"Pinchbeck" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... polishing up a steel chain that might on an emergency have served to chain up a very large bull-dog; but the Squire adapted it to the more fashionable use of adorning himself, and making safe his ponderous pinchbeck watch. Belhash now puffed, and blowed, and swore, and sweated, and piled on the chalk, and rubbed and tugged criss-crass his knee, until, with the motion and fritting, he had well nigh covered his cloth with the white substance, from the knee downward. Getting it to the dignity point of brightness ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... picture fair enough, sir? There is in it no mirage, no Fata Morgana, no marsh fire. You are a man of great abilities, with ample power to direct those inner forces to outward ends that shall truly gild your name. Truly, sir, not falsely. Gold, not pinchbeck. Clear glory of duty highly done, not a cloudy fame whose wings are drenched with blood and tears. Come, sir, come—make an old man happy!" He dragged his chair nearer to Rand and held out ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... passed away peacefully in the arms of the Duchess Charlotte; and that the drink-soiled broken body, from which she must so often have recoiled in disgust and terror, had been laid out, with the sad mock royalty of a gilt wooden sceptre and pinchbeck crown, in state in the cathedral of Frascati; when, I say, the news reached Paris, this woman, so confident of having been in the right, and who had written so frankly that if she did not hate her husband it was from mere Christian charity ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... scarecrow of an idol as that gaping straw-stuffed inanity you worship, and call honor? It is not Honor; it is but your honor. It is neither gold, nor silver, nor honest copper, but a vile, worthless pinchbeck. It may be, however, for I have not the honor to belong to any of your clubs, that you no longer insult the word by using it at all. It may be you have deposed it, and enthroned another word of less significance to you still. But ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... Abbotsford and the hospitalities which he extended to all comers wasted his time and finally brought about his bankruptcy. Leslie Stephen and others have even made merry over Scott's Gothic,[14] comparing his plaster-of-Paris 'scutcheons and ceilings in imitation of carved oak with the pinchbeck architecture of Strawberry Hill, and intimating that the feudalism in his romances was only a shade more genuine than the feudalism of "The Castle of Otranto." Scott was imprudent; Abbotsford was his weakness, but it was no ignoble weakness. If the ideal ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... double-bitted axes of much the same pattern as those with which our forbears hewed through Norman mail caught the light of the polished brass lamps and flashed upon the wainscot, while even an odd cross-cut saw had been skillfully impressed into the scheme of ornamentation. But there was nothing pinchbeck or tawdry about them. Whirled high by sinewy hands, or clenched in hard brown fingers while a steady eye stared down the barrel, that a bridge might span a ravine where no bridge had been, or venison help to cut down the grocery bill and leave the more for the breaking of virgin soil, that ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... This traveller had a very pretty turn for the invention of ornamental designs in fgold and precious stones and he was an accomplished draughtsman. In his journeys about the country he carried with him a tray of pinchbeck and of coloured glass, which represented in duplicate a tray of real jewellery and precious stones which was kept under lock and key at the showroom. It happened, whether by accident or design, that the one tray was substituted for the other, the pinchbeck imitations ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... by the Gazette, that Lord Cowper's pinchbeck principality is allowed. I wonder his Highness does not desire the Pope to make one of his sons a bishop in ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... we shall, instead of giving any character of this young gentleman, content ourselves with describing his dress only to our readers. He wore, then, a pair of white stockings on his legs, and pumps on his feet: his buckles were a large piece of pinchbeck plate, which almost covered his whole foot. His breeches were of red plush, which hardly reached his knees; his waistcoat was a white dimity, richly embroidered with yellow silk, over which he wore a blue plush coat with metal buttons, a smart sleeve, and a cape reaching half ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... pretence even in another woman, but especially in a man. The really eccentric she was not afraid of—could even love, being a searcher after the new and strange, like so many modern pilgrims. But pinchbeck eccentricity—Brummagem originalities—gave to her views of the poverty of poor human nature leading her to a depression not un-tinged ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... Ringsend, and kept the little shop over against the 'Plume of Feathers,' where you might have your pick and choice of all sorts of nice and useful things—bacon, brass snuff-boxes, penny ballads, eggs, candles, cheese, tobacco-pipes, pinchbeck buckles for knee and instep, soap, sausages, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... and then to the babe on her shoulder, she plucks the little one from its lashings and holds it up with a coaxing expression on her countenance, like a cheap-jack tempting a simpleton at a fair to purchase a pinchbeck watch. ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... wish'd in such things to stand neuter, For silly wards will bring their guardians blame: So when he saw each ancient dame a suitor To make his little wild Asiatic tame, Consulting 'the Society for Vice Suppression,' Lady Pinchbeck was ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... only to one himself of a fine nature as well as of a large mind. Nor is there any mawkishness or cheap surface sentimentality in it all. His pathos never makes you wince: you can always read his works aloud, the deadly and unfailing test of anything flat or pinchbeck in literature. His gift of humor saves him from this: true humor and true pathos are always found together because they are not two but one, twin aspects of the very same events. He who sees the ludicrous in misfits must see their ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... as he left the room, and returned in three minutes to say that there was no name at all resembling Talboys in the letter rack. There was Brown, and Sanderson, and Pinchbeck; only three ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... store, he washed his hands and forearms, and put on his working clothes, blue overalls and a jumper, over cheap trousers and vest. Then he got together his small belongings—an old campaign hat, a pair of boots, a tin of tobacco, and a pinchbeck bracelet which he had found one Sunday in the Park, and which he believed to be valuable. He stripped his blanket from his bed and rolled up in it all these objects, together with the canvas sack, fastening the roll with ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris |
