"Rigmarole" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you were ignorant of its contents. But Edward might have known that something like this would happen. Why didn't he put the letter into his pocket, and keep it until he came home? He seems to have lost his common sense. And then he must go off into that rigmarole about Mr. Lyon, and try to make him out a saint, as if to encourage you to give his letter to Fanny. I've no patience with him! Mr. Lyon, indeed! If he doesn't have a heart-scald of him before he's done ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... the least." What an absurd rigmarole she was uttering! Yet such was the spell of her eyes, her voice, her nearness that I merely felt like saying, "Tell ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... in her breathless rigmarole of Johns and memories. Leaning forward suddenly she cried into the newspaper man's ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... they had, they learn that power, patronage and pay are reserved for us and our friends. Well then like practical men, they look to some result, and they get it. They are asked out to dinner more than they would be; they move rigmarole resolutions at nonsensical public meetings; and they get invited with their women to assemblies at their leader's where they see stars and blue ribbons, and above all, us, whom they little think in appearing on such occasions, make the greatest conceivable ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... to Jack, and scarcely less so to Carlos, to observe the sympathetic courtesy with which the English Consul listened to all this rigmarole, which, from his manner, one might have believed to have been absolutely convincing—until he remarked, ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... mouths is the speech that declares this present age to be an age of specialisation. We all know the profound droop of the eminent person's eyelids as he produces that discovery, the edifying deductions or the solemn warnings he unfolds from this proposition, and all the dignified, inconclusive rigmarole of that cylinder. And it is ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... Bennett lays at the door of his countrymen who command British and Khedivial troops. The Sirdar himself is included in his rigmarole of accusations. But whether dealing with particulars or the general course of events, Mr Bennett discloses that he has scarcely a nodding acquaintanceship with truth. He has said:—"This wholesale slaughter was not confined to Arab servants," i.e., killing wounded dervishes. "The Soudanese ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... Bethinking thyself and the rest of the rigmarole. Bethink yourselves, Fathers, I will go. But I will take my son, Alexey, away from here for ever, on my parental authority. Ivan Fyodorovitch, my most dutiful son, permit me to order you to follow me. Von ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... were hailed successively, as a grocer's wife upon a party of pleasure with her eldest apprentice—as an old woman carrying her grandson to school—and as a young strapping Irishman, conveying an ancient maiden to Dr. Rigmarole's, at Redriffe, who buckles beggars for a tester and a dram of Geneva. All this abuse was retorted in a similar strain of humour by Greenjacket and his companion, who maintained the war of wit with the same alacrity with ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... clodhopper, clutch, coddle, copious, cosy, counterfeit money, crazy (dilapidated), crone, crook, croon, cross-grained, cross-patch, cross purposes, cuddle, to cuff (to strike), cleft, din, earnest money, egg on, greenhorn, jack-of-all-trades, loophole, settled, ornate, to quail, ragamuffin, riff-raff, rigmarole, scant, seedy, out of sorts, stale, tardy, trash. How Halliwell ever came to class these words as archaic I cannot imagine; but I submit that any one who sets forth to write about the English of England ought to have sufficient ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... daub sieve, sieve won't hold water, water won't wet stone, stone won't edge axe, axe won't cut rod, rod won't make a gad, a gad to hang Manachar who has eaten my raspberries every one." (So ran the rigmarole with which Mrs. Nance had beguiled my infancy.) The second refrain echoed poor Nat's cry, "She needs help, needs help, and you could not see! Blind, blind, that ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... pulled down the German flag and risked my neck half a dozen times and had myself made King just to boom his Yokohama cable stock? Confound him! You might at least swear back. Tell him just what the situation is in a few words. Here, stop that rigmarole to the paper, and explain to your home office that we are awaiting developments, and that, in the meanwhile, they must put up with the best we can send them. Wait; ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... Harry, "if he ever did get anything right through this rigmarole and hanky-panky it was simply because he ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... greatest of Biblical scholars, wrote in his journal, on the threshold of manhood: "I am not myself a believer in impossibilities: I think that all the fine stories about natural ability, etc., are mere rigmarole, and that every man may, according to his opportunities and industry, render himself almost anything he ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... after-dinner oratory, that sounded so telling as we delivered it before the looking-glass, falls strangely flat amidst the clinking of the glasses. The passionate torrent of words we meant to pour into her ear becomes a halting rigmarole, at which—small blame to ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... this. Having discovered his weakness, his mother was much in the habit of playing upon it, as the only means of persuasion or dissuasion within her command which was likely to make any impression upon his knotty young rind. So, while she was spinning out her rigmarole, Sprigg was making a great show of amusing himself with Pow-wow, slapping him over the muzzle with his coonskin cap, or setting that ornament in divers ways on the old dog's head; now with the tail over the right ear, then over the left, or over the nose; ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... at the old man, but he apparently meant just what he said. "All right, Mother," he said finally. "How in hell do I marry her without any rigmarole?" ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... Roderigo that three great men of Venice went to Othello and begged him to make Iago his lieutenant; that Othello, out of pride and obstinacy, refused; that in refusing he talked a deal of military rigmarole, and ended by declaring (falsely, we are to understand) that he had already filled up the vacancy; that Cassio, whom he chose, had absolutely no practical knowledge of war, nothing but bookish theoric, mere prattle, arithmetic, whereas Iago himself had often fought by Othello's side, and ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... long rigmarole tale of an attack which had been made on his house by a party of brigands, as he called them, from Venezuela, the chief object of which, as he suspected, was to carry off his wife; however, they, or some one else, had pulled down the consular flagstaff. A half-caste, who claimed to be ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... I'm going to sleep," says Desmond, drowsily. "I hope somebody will rouse me when he has done, or pick me out of the water if I drop into it. Such a rigmarole of a story I never heard in ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... Your rigmarole (if you will excuse the word) about the tombstone gives quite a wrong idea of my attitude on that occasion. I stayed away from the funeral for reasons which are, I should think, sufficiently obvious and natural, but which you somehow ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... "Get off some rigmarole of your own, I tell you," laughed the coming bridegroom, speaking to his companion, "It's no matter what it is, only don't make me burst out laughing in the middle of it, for Estella might resent it. She's a ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... more may be noticed here:—the rigmarole, snatches of which probably most of us have heard, which contains an immense number of mere truisms having no connexion with each others, and no bond of union but the metrical form in which their juxtaposition is effected, and the rhyme, which is kept up very well throughout, though sometimes by ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... figures, which I cannot enumerate; neither, indeed, need I, for they were of the kind which even to the present day form the style of popular harangues and patriotic orations, and may be classed in rhetoric under the general title of Rigmarole. ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... more that there is nothing in a name. The name Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names of the Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if they had been named by the child's rigmarole,—IERY FIERY ICHERY VAN, TITTLE-TOL-TAN. I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming over the earth, and to each the herdsman has affixed some barbarous sound in his own dialect. The names of men are, of course, as cheap and ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau
... thou art a bard completely imbued With genius not to be controlled, Be thou not untractable Within the court of thy king; Until thy rigmarole shall be known, Be thou silent Heinin As to the name of thy verse, And the name of thy vaunting; And as to the name of thy grandsire Prior to his being baptized. And the name of the sphere, And the name of ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 3 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... decrees laid down ex cathedra, and accepted without question by the poor humble public? I tell you, sir, that I have a brain of my own and that I should feel myself to be a snob and a slave if I did not use it. If it pleases you to believe this rigmarole about ether and Fraunhofer's lines upon the spectrum, do so by all means, but do not ask one who is older and wiser than yourself to share in your folly. Is it not evident that if the ether were affected to the degree which he maintains, and if it were obnoxious to human health, the result ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a Wallis islander, speaking no English and about fifty words of Samoan, recently promoted from the bush work, and a most good, anxious, timid lad of 15 or 16 - looks like 17 or 18, of course - they grow fast here. In comes Mitaiele to Lloyd, and told some rigmarole about Paatalise (the steward's name) wanting to go and see his family in the bush. - 'But he has no family in the bush,' said Lloyd. 'No,' said Mitaiele. They went to the boy's bed (they sleep in the walled-in compartment of the verandah, once my dressing-room) and called ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... be going now," chimed in Fidge, jumping up eagerly, for all this rigmarole had been ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... time he continued talking to himself, talked of how he had brought 'the frigate' safely to harbour, and how he had been awarded a 'gold medal' by the king. We could hear only anppets of this long rigmarole, but we never lost the drift of it. He spoke alternately in Danish and Icelandic, in many different tones of voice, and one could always tell, by the way he spoke, where he was in 'the frigate': whether he was addressing ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... for a great effort, and then started on the queerest rigmarole. I didn't get hold of it at first, and I had to stop and ask him questions. But here is the gist ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... "Pooh! Alma. That rigmarole is not in the guide books. Come, Dixon is waving his handkerchief down there, as a signal that luncheon ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... hulks, or, which is perhaps the likelier, to the gallows. And this scamp, too,' I added, with a gesture towards Lee, whom I hardly dared venture to look at, 'who has been pitching me such a pretty rigmarole, is, I see, a fellow-rogue to yourself. This house appears to be little better than a thieves' ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... little school histories there is but a tedious, bare narrative of apparently unconnected facts, and there is a profitless rigmarole of dates and names: but when the sequence of cause and effect is not obscured, and form and life are given to the actors, and the development of events and institutions is traced, the story of the United States becomes, ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 16, February 25, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... swooped. 'No rigmarole!' she said, sharply. 'Do you confess you put it there or do you ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... but rarely does either he or Mrs. Carlyle say a good word for any considerable English writer then living. It is true that he criticises, more or less disparagingly, all his own works, from Sartor, of which he remarks that "only some ten pages are fused and harmonious," to his self-entitled "rigmarole on the Norse Kings": but he would not let his enemy say so; nor his friend. Mill's just strictures on the "Nigger Pamphlet" he treats as the impertinence of a boy, and only to Emerson would he grant the privilege to hold his own. Per contra, ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... taking leave of him, returned to her house; whilst the scholar, rejoiced for that himseemed his desire was like to have effect, made an image with certain talismanic characters of his own devising, and wrote a rigmarole of his fashion, by way of conjuration; the which, whenas it seemed to him time, he despatched to the lady and sent to tell her that she must that very night, without more tarriance, do that which he had enjoined her; after which he secretly betook himself, with a servant of his, to the house ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... you pay SMALL? Rubbish! You pay me altogether too much and what I give you to eat isn't worth half of it. But there, I didn't mean to go into all this at all. What I told you all this long rigmarole for was to see if you could think of any way for me to turn those Development Company shares of mine into money. Not what father paid for them, of course, or even half of it. But SOME money at ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... seventy-seventh year when he completed the Early Kings of Norway. "Finished yesterday that long rigmarole upon the Norse kings" is the comment in his Journal under date February 15th, 1872.—Froude, Carlyle's Life in ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... arduous mount to get to it. The peasant girl who stands inside the door, and in a sing-song voice that never varies mixes up saints, fathers, towns, corn, potatoes, bells, and "quelque chose pour le gardien," in her rigmarole, was the least attractive adjunct ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... I declare the creature has been listening to all this rigmarole, instead of attending to me. Do you ever expect forgiveness? But now that they are all talking together, and you cannot make out a word they say, nor they hear a word that we say, I will describe the company to you. First, there is the old gentleman on my left hand, at the head of the table, ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... doors is a mystic act: it has in it some flavor of the unknown, some sense of moving into a new moment, a new pattern of the human rigmarole. It includes the highest glimpses of mortal gladness: reunions, reconciliations, the bliss of lovers long parted. Even in sadness, the opening of a door may bring relief: it changes and redistributes human forces. But the closing of doors ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... viciously, as she spoke. "Hang me if I didn't think so all the time!" she exclaimed with a sudden change of tactics. "That Jasper's a thief. I heard you say something about those deeds, and Jasper told me a long rigmarole that you wouldn't sign them. Whether that's true or not, Heaven only knows. Jasper's a bad one, an' he's sold me. He's got the coin, and I'll split on him, as I threatened. No, it's no use your trying to make me hush up, I will speak out. I'll show ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... reason I call her a dreadful old woman is that she's told you all this rigmarole. It makes me quite hot. She sha'n't amuse herself by taking you in like ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... have been so precious and costly? Would the illustrations have so enriched photographers? And would the amanuensis have made L350 more out of the thing then Mr. Murray himself? The price was not extortionate. But it was farcical. The entire rigmarole combines to throw into dazzling prominence the fact that modern literature in this country is still absolutely undemocratic. The time will come, and much sooner than many august mandarins anticipate, when such a book as the "Letters of Queen Victoria" will ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... there, Dixie," he said, firmly. "I'm going to stick right here, and do the best I can. Folks may talk some about me and Hettie not living together, but I can't put up with all that rigmarole over there. It ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... to be no harps and lutes in our heaven, only drums; and the preservation of all the essentials of poetry, by the simple enumeration of the utensils to be found in a back kitchen, sounded, I could not help thinking (here it becomes necessary to whisper), not unlike rigmarole. I waited for the master to speak. He had declared that the Republic would fall if it did not become instantly naturalistic; he would not, he could not pass over in silence so important a branch of literature as poetry, no matter how contemptible he might think it. If he ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... Monson," he continued, after a very beautiful specimen of rigmarole in the way of love-making, a rigmarole that might have very fairly figured in an editor's law and logic, after he had been beaten in a libel suit, "I think, Miss Monson, you cannot have overlooked the VERY particular attentions I have endeavored ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... p. 373) has given a long detail of it, in that manner vulgarly, but significantly, called rigmarole; in which, amidst an ostentatious exhibition of arts and artists, he talks of 'proportions of a column being taken from that of the human figure, and adjusted by Nature—masculine and feminine—in a man, sesquioctave of the head, and in a woman sesquinonal;' nor has he failed to introduce a jargon ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... Magdalen. I had a letter from your Aunt Mary this morning, a long rigmarole. She says she is following her letter, and is coming to have a serious talk with me. Hang it all! Can't a man have a ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... fat as a stage financier, paused here to gasp; for the utterance of this string of banalities, this rigmarole of commonplaces, had left him breathless. He was very much dissatisfied with his performance; and ready to curse his barren imagination. He longed to hit upon swelling phrases and natural and touching gestures, but in vain. He could ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... turning over to a fresh page he came upon a passage in the life of one of the Elect who was mourning for his mother, excusing him in this solemn rigmarole: "After granting to the feelings of nature such relief as grace cannot forbid on ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... shall I say?" cried Sallie, as Fred ended his rigmarole, in which he had jumbled together pell-mell nautical phrases and facts out of one of his favorite books. "Well, they went to the bottom, and a nice mermaid welcomed them, but was much grieved on finding the box of headless knights, and kindly pickled them in brine, hoping to discover ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... perfect. During the war in many British Embassies and in the British Foreign Office there were nearly always men, permanent officials or else special appointees, who quite successfully discounted the prevailing war mind. They discarded the rigmarole of being pro and con, of having favorite nationalities, and pet aversions, and undelivered perorations in their bosoms. They left that to the political chiefs. But in an American Embassy I once heard an ambassador say that he never reported ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... to talk like a woman in a Shaw play. I don't like this rigmarole about "pursuit." Say you're in love, like a civilized human being. And take a cigarette, ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... big-sister frown of warning, Allison said, in a low aside: "For pity's sake, don't stop to tell all that long rigmarole over now. We want to hear some ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... adequate, of this peculiarity; it is best hinted at in a remark on De Quincey's conversation which I have seen quoted somewhere (whether by Professor Masson or not I hardly know), that it was, with many interesting and delightful qualities, a kind of "rigmarole." So far as I remember, the remark was not applied in any unfriendly spirit, nor is it adduced here in any such. But both in the printed works, in the remembrances of De Quincey's conversation which have been printed, in ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... beginning to be bored. Had the butler fallen prey to one of the graminophile sects like Brother Paul's and gone through all this rigmarole merely to give me notice previous to ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... contend that no vigor of literary expression could possibly excel his mother-in-law's curses. Not that he ever saw her again: his wife and eldest son tracked him to Breslau, but only in quest of ducats and divorce: the latter of which Maimon conceded after a legal rigmarole. But he took no advantage of his freedom. A home of his own he never possessed, save an occasional garret where he worked at an unsteady table—one leg usually supported by a folio volume—surrounded ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... "Why, gal alive! what rigmarole 's this? Married—ay, an' so you shall be, in gude time. You 'm light-headed, lass, I do b'lieve. But doan't fret, I'll ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... certainly seemeth good to me, By and large, in part and in whole. I'll put it in practice and find if it fact is, Or only a mystical rigmarole." ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... scarcely be a shadow of doubt, that he was for a considerable while at some school or other, where he had a number of cronies. In proof of this, and to show that we have good reasons for our suppositions, James recommends me to print the following rigmarole meditations, on the top of which is written ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... the crowd to hear, And his voice rang loud and his voice rang clear; And he lifted his head and began to troll The whimsical words of his rigmarole:— ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... me the whole affair; but, what is more, I have discovered that all this pretty rigmarole about Celia being carried off by gypsies, and having a great nobleman for her father, who is setting out from Spain to come hither, is nothing but a mere stratagem, a merry trick, a made-up story, a tale raised by Lelio to ...
— The Blunderer • Moliere
... should not be a mere dry rigmarole, but include a certain appeal to sentiment. The subject should begin to make the entries himself when old enough to do so properly, i.e. so that the book will not be disfigured—though indeed the naivity of juvenile phrasing, etc., may be of a particular interest. From a graphological ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... near my father, that, not knowing what he might do, I rushed between them, and hastily pushed back the arm-chair to the wall. Then the monk, speaking in a mournful tone, which was rendered still more terrifying by the approach of night, began to pour out some lamentable rigmarole of a confession, and ended by asking pardon for his crimes, and declaring that he was already covered by the black veil which parricides wear when ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... rigmarole in all my born days." And then, angrily to Rachel, "Go down and look on th' ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... over which they build a hut; and a fire is kept lighted for a certain length of time. It is likewise customary for his wife or nearest relation, if at any future period they should happen to pass near the grave, to repair the hut, rekindle the fire, and utter a long rigmarole to the departed, to induce him to lie still, and not come back and torment them. Nothing will induce a stranger to go near a new grave, or to mention the name of the departed for a long time after his death. They always speak of him as So-and-so's ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... day, enjoying the life he gives us, eating the bread and meat he gives us, drinking his good refreshments, resting upon his warm beds, and so on.... Every day, and every day, and every day—and who among us, I, most especially for one, ever thinks, except may be by scuttling through a few rigmarole words—ever thinks, I say, of thanking Him for it—of lifting up a warm, honest heart, of true real thanking, I mean? Of loving Him the better, and trying to serve and please Him the better—when ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... nearest station on a bicycle and who arrived hot and ravenously thirsty. And Father Jean, under promise of seeing Suzanne on the first opportunity, believed it. But to most of his flock it sounded an impossible rigmarole, told for the purpose of disguising ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... of rigmarole and bombast was followed by those of his sons, the Princes Maximilian Luitpold, Adalbert, and Carl. As for Maximilian, the new sovereign, he, rather than risk being thrown out of the saddle, was prepared to make a clean sweep of a number of existing grievances. ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... all her heart. She was all he had, as he was all the world to her. And so, as she gave ear to his long, illogical rigmarole of argument and defense, she slowly found that her pity and her love were making vital decisions for her. As of old, in poignant moments, her father lapsed at last into a denunciation of the Isbels and what ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... dealings with one another than if they were as ignorant of the Ten Commandments as the most benighted heathens, to whom even the name of Moses was never spoken. Yet, from your looks, I see that you are wondering within yourselves what all this rigmarole about England, France, the Six Nations, and disputed territories, can have to do with George Washington. Had you held a tight rein on your impatience a little while longer, you would have found out all about it, without the inconvenience of wondering; and hereafter, my little ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... a long rigmarole, which he called a "Declaration": I saw that it was but a heap of lies, and thrust it into the blacksmith's fire, and blew the bellows thrice at it. No one dared attempt to stop me, for my mood had not been sweet of late; and of ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... as Sterne or Dickens do sham ones over their figments. This realism of Carlyle's gives a great charm to his histories and biographies. The amount he tells you is something astonishing—no platitudes, no rigmarole, no common-form, articles which are the staple of most biography, but, instead of them, all the facts and features of the case—pedigree, birth, father and mother, brothers and sisters, education, physiognomy, personal habits, dress, ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... Forgive this long rigmarole: it is only to put you in possession of what may happen if you approve, and your invitations and domestic ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... was like an old wizard, as he looked here and there, seeking a way, peering into the tangle, or withdrawing from a thicket, and muttering to himself, "There ain't no speckerlation there." And when the way became altogether inscrutable,—"Waal, this is a reg'lar random scoot of a rigmarole." As some one remarked, "The dictionary in his hands is like clay in the hands of the potter." "A petrifaction was a kind of a hard-wood ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... machine now," broke in Sir Ronald, who was by no means anxious to listen to the well-worn rigmarole again. "You can show that to him, and tell him all about it. I shall bring him down, for ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... know the rigmarole, the salutes; I could begin a duel, par exemple. It's the other man ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... at the White House, which seemed to have been "edited" by the President himself—as often royalty revises plays—for his special entertainment, the Cabinet being invited, after a rigmarole of stilted phrases purporting to be by Washington, Franklin, Napoleon, and other past celebrities, Mr. Welles, secretary of the navy, remarked: "I will think this matter over, and see what conclusion to ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... took me for a Jacobite, for he began a rigmarole about loyalty and hard fortune. I hastened to correct him, and he took the correction with the same patient despair with which he took all things. 'Twas but another ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... Bank, the Five Powers, "(Now turned into two) with their rigmarole Protocols;— "Ha! ha! ye gods, how this new friend of ours "Will knock, right ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... difficult to understand how all that Vaka says can be an answer to Indra's question. The chief of the gods enquires: What are the joys of those that lead deathless lives? Vaka breaks away unto a confused rigmarole about the merits of independence and the religious merit of entertaining guests and servants. All the printed editions have the passage ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... had been in to see mother, and she'd been tellin' over what luck Nancy'd had down to Hartford: how't she had gone into a shop, and a young man had been struck with her good looks, an' he'd turned out to be a master-shoemaker, and Nancy was a-goin' to be married, and so on, a rigmarole as long as the moral law,—windin' up with askin' mother why she didn't send us girls off to try our luck, for Major was as old as Nance Perrit. I'd waited to hear mother say, in her old bright way, that she couldn't afford ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... I shun all such persons and circles, as much as possible; and pray the gods to make me a brick layer's hodbearer rather. O the "cabriolets, neatflies," and blue twaddlers of both sexes therein, that drive many a poor Mrs. Rigmarole to the Devil!*—As for me, I continue doing as nearly nothing as I can manage. I decline all invitations of society that are declinable: a London rout is one of the maddest things under the moon; a London dinner makes me sicker for a week, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... friend of mine, who asked me to attend her professionally—I mean in my professional capacity. Oh! nothing serious, but we had to communicate with her people and I know all about her. She is not a normal woman. Of course, that rigmarole about the cardinal is all nonsense. She is the daughter of a fisherman of Siracusa. She did dance here once for a few nights, but only at the Biondo, and no one noticed her, she was in one of the back rows of the ballet. Did they tell you why ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... . . Mrs. Andrews lowered her voice . . . "I believe he tells queer stories. Gracie came home from school one day last week with the greatest rigmarole he had told her about people who lived down at the shore . . . stories there couldn't be a word of truth in, you know. I told Gracie not to believe them, and she said Paul didn't intend her to. But if he didn't what did he ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... our travellers had an opportunity of visiting some of these old missionary establishments; and observing the odd rigmarole of superstitions there practised under the guise, and in the name of religion—a queer commingling of pagan rites with Christian ceremonies—not unlike those Buddhistic forms from which these same ceremonies have ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... political subject was one that appeared in November, 1836, in which he recommended the subversion of republican institutions and the election of an emperor. If he ever had a political conviction, we believe he expressed it then. After a rigmarole of Roman history and Augustus Caesar, he ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... pancakes, a lunch . . . you'll get your cab-fare. Come along, dear chap. You spout out some rigmarole like a regular Cicero at the grave and what ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... take a leading part in another expulsion, and to make contemptuous references to the conduct of the Colonial Secretary himself. The Attorney-General had expressed an opinion that the Secretary might have found something better to do than to sit down and answer "Mackenzie's rigmarole trash." Solicitor-General Hagerman had remarked that the Secretary had stultified himself by noticing statements which rested on no better authority than that of a person who had been twice expelled the Assembly, and who had been declared ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... into Prussia, Vox populi is the voice of the King, and the voice of the king is therefore vox Dei. When a king speaks for his people he must speak sooth; what he says of other peoples must be taken with a grain of salt. Bearing this in mind, the apparent inconsistency between the regal rigmarole and the Imperial improvisation (these epithets are a tribute to the Republic) which I have received by our special wire from Europe were addressed by the monarchs to their respective armies before the grand "wiring in" ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 19, August 6, 1870 • Various
... replied Sancho, "that this Merlin, or those enchanters who enchanted the whole crew your worship says you saw and discoursed with down there, stuffed your imagination or your mind with all this rigmarole you have been treating us to, and all that is still ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... ahead and let me have all the facts. She is Hare Sahib's daughter; Ali told me that. Precious rigmarole of ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... peevishly; "it's worse than the heat. Do you know what's happened? The chief has saddled Old Signal Corps on me. Yes, sir, I've got to take his old pet, the major, on the city staff. It seems he's succeeded in losing what little property he had—the chief told me some rigmarole about sudden financial reverses—and now he's down and out. So I'm elected. I've got to take him on as a reporter—a cub reporter sixty-odd years old, mind you, who hasn't heard of anything worth while ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... all this rigmarole, I don't still feel quite comfortable. I seem to see your bewildered—even rather wrathful—face; I feel that it will be almost impossible you should not ascribe to me some hidden motives, and so, like a Roman who has committed some folly, I wrap myself majestically in ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Waiting-Maid—sure, I did the girl no Harm, beyond whispering a little soft nonsense in her ear now and then. But she must needs have a succession of Hysterical Fits after my departure from the Tower, and write me many scores of Letters couched in the most Lamentable Rigmarole, threatening to throw herself into Rosamond's Pond in St. James's Park (then a favourite Drowning-Place for Disconsolate Lovers), with many other nonsensical Menaces. But I was firm to my Determination to do her no harm, and therefore carefully abstained from ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... I consider that there is just as much imagination in that story as in the morbid rigmarole you threw at us ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... His services were necessarily dispensed with on the abolition of the feudal system. Memories of him still linger in Matsue; and old people remember a popular snatch about him—a sort of rapidly-vociferated rigmarole, supposed to be an imitation ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... it from you, depend on it," said the other. "And I think you are very well out of your other partnership. That worthy, Altamont and his daughter correspond, I hear," Pen added after a pause "Yes; she wrote him the longest rigmarole letters that I used to read: the sly little devil; and he answered under cover to Mrs. Bonner. He was for carrying her off the first day or two, and nothing would content him but having back his child. But she didn't want to come, as you may fancy; and he was not very eager ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... who at present go in and out of our household, are they worth having? Each one of them listens to what the patient has to say of the ailment, and then, adding a string of flowery sentences, out he comes with a long rigmarole; but they are exceedingly diligent in paying us visits; and in one day, three or four of them are here at least four and five times in rotation! They come and feel her pulse, they hold consultation together, and write their prescriptions, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... you ain't never got in. But me, his old pardner and pal! It's a shame, and a sin! He's throwed lots of cold water of late. I am blowed if I likes His wobbleyfied views about Payment of Members, and Strikes. And then that HOOD bizness! Long rigmarole—cheered by the Tories! I fear it's all Ikybod now with our ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various
... taken through the usual rigmarole such as I had at first experienced at Goch. The evidence also, as usual, was committed to paper. It was a perfunctory enquiry, however, and was soon completed. Naturally upon its conclusion I considered that I would be free to resume my journey. I ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... precise; it was sealed with red wax, but the impression was sunk: a proper seal had not been used! Especially where his own family was concerned, Mr. Wylder was not the most delicate of men! he opened the letter, and in it found what he called a rigmarole of poetry and theology! "Confound the fellow!" he said to himself. Lady Ann did well to warn him! There should be no more of this! The scatter-brain took after her mother! He would give it ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... do, you're a brave woman to live in the house with that mirror. Or, perhaps, it comes of believing so much. A certainty of confidence, which asks no questions, must be to some extent a fortifying thing. By the way, you will remember that the long rigmarole I gave you was not my own explanation, but the expert's? Mine is considerably simpler and shorter. In fact, it can be summed up in ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... a landlady," Sebright chuckled. "Old but good, he says. He expected to die there in peace, a good Christian. And what's that about the priests getting hold of his very last bit of silver? I must say that sounded truest of all his rigmarole. For the salvation of his ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... and looked into his father's eyes without blinking. The prosecutor went on, thinking: "What next?" He spun out a long rigmarole, and ended like this: ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... any thing in this inflated rigmarole that is not adequately expressed in my amended statement, what is it? As to eloquence it will hardly be argued that nonsense, falsehood and metaphors which were old when Rome was young are essential to that. The first man (in early Greece) who spoke of awakening an echo ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce |
