"Fribble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... morality. The most explicit summary of the general tone of the class-morality may, I think, be gathered from Chesterfield's Letters. Though written at a later period, they sum up the lesson he has imbibed from his experience at this time. Chesterfield was no mere fribble or rake. He was a singularly shrewd, impartial observer of life, who had studied men at first hand as well as from books. His letters deal with the problem: What are the conditions of success in public life? He treats it in the method of Machiavelli; ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... opened the door for him. She had been sitting by the child's bedside, listening to the firing, and waiting for her husband's return without a murmur. Flirt, fribble, and shrew as she was, Julia Vickers had displayed, in times of emergency, that glowing courage which women of her nature at times possess. Though she would yawn over any book above the level of a genteel ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... sight, The tyrant read with great delight, Struck with the genius of the bard.) In flowing robes bedaub'd with nard, And saunt'ring tread he came along, Whom, at the bottom of the throng, When Phalereus beheld, he said: "How dares that fribble show his head In this our presence?" he was told— "It is Menander you behold." Then, changed at once from fierce to bland, He call'd, and ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... it is something in myself," she said presently; "something a little wrong that I'm dreadfully tired of. Always men. Out here a Howat Penny, just like any fribble about the Court. God, I'd like to be that girl across the road, in the barnyard." He was back at the fire again when Gilbert Penny entered the room. The latter dropped ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... old Ferry! all muddles And puddles— Go fribble and dribble along on your way; We drink to your health with molasses In glasses, And waft you farewell ...
— The Admiral's Caravan • Charles E. Carryl
... can be. I've never known it but by report. I've always fancied I should like it. In a small way at home, of course, I did try to stand by my idea of it. I must be a conservative by nature. People at home used to call me a cockney and a fribble. But it wasn't true," he went on; "if it had been I should have made my way over here long ago: before—before—" He paused, and his head dropped sadly ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... gentle envy of her sisters until one fatal night when Romley, in the rectory parlour at Wroote, attuned his voice to sing the Vicar of Bray. In his study Mr. Wesley heard it. He, of all men, was no Vicar of Bray, albeit he had abjured Dissent: but he felt his cloth insulted, and by this fribble of his own order. It was treason in short, and he bounced into the ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... glory, ventured to intimate his opinion that they, like other idols, had a fair share of clay and rubbish in their composition, and who, after professing a kind of sham republicanism, was frightened by the French Revolution into a paroxysm of ultra-Toryism. 'You wretched fribble!' exclaims Macaulay; 'you shallow scorner of all that is noble! You are nothing but a heap of silly whims and conceited airs! Strip off one mask of affectation from your mind, and we are still as far as ever from the real man. ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... cabinet; the walls were covered with pictures, one of which was worth more than the whole lineage of the owner of the palace. Is not Art a wonderful thing? A Venetian noble might be a fribble or an assassin, a scoundrel, or a dolt, worthless, or worse than worthless; yet he might have sat to Titian, and his portrait may be inestimable,—a few inches of painted canvas a thousand times more valuable than a man with his veins and muscles, ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Mr. Fribble may not, perhaps, be much mistaken where he intimates, that the supplying a Man's Wife with Pin-money, is furnishing her with Arms against himself, and in a manner becoming accessary to his own Dishonour. We may indeed, generally ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele |
