before them the most exquisite type of gravity of manner in the followers of Islam, whose qualities they appreciated and appropriated, ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... which Odysseus accuses Palamedes of treachery during the siege of Troy (this is generally considered spurious). According to Alcidamas, the highest aim of the orator was the power of speaking extempore on every conceivable subject. Aristotle (Rhet. iii. 3) criticizes his writings as characterized by pomposity of style and an extravagant use of poetical epithets and compounds and far-fetched metaphors. Of other works only fragments and the titles have survived: Messeniakos, advocating the freedom of the Messenians and containing ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... dressed therein, with hat cocked upon his crown, his paws grasping a cane, and placed under his coat-tails, so as to show off all the glory of his waistcoat, frill, and splendid jewellery, he marched into the streets. He made so imposing a figure in his new dress, and assumed such an air of pomposity, that it was no wonder the uninitiated should have been deceived, and have taken him for a lion of the very first nobility; nor can we be surprised that a poor cur, almost in a state of nudity, should, in ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... one seldom thinks about reputation, when one is like the princess who replied to a question on the state of her soul, 'At twenty one has no soul;' and she possesses the qualities that are so essential to style—natural eclat, originality of expression, grace, color, amplitude without pomposity and abundance without prolixity; moreover, she invents nothing, but, knowing how to observe and to express in perfection everything she had seen and felt, she is a witness and painter of her century: also, she loves nature—a sentiment very ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme |
