"Tinsel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... before the dramatic corps, offered myself as a volunteer. I felt terribly agitated and abashed, for "never before stood I in such a presence." I had addressed myself to the manager of the company. He was a fat man, dressed in dirty white; with a red sash fringed with tinsel, swathed round his body. His face was smeared with paint, and a majestic plume towered from an old spangled black bonnet. He was the Jupiter tonans of this Olympus, and was surrounded by the interior gods ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... even the late eminent Macfarren, the worst enemy music has ever had in this country, did not disdain to prepare "a performing edition," and to improve Mozart's improvements on Handel. One wonders whether Mozart, when he overlaid the "Messiah" with his gay tinsel-work, dreamed that some Costa, encouraged by Mozart's own example, and without brains enough to guess that he had nothing like Mozart's brains, would in like manner desecrate "Don Giovanni." Like "Don Giovanni," there ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... buckles, all old family relics—presented the same appearance as those worn by him during his ordinary labors. And this, by the way, exhibits another feature of the extreme simplicity of the time—and one too highly praise-worthy—when the individual was sought for himself alone, and not for the tinsel gew-gaws, comparatively speaking, he might chance to exhibit. Necessity forced all to be plain and substantial in the matter of dress; and consequently comfort and convenience were looked to, rather than ostentatious display. All at ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... fetched and carried, for whom we bound nosegays on the heath and stole apples from the orchard and climbed upon the table after desert, if we were left alone in the dining-room, to lay hands on some beautiful sweetmeat wrapped in tinsel and fringes of pink paper—have we not met her again in after-life, a grown woman, very, very far from our ideal of feminine grace and beauty? And still in spite of changes in herself and ourselves there has clung to her memory ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... dismount and kneel in obeisance, and 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
... shards of peppermint which elude the thrusting index, and will be found again next December); the dining-room floor is thick with fallen needles; the gay little candles are burnt down to a small gutter of wax in the tin holders. The floor sparkles here and there with the fragments of tinsel balls or popcorn chains that were injudiciously hung within leap of puppy or grasp of urchin. And so you see him, the diligent parent, brooding with a tender mournfulness and sniffing the faint whiff of that ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... when you are about to scatter on various errands. You are all going on the same errand, and I like to feel bound with you in one common organization for the glory of America. And her glory goes deeper than all the tinsel, goes deeper than the sound of guns and the clash of sabers; it goes down to the very foundations of those things that have made the spirit of men free and happy ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... des Panoramas. The tinsel of the ARTICLE DE PARIS, the false jewelry, the gilded zinc, the cardboard made to look like leather, had been the passion of her early youth. It remained, and when she passed the shop-windows she could not tear herself away from them. It was the same with her today ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... Delia had now come to the swift decision natural to her age and character. Anna was unworthy. She had been tried and found wanting. Gold had been offered to her, and she had chosen tinsel. It was not surprising that the Palmers should be preferred to herself, but that any one related to the Professor, able to see and know him, should be capable of turning aside and neglecting him for others, was a thing ...
— Thistle and Rose - A Story for Girls • Amy Walton
... 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 like even ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... 'em!—though there's a many to pick an' choose from—a darned sight too many if you axes my opinion! Old Putty Leveson, wi's bobbin' an' 'is bowin's to the east—hor!—hor!—hor!—a fine east 'e's got in 'is mouldy preachin' barn, wi' a whitewashed wall an' a dirty bit o' tinsel fixed up agin it—he wouldn't touch a child o' ourn, to save 'is life—though 'e's got three or four mean, lyin' pryin' brats of 'is own runnin' wild about the place as might jest as well 'ave never been born. And as for Francis Anthony, the 'igh pontiff o' Riversford, wi's big altar-cloak ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... and with it the sideshow and its banners, the Punch and Judy show, the horse tent, the cook tent, the blacksmith shop. Where once stood a dripping white city, now stretches a barren, ugly waste of unhallowed, unfamiliar ground, flanked by the solitary temple of tinsel and sawdust which they have just left behind, and which even now is being desolated by scowling men in overalls. The crowd oozes forth, to find itself completely lost in the night, all points of the compass at odds, no man knowing east from west or ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... extempore to the guitar. He had had them instructed by the famous Gorilla, who was crowned poetess-laureate at the capitol by night, six years later. She was crowned where our great Italian poets were crowned; and though her merit was no doubt great, it was, nevertheless, more tinsel than gold, and not of that order to place her on a par with ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... heads. And it will be best for me to go back to Kunzendorf. I have nothing to do here; no one cares for an old fellow like me. I have hoped on from day to day, but all my hopes are gone now. Amelia, take off your tinsel, and pack up our traps. The best thing we can do will be to start this very evening and return to our miserable, ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... without assistance, strong black men fighting for their liberties. She could ride horseback, sitting like men, in a way to make Joan of Arc seem a maid of mere tinsel. ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... Shelley has it; and much peace of mind it gave him!' answered Lancelot. 'I have grown sick lately of such dreary tinsel abstractions. When you look through the glitter of the words, your "spirit of beauty" simply means certain shapes and colours which please you in beautiful things and in ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... confidence in those who try to shine in contradictory subjects. I could have secured an immense amount of popularity if I had gone in for a crescendo of anti-clericalism after the Vie de Jesus. The general reader likes a strong style. I could easily have left in the flourishes and tinsel phrases which excite the enthusiasm of those whose taste is not of a very elevated kind, that is to say, of the majority. I spent a year in toning down the style of the Vie de Jesus, as I thought that such a subject could not be treated too soberly or too simply. And ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... arrived at its own conclusions. Only nobody could discover who was the young girl concerned, or where she came from or what might be her name. And, after a few days, Broadway, also, forgot the matter amid the tarnished tinsel and raucous noises of its own mean and ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... whether of landscape or of architecture, the panoply of war, or the luxury of royal courts. That is fun—pleasure and amusement. No; the real work of the stage lies in the creation of a character. A great character will live forever, when paint and canvas and silks and satins and gold foil and tinsel shall have gone the way of ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... 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 and all my former cares. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... loaded with lackeys, as tall as Swiss, with most gaudy liveries, all covered with lace, appeared in the court, and disembarked the whole wedding company. Never was country magnificence more naturally displayed: Rusty tinsel, tarnished lace, striped silks, little eyes, and full swelling breasts, appeared ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... plastered over with white chalk, which had a singularly ghastly effect; a short-skirted, low-necked gold frock, cut like a little girl's, partly covered the body, and over this were draped coarse folds of scarlet, purple, and white, with tinsel stars along the seams, and so disposed as to display to fullest advantage the brawny calves of ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... 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
... Nobody put any tinsel on the tree—that was left for the middle of the night like the story of the old time legend. Whether the spiders and the Christmas fairies, working together, really covered the tree with silver, Mary Jane never stopped to figure out. But at any rate the tree ...
— Mary Jane's City Home • Clara Ingram Judson
... troth, it's but a night-gown in respect of yours: Cloth of gold, and cuts, and laced with silver, set with pearls down sleeves, side-sleeves, and skirts, round underborne with a blueish tinsel: but for a fine, quaint, graceful, and excellent fashion, ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Knight edition]
... link with the more pleasant sides of life, and soon in her despair and anger his modest merits took heroic proportions in her eyes. She forgot her past dislike; she thought only of this, the simple good man, contrasted with the showy and fickle-hearted—true metal against glittering tinsel. His very weaknesses seemed homely and venial. He was of her own world, akin to the things which deep down in her soul she knew she must love to the last. It is to the credit of the man's insight that he saw the mood and took pains to ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... in, and nobody ever heard of him again. By the following morning the transformation was complete, and the coffin moving unsheltered up the course of the river, as though to take possession of the stream, was much more striking than all the tinsel and canopies imaginable. The whole voyage up to Courbevoie, the point of arrival, was a mere classic reproduction of the usual official journey—flags, authorities girt with tricolour sashes, clergy pronouncing blessings, shaking with terror all the time, horses, gendarmes, curious crowds ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... alter to the sacrifice of her future joy. Story oft told in the vicissitudes of betrayed innocence and in the fate of those who build their happiness in the castles of fancy: like the brilliancy of sunset her moment of pleasure faded; the novelty and tinsel of her gilded home lost their charm, and the virtue of her childhood was wrecked on golden rocks. She no longer went to daily Mass; her visits to the convent became less frequent, her dress lighter; her conversation, toned ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... refused to charge another one of the picadores. Their places, therefore, had to be taken by the banderilleros. These gay-looking people are men on foot with arrows two feet long, each with a hooked point. On the other end these arrows are decorated with little flags, brass foil, tinsel, and even bird cages whence gaily decked birds are permitted to escape. With these arrows the banderilleros walk right up to the bull, and, when he is ready to charge, jump to one side and thrust their weapons deep into his neck, halfway between his ears and his horns. Then the beast ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... the later work hardly needs discussion. Dino has the quaint directness, the dramatic force, the tenderness of Froissart, but it is a nobler and more human tenderness; a pity not for the knight only, but for knight and burgher as well. The sham tinsel of chivalry which flutters over the pages of the gay Canon of Liege is exchanged in Dino for a manly patriotism, a love of civic freedom, of justice, of religion. In his quiet way he is a great artist. ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... articles of unknown name and purpose, and for a moment he hesitated. Hands in his pockets, he looked first at Mother McNeil and then at a little lame boy on the floor beside an open trunk, out of which he was taking gaily-colored ornaments and untangling yards of tinsel; and then he looked at Frances, who, with a big apron over her black dress, with its soft white collar open at the throat, was holding a pile of empty stockings in ...
— How It Happened • Kate Langley Bosher
... this shepherd race! I know them, I have led them on in fight— I saw them in the battle of Favenz. What! Austria try, forsooth, to force on us A yoke we are determined not to bear! Oh, learn to feel from what a stock thou'rt sprung; Cast not, for tinsel trash and idle show, The precious jewel of thy worth away. To be the chieftain of a free born race, Bound to thee only by their unbought love, Ready to stand—to fight—to die with thee, Be that thy pride, be that thy noblest boast! Knit ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... 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 ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... man, sparkling in satin and silver, lifted on high his two barb-tipped sticks, gaily ornamented with tinsel paper, and called Vivillo from a distance. His mocking voice infuriated the bull, who rushed upon him; then, as he swayed lightly aside, it was all he could do to save himself from the great animal's sudden, swift turn, without ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... great glass-colored beads sewed all over them. But the chef-d'oeuvre was the head-dress, which was a sort of helmet with gauze wings and the jewels of the family (Mrs. M.'s and mine) fastened on it. From the helmet flowed a mane of gold tinsel, which I curled in with my hair. The effect was very original, for it looked as though my head was on fire; in fact, I looked as if I was all on fire. Before I left home all the servants came to see me, and their magnifique, and superbe, and etonnant quite turned my head, ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... 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 Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... the court and guardsmen of Butaritari. The court ladies were busy making mats; the guardsmen yawned and sprawled. Half a dozen rifles lay on a rock and a cutlass was leaned against a pillar: the armoury of these drowsy musketeers. At the far end, a little closed house of wood displayed some tinsel curtains, and proved upon examination to be a privy on the European model. In front of this, upon some mats, lolled Teburcimoa, the king; behind him, on the panels of the house, two crossed rifles represented fasces. He wore pyjamas which sorrowfully misbecame his bulk; his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... by such an excess of words, figures and ornaments as to be ridiculous and disgusting. It is like a circus clown dressed up in gold tinsel Dickens gives a fine example of it in Sergeant Buzfuz' speech in the "Pickwick Papers." Among other varieties of style may be mentioned the colloquial, the laconic, the concise, the diffuse, the abrupt the flowing, the quaint, ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... you how books of imagination had supplanted the Bible in my esteem; those books now, in a measure, yielded to the irresistible attraction of outdoor amusement; but my mind was so abundantly stored with the glittering tinsel of unsanctified genius, as it shone forth in the pages of my beloved poets, that no room was left for a craving after better studies. Yet the turn of my mind was devotional in the extreme; so much so, that had the Lord permitted me at that time to come in contact ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... difficult place, and filled it well; but the court of the Second Empire was all spangles and tinsel. It was composed of men and women all more or less adventurers. It was the court of the nouveaux riches and of a mushroom aristocracy. There were prizes to be won and pleasures to be enjoyed, and it was "like as it was in the days of Noe, until the ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... He would have urged the "haste" which "the King's business" requires, and might have reminded us that viands are as wholesome on a wooden trencher as on a plate of gold. He would have told us that truth needs no tinsel, and that the road over a bare heath may be more direct than the pretty windings of the valley. Or, rather, he would have said, as he has written—"Know that you have to do with a person who, provided his words but clearly express the sentiments ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... established for human development as a fraud. It stigmatizes law as the machinery of injustice; it sneers at society as hollow-hearted corruption and insincerity; it brands politics as a reeking mass of rottenness, and scoffs at morality as the tinsel of sin. Its disciples are those who rail and snarl at everything that is noble and good, to whom a joke is an assault and battery, a laugh is an insult to outraged dignity, and the provocation of a smile is like passing an electric current through the facial ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... forth. ... Nor does this passage of tinsel stand alone. When the iron cools and Hubert says he can revive it, Arthur replies with ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... its noisy phantasms, its poor paper-crown's tinsel-gilt, is gone; and divine everlasting Night, with her star-diadems, with her silences and her veracities, is come! What hast thou done, and how? Happiness, unhappiness; all that was but wages thou hadst; thou hast spent all that, in sustaining thyself hitherward; not a coin ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... of paint and tinsel and silk attire, of cheap sentiment and high and mighty dialogue! Will there not always be rosin enough ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 you to accept it as a principle; something that sticks close, and springs ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the taste displayed in 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
... knights In battles feigned (the better fortitude Of patience and heroic martyrdom Unsung), or to describe races and games Or tilting furniture, emblazoned shields, Impresses quaint, caparisons and steeds, Bases and tinsel trappings, gorgeous knights At joust and tournament; then marshalled feast Served up in hall with sewers and seneshals: The skill of artifice and office mean; Not that which justly gives heroic name To person ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... fellows. He shows that he 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
... at that moment, whether for mispayment or tinsel. I had my duty to do, and I did it. If the news were true, the Queen was little like to snyb [blame] me when she found it so: and if no, well, I had but done as I should. And I knew that Dame Tiffany, which tended her like a hen with one chicken, should ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... Lindsay, what she meant to do. When she stepped from his brougham, flushed after the indubitable triumph of the evening, with her arms full of real bouquets from Chatterjee's—no eight-anna bazar confections edged with silver tinsel—it occurred to her that this reticence was not altogether fair to so constant a friend. He was there, keen and eager as ever in all that concerned her, foremost with his congratulations on the smiling fringe of the party assembled ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... the modern transcendentalist, as well as to the ultra-puritanic type of mind, as if addressed to a deity of an almost absurdly childish character, taking delight in toy-shop furniture, tapers and tinsel, costume and mumbling and mummery, and finding his "glory" incomprehensibly enhanced thereby:—just as on the other hand the formless spaciousness of pantheism appears quite empty to ritualistic natures, and the gaunt theism of evangelical sects seems intolerably ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... on hamely fare we dine, Wear hoddin gray, and a' that; Gie 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 ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... continuing on the Broad Highway, entered the Valley of Temptation with all its gaiety and outward happiness. This valley is known by the pilgrims of the King's Highway as the Devil's Heaven, for here the tinsel of the world, the pomp of society, and the wealth of material grandeur are manifested ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... 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 ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... be hard, methinks, sir, to decide between a coronet and a player's tinsel crown," observed his princely rival, with a sneer, as he too arose and ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... not in intellectual acquirements. It consists in the development of the triune man—body, soul and spirit—in their divine harmony. Without a cultivation of the spirit in harmony with its immortal destiny, all that this world calls culture is but the gilded tinsel that bedecks the putrefaction of death. The truly cultured man is developed in harmony with the laws of his being. This being is compound, having a fleshly and a spiritual side. Hence, to cultivate one to the neglect of the other is to disproportion him whom God created in ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... was with Emmy Lou. It had certain treasures between its leaves. One expects to find faint sweet rose-leaves between the pages of the Green and Gold Book, and the scrap of tinsel recalls the gleam and shimmer of the goose ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... deeper note in the hoarse complaints of those same men—a note no less ominous than was that newer, hoarser one of the swollen river—nevertheless were duly thankful that the leaden sky had at least a tinsel ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... a representative of Winter was Tom Watkins, decorated superbly as a Christmas Tree. Boughs of Norway spruce were bound upon his arms and legs and covered his body. Shining balls hung from the twigs, tinsel glistened as he passed under the lantern light, and strings of popcorn reached from his head to his feet. There was no question of his popularity among the children. Every small boy who saw him asked if he had ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... fare we dine, Wear hodden pray, and a' that? Gie 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' men for ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... short. They will sell their vote much more readily than the lowest classes of men now do. They will hold it with greater levity. They will trifle with it. They will sell their vote any day for a yard of ribbon or a tinsel brooch—unless they are offered two yards of ribbon or two brooches. They will vote over again every hour of every election day, by cunning disguises and trickery. And thus, so far as women are concerned, the most degraded element in society will, in fact, represent the whole sex. Nay, they will ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... habit she had worn ever since her husband's death, were made matters of reproach to her. But though Mina had been born a tiller of the earth, he had died a grandee of Spain, ennobled yet more by his patriotism and great qualities than he could be by the tinsel of a title; the character of the countess was that of a high-minded and virtuous woman; and as to the accusation of being a santarona, or affectedly pious, it was no less unjust than malicious. Here is Captain Widdrington's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... In unremitting drudgery and care! How many a vulgar Cato has compelled 140 His energies, no longer tameless then, To mould a pin, or fabricate a nail! How many a Newton, to whose passive ken Those mighty spheres that gem infinity Were only specks of tinsel, fixed in Heaven 145 To light the midnights ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... evermore. I shall perhaps expose our young man to the contempt of 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 ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... 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 the word ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... or "engages," having spent their season's gains in carousal, packed their blanket capotes and were ready for the wilderness again. They made a picturesque crew in their gaudy turbans, or hats adorned with plumes and tinsel, their brilliant handkerchiefs tied sailor-fashion about swarthy necks, their calico shirts, and their flaming worsted belts, which served to hold the knife and the tobacco pouch. Rough trousers, leggings, and cowhide shoes or gaily-worked ...
— The Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin • Frederick Jackson Turner
... a similar costume of pale gray and lavender, with a tall headdress of wire covered with white gauze and tinsel. ...
— The Belles of Canterbury - A Chaucer Tale Out of School • Anna Bird Stewart
... the Hobby Horse, that once played so prominent a part in these boisterous masquerades, but such life as it still enjoys at Padstow is somewhat a galvanised existence, just as children still occasionally dress in poor tinsel and gaiety in order to collect a few coppers. Such exhibitions are ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... invitation for you, Colonel." He was in one of his gently sparkling moods. "Get into your armor asinorum, for we fare forth to make contest with tinsel and gauze. In other words, we mingle with the proletariat. We go to see Margaret Anglin and Henry Miller in that superb and realistic Western ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... laid by the heels. Men of his own squadron took him. He demanded at first to be treated as befitted his rank; but none of his self-importance went with his black captors. "We'll brigidiale-gene'al yer, yer black scound'al," they remarked cheerfully, as they stripped off his tinsel stars. "Yer oughter ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... of a ship. At the farther end there were two stone staircases leading to opposite sides of the stage. In front of her were a drum and barrel, and the semi-darkness at the back was speckled over with the sparkling of the gilt tinsel stuff used in pantomimes; a pair of lattice-windows, a bundle of rapiers, a cradle and a breastplate, formed a group in the centre; a broken trombone lay at her feet. The odour of size that the scenery ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... them in the felicitous wedding of elevated thought or vigorous argument to noble diction. By the side of his serried yet persuasive periods the efforts of Fox seemed ragged, those of Burke philosophic essays, those of Sheridan rhetorical tinsel. And this harmony was not the effect of long and painful training. His maiden speech of 26th February 1781 displayed the grace and forcefulness which marked his classic utterance at the Lord Mayor's banquet ten weeks before ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... in his eyes and heart only. He is accustomed to the lights, to the spectators, to the laughter, to the applause, to the frightened scream of the hysterical women in the audience, to the close air and to the narrow stage behind the bars. The tamer in his tights and tinsel has grown used to his tiger, to his emotions, to his hourly danger. He even finds at last that his mind wanders during the performance, and that at the very instant when he is holding the ring for the leap, or thrusting his head into the beast's fearful jaws, he is thinking of his wife, ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... at Hof, a handfulof houses on the brow of a breezy hill, the church and tavern standing opposite to each other, and nothing between them but the dusty road, and the churchyard, with its iron crosses, and the fluttering tinsel of the funeral garlands. In the churchyard and at the tavern-door, were groups of peasants, waiting for divine service to begin. They were clothed in their holiday dresses. The men wore breeches and long boots, and frock-coats with large metal buttons; the women, straw ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... with simple faith and simple trust, gazed in reverence on the naive wax figure behind the grating, within its throne of rough stone and whitewash. It was dressed in blue calico spangled with tinsel, and had a crown on its head made of gilt paper and a veil of coarse tarlatan. Two china pots containing artificial flowers were placed on either side ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... tender. She stooped and gathered Dinah to her bosom. "Oh, my dear," she murmured, "never prefer the tinsel to the true gold! He is far, far the greatest man I know. And you—you ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... troth's but a night-gowne in respect of yours, cloth a gold and cuts, and lac'd with siluer, set with pearles, downe sleeues, side sleeues, and skirts, round vnderborn with a blewish tinsel, but for a fine queint gracefull and excellent fashion, yours is ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... "Eros," love of the individual, of the race, of nature, and in this he follows Christ, in whose system of Philosophy, Love is ever the pre-dominating idea which permeates mankind with its beneficial effects, and will, when the bastard tinsel with which the truths of the Nazarene are hidden, be replaced by that pure gold which it is impossible to trace in the enunciations of any previous philosopher. This subject is always present to Shelley, and he thus appeals in one of his ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... Asiatic temples and pagodas, in which the chief entertainments are held. The approaching avenues are illuminated with many-colored lights suspended from the branches of the trees, and wind under triumphal archways, festooned with flowers. The theatres present open fronts, and abound in all the tinsel of the stage, both inside and out. The grounds are crowded to their utmost capacity with the rank and fashion of the city, in all the glory of jeweled head-dresses and decorations of order. Festoons of variegated lights swing from the trees over the audience, and painted figures ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... came to see us, bringing a present of flour. I gave him a tin plate, a wooden spoon, the last of the tea-cups, and a tinsel paper of mother-of-pearl shirt buttons, which took his fancy so immensely, that my wife was begged to suspend it from his neck like a medal. He was really a very good old fellow—by far the best I have seen in Africa. He was ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... however, and that practically confined to Archangel and environs, will admit even most privately that any gift or advantage is payment for a given favor which would not be extended in the ordinary course of business. This class is not the national back-bone, but rather the tinsel trimmings in ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... oar,—sometimes she drifts. But what greatness she has is genuine; there is no tinsel of any kind, no drapery carefully adjusted, no chosen gesture about her. May Heaven lead her, at last, to the full possession of her best self, in harmony with ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the floor in a corner, and many of the guests also were seated on the floor. Miss Ingate, intoxicated by the rapture of existence, and Miss Thompkins were carefully examining the frescoes on the walls. A young woman covered from head to foot with gold tinsel was throwing chocolates into Musa's mouth, or as near to it as ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... them, but only a terrible, a brutal record of spoliation and of wreckage, of plunder, and of despair. And the gaslight, striking the flat surface of the mirror, made the record glitter with a thin, cheap sparkle, like the tinsel trappings of the life whose story the mirror revealed ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... to be painfully harvested by following her mother's tuition, and accept the easily gathered luscious golden fruit offered her by her father. Like all children and many adults, the glitter and the tinsel of the present enjoyment were too powerful and seductive to be resisted, or to be postponed for ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... of 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
... of tinsel satin favors that used to be the featured and gayest decoration of every ballroom, is gone; the cotillion leader, his hands full of "seat checks," his manners a cross between those of Lord Chesterfield and a ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... targets are discovered the airman drops a smoke ball directly over it or lets fall some strips of tinsel, which glitter in the sun as they slowly descend to the earth. The range to the target is apparently ascertained by those near the guns by a large telemeter, or other range finder, which is kept trained on the aeroplane, so that when the signal is made the distance ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... do but to let them alone; that by degrees the blood will be absorbed and the tumour will disappear, and as it does so we may trace the gradual transformation of the membrane which covered it into bone, as we feel it crackling like tinsel under the finger. Two, three, or four weeks may be needed for the entire removal of one of these blood-swellings. The doctor will at once recognise its character, and you will then have nothing to do but to wait—often, unhappily, so much harder for the ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... 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 ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... display was mere tinsel show compared with the great pageant that has moved before those few men who have lived through the whole length of the past ...
— The New Minister's Great Opportunity - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... dead. A strange, sad story clings About the memory of this mindless man; A tale that strips war's tinsel off, and brings Its horrors out, as ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... me if I would go across to a clipboard and pull it open there would be something there waiting for me. And it was on all-fours that I went all eagerness across great patches of rose-pattern, till I had butted my way through a door left ajar, and found in a cardboard box of bright tinsel and flowers two little wax babes ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... 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, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... the doctrine ascribed to Jesus and its effects are to be considered quite irrespectively of his personal history. And—as I hope I have shown—the actual doings and sayings of every founder of a Faith or a school of philosophy must be sought for under a heap of tinsel and rubbish contributed by successive generations ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott
... differently 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... whose beauty one might give up all things. Young, elegant, serpentine; clad in a single garment, a light cinnamon gown clasped at the waist; no stockings, her legs bare and brown; on her head a Persian scarf embroidered with red and gold tinsel; her face white, with a delicate pink flush over it; hair and eyes black as night, but also with a glitter of stars. Wherever she walked she was a picture, and whether she was working about the house, ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... and straight before him, and he meant it still, increasingly difficult as it appeared. But all the talk of the lonely soul, of the eternal isolation of the spirit, in which man was doomed to live, all the tinsel sentimentalisms of which the talk of the bilingual poetess had mainly consisted, afforded perhaps as poor a pabulum as he could anywhere have found. There was he, with that sore-stricken heart of his, so ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... a shiny tinsel star, Boxed all the time as such things are, And only used just once a year, Oh, life is ...
— Songs for Parents • John Farrar
... 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 ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... the city and distributed the most costly presents to the crowd. Engines were erected in all the squares which cast forth showers of confectionery among the people, while the artisans in chariots[185] adorned with tinsel and flying streamers exhibited the badges of their respective trades through the streets. Such brilliant displays of life and pageantry among the palaces and domes and gilded minarets of Lahore made the city altogether like ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... by the Spanish writer, Cervantes (1547-1616 A.D.), is a famous satire on chivalry. Our American "Mark Twain" also stripped off the gilt and tinsel of chivalry in his amusing story entitled A Connecticut Yankee at ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... fabric, our boasted civilization rests on the foundations of a lie, a most gigantic lie—the religious, political and economic lie, a triune lie, from whose fertile womb has issued a world of corruption, evils, shams and unnameable crimes. There, denuded of its tinsel trappings, your civilization stands revealed in all the evil reality of its unadorned shame; and 'tis a ghastly sight, a mass of corruption, an ever-spreading cancer. Your false civilization is a disease, and capitalism is its most malignant form; 'tis the acute stage which is breeding ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... nothing there. Even the silver plates on the coffins with the names of those gentlemen were no thicker than a sword. But I found a crown in the church itself. I borrowed it from St. Michael. He had a sword in his hand, but he did not strike. No. And there was only tinsel on ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... mixed company of the pious and the vicious of the capital. There was the Metropolitan in his robes and with his great crucifix, Ministers of State in uniforms with decorations, Actual Privy Councillors and their wives, and dozens of underlings in their gaudy tinsel, prelates with crosses at their necks, and women of all classes, from the highest aristocracy to the painted sister ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... soon a gorgeous figure of Santa Claus was smiling down from the very tiptop of the tree. With her flushed face, eager eyes, and golden hair the busy marquise looked like its patron saint. Ropes of gold and silver tinsel were swiftly draped around and up and down; enmeshed in these were little red Santas, gayly colored paper horns filled with candy, colored balls, white and yellow birds, little colored candles with ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... Oceanus, By the earth-shaking Neptune's mace, And Tethys grave majestick pace, By hoary Nereus wrincled look, And the Carpathian wisards hook, By scaly Tritons winding shell, And old sooth-saying Glaucus spell, By Leucothea's lovely hands, And her son that rules the strands, By Thetis tinsel-slipper'd feet, And the Songs of Sirens sweet, By dead Parthenope's dear tomb, And fair Ligea's golden comb, Wherwith she sits on diamond rocks Sleeking her soft alluring locks, By all the Nymphs that nightly ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... Berrington, who, having entered during the contest, had stood unobserved until this moment; "and their gold and tinsel would prove but dross and bubble, if struck by the Ithuriel touch of ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... in a corner; a quaint arrangement of helmets, masks, and huge 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 at you from the far ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the parade ground in more than Solomonic splendor of uniform. His inflated form bore upon it all the blue and tinsel prescribed by the Army Regulations for the raiment and insignia of a First Lietenant of Infantry, with such additions as had been suggested by his exuberant fancy. His blue broadcloth was the finest and shiniest. ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... which, to my mind so much enhanced by their complete simplicity, I only wish I had the power to do justice. But I cannot, so it is useless talking more about it. But when I compare this great work of genius to some of the tawdry buildings and tinsel ornamentation produced in these latter days by European ecclesiastical architects, I feel that even highly civilized art might learn something from the Zu-Vendi masterpieces. I can only say that the exclamation which sprang to my lips ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... Certificates, Kenneth's bonnet, a thin packet of real letters, and the famous champagne cork. She kisses the letters, but she does not blub over them. She strokes the dress, and waggles her head over the certificates and presses the bonnet to her cheeks, and rubs the tinsel of the cork carefully with her apron. She is a tremulous old 'un; yet she exults, for she owns all these things, and also the penny flag on her breast. She puts them away in the drawer, the scarf over ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... consumed. Now was not this characteristic?—the ruling passions of Pope are nothing to it. Whilst the poor distracted manager was bewailing the loss of a building only worth L300,000., together with some twenty thousand pounds of rags and tinsel in the tiring rooms, Bluebeard's elephants, [6] and all that—in comes a note from a scorching author, requiring at his hands two acts and odd scenes of ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... femininely soft body the hardness which stands for manliness; for him must be multiplied days of mental reorganization to change the will of a weakling into saving masterfulness; nor will these suffice unless, in the white heat of a moral revelation, the false tinsel woven into the fabric of his character be consumed. For months he must deny himself the luxuries, even many of the comforts, his mother's wealth is eager to give. Yet these weeks and months of development may never be, for in a short time he will again ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... 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 their ...
— The Mummy's Foot • Theophile Gautier
... 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 against police butters-in, or ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... mitigation of a life which, fundamentally, did not fill them; they had an absorbing labor, love and home and children, the church, yet they were unsatisfied. They were discontented with the primary facts of existence, the serious phases, and wanted, above everything, tinsel and laughter. If a girl passing on the street smiled boldly at such youths they were fired with triumph and happiness; they nudged each other violently and made brazen declarations which, faced by the girls, escaped in disconcerted laughter. Their language—and ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... priceless Persian and Indian carpets from the "Tosho Khana" or Treasury. The sides and roof were stretched at one end with sulphur-coloured Indian silk, at the other with pale blue silk, the yellow silk with a two-foot border of silver tinsel, the blue edged with gold tinsel. Cunning craftsmen from Agra fashioned "camouflage" doorways and columns of plaster, coloured and gilt in the style of the arabesques in the Alhambra, and the thing was ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... waters by old experience, there is very much skill in salmon- fishing. It is all an affair of muscle and patience. The choice of flies is almost a pure accident. Every one believes in the fly with which he has been successful. These strange combinations of blues, reds, golds, of tinsel and worsted, of feathers and fur, are purely fantastic articles. They are like nothing in nature, and are multiplied for the fanciful amusement of anglers. Nobody knows why salmon rise at them; nobody knows why they will bite on one day and not on another, ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... freshness of the breeze and the splendor of the January moon, the people filled the fair to see, be seen, and amuse themselves. The music of the cosmoramas and the lights of the lanterns gave life and merriment to every one. Long rows of booths, brilliant with tinsel and gauds, exposed to view clusters of balls, masks strung by the eyes, tin toys, trains, carts, mechanical horses, carriages, steam-engines with diminutive boilers, Lilliputian tableware of porcelain, pine Nativities, dolls both foreign and domestic, ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... another pair who flourished in tawdry, 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, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... him as self-pronounced. If "Mr." is the Grand-Hotel Jupiter, the Head-Waiter is its Mercury. Nothing modern is so versatile as the Head-Waiter. The first thing about the Head-Waiter is his cigars. These are covered with tinsel and colours: very gay—almost as gay as the Head-Waiter. They are of unpronounceable and unknown brands. They vary in price and size, but agree in flavour—liquorice, tempered by ink. Like the fabled fruit, they crumble to ashes in your mouth. If you are only a bird of passage, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 3, 1892 • Various
... the woman takes her place beside the man in the governance and arrangement of external affairs of her race will also be that day that heralds the death of war as a means of arranging human differences. No tinsel of trumpets and flags will ultimately seduce women into the insanity of recklessly destroying life, or gild the wilful taking of life with any other name than that of murder, whether it be the slaughter of the million or of one by one. ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... lead the life of a recluse of seventy. Here we are in the height of the London season, and I am sure you haven't been into ten houses, when a hundred of the very best are open to you—" I loathe the term "best houses." The tinsel ineptitude of them! For entertainment I really would sooner attend a mothers' meeting or listen to the serious British Drama—Have I read so and so's novel? Am I going to Mrs. Chose's dance? Do I ride in the Park? Do ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... with candles and was resplendent with decorations that represented long hours of work with shears and paste on the part of unaccustomed fingers. Suggestions from a thousand Christmas minds were on that tree, and the result showed it. The star of Bethlehem, made of tinsel, ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... "moral suasion" to the dogs. Above all, your demagogue dreads satire as vermin the avenging thumb—'Any thing but that,' squeaks he, 'an you love me. Liken me to Lucifer, or Caius Gracchus; charge me with ambition, and glorious vices; let me be the evil genius of the commonwealth, the tinsel villain of the political melodrama; but don't threaten me with the fool's cap, or write me down with Dogberry; above all, don't quote me in cold blood, that the foolish people may see, after the fever heat has subsided, what trash I ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... life, they seemed to grow In a green field; and as the wind did blow, Sometimes a lily, then a rose, takes place, And blushing seems to hide it in the grass: And here and there good oats 'mong pearls she strew, That seemed like spinning glow-worms in the dew. Her sleeves were tinsel, wrought with leaves of green In equal distance spangeled between, And shadowed over with a thin lawn cloud, Through which her workmanship more ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... emeralds and other precious stones, mainly introduced for their effect in color, few of them being of great value as gems. Stones with flaws, and others which are mere chips or scales, are laid on like tinsel. Two cases are filled with gaudy trappings and caparisons—horse and camel saddles with velvet and leather work, gold embroidery and cut-cloth work (applique); an elephant howdah of silver; chowries of yak tails with handles of sandal-wood, chased gold or ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... who prize The tongue that is smooth to deceive; Yet sure she had sense to despise, The tinsel ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... 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 ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... choicest raiment that her wardrobe contained, and she was bright and cheery and exceedingly incompetent. It was her costume that shocked him. Not only was she attired in a low-necked, rose-coloured evening gown, liberally bespangled with tinsel, but she wore a vast top-heavy picture-hat whose crown of black was almost wholly obscured by a gorgeous white feather that once must have adorned the king of all ostriches. She was not at all his idea of a chambermaid. He started to back out of the door with an ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... 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 ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... in May, 1841,—a long column of troops entered Paris with a celerity hitherto unknown. There was no false glitter, no tinsel; everything was neat and martial, with bugles for their only music, and a uniform that was sombre, indeed, but of such harmonious simplicity as to be by no means devoid of elegance. This column consisted of the Chasseurs, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... harbor came the night winds Robed in tinsel veils of vapors, And they whispered in the branches Of the cedar trees above her— Whispered of the King, their master, Whispered terms for ...
— The Legends of San Francisco • George W. Caldwell
... 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 ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... the pretended science of Homoeopathy, to which you are asked to trust your lives and the lives of those dearest to you. A mingled mass of perverse ingenuity, of tinsel erudition, of imbecile credulity, and of artful misrepresentation, too often mingled in practice, if we may trust the authority of its founder, with heartless and shameless imposition. Because it is suffered so often to appeal ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... what innocence is? Ask the average clergyman to describe innocence to you, and when he gets through, think a bit, take off the tinsel words with which he has decked out his graven image, and you'll find what? Ignorance enshrined. Every clergy the world has seen has enshrined ignorance, and ignorance has no single virtue that a ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... the modern world, without tinsel and pasteboard; since I conceived him in fire and bore him in agony; since—even the cream of this tart is sour—since I carried him to and fro in my pocket, as a young kangaroo is carried in the ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... down Sixth Avenue to the Cigar-Makers' Ball. They made an Indian file through the Christmas shopping crowds, and stopped frequently and noisily before the street-booths' glamour of tinsel and teddy-bears. They shrieked all with one rotund mad laughter as Tom Poppins capered over and bought for seven cents a pink bisque doll, which he pinned to the lapel of his plaid overcoat. They drank hot chocolate at the ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... onepiece evening frock executed in moonlight blue, a tinsel sylph's diadem on her brow with her dancecard fallen beside her moonblue satin slipper, curves her palm softly, breathing quickly) Voglio e non. You're hot! You're scalding! The left ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... worth while to go for a moment behind the scene; We have seen the actors, with mask and cothurn and tinsel crown, playing their well-conned parts upon the stage. Let us hear them threaten, and whimper, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... gold and silver money, besides a lot of beads, trinkets, and gaudy tinsel things, such as earthly savages have been willing to barter ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... the Bridegroom, the mortal stains the immortal and the human mars the beauty of the divine, in the light of His appearing they will assume new attitudes and receive His quickening and thrill with His pulse. When I conceive of this reward for our Daysman I protest that all other triumphs seem as tinsel and sham. The Desire of all nations shall then see of the travail of His soul and shall be satisfied. The subtle patience of China, the fierce resistance of Japan, the brooding soul that haunts the Ganges valley, the tumult of emotion of the Ethiopian breast, all are for His appearing; they must ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... 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 ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... very proud tradition in the person of the King of Spain, although France, which has been ruled by so many members of the family, will probably never again behold a Bourbon king. The deposed Braganzas bear a name which is ancient, but which has a somewhat tinsel sound. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... contempt of him; and declared, that, were there not another man in England, she would not have him. She was ready, on the contrary, she could assure them, to resign her pretensions under hand and seal, if Miss Clary were taken with his tinsel, and if every one else approved of his address ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson |
