"Tinsel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... current now-a-days, he utterly despises. But the kindliness, the glowing sympathies of a few kindred spirits gladden him and make him happy. Though modest and retiring in his disposition, he has no shamefacedness. His conversation is like his verse; there is neither tinsel nor glitter, but genuine, solid stuff. Something that bears examination; something you can take up and handle; something to brood over and reflect upon; something that wins its way by its truthfulness, and compels ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... disguise—in private life he had a castle and retainers; and even Gygi, the gendarme, was a make-believe official who behind the scenes was a vigneron and farmer in a very humble way. Daddy, too, seemed sometimes but a tinsel author dressed up for the occasion, and absurdly busy over books that no one ever saw on railway bookstalls. While Mademoiselle Lemaire was not in fact and verity a suffering, patient, bed-ridden lady, but a princess who escaped from her disguise ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... of the stage resembles the happiness of real life about as much as the tinsel crown of the mock queen resembles the regalia of the sovereign," replied Leone. "It would be far better if your ladyship would not mention ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... vice as to have lost that instinctive loathing for it which they may have once experienced. Thinking to gain a life of ease, with means to gratify their love of show, they barter away their peace of mind for this world, all hope for the next, and only gain a little worthless tinsel, the scorn of their fellow-creatures, and a host of ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... those poor painted faces of the dancers pirouetting in the midst of a public they can more surely enchant from the distance of the stage. The costumes, so many of them, came from humble costumers who let them from year to year without renewal of the tinsel or freshening of the ribbons. But those very things gave to this page of life its depth of interest, ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... time to time in past years for future sorting—an intention that he had never carried out. From the melancholy mass of papers, faded photographs, seals, diaries, withered flowers, and such like, Jocelyn drew a little portrait, one taken on glass in the primitive days of photography, and framed with tinsel in ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... of dangling slippers, red and yellow, like cherries; a little farther on we come to a long trellis of clothes, limp and pendulous, like bunches of grapes; then we pass through a patch of saddles, plain and coloured, decorated with all sorts of beads and tinsel, velvet and morocco, lying on the ground or hung on wooden ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... but with a judgment inferior to Virgil's; nay, in point of the interdependence of the adventures, to Ariosto, and with far less general vigour. The mixture of affectation with his dignity is so frequent, that, whether Boileau's famous line about Tasso's tinsel and Virgil's gold did or did not mean to imply that the Jerusalem was nothing but tinsel, and the AEneid all gold, it is certain that the tinsel is so interwoven with the gold, as to render it more of a rule than an exception, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... of the nacre of any mussel or oyster-shell you might cut, at your pleasure, any quantity of small flat circular discs of the prettiest colour and lustre. To some extent, such tinsel or foil of shell is used pleasantly for decoration. But the mussel or oyster becoming itself an unwilling modeller, agglutinates its juice into three dimensions, and the fact of the surface being now geometrically gradated, together with the savage instinct of attributing ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Santa Claus, never having visited Hannah before, had a mind to make up for lost time. An overflowing stocking hung from the mantel; a tree loaded with presents and tinsel stood by her bed; about the room were placed large gifts, everything a little girl might wish for. Hannah was dazed. She didn't see her mother and father standing in the doorway of the nursery, their arms about each other, and smiling. She tugged at her window until it ...
— The Little Mixer • Lillian Nicholson Shearon
... frocks, and a very singular figure as large as life, supposed to represent the deposition in the holy sepulchre, which was covered by a shroud of worsted gauze, studded over with enormous artificial flowers and tinsel like a Lady's ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... candles, red, white, and blue, were fastened to the different boughs. Dolls that looked exactly like real people—the tree had never seen such before—swung among the foliage, and high on the summit of the Tree was fixed a tinsel star. It ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... 1637, in the part of the cabin consecrated as a chapel, Father Pijart celebrated Mass. The residence was named La Conception de Notre Dame. For a wilderness church it was a marvel. At the entrance were green boughs adorned with tinsel; pictures hung on the walls; crucifixes, vessels, and ornaments of shining metal ornamented the chapel. From far and near Indians flocked to see this wondrous edifice. Best of all, a leading chief offered himself for baptism. The future looked promising; the Indians showed the fathers 'much ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... artillery, the cavalry, the ordnance detachment, the engineers and the men of the Signal Corps. The officers, likewise, shook their heads. All were greatly disappointed to think that the Army had to compete with the sawdust, the tinsel, the gay music and the dash ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... error is operating here, and that multitudes of mankind, especially innocent, loving, and gentle mankind, to say nothing of tender, enthusiastic, love-blinded womankind, are to some extent deceived by the false ring of that which is not metal, and the falser glitter of a tinsel which is ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... and the 'Sorrows of Werther.' But Napoleon's range of reading was very extensive. It included Homer, Virgil, Tasso; novels of all countries; histories of all times; mathematics, legislation, and theology. He detested what he called "the bombast and tinsel" of Voltaire. The praises of Homer and Ossian he was never wearied of sounding. "Read again," he said to an officer on board the BELLEROPHO—"read again the poet of Achilles; devour Ossian. Those are the poets who lift up the soul, and give to ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... thoroughly that I cannot hate him. I abhor him. It is you who must save me from him; it is you who must also save me my principality. Oh, they envy me, these poor people, because I am a Princess, because I dwell in the tinsel glitter of the court. Could they but know how I envy their lives, their homes, their humble ambitions! Believe me, monsieur, as yet I love no man; but that is no reason why I should link my life to that of a man to whom virtue in a woman means nothing. He caused my mother great sorrow. ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... like madness freed from every bond, With all the tinsel-state of puppet-play! Lay off the crown, for it befits thee not, Even in jest; ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Marston, of thus betraying a temper which time ought to have cooled. But, after all, what is public life but a burlesque; a thing of ludicrous disappointment; a tragedy, with a farce always at hand to relieve the tedium and the tinsel; the fall of kingdoms made laughable by the copper lace ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... are growing old and find themselves broken in body and in spirit, who are thrust aside in the fierce competition of their trade in favour of younger rivals; those who find the wine in their tinsel cup turning, or turned, to gall, the case is different. They are sometimes, not always, glad to creep to such shelter from the storms of life as the Army can offer, and there work out their moral and physical ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... respect, with any the least weakness either of hand or design, is only to set the weakness in a more glaring light, dressing it up, not in the gorgeous array and real jewellery of the court, but in the foil and tinsel glitter, and mock regality of a low theatrical pageantry. And this would be the case even if we had in use his luscious vehicle; but with an inferior one, too often with a bad one, the case of weakness is aggravated, and not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... might be called a street of cafes at Perpignan, not far from the Castillet. They are great, splendid establishments, with wide, overhung, awninged terraces, and potted plants and electric lights and gold and tinsel, and mixed drinks and ices and sorbets, and all the epicurean cold things which one may find in the best establishment in Paris. These cafes are side by side and opposite each other, and are as typical of the life of the town as is the Rambla typical of Barcelona, ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... gay-colored rags, and tatters, he brandishing a sweep's broom and she a ladle. Jim Crow and a fancifully bedizened ballet-dancer in white muslin, often swelled the ranks, and the rest of the party rigged out in a profusion of gilt paper, flowers, tinsel and gewgaws, their faces and legs colored with brick-dust, made up a comical crowd. But even these mild remains of the great festival are almost entirely banished to the rural districts, and ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... forgot to mention, was completed laced with locomotive tinsel, and moved as by instinct, in all directions; but as my mother was not fond of such company, she furnished me with a suit of my father's, who was absent at sea, and condemned my laced suit for the ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... Beffa, Helvetia Exchange," with the white cross and plumed hat of Switzerland. One street is all Chinese, with shiny-haired women, and little mandarins with long cues of braided red silk. The babies seem to be dressed in imitation of the idol in the temple; their tight caps have the same tinsel and trimmings, and the resemblance their little dry faces bear ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... is not in this connection out of place. "We may all be fine fellows," said Stevenson, "but none of us can write like Hazlitt." To write a style that is easy yet incisive, lively and at the same time substantial, buoyant without being frothy, glittering but with no tinsel frippery, a style combining the virtues of homeliness and picturesqueness, has been given to few mortals. Writing in a generation in which the standards of prose were conspicuously unsettled, when the most ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... which has supplanted the ancient crown of gold and silver and tinsel, worn with such unconsciousness of its esoteric message, symbolizes one of the most beautiful truths relating to the spiritual ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... Bertram, indeed, had come to assume a vastly different aspect from what it had displayed in times past. Heretofore it had been a plaything which like a juggler's tinsel ball might be tossed from hand to hand at will. Now it was no plaything—no glittering bauble. It was something big and serious and splendid—because Billy lived in it; something that demanded all his powers to do, and be—because Billy was watching; something that might be a Hades of torment or ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... "illusions" on the imagination, or on any other faculty. It may be the case also that the stock poetical diction and mechanism of Addison's time, with the "Delias" and "Phyllises," "nymphs," "swains," "lyres," and other tinsel elegancies in which it delights, will be—nay, are already—the abomination of a discerning world. But if by "poetry" is meant what should be meant—the vivid, impassioned and rhythmical expression of rare emotions and exquisite thoughts, the revelation by genius of the ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... fact on record or capable of being shewn, to prove that Dr. Priestley was guilty of any other crime than being a dissenter from the church of England, and a warm friend of American Independence. For this he was abused by Porcupine—and Denny is only Porcupine with a little more tinsel to cover his dirt. It is worthy of remark, that after a whole sheet of promises of "literary lore" and "products of the master of spirits" of the nation—the first and second numbers of the Portable Foolery, are stuffed ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... brick-work of the chimney-place, and there remained a moment or two. Then slowly retired, and as it retired something was heard to fall upon the shavings and tinsel of ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... pulled her clothing furiously from her, and stood with nothing but a plain coloured shawl of gauze covered in tinsel twined about her slim waist, "why hast thou wasted precious moments? Why has thou imperilled my chance by infuriating the great man? Out of my way, ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... at the idea of having a Christmas tree without the usual tinsel and glittering baubles. But after Robin and Harkness had worked for a half-hour she admitted the effect was very Christmasy ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... clanked down again upon the sandy shore two or three feet in front of where they had stood—or behind, just as it happened; and their swords banged against their breast-plates and shields, proving that they were real metal and not merely tinsel; and they twirled round and round like beef on a roasting-jack, until at last Michele dealt the inevitable blow and the giant fell dead on the sand with a thud that jolted the coast, shook the islands, rippled across the sunset ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... hamely fare we dine, Wear hoddin gray, and a' that? Gi'e fools their silks, and knaves their wine, A man's a man for a' that; For a' that, and a' that, Their tinsel show, and a' that— The honest man, though e'er sae poor, Is king o' ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... not been for Pocahontas. She was resolved that her beloved white chief should want for nothing, and now every four or five days she came to the fort laden with provisions. Smith also took Captain Newport to visit the Powhatan, and great barter was made of blue beads and tinsel ornaments for ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... from what was anticipated. It is an infinitely higher and holier and nobler thing than our childhood fancied. The world that lay before us then was but a tinsel toy to the world which our firm feet tread. We have entered into the undiscovered land. We have explored its ways of pleasantness, its depths of dole, its mountains of difficulty, its valleys of delight, and, behold! it is very good. Storms have swept fiercely, but they ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... man carried away by abnormal appetites, and wickedness, and the devil, may of course commit murder, or forge bills, or become a fraudulent director of a bankrupt company. And so may a man be untrue to his troth,—and leave true love in pursuit of tinsel, and beauty, and false words, and a large income. But why should one tell the story of creatures so base? One does not willingly grovel in gutters, or breathe fetid atmospheres, or live upon garbage. If we are to deal with heroes and heroines, let us, at any rate, have heroes and ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... (or should) make them sick. For the publishers' "blurb" confuses all standards. Every book is superlative in everything. And the hack reviewer, when he likes a book, likes everything and applies Shakespearian adjectives and Tolstoyan attributes to creatures of dust and tinsel, or blunders helplessly into dispraise of scholarship, restraint, subtlety, taste, originality—anything ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... horseback, with lances and banners. We were a little too near for the full enjoyment of the spectacle; for, though some of the armor was real, I could not help observing that other suits were made of silver paper or gold tinsel. A policeman (a queer anomaly in reference to such a mediaeval spectacle) told us that they were going to joust and run at the ring, in a field a ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... thought of the women on the Rieka River—a tired girl dressed in faded tights did a few easy contortions between the tables, and in a bored manner collected her meed of halfpence—we thought of the cheery idiot of Scutari. Was it worth it, we asked each other, this tinsel culture to which we had returned? And not bothering to answer the question went back to our hotel ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... a fashion set in of adorning engravings with pieces of cloth, silk, and tinsel. At best it was a stupid fancy, and was responsible for the destruction of many fine old mezzotints and coloured prints. The hands, face, and background of an engraving were cut out, and pasted on a sheet of cardboard, pieces of some favourite brocaded gown, perhaps, were ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... ask, when back on Blighty's shore My frozen frame in liberty shall rest, For pleasure to beguile the hours in store With long-drawn revel or with antique jest. I do not ask to probe the tedious pomp And tinsel splendour of the last Revue; The Fox-trot's mysteries, the giddy Romp, And all such folly I would fain eschew. But, propt on cushions of my long desire, Deep-buried in the vastest of armchairs, Let me recline what time the roaring fire Consumes itself ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... of religion," Mrs. Gould pursued, "was shocked and disgusted at the tawdriness of the dressed-up saints in the cathedral—the worship, he called it, of wood and tinsel. But it seemed to me that he looked upon his own God as a sort of influential partner, who gets his share of profits in the endowment of churches. That's a sort of idolatry. He told me he endowed churches ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... think, that I was fond of what I know is not my due. I meant to express this apprehension as respectfully as I could, but my words failed me-a misfortune not too common to me, who am apt to say too much, not too little! Perhaps it is that very quality which your ladyship calls wit, and I call tinsel, for which I dread being praised. I wish to recommend myself to you by more essential merits-and if I can only make you laugh, it will be very apt to make me as much concerned as I was yesterday. For people to whose approbation I am indifferent, I don't care whether they commend ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... for red-coats?" he snorted fiercely, his keen, scarred face flushing violently, his steel-gray eyes shining like silver tinsel. "If Fyles and his boys butt in there'll be a dandy bunch of lead flying around Rocky Springs. Maybe it won't drop from the sky neither. There's fools who reckon when it comes to shooting that fair play's a jewel. Wal, when I'm up ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... will yield up all that she has, making, it may be, but one protest for Justice' sake and then no more. And she will urge her children to do the same. If the world will let her have no jewels, then she will put glass beads in her monstrance, and for marble she will use plaster, and tinsel ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... criticism here. But on all sides in the social conversation of the young people of this day, it seems to be agreed to give good, plain, strong English the go-by and to indulge in the embroidery of adjectives. Tawdry adjectives such as 'beautiful', 'lovely,' 'horrid', 'awful', and the like worn tinsel. I suppose I might venture the assertion without fear of contradiction, that this is the stock in trade in most young girls in qualifying their conversation. The use of that tinsel gives a wholly unreal tone to what is being said and is so pregnant with affectation as to be tiresome. Between ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... superior minds if I say that all this seemed to him an insuperable impediment to his making up to Verena. His scruples were doubtless begotten of a false pride, a sentiment in which there was a thread of moral tinsel, as there was in the Southern idea of chivalry; but he felt ashamed of his own poverty, the positive flatness of his situation, when he thought of the gilded nimbus that surrounded the protegee of Mrs. Burrage. This shame was possible ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... indescribable human figure, with its face buried in its hands. It wore an anomalous garment, slashed with various colors, like a harlequin's coat. Upon one shoulder was sewed the semblance of a door cut out of blue cloth; on the other, a crescent cut out of green. Upon the head was set a tinsel crown, amid tangles of disordered hair. Above was a huge brass key, suspended by a tow string from the ceiling. Table and floor were littered with manuscripts and papers; under the former I observed an ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... desire to be more than Friedland, to unite some shadow of command with the substance, to wear some crown of tinsel, as well as the crown of power? We do not know, we know only that his ways were dark, that his ambition was vast, and that he was thwarting the policy of the Jesuits and Spain. Great efforts were made in vain to get up a case against his memory; recourse was had to torture, the use ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... no less fond of the arts, provided he finds in them a sincere interpretation of life. This is why the theatre, with its false values, its tinsel and affectation, has to him seemed a gross deformation of the reality, ever since the day when at Ajaccio he attended a performance of "Norma," in which the moon was represented by a round transparent ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... eating supper, a dozen Indian girls were gathered about a table in one of the large rooms behind the house, busily engaged in blowing out the contents of several hundred eggs and filling the hollowed shells with cologne, flour, tinsel, bright scraps of paper. Each egg-was then sealed with white wax, and ready for the cascaron frolic of ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... with tiny lighted tapers and radiant with shiny tinsel cut in pretty devices or in thread-like strips. Bright balls, gay toys, and paper flowers help to enhance its beauty, and sometimes scenes from sacred history are arranged with toys at the base of ...
— Yule-Tide in Many Lands • Mary P. Pringle and Clara A. Urann
... gong. My masseur disappeared. A stunted old Negress entered, dressed in the most tawdry tinsel. She was talkative as a magpie, but at first I did not understand a word in the interminable string she unwound, while she took first my hands, then my feet, and polished the ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... sentence of verbose and flaccid Latin, analyse them with difficulty, and when at last we come to the central thought enshrouded in them, we too often find that it is the merest and most obvious commonplace, a piece of tinsel wrapped in endless folds of tissue paper. Perhaps from one point of view the study of the style of Cassiodorus might prove useful to a writer of English, as indicating the faults which he has in this age most carefully to avoid. Over and over again, when reading ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... was gorgeous with silk curtains and cushions embroidered with gold thread and embossed with tinsel ornaments, the work of the bride herself. The seat for the bridegroom was somewhat higher and larger than the bride's. At last the bridegroom approached in a large barge, which held about two hundred people. A small boat preceded it with three guns, ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... Jack was landed in Canada, with only a few shillings in his pocket; from that period he became an outskirter. The romance in his nature pointed to the backwoods; he went thither at once, and was not disappointed. At first the wild life surpassed his expectations, but as time wore on the tinsel began to wear off the face of things, and he came to see them as they actually were. Nevertheless, the romance of life did not wear out of his constitution. Enthusiasm, quiet but deep, stuck to him all through his career, and carried him on and over difficulties that would have disgusted ...
— Fort Desolation - Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land • R.M. Ballantyne
... dismay, the other with diversion. At last the Colonel, slower of foot than the rest, arrived on the scene, just as the pride of his heart, the old King Chanticleer of the yard, made his exit, draped in a royal red paper robe and a species of tinsel crown, out of which his red face looked most ludicrous as he came halting and stupefied, haying evidently been driven up in a corner and pinched rather hard; but close behind him, chuckling forth his terror and ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... she received with empressement. She was dressed to her heart's delight, with a profusion of mock pearl and tinsel; her hair in a shower of long curls in front, with any quantity of bows and braids behind, and a wreath!—that required all Mrs. Castleton's self-possession to look at without laughing. Her entrance excited no little sensation—for she was a striking-looking ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... grown there, and little blue and white tapers were placed among the leaves. Dolls that looked for all the world like men—the Tree had never beheld such before—were seen among the foliage, and at the very top a large star of gold tinsel was fixed. It was really ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... a suit of spangled white; and side by side bowed the dark Kings of Iron and Lead, the one mighty in black, the other sullen in blue; and after them were the Copper King, gleaming ruddy and brave, and the Tin King, strutting in his trimmings of gaudy tinsel which looked nearly as well as silver, but were more economical. And this fine troop of lackey kings most politely led Thor and Loki into the palace, and gave them of the best, for they never suspected who these seeming maidens ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... scene from fairyland. Cedar branches, decked with flakes of artificial snow, and great white snowbanks, completely hid the walls from view. Spread over the floor, except for a space in the middle reserved for dancing, were pine needles and more patches of snow; and everywhere frosty tinsel glimmered in the soft, blue light ...
— The Girl Scouts' Good Turn • Edith Lavell
... to be attracted by glitter and tinsel, and to live for earthly things which perish in the using. The candidate who cares much for honour and nothing for learning, the professional man who will sacrifice reputation to win a fortune, and all who wrong others in order to better ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... traveller in Birmingham jewellery, he told the land lady of the quiet little inn, and was on his way to that busy commercial centre to procure a fresh supply of glass emeralds, and a score or so of gigantic rubies with crinkled tinsel behind them. The Major, usually somewhat silent and morose, contrived to make himself very agreeable to the jovial frequenters of the comfortable little public parlour of the ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... the history of Italian literature, when the great classical writers were decried and neglected, and the genius of one man depraved the taste of the age in which he lived. Marini introduced, or at least rendered general and fashionable, that far-fetched wit, that tinsel and glittering style, that luxurious pomp of words, which was easily imitated by talents of a lower order: yet in the Adonis there are many redeeming passages, some touches of real pathos, and some stanzas of natural and beautiful description: and thus ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... weapons a la Waterloo suggests "scalping trophies." The china is curious—there is even an empty ginger jar—picked up in country places, of a rare and valuable old-fashioned type. He has the finest collection of old tinsel pictures of the Richard III. and Dick Turpin order in the kingdom, and values an old book full of tinsel patterns of the most exquisite design and workmanship. Old glass pictures are scattered about, "Lord Nelson's Funeral Car," and Joey Grimaldi grins ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... do a thing for Christmas this year," she declared, as nearly everybody in the village had intermittently declared, "not a living, breathing thing. I can't, and folks might just as well know it, flat foot. What's the use of buying tinsel and flim-flam when you're eating milk gravy to save butter and using salt sacks for handkerchiefs? I ain't educated ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... can write no article just now; I am pioching, like a madman, at my stories, and can make nothing of them; my simplicity is tame and dull—my passion tinsel, boyish, hysterical. Never mind—ten years hence, if I live, I shall have learned, so help me God. I know one must work, in the meantime (so says Balzac) comme le mineur enfoui sous ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which each of them might well have had for the vast knowledge of the other. When the Decline and Fall was published, Burke read it as everybody else did; but he told Reynolds that he disliked the style, as very affected, mere frippery and tinsel. Sir Joshua himself was neither a man of letters nor a keen politician; but he was full of literary ideas and interests, and he was among Burke's warmest and most constant friends, following him with an admiration ...
— Burke • John Morley
... Catholicism, was, as is well known, the original of Lothair in Lord Beaconsfield's famous novel. Lord Beaconsfield's portrait of him was disfigured, and indeed made ridiculous, by the gilding, or rather the tinsel, with which his essentially alien taste bedizened it; but, apart from such exaggerations, there were elements in it of unmistakable likeness, and the entertainment to which I am now referring was, apart from its peculiar ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... Passing from one hospital to another, and bestowing general sympathy, with small works, is not what wounded men want. It was very soon perceptible how the men in that hospital appreciated the solid worth of the one and the tinsel of the other. ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... farmers, instead of cultivating the fields, had to act as bearers of the dogs' sedan-chairs. Thus, the city of Kamakura presented the curious spectacle of a town filled with well-fed dogs, clothed in tinsel and brocades, and totalling from four to five thousand. Twelve days in every month used to be devoted to dog-fights, and on these occasions, the regent, the nobles, and the people inside and outside the mansion used to assemble as ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... course, came arrayed in their best. They were received by Mrs. Roosevelt, who had a hand-shake and a kind word for each, and then some of the Cabinet ladies, who were assisting, gave to each visitor a button, set in ribbon and tinsel and inscribed "Merry Christmas and Happy ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer
... was the natural result of electricity; the vision of Zachariah was effected by the smoke of the chandeliers in the temple; the Magian kings, with their offerings of myrrh, of gold, and of incense, were three wandering merchants, who brought some glittering tinsel to the Child of Bethlehem; the star which went before them a servant bearing a flambeau; the angels in the scene of the temptation, a caravan traversing the desert, laden with provisions; the two angels ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... and alone, my Frederick, when we belong to one another—when nothing more can separate us, when we shall no more have to meet under the veil of secrecy, no more have to conceal the fair, divine reality under borrowed tinsel! You know, love, ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... the terrace, he saw Kathleen and Scott—the latter carrying a butterfly net—examining the borders of white pinks with a lantern. In and out of the yellow rays swam multitudes of night moths, glittering like flakes of tinsel as the lantern light flashed on their wings; and Scott was evidently doing satisfactory execution, for every moment or two Kathleen uncorked the cyanide jar and he dumped into it from the folds of the ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... 'I suppose tinsel or gold depends on the using,' said he, thoughtfully; 'there are some lumps of solid gold among those papers, I am sure, one, in particular, about a trifle. May I see that ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the next weeks. It was filled with the dainty oddments which a woman of means and taste collects in the course of years; trimmings and laces, and scraps of fine brocades; belts and buckles, and buttons of silver and paste; glittering ends of tinsel, ends of silk and ribbons that were really too pretty to throw away, and cunning little motifs which had the magic quality of disguising deficiencies and making both ends meet. Claire gave with a lavish hand, and Cecil's gratitude was pathetic in its intensity. More and more as the ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... walked the earth ever passed to his tomb through such a storm of human tears. The pageants of Alexander, Caesar, and Wellington were tinsel to this. Nor did the spirit of Napoleon, the Corsican Lieutenant of Artillery who once presided over a congress of kings whom he had conquered, look down on its ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... It is a real thing," said Mrs. Mayflower. "It does not project itself in advance of us; but exists in the actual and the now, if it exists at all. We cannot catch it by pursuit; that is only a cheating counterfeit, in guilt and tinsel, which dazzles our eyes in the ever receding future. No; happiness is a state of life; and it comes only to those who do each day's work peaceful self-forgetfulness, and a calm trust in the Giver of all good for the blessing that lies stored for each one prepared to receive it in ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... die, glorious and lofty as they are, proudly as they stand over their trembling subjects! Even to them comes the dark hour in which all the borrowed and artistically-combined tinsel of their lives falls from them; a dark hour, in which they tremble and repent, and pray to God for what they seldom granted to their fellow-men—mercy! Mercy for those false tales which they have imposed upon the people, for those false tales of the higher endowments ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... opinion, the Christian public generally will feel under great obligations to the publishers of this work for the beautiful taste, arrangement, and delicate neatness with which they have got it out. The intrinsic merit of the Bible recommends itself; it needs no tinsel ornament to adorn its sacred pages. In this edition every superfluous ornament has been avoided, and we have presented us a perfectly chaste specimen of the Bible, without note or comment. It appears to be just what is needed in every family—'the ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... ceremony is a funeral without a legacy; an assembly is a mob, and a ball a compound of glare, tinsel, noise, and dust. However amusing in their freshness, after a few repetitions, they are only rendered endurable by the prospect of some collateral gain, or the gratification of personal vanity. To exhibit the beauty of a young wife, or the diamonds of an old one; to be able ...
— The Mirror, 1828.07.05, Issue No. 321 - The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction • Various
... his vivid lines assume The garb and dignity of ancient Rome.— Let college verse-men trite conceits express, Trick'd out in splendid shreds of Virgil's dress; From playful Ovid cull the tinsel phrase, And vapid notions hitch in pilfer'd lays: Then with mosaick art the piece combine, And boast the glitter of each dulcet line: Johnson adventur'd boldly to transfuse His vigorous sense into the Latian muse; Aspir'd to shine by unreflected ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... me placed in the guard-house. I told him I hoped to die if I could help it. I said the horse seemed to be possessed to do some circus business wherever he went. I confided to the colonel that the horse had been a circus-horse before the war, and the music and tinsel, and crowd that he saw, had turned his head and made him think that he was again with his beloved circus, where he had spent the best years of his life. The colonel said I ought to have known better than to bring a circus horse to a funeral. Well, when the drum major got out of sight the horse acted ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck
... the true. Madame de Frontignac longed for one strong, unguarded, real, earnest word from the man who had stolen from her her whole being. She was beginning to feel in some dim wise what an untold treasure she was daily giving for tinsel and dross. She leaned back in the carriage, with a restless, burning cheek, and wondered why she was born to be so miserable. The thought of Mary's saintly face and tender eyes rose before her as the moon rises on the eyes of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... guard-house, a popular uprising, the fish-market, the galleys, the wine-shop, the poule au pot of Henri Quatre, are treasure-trove in her eyes. She seizes upon this canaille, washes it clean, and sews her tinsel and spangles over its villainies; purpureus assuitur pannus. Her object seems to be to deliver patents of nobility to all these roturiers of the drama; and each of these patents under the great seal is ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... and other cities, they use to trim up their churches and monastries on solemn festivals, when there is station and indulgences granted in honour of the saint or patron; as also on occasion of signal victories, and other joyful tidings; and those garlands made up with hobby-horse tinsel, make a glitterring show, and rattling noise when the ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... in a style of princely magnificence. The dresses were of rich material, profusely ornamented with gold and silver, the kind indulgence of the audience, for once, not being asked to attribute an extraordinary value to professional tinsel. The author is said to have laid out four hundred pounds for this occasion. Brennoralt, also a tragedy, was first published under the title of The Discontented Colonel, in 1639, as a satire on the Scottish ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... cathedral. It was St. John's eve. "At twelve o'clock to-night," said H., "the spirits of all who are to die this year will appear to any who will go alone into the dark cathedral and summon them"! We were charmed with the interior. Twilight hid all the dirt, cobwebs, and tawdry tinsel; softened the outlines, and gave to the immense arches, columns, and stained windows a strange and thrilling beauty. The distant tapers, seeming remoter than reality, the kneeling crowds, the heavy vesper chime, all combined to realize, H. said, her dreams ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... escaped cascades of silver-lustrous Chinese silks and waves of tinsel, which an oblique sunbeam shot through with luminous beads, while portraits of every era, in frames more or less tarnished, smiled through ...
— The Mummy's Foot • Theophile Gautier
... committed to a short and vigorous exposition and defence of the point in question. The entire room became attentive. Then, as he paused, the strident voice of a noted and irascible man proclaimed, "That's not democracy and not Jefferson—that doctrine, Mr. Rand. Veil her as you please in gauze and tinsel, you've got conquest by the hand. You may not think it, but you're preaching—what's ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... in the clouds. That night at Cadenabbia had apparently knocked the bottom out of his dream. Women were riddles which only they themselves could solve for others. For this one woman he was perfectly ready to throw everything aside. A man lived but once; and he was a fool who would hold to tinsel in preference to such happiness as he thought he saw opening out before him. Nora saw, but she did not care. That in order to reach another she was practising infinite cruelty on this man (whose one fault lay in that he loved her) did not appeal to her pity. But her arrow flew ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... the farmer by whom he was raised, and M. Roland, the butcher of the carnival, followed by a hundred of the same craft, dressed as cavaliers of the different ages of France. They made a very showy appearance, although the faded velvet and soiled tinsel of their mantles were ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... tempted the crowds with vulgar indecencies, and the booths that had sheltered the petty games of chance where loud-voiced criers had persuaded the multitude with the hope of winning a worthless bauble or a tinsel toy, were being cleared away from the borders of the plaza, the beauty of which their presence had marred. In the plaza itself—which is the heart of the town, and is usually kept with much pride and care—the bronze statue of the vigorous Rough Rider Bucky O'Neil ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... their arrangement, the folding doors communicating with another parlor were suddenly thrown open, disclosing the grand achievement of the afternoon—the beautiful Christmas tree—tall, wide-spreading, glittering with lights and tinsel ornaments, gorgeous with gay colors, and every branch loaded ...
— Elsie's New Relations • Martha Finley
... upon our theatre within even the last twenty-five years—by the advent of "the sensation drama," invented and named by Dion Boucicault; by the resuscitation of the spectacle play, with its lavish tinsel and calcium glare and its multitudinous nymphs; by the opera bouffe, with its frequent licentious ribaldry; by the music-hall comedian, with his vulgar realism; and by the idiotic burlesque; with its futile babble and its big-limbed, ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... you unfledged Guy Fawkes. I know nothing would give you greater joy than to put on a mask, grasp a dagger in your hand, and go to Wesley, crying, 'Villain, your secret or your life!' Dick, you're a stage hero; you're a thing of sawdust and tinsel. Come to the parlor and hear Kate play the divine songs of Mendelssohn; perhaps, night-eyed conspirator, to whirl Polly or Miss Rosa in the delirium of the ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... pretend to honest love, or feel insulted by the proffer of a stolen regard? And what have we to do with homes, or hearts, or firesides? Have we not the playhouse, its paste diamonds, its paste feelings, and the loud applause of fops and sots—hearts?—beneath loads of tinsel and paint? Nonsense! The love that can go with souls to heaven—such love for us? Nonsense! These men applaud us, cajole us, swear to us, flatter us; and yet, forsooth, we would have them respect ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... talk of tinsel! why we see The old mark of rouge upon your cheeks. You prate of nature! you are he That spilt his life ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... Nor leaf, nor fruit, nor blossom bore. Sid's sceptre, full of juice, did shoot In golden boughs, and golden fruit; And he, the dragon never sleeping, Guarded each fair Hesperian Pippin. No hobby-horse, with gorgeous top, The dearest in Charles Mather's[7] shop, Or glittering tinsel of May Fair, Could with this rod of Sid compare.[8] Dear Sid, then why wert thou so mad To break thy rod like naughty lad?[9] You should have kiss'd it in your distress, And then return'd it to your mistress; Or made it a Newmarket switch,[10] And not a rod for thine own breech. But ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... and I had the fancy to call her Medea. "La pessima Medea!" cried one of the boys—"the one who used to ride through the air on a goat?" "No, no," I said; "she was a beautiful lady, the Duchess of Urbania, the most beautiful woman that ever lived." I made her a crown of tinsel, and taught the boys to cry "Evviva, Medea!" But one of them said, "She is a witch! She must be burnt!" At which they all rushed to fetch burning faggots and tow; in a minute the yelling demons had ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... wonderful things of the Augustan city stand out in high relief, above the varied crowd that fills the streets, with all the dignity that centuries of power can lend. To the tawdry is opposed the splendid, the Roman general in his chiselled corselet and dyed mantle faces the Greek actor in his tinsel; the band of painted, half-clad, bedizened dancing-girls falls back cowering in awestruck silence as the noble Vestal passes by, high-browed, white-robed, untainted, the incarnation of purity in ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... frequently excited their derision, and now afforded fresh matter for their ridicule. The customs of Germany, the simple habiliments in which the retainers of the greatest houses were arrayed in that country, were contrasted with the tinsel and glitter in which the prelate pranked himself. It was proposed, by way of showing contempt for Granvelle, that a livery should be forthwith invented, as different as possible from his in general effect, and that all the gentlemen present should indiscriminately adopt it for their ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... oh stay! Within thy gates, love-garlanded, remain: For love this Mammon seeks not, but for gain— He is the same alway. This god in burnished tinsel, as of old, Cares for no music save of clinking gold— All else to him is vain: His heart is flint, his ears are dull as lead; A crown of care he bringeth for thy head, And ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... some forty feet we find we are again in the track of the Royal Procession! There are tiny decorations going up amongst the trees. A triumphal arch, quite twenty feet high, is being covered with coloured paper and tinsel, and a line of flags and freshly cut palm leaves leads to the little siding on the line that goes to Rangoon. The place is so pretty that you feel it is a pity that its natural features should be disturbed by ornament however ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... careless demeanour. A table well spread with fine-looking artificial flowers and viands may be nice for the eye, but who can satisfy his hunger and thirst with them? Thus it is with your altiloquent talkers, Miss Bunting. They give you, as a rule, only the tinsel, the varnish, the superficial, which vanishes into thin nothing under your analysis of thought or your reflection of ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... looks at things, and not at the traditions of things. He is not led away by the cry of the mob, and the gleam of gold so pure and solid almost changes into indignation our regret that he has ever suffered himself to be deceived by the glare of tawdry tinsel. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... ensure success. The best patterns for various times of the year are—For February, March, and April, big Shannon Blue Fly, the Black Goldfinch, the Jock Scot, and the Yellow Lahobber; for May, June, and July, Purple Mixture, tinsel bodied Green Parrot, purple bodied Green Parrot, Silver and Blue Doctors, Purple Widgeon, Orange and Grouse, and Thunder and Lightning. Towards the end of the season here, as elsewhere, strange fancy ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... might better be said that Maude and Miss Allsop dressed it, while I gave a perfunctory aid. Both the women took such a joy in the process, vying with each other in getting effects, and as I watched them eagerly draping the tinsel and pinning on the glittering ornaments I wondered why it was that I was unable to find the same joy as they. Thus it had been every Christmas eve. I was always tired when I got home, and after ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... fleet of canoes from Quebec or Montreal was a fine sight. The trading canoe of bark was forty-five feet long, and carried four tons of goods. The crew of eight men, with their hats gaudy with plumes and tinsel, their brilliant handkerchiefs tied around their throats, their bright-colored shirts, flaming belts, and gayly worked moccasins, formed a picture that can not be described. When the axes, powder, shot, dry goods, and provisions ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... shout above the tumbled roar, Lest brave ships drive and break against the shore. What though thy sounding song be roughly set? Parnassus' self is rough! Give thou the thought, The golden ore, the gems that few forget; In time the tinsel jewel will be wrought. Stand thou alone, and fixed as destiny, An imaged god that lifts above all hate; Stand thou serene and satisfied with fate; Stand thou as stands the lightning-riven tree, That lords ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... but it was as though I had found a new earth here within the old one, but more spacious and beautiful than any I had known before. I have thought, often and often, that this world we live in so dumbly, so carelessly, would be more glorious than the tinsel heaven of the poets if only we knew how to lay hold upon it, if only we could win that complete command of our own lives which is the ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... ever since, doing washing and behaving with admirable propriety, no sign of opium about him anywhere. One element that they introduced was Colour. Our modern Fairs are not very strong in the element of Colour. It is true that one of the roundabouts was ablaze with gilt and tinsel, and in the centre of it, whence comes the music, there were women with brazen faces and bosoms of gold. It is true also that outside the Circus and the Fat Sisters and Battling Edwardes there were flaming ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... can guess at your meaning. She has no doubt a mind as fair as her face, but none of the tinsel which we so often take for gold. ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton |
