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More "Humbug" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been here twenty-four hours," he said. "I have looked you up at the first opportunity. Now am I a nuisance? Be frank! I told the servant that if you were at work you weren't to be disturbed. Don't humbug about it; if I am in ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... Stuart that the carriage would soon be round, 'I knew very well how you and Wallace would take her. You and I will have to defend each other, Mrs. Stuart, against those two shower-baths, and when we go to see her afterwards I shall be invaluable, for I shall be able to save Kendal and Wallace the humbug of compliments.' ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "possessions." The only terms upon which educated British and Indians can meet to-day with any comfort is precisely that. The living intercourse of the British and Indian mind to-day is the discussion of the restoration. Everything else is humbug on the one side ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... the leaven of the Pharisees is still extant, and runs as follows: —Self-deceit 0.33 want of charity 0.5 outward show 0.33, humbug infinity, insert Sim or not as required. Reader, let each one who would seem to be righteous take unto himself ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... read the human countenance correctly; and some special circumstance must have roused the suspicions of these four persons so much as to cause them to make these observations, and they were not as usual deceived by the humbug of this skilled actor, a past master ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... "Humbug! humbug! humbug! We need not discuss Donato, who is merely a very smart juggler. As for M. Charcot, who is said to be a remarkable man of science, he produces on me the effect of those story-tellers of the school of Edgar Poe, who end ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... for an impudent, swindling, sneaking French humbug!—Your tone instantly changes, and you tell him to go about his business: but at twelve o'clock at night, when the voyage is over, and the custom-house business done, knowing not whither to go, with a wife and fourteen exhausted children, scarce able to stand, and longing for bed, you find ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... won't be scolded by you. After all, I am your elder, and you are bound, at any rate, to show me decent outward respect. If you only mean to talk humbug of this sort I am ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... possessing an 'ideal' is that, lodging in you as it does, it insists upon the interior being furnished by your personal satisfaction, and not by the blindness or stupidity of the outer world. Thus, in one direction, an ideal precludes humbug. The ladies might desire to cloak facts, but they had no pleasure in deception. They had the feminine power of extinguishing things disagreeable, so long as nature or the fates did them no violence. When ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... startled. This "an innocent!"—this a girl who had no mind to be formed! In that presence he could not be cynical; could not speak of Nature as a mechanism, a lying humbug, as he had done to the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... a fool, Gerty!" said he, in downright anger. "You know it is no use your trying to humbug me. If you think the ways of this house are too poor and mean for your grand notions of state—if you think he has not enough money, and you are not likely to have fine dinners and entertainments for your friends—if you are determined to break off the match—why, then do it! but, I tell you, don't ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... Come, Belle, make up your mind, and let us be off to America; and leave priests, humbug, learning, ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... trustworthy and true, but out of it hardly rises above the conceptions of a boarding-school Miss in her teens. She appears to us a kind of strong-minded old maid, but with her strong-mindedness greatly modified by the presumption as well as the sentimentality of romantic humbug. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... thought it had "burst," others that it had "burned out." Betsy said: "Whatever it was, it was a humbug;" and the wisest man in Whitefield could neither tell whence it came nor whither it went. One thing, however, was certain: Farmer Lathem said that never, since his orchard began to bear, had he gathered such a crop of apples as he did, despite ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... the other day that life was nothing but a humbug, and he said he should bring me a remedy against that false notion the next time he came, and you, I suppose, are that remedy," she continued. "Come, begin; I am ready to take any ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... know. First of all, he wasn't any thing to me. It isn't very flattering; but it is so. He has never kissed so much as the end of my finger. He used to say that he loved me, but that he respected me still more, because I looked so much like a daughter he had lost. Old humbug! And I believed him too! I did, upon my word, at least in the beginning. But I am not such a fool as I look. I found out very soon that he was making fun of me; and that he was only using me as a blind to keep suspicion away from ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... wonderful, remote, fairy-land region, where all sorts of poetical things may take place without the slightest difficulty. Of course Shakespeare would not have done thus, but that he saw quite through the grand critical humbug which makes the proper effect of a work of art depend upon our belief in the actual occurrence of the thing represented. But your "critic grave and cool," I suppose, is one who, like Wordsworth's ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... humbug,' said Wylder. 'It's not real. I showed it to Platten and Foyle. It's some sort of glass. But I would not part with it. I got a fancy into my head that luck would come with it, and maybe that glass stuff was the thing that had the virtue in it. Now look at these Persian letters on the ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Excellency and his Lordship are all a humbug now, you know," said the Justice; "mere St. Germains titles—Earl of Beauchamp and ambassador plenipotentiary from France, when the Duke Regent scarce knew that he lived, I daresay. But you must have seen old Sir Frederick Vernon at the hall, when he ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... and Bright, he'd wait till Star was drawin' good an' solid, an' then he'd as much as say, 'Oh! you kin pull all that, kin ye? Well, stick to it, my boy, an' I'll manage to trifle along with the rest o' the load.' Wo-hoish, Star! haw, Bright! git up, ye old humbug! You're six year old now, an' you ain't changed a mite in four years, though I've drove you stiddy, and tried to spare the other ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... du believe In Humbug generally, Fer it's a thing thet I perceive To hev a solid vally; This heth my faithful shepherd ben, In pastures sweet heth led me, An' this'll keep the people green To feed ez they have ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... man, what humbug!" exclaimed Valero in utter indignation, "and may I ask if you have a ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... everyone concerned. Frankly, the Green family exasperate me," declared Mrs. Fielding. "I can put up with Jack. He's such a smart, good-looking boy, and he can drive like the devil. But I've no use for the other two, and never shall have. I think Green's a humbug. Is he going to join your picnic-party ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... London. Has Mr. Greenwood found obituary poems dropped on the grave of the famous Beaumont? Did Fletcher, did Jonson, produce one melodious tear for the loss of their friend; in Fletcher's case his constant partner? No? Were the poets, then, aware that Beaumont was a humbug, whose poems and plays were written ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... "Why, you selfish old humbug!" cried Uncle John, indignantly. "Why can't she go, when there's money and time to spare? Would you keep her here to cuddle and spoil a vigorous man like yourself, when she can run away and see the world ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... cruisers rounded the far point, and the boys welcomed them warmly as a sort of guarantee that there would be no humbug about this embarkation. Again came the animated scene as they shipped their horses, again a last night to roam streets, which echoed with mirth far into the night, and again the crowded piers aflutter with handkerchiefs, drawing away in the distance. The Tahiti passed close astern of the two ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... losses, my object and all; and what was his plea, think you? Why, he disapproved of gambling; couldn't think of lending me a sixpence for any such purpose; and, as for going into such a suspected quarter as a gambling-house—wouldn't do it for the world! Was there ever such a puritan—such a humbug!" ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... disposed of with a sneer. A toss of the head and a cry of "humbug," will not suffice to meet its claims and the testimony of careful, conservative men who have studied thoroughly into the genuineness of its manifestations, and have sought for the secret of its power, and have become satisfied as ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... seen her I think you'll take my views. Of course it's the very last thing I ever imagined myself doing; but I begin to see that the talk about fate isn't altogether humbug. I want this girl for my wife, and I never met any one else whom I really did want. She suits me exactly. It isn't as if I thought of marrying an ordinary, ignorant, low-class girl. Eve—that's ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... before; you should not have pulled the curb-bit that way!' And when the vulgar dandy, strutting along, with his Brummagem jewellery, his choking collar, and his awfully tight boots which cause him agony, meets the true gentleman; how it rushes upon him that he himself is only a humbug! How the poor ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... by a Humbug. That's what it ought to be called. I was looking forward to having a good crack with you the night, but sure a newspaper man need never hope to have ten minutes to himself. I've given Miss Squibb orders to have a good warm ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... than at the same period a Warrington would confess that he was a contributor to the leading journals of the day. The members were on the look-out for any indications of intellectual originality, academical or otherwise, and specially contemptuous of humbug, cant, and the qualities of the 'windbag' in general. To be elected, therefore, was virtually to receive a certificate from some of your cleverest contemporaries that they regarded you as likely to be in future an eminent man. The judgment ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... the masters, have anything to do with the making or keeping them so. I maintain that despotism is the best kind of government for them; so that in the hours in which I come in contact with them I must necessarily be an autocrat. I will use my best discretion—from no humbug or philanthropic feeling, of which we have had rather too much in the North—to make wise laws and come to just decisions in the conduct of my business—laws and decisions which work for my own good in the first instance—for theirs in the second; ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... though it was evident he was very comfortable where he was. And she! She had laughed at his jokes; they were not very clever jokes, they were not very new. She had probably read them herself months before in her own particular weekly journal. Yet the harmless humbug made him happy. I wonder if ten years hence she will laugh at such old humour, if ten years hence he will take such clumsy pains to put her cape about her. Experience shakes her head, and is ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... that," cried the Squire, "'tis the best think I know about Rickeybockey, that he don't attempts to humbug us by any such foreign trumpery. Thank heaven, the Hazeldeans of Hazeldean were never turf-hunters and title-mongers; and if I never ran after an English lord, I should certainly be devilishly ashamed of a brother-in-law whom I was forced to call markee or count! I should feel sure he ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... "Froude is staying up, and I see a great deal of him." ... "Froude is most enthusiastic in his plans, and says, 'What fun it is living in such times as these! how could one now go back to the times of old Tory humbug?'" From henceforth his position among his friends was that of the most impatient and aggressive of reformers, the one who most urged on his fellows to outspoken language and a bold line of action. They were not men to hang back and be afraid, but they ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... regard to marriage and all sex questions, and the sacred nature of property. To read many disquisitions on that period today one would suppose that no one living really believed in these things: that humbug explained the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... and, followed by the others, he ran to the crag and shouted, "Give us none of your humbug! Bring back the boat, or it will be the worse ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... about Cumberland not altogether right, I fancy; I'm not very strait-laced myself, particularly if there's any fun in a thing, not so much so as I should be, I suspect; but Cumberland is too bad even 26for me; besides, there's no fun in what he does, and then he's such a humbug—not straightforward and honest, you know. Lawless would not be half such a bully either, if Cumberland did not set him on. But don't you say a word about this to any one; Cumberland would be ready to murder me, or to get somebody ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... attestations of the patients, and decoying the simple, the ignorant, well-intentioned, but deceived neighbours, to add their signatures to cases of which they know nothing, and of which the details are a series of bombast, falsehood, ignorance, and humbug. There are many of the cases which I have related to which I could have obtained the signatures of clergymen, Members of Parliament, magistrates, and other persons high in rank and station in life, without saying a word about overseers, churchwardens, and parishioners, ...
— Observations on the Causes, Symptoms, and Nature of Scrofula or King's Evil, Scurvy, and Cancer • John Kent
... John, don't talk humbug. I'd like to see you following goodness when beauty is gone. I've known lots of plain old maids that were perfect saints and angels; and yet men crowded and jostled by them to get the pretty sinners. I dare say now," she added, with a bewitching look over her shoulder at him, "you'd ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... "Interest of humbug!" snapped Prof. Darmstetter, his own sarcastic self again. "You consent because you vant to be beautiful. You care not'ing for science. I can trust you vit' my secret. You need svear no oat's not to reveal it. You vant to be t'e only perfect voman in ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... down and whispered to her. "Don't you go getting caught by that sweep who runs their chapel up in London. He's a humbug if ever there was one—you mark my words. I know a thing or two. He's done your aunts a lot of harm, and he'll have his dirty fingers on you if you ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... now! There's many a chap as envies me. Yet how strange it felt when I crossed myself before the icon. It was just as if some one shoved me. The whole web fell to pieces at once. They say it's frightening to swear what's not true. That's all humbug. It's all talk, that is. It's ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... that honest stupidity is a much better thing than clever insincerity or fluent repetition of second-hand dogmas. But, in fact, this dislike of 'Lycidas,' and a good many instances of critical incapacity might be added, is merely a misapplication of a very sound principle. The hatred of cant and humbug and affectation of all vanity is a most salutary ingredient even in poetical criticism. Johnson, with his natural ignorance of that historical method, the exaltation of which threatens to become a part of our contemporary cant, made the pardonable ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... says the word, George shudders. . . I've got a man at hand competent for the job who will do the trick for five hundred, and only too pleased at the chance, says Cloete. . . George shuts his eyes tight at that sort of talk—but at the same time he thinks: Humbug! There can be no such man. And yet if there was such a man ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... himself to the business of which his father had been justly proud. The house of Henry Woodman had been a pioneer in the establishing of a trade in pure drugs. In the time of the elder Woodman, adulteration and humbug were the rule, not ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... that the game of politics was a game of compromises: something was deemed admirable now that had been hitherto almost execrable; and that which was utterly impossible to-day, if done last year would have been a triumphant success, and consequently he pronounced the whole thing an 'imposition and a humbug.' 'I can understand a right and a wrong as well as any man,' he would say, 'but I know nothing about things that are neither or both, according to who's in or who's out of the Cabinet. Give me the command of twelve thousand men, let me divide them into three flying columns, ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... changes effected in the government of the colonies by the Whigs, during their long and perilous rule. If of the former kind, it is to be lamented that he concealed his deliberate convictions under an allegorical piece of humour. His disposition to "humbug" was so great, it was difficult to obtain a plain straightforward reply from him; but had the Secretary of State put the question to him in direct terms, what he thought of Lord Durham's "Responsible government," and the practical working of it under Lord Sydenham's ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... scientific, and all that; but railways were commercial enterprises, not toys; and if the atmospheric railway could not work to a profit, it would not do. Considered in this light, he even went so far as to call it "a great humbug." "Nothing will beat the locomotive," said he, "for efficiency in all weathers, for economy in drawing loads of average weight, and for power and speed as ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... pail into which to pour his troubles I cannot say. I let him talk on, and when he had ended I showed him plainly that I had been thinking most of the time about something else. Whether Marriot was entirely a humbug or the most conscientious person on our stair, readers may decide. He was fond of argument if you did not answer him, and often wanted me to tell him if I thought he was in love; if so, why did I think so; if not, why not. What makes me on reflection fancy that he was sincere is ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... considered himself a man at all events, burst into a loud fit of laughter, in which his companion joined him, at the absurdity of their conversation; of which, although they had spoken in earnest, they were both somewhat conscious. "But I say, old fellow, without any more humbug about love and such like bosh, just look at the dear old craft! how beautifully she sits on the water— what a graceful sheer she has—and how well her sixteen guns look run out, like dogs from their kennels, all ready to bite. You should ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... for nothing—you need only sign—have they not done the likes of us often enough? No, my friend, none of your humbug. Nowadays we have a little sense," he added, and began shouting at a colt that ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... that you have been a coquette? How! have I been only the foster-father of thy little poet?" "No! No!" replied the enraged mother; "he is all thine own! Console thyself, poor John; thou alone hast been my mate. And who is this 'Pollo, the humbug who has deceived thee so? Yes, I am lame, but when I was washing my linen, if any coxcomb had approached me, I would have hit him on the mouth with a stroke of my mallet!" "Mother," exclaimed the daughter, "'Pollo is only a fool, not worth talking about; ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... who was selling us to the Tuxedo people, we can protect ourselves hereafter," declared Mr. Wheatcroft. "And in spite of your trying to humbug me into believing you guilty, Major, I'm willing to ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... yae thing that there's fower places staunin' in Millar's Level," said Jamie Lauder, "an' I'm telt there's five or six staunin' in the Black Horse Dook. It's a' a bit of humbug, an' I think we should try an' put an ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... to hush Lasse, but the "cuckoo" rose within him together with his wrath, and he continued: "So he's above recognizing decent people who get what they have in an honorable way, and not by lying and humbug! They do say he makes love to all the farmers' wives wherever he goes; but there was a time when he had to put ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... boast with Mr. Wiseacre that he had never been humbugged in his life. He took the newspapers and read them regularly, and thus got an inkling of the new and strange things that were ever transpiring, or said to be transpiring, in the world. But to all he cried "humbug!" "imposture!" "delusion!" If any one were so bold as to affirm in his presence a belief in the phenomena of Animal Magnetism, for instance, he would laugh outright; then expend upon it all sorts of ridicule, or say that the whole thing was a scandalous ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... defined what the dream will be like when it comes. Your masters have. Let me read some choice bits to you from these big-brained, clear-eyed men who created your movement. I like these men because they scorn humbug. Defiance, disobedience, contempt for ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... beyond. Il boit. De German, he looks to de end. Er sauft. De Englishman, he sits down fresh and intends to get fuddled; but he is a hypocrite. He does not say de truth to hisself nor to nobody, he says, I will get fresh, when he means de odder ding. Big humbug. You understand?" ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... know it's all a howling cram about William Tell? There never was such a chap! This is the place he used to hang out in, and everyone says it's all my eye what the history says about him. You'd better let Moss know. Tell him, from inquiries made by me on the spot, I find it's all humbug, and he'd better get some chap to write a new history who knows something about it. I was asking Railsford—by the way, he's a stunning chap. We ran up against him on the Saint Gothard, and he's been with us ever since. No end of a cheese! Rowed in the Cambridge boat three ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... "it may have been all the same with the dog, and I believe there's humbug in it; for if the dog had made his appearance, as master pretends he did, all of a sudden, he'd a ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... cocking a critical eye on the now furious Quinby. "I am afraid we most of us enjoy our scandal, and for my part I always like to see a humbug catch it hot. But if the scandal's about a woman, and if it's an old scandal, and if she's a lonely woman, that quite alters the case, and in my opinion the author of it deserves ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... to represent a combination of humility, amiability, gentility, and as many other "ilitys" as could be squeezed into his expressive features. It is hardly necessary after this description to say that Iiani was a very tall humbug, pleasant in manner when he had his own way. He was lazy to such a degree that he invariably fell asleep upon his mule after smoking innumerable cigarettes. In these cases his long body swayed to the right and ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... depressing dazzling joke in which after all our sense of her contradictions sinks to rest—the grimace of an over-strained philosophy. It's rather a comfort, for the curiosity-shops are amusing. You have bad moments indeed as you stand in their halls of humbug and, in the intervals of haggling, hear through the high windows the soft splash of the sea on the old water-steps, for you think with anger of the noble homes that are laid waste in such scenes, of the delicate ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... jabber, mere words, hocus-pocus, fustian, rant, bombast, balderdash, palaver, flummery, verbiage, babble, baverdage, baragouin[obs3], platitude, niaiserie[obs3]; inanity; flap-doodle; rigmarole, rodomontade; truism; nugae canorae[Lat]; twaddle, twattle, fudge, trash, garbage, humbug; poppy-cock [U.S.]; stuff, stuff and nonsense; bosh, rubbish, moonshine, wish-wash, fiddle-faddle; absurdity &c. 497; vagueness &c. (unintelligibility) 519. [routine or reflexive statements without substantive thought, esp. legal] boilerplate. V. mean nothing; be unmeaning ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... say what I feel. I don't know myself.... But I'm not going to lose you like this. I'm not going to let you slip a second time. I was awake about it all last night. I don't care where you are, what your people are, nor very much whether you've kept quite clear of this medium humbug. I don't. You will in future. Anyhow. I've had a day and night to think it over. I had to come and try to find you. It's you. I've never forgotten you. Never. I'm not going to be ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... "never was a piece so well played as Zaire at the fourth appearance. I very much wished you had been there; you would have seen that the public does not hate your friend. I appeared in a box, and the whole pit clapped their hands at me. I blushed, I hid myself; but I should be a humbug if I did not confess to you that I was sensibly affected. It is pleasant not to be dishonored ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... "Why, I declare if there is not something written upon it!" and he put up his binoculars, "Why, it is nothing more nor less than a big advertisement. Looks like humbug," he continued. "What's the ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various
... song is near its close, A secret, now, I will disclose, Don't tell, for it's beneath the rose, A humbug is ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... your success," said Roswell, in the same disagreeable manner. "Of course that's all humbug. I suppose you've ...
— Fame and Fortune - or, The Progress of Richard Hunter • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... alleged, the fiction should have been respected, at any rate by its authors. It was not. A few weeks later the Premier ordered the publication of the text of the Treaty, although, in the meantime, it had not been signed by M. Poincare. "The excuse founded upon Article 8 was, therefore, a mere humbug," flippantly ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... last attempt at savage life was that of the harmless humbug who called himself the hermit. In a great tree, close by the highroad, he had built himself a little cabin after the manner of the Swiss Family Robinson; thither he mounted at night, by the romantic ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... considerable difficulty about from the part which we have both taken. With respect to the Finance plan, I feel convinced that it must end where it ought to have begun, in an appropriation of part of the Sinking Fund, and that this will be done with more or less disguise and humbug, but that no regard for consistency will be sufficient to prevent ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... is a passage that I never could quite understand. I never, hardly, see a pure breed either of goat or sheep. I never see anybody who deserves go straight to heaven or who deserves to go straight to hell. When the judgment day comes it will be a difficult task. Why, Pauline, my dear, I am a humbug myself." ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... the principal isn't hard with the boys when they come right square up to the mark; but you can't humbug him." ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... is new to the ophthalmoscope. The old humbug never saw your right retina at all—nor your left one either, for that matter. He only pretended, and judged entirely by what you told him; and you didn't tell him very clearly. He's a Belgian, you know, and a priest, ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... in danger of being out-rivalled, and the German navy had developed into such a formidable menace, that after France had been defeated, our own shores would have been immediately attacked by the Germans; it was therefore humbug to suggest that our motive had not been one ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... declare!" gasped the yellow hen, in amazement; "if the copper man can do half of these things he is a very wonderful machine. But I suppose it is all humbug, like so many other ...
— Ozma of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... laugh like a child, and slipped her feet to the floor: "Oh, you cross Marta, you dear humbug!" she cried, "As if you wouldn't let the master walk over you and never complain! Go on with that wonderful muffler of his, and I will let him in myself. No, don't touch me! Let me go ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... times; but when the blues or the imp of the perverse get hold of me all my philosophy goes to the devil, and I realize what an arch humbug I am." ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... caution. In very truth a delightful bundle of paradox. Quick-witted and impatient, she had yet infinite toleration for the simpleton, and could on occasion suffer fools with a gladness quite unshared by her much gentler daughter or her husband. But the snob, the sycophant, and, above all, the humbug met with short shrift at her hands, and the insincere person hated her heartily. She spoke her mind with the utmost freedom on every possible occasion, and as she had plenty of brains and considerable shrewdness her remarks were ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... to statesmen. These maxims were too much in vogue throughout the lower ranks of Walpole's party, and were too much encouraged by Walpole himself, who, from contempt of what, is in our day vulgarly called humbug; often ran extravagantly and offensively into the opposite extreme. The loose political morality of Fox presented a remarkable contrast to the ostentatious purity of Pitt. The nation distrusted the former, and placed implicit confidence in the latter. But almost all the statesmen of the age had ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... be asked to run. And the healthier the world becomes, the more they are compelled to live by imposture and the less by that really helpful activity of which all doctors get enough to preserve them from utter corruption. For even the most hardened humbug who ever prescribed ether tonics to ladies whose need for tonics is of precisely the same character as the need of poorer women for a glass of gin, has to help a mother through child-bearing often enough to feel that he is not living wholly ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... going back to New York, to open a saloon (as they call it) in partnership with another man. He's in England, he says, on business. It's my belief that he wants money for this new venture on bad security. They're smart people in New York. His only chance of getting his bills discounted is to humbug his ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... a clock. After a while a bell rang from an inner room, a door opened, and a gentleman appeared, whose interview with Doctor Lagarde had terminated. His opinion of the sitting was openly expressed in one emphatic word—"Humbug!" No contribution dropped from his hand as he passed the ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... consider themselves the champions of oppressed nationalities—Poland, Finland, and even Ireland; and thus a strong nationalist tendency exists in the revolutionary movement. Against this nationalist tendency Shaw set himself with sudden violence. If the flag of England was a piece of piratical humbug, was not the flag of Poland a piece of piratical humbug too? If we hated the jingoism of the existing armies and frontiers, why should we bring into existence new jingo armies and new jingo frontiers? All the other ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the books now as a Protestant, or Church of England man; but I do not believe all that churchmen believe. I think there's a good deal of humbug about what is called Christianity altogether. I have tried several creeds, and there's none of them squares exactly ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... seized upon detached phrases of Clerambault's pamphlet and brandished them as an act of treason. A personal letter would not have satisfied his virtuous indignation; he chose a loud "yellow journal," a laboratory of blackmail despised by a million Frenchmen, who nevertheless swallowed all its humbug ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... take very little stock in saints, and she strikes me as a little of a humbug, your Cecilia; but I would like to know what the effect of the 'Old Curiosity Shop' would be on a full-blooded Indian squaw. Catherine, will you try to read it if I bring ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... about to reply, when he went on, with a still more deadly quiet: "I am not here to bandy words with you. Let us have no more of this humbug. ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... people of Southern Khorassan is to offer one's food in turn to everybody present and say, "Bis-millah," before commencing to eat it yourself. Although a ridiculous piece of humbug, it is generally my custom to fall in with the peculiar ways of the country, and for days past have invariably offered my food to scores of people whom I knew beforehand would not take it. The lack of courtesy at this hamlet ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... so very good,' said Mark. He felt himself a humbug, for he could have leaped the stile with ease at that very moment. He had very little excuse for practising in this way on her womanly sympathy, except that he dreaded to lose her just yet, and found such a subtle intoxication in being tended ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... best," said Atherley, "was the American one. I really admired old Stamps, and old Stamps admired me; for she knew I thoroughly understood what an unmitigated humbug she was. She had a fine sense of humour, too. How her eyes used to twinkle when I asked ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... here again yesterday. He enquired after you, and asked to be very kindly remembered to you. I should like Doctor Hilary to attend me in any illness. He gives one such a feeling of strength and reliance. There's absolutely no humbug about him. ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... very easy to humbug those who are so eager to be humbugged as people are in this world of humbug—We show ourselves excessively disinterested, ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... a hero or a humbug? a patriot or a pretender? Ask Vermont and she cries "Nulli secundus!" Ask New York and the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... volcano almost laughed in her face, and the black diamond eyes twinkled furiously as they turned away to hide their scornful amusement—so strong was the nun's conviction that the new benefactress was a humbug. The Princess looked at the names quite calmly after she had written them—Sister Saint Paul, Sister Giovanna, and Sister Marius—and asked whether she had seen any of them during her visit. But the Mother Superior answered that they were all three ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... YALLOBALLY RECORD.—"The humbug who had the folly and indecency to pick up the name of Napoleon second-hand at a sale of old pledges, has been thrashed and is a prisoner. Except the Army of the West, and the division on the Mar road, which is commanded ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... like a lamb; two or three words were interchanged on this occasion. At Reading the Marlborough of our tale made one of the safe investments of that day; he bought a "Times" and "Punch"—the latter full of steel-pen thrusts and woodcuts. Valour and beauty deigned to laugh at some inflamed humbug or other punctured by "Punch." Now laughing together thaws our human ice; long before Swindon it was a talking-match; at Swindon who so devoted as Captain Dolignan? He handed them out, he souped them, he tough-chickened them, he brandied and cochinealed one, and he brandied and burnt-sugared the ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... ain't beautiful! Don't you try to humbug me. I am ugly, and I know it! For, last winter, when I went down to the grocery to fetch Forty-nine—he'd gone down there to get medicine for his ager, Mr. John Logan—I heard a man say, 'She is ugly as a mud fence.' Oh, I went for him! I made the fur fly! But that didn't make ...
— Shadows of Shasta • Joaquin Miller
... Christophe still went upon his official duties, he had had the bad taste in conversation with the Grand Duke himself, with revolting lack of decency, to give vent to his ideas concerning the illustrious masters: it was said that he had called Mendelssohn's Elijah "a clerical humbug's paternoster," and he had called certain Lieder of Schumann "Backfisch Musik": and that in the face of the declared preference of the august Princess for those works! The Grand Duke had cut short his impertinences ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... 'Infant humbug, sir,' replied Mr Folair. 'There isn't a female child of common sharpness in a charity school, that couldn't do better than that. She may thank her stars she was born ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... mean to tell me that that pastoral object, happily introduced on the roofs of houses, does not recall the green fields, daisies, babbling brooks, and cloudless skies of early boyhood? Humbug!" The speaker flattened his nose still more against the glass by way ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... common sense, the voice of sad experience, the voice of Catholic bishops, and especially the voice of the Holy Father, is raised against, and condemns, the Public School system as a huge humbug, injuring, not promoting, personal virtue and good citizenship, and as being most pernicious to Catholic faith, and life, and all good morals. A pastor, therefore, cannot maintain the contrary opinion without ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... that the widow was a humbug, and Archie telegraphed back that he quite agreed with her. But the Professor, whom the momentary silence had brought back to the present century, looked up and asked Lucy if the ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... more astute among the people had certainly thought for a while that the cannon was a humbug, that it was useless either to royalist or to republican, in fact, that it would never go off at all. But these sceptics were cured of their infidelity at Thouars, when they saw the soldiers as well as the republicans of the town fall in heaps beneath ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... making those disclosures, which at first he seemed bent on withholding. Whether the priest honestly interpreted what he believed the divinity said to him, or whether he was not all the while guilty of a vile humbug, I shall not presume to decide. At any rate, whatever as coming from the god was imparted to those present seemed to be generally of a complimentary nature: a fact which illustrates the sagacity of Kolory, or else the timeserving disposition of this ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... of Things as They Ought to Be is a humbug. There is but one God, and He is the God of Things ...
— 21 • Frank Crane
... "There's no humbug about her game," cried Black, whose face was lined with the furrows of anxiety and pale with long watching; "she means to take us on the open sea, and she's welcome to the course. If I don't riddle her like ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... stop stealin' and—and raise some honest children." Mr. Killibrew threw back his head broke into loud, jelly-like laughter. "Why, don't you know, Peter, she's an old liar. If I gave her a hundred a week, she'd steal. And children! Why, the old humbug! She's too old; she's had her crop. And, besides all that, I don't mind what the old woman takes. It isn't much. She's a good old darky, faithful as a dog." He arose from his swivel-chair briskly and floated Peter out before him. "Tell her, if she ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... ear" means a horror of Martial's obscene jokes, I could wish that all Christians might have Dutch ears. When we consider their morals, no nation is more inclined to humanity and benevolence, less savage or cruel. Their mind is upright and void of cunning and all humbug. If they are somewhat sensual and excessive at meals, it results partly from their plentiful supply: nowhere is import so easy and fertility so great. What an extent of lush meadows, how many navigable rivers! Nowhere are so many towns crowded together within so small an ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... day I'll suddenly discover that He does exist. In that case, Mr. Savva, I thank you, but I'd rather not. Why should I? I live a nice, quiet existence. Of course, it's all a humbug, an imposition. But what business is it of mine? The people want to believe—let them. It ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... attack. Thence various other alleys led to the front line. Our new sector was by no means luxurious. There was a front line trench and portions of a reserve line, all rather the worse for wear, while the communication trenches, "Hurrah" and "Humbug" Alleys, were unspeakably filthy. The whole area at the top of the hill was an appalling mess of tangled machinery from Puits 14 bis, battered trenches, the remains of two woods, Bois Hugo and Bois Raze, and shell holes of every size and shape. There was mud and wet chalk ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... do take interest—that's the mischief; there isn't time to work—that's the truth! I shall scrape through the Trip, and then I shall have done with all this nonsense about the classics; it really is humbug, isn't it? Such a fuss about nothing. The books I like are those in which people say what they might say, not those in which they say what they have had days to invent. I don't see the good of that. Why should I work, when I don't ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Colonel staggered for a moment, and, oh—as the ladies say—is it not gratifying to find that where honest reasons go for nothing, humbug can obtain a moment's hearing? The Colonel admitted there was something in that; but even humbug could not divert him long from his mania. "The only thing to be done," said he, "is to cut him out between this and then. Why, ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... you out. You are not a bit solemn, really, only you put on the airs of a sister of mercy. So you don't like Etta; you need not be afraid of telling me so; she is the greatest humbug in the world, only Giles is so foolish as to believe in her. I call her a humbug because she pretends to be what she is not; she is really a most prosaic sort of person, and she wants to make people believe that she is ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... friend was deputed to enquire his purposes. Here Brummell's knowledge of every body did him good service. The deputy on this occasion having once figured as the head of a veterinary hospital, or some such thing, but being then in the commissariat,—"Why, Vulcan!" exclaimed Brummell, "what a humbug you must be to come and lecture me on such a subject! You, who were for two years at hide-and-seek to save yourself from being shot by Sir T. S. for running off with one of his daughters." "Dear me," said the astonished friend, "you have touched ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... pulled from his pocket a small portable case of medicines—"Catch me without my tools,"—he said; "here I have the real useful pharmacopoeia—the rest is all humbug and hard names—this little case, with a fortnight or month, spring and fall, at St. Ronan's Well, and no one will die ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... his head and huge grizzled beard. "German University humbug!" growled he. "Get you into a scrape some day. The cloud's not made in that way, I tell you! Come, let's go back ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... isn't Beer,—it's Candor!' said Abel. 'It's your own proposal, Hollins. Suppose it's evil to swear: isn't it better I should express it, and be done with it, than keep it bottled up, to ferment in my mind? Oh, you're a precious, consistent old humbug, you are!' ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... capital notion of the principles of grouping. Now these things are valuable in themselves, but they are doubly, trebly valuable as possessed by a person of real comic humour; and a total despiser of that Venerable Humbug which almost all the artists of our day seem, in one shape or other, to revere as the prime god of their idolatry. Nobody, that has the least of an eye for art, can doubt that Cruikshank, if he chose, might design as many annunciations, ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... she was quite right. There were several wicked Witches who caused a lot of trouble; but now they are all out of business and only the great Sorceress, Glinda the Good, is permitted to practice her arts, which never harm anybody. The Wizard of Oz, who used to be a humbug and knew no magic at all, has been taking lessons of Glinda, and I'm told he is getting to be a pretty good Wizard; but he is merely the assistant of the great Sorceress. I've the right to make a servant girl for my wife, you know, or a ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... a boy in our school who says there is no God at all, and that it's no use having priests or Cardinals or Cathedrals,—it's all rubbish and humbug!" ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... Pope's attack, but Pope—quoad Pope, the poet—against all the world, in the unjustifiable attempts begun by Warton and carried on at this day by the new school of critics and scribblers, who think themselves poets because they do not write like Pope. I have no patience with such cursed humbug and bad taste; your whole generation are not worth a Canto of the Rape of the Lock, or the Essay on Man, or the Dunciad, or 'any thing that is his.'—But it is three in the matin, and I must go to bed. Yours ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... loved simple, natural, unaffected people, and the part of a sibyl was very distasteful to him. He suspected the inspiration of green tea in much that Margaret said, and very ungallantly pronounced her a humbug. But as he did this only upon the paper of his own private diary, with no thought of it ever being paraded before a critical and captious world, we should not blame him too severely. And if he was mistaken in what he wrote concerning ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... rang the bell and out came Simon—the man who'd got me convicted, and my own brother too, mind you!—looking as smug as the hard-hearted old humbug he was. He got the shock of his life when he saw who it was, but I began gently and I put a proposition to him. I'll bet none of you will guess ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... modern mode, also a dexterous liar and officious matchmaker, played with her head in her most accomplished manner and gave full value in the general scheme to a character which the author made a person when he might have been content with a peg. Mr. DION BOUCICAULT'S physician was as bland a humbug as ever coined guineas in Mayfair. Mr. MARTIN LEWIS, as a profoundly silly ass, played a difficult hand without fault. Miss NINA SEVENING, as a consoler of handsome men in trouble, and Miss FLORENCE LLOYD, as Caroline's maid, competently ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... sensible and practical a man," said the superintendent, sneering, "to be taken in by so palpable a humbug. Why, it reads like ...
— Brave and Bold • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... program. They all expect that I shall leave Paris to-night or early to-morrow. Indeed, an impudent fellow representing 'Le Soir' says that if I don't bestir myself I shall be christened the Sluggard King. But I shall humbug them finely. Leave that to me. Your portmanteaus have been smuggled out by way of the servants' quarters, and you must vanish unseen. Buy a ticket for Vienna, ignore Stampoff during the journey, accept my blessing, and take this." He ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... position, Fyodor Fedoritch,' Avdey went on with an affectation of sympathy; 'it's disagreeable, certainly. A man has been acting, acting a part, and no one has recognised him as a humbug; and ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... what it is," persisted Tom, adding humbug to cruelty. "You would be nothing but a sham!—A live dishonesty! A jackdaw in peacock's feathers!—I am sorry, Letty, your own sense of truth and uprightness should not prevent even the passing desire to act such a lie. Your fine dress would be just a fine fib—yourself ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... sort.' Am I a humbug, an impostor, an adventuress, a puppet and play-actress? Or is it that I have forfeited my right, my rank of gentlewoman, my position in the ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... into the sectarian scientist's attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations and of scientific laws and objects may be all. But whenever I do this, I hear that inward monitor of which W. K. Clifford once wrote, whispering the word "bosh!" Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow "scientific" bounds. Assuredly, the real world is of a different temperament—more ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... her I think you'll take my views. Of course it's the very last thing I ever imagined myself doing; but I begin to see that the talk about fate isn't altogether humbug. I want this girl for my wife, and I never met any one else whom I really did want. She suits me exactly. It isn't as if I thought of marrying an ordinary, ignorant, low-class girl. Eve—that's her name—is very ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... the chase almost as there are dogs. Some follow up the chase {asaphos}, indistinctly; some {polu upolambanousai}, with a good deal of guess-work; others again {doxazousai}, without conviction, insincerely; others, {peplasmenos}, out of mere pretence, pure humbug, make-believe, or {phthoneros}, in a fit of jealousy, {ekkunousi}, are skirters; al. ...
— The Sportsman - On Hunting, A Sportsman's Manual, Commonly Called Cynegeticus • Xenophon
... what humbug!" exclaimed Valero in utter indignation, "and may I ask if you have a tooth left in ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... the postmaster, "you are not going to be fooled in this way. Dewitt is a humbug, ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... wrong and unmanly men about, then,' said Alaric. 'Look through the Houses of Parliament, and see how many men there have married for money; aye, and made excellent husbands afterwards. I'll tell you what it is, Charley, it is all humbug in you to pretend to be better than others; you are not a bit better;—mind, I do not say you are worse. We have none of us too much of this honesty of which we are so fond of prating. Where was your honesty when you ordered the coat ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... can hardly tell you, it's so sad! If you're the sweet woman that in spite of everything I think you are, you'll be sorry all the way through to your heart. He—he hired a wretched humbug of a man who pretended to be an English swell to teach him manners, so that he could be a little worthier of you. He, Nick Hilliard, the noblest gentleman that ever drew breath, to stoop to learning from a little thing who called itself ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... that on the following day, spent in idling in the forest and about the hamlet, conversing with the cottagers, we were told that our old man was a bit of a humbug; that he was a great talker, with a hundred schemes for the improvement of his fortunes, and, incidently, for the benefit of his neighbours and the world at large; but nothing came of it all and he was now fast sinking into ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... Oxford, whose Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Engliach, translated into his native language for the use of British islanders as a Primer of Spoken English, is the most accessible standard work on the subject. In such words as plum, come, humbug, up, gum, etc., Mr. Sweet's evidence is conclusive. Ladies and gentlemen in Southern England pronounce them as plam, kam, hambag, ap, gan, etc., exactly as Felix Drinkwater does. I could not claim Mr. Sweet's authority if I dared to whisper that such coster English as the rather ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... dress, and Mr. Canton had diligently fixed a great gulf between himself and his fellow-men. Charlton's old, bitter aggressiveness, which had well-nigh died out under the sweet influences of Lurton's peacefulness, came back now, and he mentally pronounced the new chaplain a clerical humbug and an ecclesiastical fop, and all such mild paradoxical epithets as he was capable of forming. The hour of service was ended, and Charlton was in his cell again, standing under the high window, trying to ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... a just, clever fellow he was! people said: one of those men improved by success: just to the defrauding of himself: saw the true worth of everybody, the very lowest: hadn't one spark of self-esteem: despised all humbug and show, one could see, though he never said it: when he was a boy, he was moody, with passionate likes and dislikes; but success had improved him, vastly. So Holmes was popular, though the beggars shunned him, and the lazy Italian organ-grinders never held their tambourines ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... nonsense, and humbug. I told you that you were better away, and you determined to stay. I knew what was best for you, but you chose to be obstinate. I have not the slightest doubt as to who ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... "Mind you don't humbug me!" Chia She observed. "I shall to-morrow send again your mistress round to ask Yuean Yang. If you two have spoken to her, and she hasn't given a favorable answer, well, then, no blame will fall on you. But if she does assent, when she broaches ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... in terrible difficulties. I've been waiting long enough. You must side with me actively, for your assistance is absolutely necessary to bring that mad girl to terms. I'm married to her. She's my wife. I must have control of this place at once; and I'll tolerate no farther opposition from her, or humbug from you. I've come now to tell ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... disposes of the last remnant of his reputation and wholly destroys his main usefulness as a moral agent, since it will make the sluggard hesitate to go to him any more. It is strange, beyond comprehension, that so manifest a humbug as the ant has been able to fool so many nations and keep it up so many ages without being ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... an open admission," he cried. "What more do you want? The fellow is a self-confessed humbug. We have only to return home and report him as the brazen imposter that ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... you see there is a lot of nonsense in all your superstitions. You know it was one of them that this place was guarded by demons. Now you have seen for yourself that it was all humbug. If you are afraid about the silver, I will take it to England and sell it there and send you the money it fetches; but that would give a great deal of trouble. It will be difficult to get the gold safely away, without being bothered with all ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... time."... "There is a vast amount of thinking which ought to be in the market. We hold our best thoughts and give our second best."... "We do a good deal of shirking in this life on the ground of not being geniuses. The truth is, there is an immense amount of humbug lurking in the folds of those specious theories about genius. Let a man or woman go to work at a thing, and the genius will take care ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... from my little correspondents for "more about the Wizard." It seems the jolly old fellow made hosts of friends in the first Oz book, in spite of the fact that he frankly acknowledged himself "a humbug." The children had heard how he mounted into the sky in a balloon and they were all waiting for him to come down again. So what could I do but tell "what happened to the Wizard afterward"? You will find him in these pages, just the same humbug ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... orthodox toes Are seldom withdrawn from the stirrup. Dr. Humdrum, whose eloquence flows, Like droppings of sweet poppy syrup; Dr. Rosygill puffing and fanning, And wiping away perspiration; Dr. Humbug, who proved Mr. Canning The beast in St. ...
— English Satires • Various
... little humbug, and goose, and prude," I said, laughing, as I released her. "What do you think of letting me kiss you like that, ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... breath, would not give up the decision of the most important questions of government, and therefore this abdication, after all, was merely an excellent means of divesting himself of burdensome obligations, embellished with a certain amount of humbug. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... "physical scientist" pays any heed at all, that he will devise a series of "tests" and "experiments" of his own, to fit his preconceived notion of things psychical, with the latent conviction, at least, that he will be able to prove the whole thing a humbug. ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... kept in her armoury the weapon which can be so mightily effective if used sparingly by a really sincere individual—the knowledge of when to be a humbug. Ambition entered to a certain extent into her life, and governed it perhaps rather more than she knew. She desired to escape from the doom of being a nonentity, but the escape would have to be effected in her own way and in her own time; to be governed by ambition ...
— When William Came • Saki
... should think so? Much good they do me! Sir, you're a humbug!—an impostor! I'm a sight to be seen for the rest of my life! Look at me, sir! Eyebrows, ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... Lest the artist's delineation of her charms on this very page humbug your fancy, take from me her authorized description. She was a nice-looking, awkward, loud, rather bashful, brown-haired girl, with a sallow complexion, bright eyes, and a perpetual smile. She had a wholesome, Spraggins-inherited love for plain food, ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... Brandy, old fellow," said he as they walked down Fifth Avenue in the gathering dusk of the early winter evening, "ever since I've begun to suspect that damned old humbug of a father of hers, I've been congratulating myself that there isn't the remotest chance of his ever becoming my father-in-law. And, by George, you'll never know how near I was to leaping blindly into the brambles. What a close ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... pirate vessels, which are intended to prey on our commerce. How long will it be before retaliation on England begins, and, when it begins, how will it end? Ay—how will it end? It is not to be supposed that we can long be blinded by such a flimsy humbug as a transfer to Southern possession of these vessels 'for the Chinese trade!' Are the English mad, demented, or besotted, that they suppose we intend to endure such deliberate aid of our enemies? When those vessels 'for the Chinese' are afloat, and our merchants begin to suffer, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the Life of Sheridan, Byron gave him some advice. "Never mind," he says, "the angry lies of the humbug Whigs. Recollect that he was an Irishman and a clever fellow, and that we have had some very pleasant days with him. Don't forget that he was at school at Harrow, where, in my time, we used to show his name—R. B. Sheridan, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... Carlyle that there is a world diameter between the South hiring a man for life, and by force holding him in slavery. But Carlyle for three years poured out such vapid humbug, cant and hypocrisy as this, and never once was sound in his thinking or fair in his view-point during ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... not a humbug, and because I am. My depraved spirit instantly recognized the dawning duplicity of yours. But you'd better be honest. You can't make the other thing work. What do ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... vote of Langdon could not be secured by humbug or in exchange for favors and as it could not be "delivered," Peabody, of course, was willing to pay in actual cash for the vote. This was the final step but one in political conspiracies of this ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... is what keeps you from promising me anything. But surely you do not care for him now. Why—why, you couldn't! The fellow who could show the white feather at such a time as this, and then try and cover up his cowardice by all that religious humbug, is not of your class, Nancy. He's a rank outsider. I'm sorry I was ever friends with him. Your father told me he was mad with himself for ever allowing him inside ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... account by Megasthenes of Indian beginnings (Plinius and Arrianus) at all amiss: the Kaliyuga computation of 3102 B. C. is purely humbug, just like the statement about the beginning of the Chinese times, to which Lassen gives credit. How can Herodotus have arrived at a female Mithra, Mylitta? Everything feminine is incompatible with the sun, yet nowhere, as far as I can see, does any deity corresponding to ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... a joint resolution of Congress, the use of "that first-class humbug and fraud, the whiskey meter," has been abolished. Now there are dozens of members of Congress who are not only "first-class humbugs and frauds," but whiskey meters, to whom whiskey is both meat and drink, and yet who ever heard of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 18, July 30, 1870 • Various
... "A humbug, again!" cried the old gentleman, growing more and more testy at these glimpses of Clifford's metaphysics. "I should like to rap with a good stick on the empty pates of the dolts ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Er sauft. De Englishman, he sits down fresh and intends to get fuddled; but he is a hypocrite. He does not say de truth to hisself nor to nobody, he says, I will get fresh, when he means de odder ding. Big humbug. You understand?" ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... Humbug, humbug, humbug!" cried Prince Bolkonski, frowning and taking his daughter's hand; he did not kiss her, but only bending his forehead to hers just touched it, and pressed her hand so that she winced ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... No end of a shirty letter from the Governor. Wants to know how much longer I expect him to be tied to the office. Old humbug, when he only turns up twice a week ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Feb. 20, 1892 • Various
... to Mugs by a Humbug. That's what it ought to be called. I was looking forward to having a good crack with you the night, but sure a newspaper man need never hope to have ten minutes to himself. I've given Miss Squibb orders to have a good warm supper ready ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... has thrown them out of their reckoning. Fright unsettles the judgment: the oppressive silence of the woods is a vacuum in which the mind goes astray. It's a hollow sham, this pantheism, I said; being "one with Nature" is all humbug: I should like to see somebody. Man, to be sure, is of very little account, and soon gets beyond his depth; but the society of the least human being is better than this gigantic indifference. The "rapture on the lonely shore" is agreeable only when you know ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Nathan rather sharply, to discover any mischief which might lurk in his expression. Perceiving that he looked perfectly sincere, and was innocent of any intention to quiz him, he merely uttered, in the most contemptuous tone, the single word "Humbug!" ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... experience infinite pleasure and edification, particularly as it seems to us to be strongly contrasted with an appearance, in all the other chimneys, of an indefinable something, only to be expressed by the interesting word "humbug." Fig. 7 a is a chimney of Cumberland, and the north of Lancashire. It is, as may be seen at a glance, only applicable at the extremity of the roof, and requires a bent flue. It is built of unhewn stones, in the same manner ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... he's a bit of a humbug with it. I thought so, and the doctor endorses my ideas. He likes being ill and nursed and petted with the best food, so as to keep out of the hard work. I don't like the fellow a bit. There, you've talked enough now, ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... marks: He was awed by "the grandeur of the mountains". "A humbug". "Fetch". "Stonewall" Jackson. He was ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... large and filthy pocket-book, all with the gravity of Solomon. He then thanked me profusely, remarking that such little services were due between countrymen; shook hands with me, "for auld lang syne," as he said; and took himself solemnly away, radiating dirt and humbug as he went. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... making of a book in large type—the book of the hour; and the profits of this scandalous volume or, if one preferred the name, this reconstruction, before an impartial posterity, of a great historical humbug, the sum "down," in other words, that any lively publisher would give for it, figured vividly in Mr. Locket's calculations. It was therefore altogether an opportunity of dealing at first hand with the lively publisher that Peter was invited to forego. Peter ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... Talent isn't genius, and you can't make it so. That music has taken the vanity out of me as Rome took it out of her, and I won't be a humbug any longer. Now what shall ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... are fools and fools." Elisabeth spoke severely; she was always merciless upon anything in the shape of humbug or snobbery. Maria Farringdon's training had not ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... Henri IV., for if they did not instigate Ravaillac, their doctrine of regicide inspired him. They can creep into any kingdom, any institution, any household, because they readily accept any terms and subscribe to any conditions in the certainty that by the adroit use of flattery, humbug, falsehood, and corruption, they will soon become masters of the situation. In France they are the real Morbus Gallicus. In Italy they are the soul of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Bozzy calls him—objecting, quarrelling, and, at last, on one occasion was so rude that he had to withdraw. Now, that this offence was rankling is evident, and it explains the fracas which took place at the opening. Blotton looked on Mr. Pickwick's travelling as pure humbug. The idea of his contributing anything useful or instructive in his so-called reports seemed nonsense. Further, was it not something of a job? Pickwick was taking three of his own special "creatures" with him—Winkle, ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... have seen what a horrid grimace he made, and how he lifted up both his hands, as if to wave off an imaginary cup of tea! I always thought that the tea sent over to this country from China was a miserable humbug; so poor Min-Yung's horror at being asked to drink a cup of it, quite upset me, and I laughed immoderately. Min-Yung laughed, too; and understood by the way I shook my fore-finger at him, just as well as if I had said, "You know very ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... sand-hills. "The very tick of the clock was enough to drive one mad in those long fearful pauses—solemn and silent as death! Can't the fools do anything for her? What is the use of nurses and doctors, and all the humbug of medicine and science? My darling! my darling! It was too cruel to hear you wailing and crying, and to know I could do you no good! What a coward I am to have fled into the wilderness like a murderer! I couldn't have stayed there, I feel I couldn't! I wish I hadn't listened at the door! ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... yet remained: would they not then effectively work falsehood? Can they consequently be treated distinctively as the truth-builders? It is the INHERENT RELATION TO REALITY of a belief that gives us that specific TRUTH-satisfaction, compared with which all other satisfactions are the hollowest humbug. The satisfaction of KNOWING TRULY is thus the only one which the pragmatist ought to have considered. As a PSYCHOLOGICAL SENTIMENT, the anti-pragmatist gladly concedes it to him, but then only as a concomitant of truth, not ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... days when my mind misgives me whether the pictorial art be not a humbug, and when the minute accuracy of a fly in a Dutch picture of fruit and flowers seems to me something more reliable than the master-touches of Raphael. The gallery was considerably thronged, and many of the visitors ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of today. Formerly, upon exciting occasions, we had a good nervous attack and all was over; the crisis passed, we became amiable again, put on rouge and went to a ball. Now it is languor, ennui, stomach troubles—all imagination and humbug! The men are just as bad, and they call it spleen! Spleen! a new discovery, an English importation! Fine things come to us from England; to begin with, the constitutional government! All this is perfectly ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... entirely ceased to believe in Ancient Mythology, and has been even heard to hint that he considers Dr. LEMPRIERE a bit of a humbug. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, Jan. 2, 1892 • Various
... the editor of The Day After To-morrow. The writer of it was a total stranger to me, even by report, and at first I did not know what to make of it. Was the man a charlatan, or a "crank?" There were no signs of craziness or humbug in his frank and simple sentences. Had he really found out a way of crossing the celestial spaces? In these days it is better not to be too sceptical as to what science will accomplish. It is, in fact, wise to keep the mind open and suspend the judgment. We are standing on the threshold of the Arcana, ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... of these things sometimes, doctor, and though a great deal of it seems to be humbug, it is as you say—I know some are sincere, and I know there is a right way. I have been more than half tempted many times during the last few weeks to discover for myself the secret of power, but I am deterred ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... you have it. It is in the funds, mind. And now let me tell you what the funds are; which is necessary if you have not read my little book called Paper against Gold. The funds is no place at all, Jack. It is nothing, Jack. It is moonshine. It is a lie, a bubble, a fraud, a cheat, a humbug. And it is all these in the most perfect degree. People think that the funds is a place where money is kept. They think that it is a place which contains that which they have deposited. But the fact is, that the ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... patent to all of us here, As any mere schoolboy can tell." Pond answered, "Of course it's quite clear;" And so did that humbug Morell. ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... nephew of the man Ferguson used to work for. Besides he's got a way of getting round people. He's a humbug ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger
... recoiling fingers. "Harness up your little bill as quick as you can, and drive it like Jehu. Fastburg to be the only capital. Slowburg no claims at all, historical, geographical, or economic. The old arrangement a humbug; as inconvenient as a fifth wheel of a coach; costs the State thousands of greenbacks every year. Figure it all up statistically and dab it over with your shiniest rhetoric and make a big thing of it every way. That's what you've got to do; that's your little ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... good, Mary," he said, wiping the perspiration from his forehead; "they're running like blazes to the south along through the furze. I suppose the devils took it that way to humbug your father, and then they'll turn for the bridge and run into Madore; and there's ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... are roundly called lies, and his silence is vilified as treachery. And on the strength of peccadillos, reprehensible in an author, but excusable in a son, the Anglo-Saxon race is accused of prudishness, humbug, pretentiousness, deceit, cunning, and bad cooking. Personally I think it was rash of Mr. Strickland, in refuting the account which had gained belief of a certain "unpleasantness" between his father and ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... the world. We owed each other the truth. We know it now; we know where we are. We needn't humbug ourselves and each other any more. You see what comes of keeping back the truth. Look how we've had to pay for it. You and me. Would you rather go on thinking ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... times submit to expense and inconvenience than hand the country over to a set of thieves who'd sell us to-morrow. We're not such fools as ye take us for. Don't we know these heroes? And when we see them and Gladstone and Morley and Humbug Harcourt with his seventeen chins, all rowling together in Abraham's bosom (as ye may say)—Harcourt licking Harrington's boots, when only yesterday Tim was spittin' in his eye—we say to ourselves 'Wait yet awhile, my Boys, wait yet awhile.' But when ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... as well confess at once that I was sadly disappointed. It was a pleasure, of course, to see what I had read of and pictured to my mind, from early boyhood; but this contemptible little affair looked very much like a humbug. A vague idea had taken possession of my mind that I would see a whole district of country shooting up hot water and sulphurous vapors—a kind of hell upon earth; but that thing ahead of us—that little curl of smoke on the horizon ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... American public discern the difference between a true fac-simile and a cunning counterfeit. Instead of the sham tete-de-Buchanan, they see the very "trick of Coeur-de-lion's face;" and finding themselves as little taxed for the original, as ever they were for the humbug, vote you a public benefactor, and send a round-robin to Congress demanding the instantaneous enactment of a universal copyright law, if not the grant of a gold medal to the beneficent Godfrey. I anticipate, however, your reply. Ten thousand copyrights ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... said the gardener sharply; "and you can tell the Captain if you like. I say it aren't fair to try and humbug a lot o' men as is ready to fight for you. It's like saying 'rats' to a dog when there ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn
... exceptionally graphic description of a lagoon on the top of one of the highest peaks of Hinchinbrook Island, in which all manner of sea fish revelled. When doubt was expressed as to the possibility of sea-water and sea-fish getting up so far "on top" and it was suggested—"What you think, that old man humbug you?" "Yes," was the ready response; "me think that old fella no tell true. Him humbug." Some blacks possess something wiser ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... 'You dear old humbug,' she cried, cutting short the sentence that neither of them quite understood, 'I believe you've ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... have any of that professional humbug, Pepps," rejoined her ladyship. "You doctors know a common disorder as soon as you see it, only you think it looks wise not to say. Is ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... illustrated. An index of 20 pages, so that any topic may be instantly consulted. A new departure in medical knowledge for the people—the latest progress, secrets and practices of all schools of healing made available for the common people—health without medicine, nature without humbug, common sense without folly, science without fraud. 12mo. 576 ...
— The Peanut Plant - Its Cultivation And Uses • B. W. Jones
... for such a milksop, Such a milksop, such a humbug; 180 I must have a graceful husband, I myself am also graceful; I must have a shapely husband, I myself am also shapely; And a well-proportioned husband, I ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... the mulatto Ned. His birthday-celebration dinner, at which the New Year's piscatory phenomenon figures in the bill of fare. A total disregard of dry laws at the dinner. Excitement over reported discovery of quartz-mines. A complete humbug. Charges of salting. Excitement renewed upon report of other new quartz-mines. Even if rich, lack of proper machinery would render the working thereof impossible. Prediction that quartz-mining eventually will be the most profitable. Miners ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... side the water, 'tis prudent to pull O'er the eyes of the public their national wool, By accusing of slavish respect to John Bull All American authors who have more or less 400 Of that anti-American humbug—success, While in private we're always embracing the knees Of some twopenny editor over the seas, And licking his critical shoes, for you know 'tis The whole aim of our lives to get one English notice; My American puffs I would willingly burn all (They're ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... peaks of Hinchinbrook Island, in which all manner of sea fish revelled. When doubt was expressed as to the possibility of sea-water and sea-fish getting up so far "on top" and it was suggested—"What you think, that old man humbug you?" "Yes," was the ready response; "me think that old fella no tell true. Him humbug." Some blacks possess something wiser ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... as Zaire at the fourth appearance. I very much wished you had been there; you would have seen that the public does not hate your friend. I appeared in a box, and the whole pit clapped their hands at me. I blushed, I hid myself; but I should be a humbug if I did not confess to you that I was sensibly affected. It is pleasant not to be dishonored in one's ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... before our time. This he had arranged, that the general might see Miss Temple, as if by accident; and also allow me, who, my father supposed, was not aware of Miss Temple being in town, to meet with her. What a deal of humbug there is in this world! Nothing but plot and counterplot! I shook hands with Cophagus, who, I perceived, had, notwithstanding his wife's veto, put on his blue cotton net pantaloons and Hessian boots, and he appeared to be so tight in both, that he could hardly move. ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... Pope—quoad Pope, the poet—against all the world, in the unjustifiable attempts begun by Warton and carried on at this day by the new school of critics and scribblers, who think themselves poets because they do not write like Pope. I have no patience with such cursed humbug and bad taste; your whole generation are not worth a Canto of the Rape of the Lock, or the Essay on Man, or the Dunciad, or 'any thing that is his.'—But it is three in the matin, and I must go ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... what a horrid grimace he made, and how he lifted up both his hands, as if to wave off an imaginary cup of tea! I always thought that the tea sent over to this country from China was a miserable humbug; so poor Min-Yung's horror at being asked to drink a cup of it, quite upset me, and I laughed immoderately. Min-Yung laughed, too; and understood by the way I shook my fore-finger at him, just as well as if I had said, "You know ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... "Of course such a marriage would suit my child, and would suit me," he wished to say;—"not only, or not chiefly, because your son is a nobleman, and will be an earl and a man of great property. That goes a long way with us. We are too true to deny it. We hate humbug, and want you to know simply the truth about us. The title and the money go far,—but not half so far as the opinion which we entertain of the young man's own good gifts. I would not give my girl to the greatest and richest ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... industries and forbidding children under twelve from working in cotton, woolen, silk, or flax mills. Children over fourteen, however, could, by special arrangement with parents or guardians, be compelled to work more than ten hours a day. "This act is very much of a humbug," commented Greeley, "but it will serve a good end. Those whom it was intended to put asleep will come back again before long, and, like Oliver Twist, ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... having fallen in with some of the members of that political junto, the Saints, who are worldly enough to link, as often as they can, into their association, the powerful by wealth or talent, his whole time is occupied in assisting to promote their humbug; and he has absolutely taken it into his head, that the attention he receives from them for his subscriptions is on account of his eloquence as a preacher, and that hitherto he has been altogether in an error with ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... Cleena will call us to our 'frugal repast,' like the poor children in stories, and I want to hear all about this 'ruined castle' I've come to live in, I mean 'dwell,' for story-book girls—'maidens'—never do anything so commonplace as just 'live.' Hally, boy, there's a lot of humbug in this world." ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... a humbug?" she said. "You know perfect well why you is using that. You want to hide us, that's why. What a silly ...
— A Little Mother to the Others • L. T. Meade
... from God's own hand and revelation. But I don't have any faith in modern spiritual seansys. They seem to me,—and I would say it in a polite, courtous way, for I wouldn't hurt your feelin's for the world,—all mixed up with modern greed and humbug." ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... ye! You want to take me to the court-house. You can't humbug me," said Noddy, fully confirmed in his suspicions by the ...
— Work and Win - or, Noddy Newman on a Cruise • Oliver Optic
... excessively that any change would be a relief to him." ... "Froude is staying up, and I see a great deal of him." ... "Froude is most enthusiastic in his plans, and says, 'What fun it is living in such times as these! how could one now go back to the times of old Tory humbug?'" From henceforth his position among his friends was that of the most impatient and aggressive of reformers, the one who most urged on his fellows to outspoken language and a bold line of action. They were not men to hang back and be afraid, but they were cautious and considerate ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... will fall, sure enough, but it will be simply because when our dear young knight, L.E., has killed her Dragon, she will have wiped out the whole brood! They can't live without their sweet and attractive little sister. And so, like many a bigger humbug, we shall take great credit, that belongs to somebody else, and assume to have done big things, at enormous expense of blood and money. Trust us, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 26, September 24, 1870 • Various
... the coming examination, form themselves into a joint-stock cramming company; take L.30 or L.40 shares in a private tutor; pitch their camp in some Dan or Beersheba which has a reputation for dulness; and, like other joint-stock companies, humbug the public, and sometimes themselves, into the belief that they are "doing business." For these classical bubbles, the long vacation is the usual season, and Wales one of the favourite localities; and certainly, putting "Reading" out of the question, three fine summer months might be worse spent, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... But you've never defined what the dream will be like when it comes. Your masters have. Let me read some choice bits to you from these big-brained, clear-eyed men who created your movement. I like these men because they scorn humbug. Defiance, disobedience, contempt for thing that ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... pretense of "Madam" or other social formula, but a plain and large "My dear," with the name appended as a concession to the humbug of life, even in regard to the woman he loved—"I am going to Hereford, but shall return here for luncheon. Mrs. Devar's illness is not likely to be lasting, and the view from the Yat is, if possible, better in the afternoon than in the morning. In addition to my obvious need of a ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... down in the books now as a Protestant, or Church of England man; but I do not believe all that churchmen believe. I think there's a good deal of humbug about what is called Christianity altogether. I have tried several creeds, and there's none of them squares exactly with ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... often at enmity with their masters, and fight them by means of the strike. "State o' trade! That's just a piece of masters' humbug. It's rate o' wages I was talking of. Th' masters keep th' state o' trade in their own hands, and just walk it forward like a black bug-a-boo, to frighten naughty children with into being good. I'll tell yo' it's their part—their cue, as some folks call it—to beat us down, to swell their fortunes; ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... hand, I do not contemplate this bi-cameral conference with the diplomatists trying to best and humbug the Labour people as well as each other and the Labour people getting more and more irritated, suspicious, and extremist, with anything but dread. The Allied countries must go into the conference solid, and they can only hope to do that by heeding and incorporating Labour ideas before they ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... whose orthodox toes Are seldom withdrawn from the stirrup; Dr Humdrum, whose eloquence flows, Like droppings of sweet poppy syrup; Dr Rosygill puffing and fanning, And wiping away perspiration; Dr Humbug who proved Mr Canning The beast in ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... admissible to be on the friendly terms on which I consider myself with you, and yet to be on such unfriendly ones that we should live close to each other and never meet!!!!![1] You write "tout a vous." Oh! you humbug! said I. No! no! it is really too bad. I should like to thank you 9000 times for all your efforts on my behalf, and to reproach you 20,000 that you came and went as you did. So all is a delusion! friendship, kingdom, empire; all is only a ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace
... my advice, and it's about the only thing most men of my age enjoy giving. Well, really, Cecil, and frankly, I think it's a dismal little story. It would be humbug if I pretended I was sorry about Mrs Raymond's—a—attitude, and I quite see its absolute genuineness But, if you'll excuse my saying so, what price ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... I have put out my gibber, and if you have read thus far, you will have taken it in. I wonder if you will ever come this length. I shall try a trap for you, and insult you here, on this last page. "O Baxter what a damned humbug you are!" There,—shall this insult bloom and die unseen, or will you come toward me, when next we meet, with a face deformed with anger and demand speedy and bloody satisfaction. Nous verrons, which ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you, Chang, my boy, is it?' said Joe. 'What! are you glad to have me, old chappie? No humbug about yer, are ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... quietly is just the same sort of nonsense as any other complaint against anything alive for being "vicious" when we want to take or kill it. "This animal," said a Frenchman who made wise fun of all such humbug, "is very wicked. When you ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... could not do it. This government would be very weak, indeed, if a majority, with a disciplined army and navy and a well-filled treasury, could not preserve itself when attacked by an unarmed, undisciplined, unorganized minority. All this talk about the dissolution of the Union is humbug, nothing but folly. We do not want to dissolve ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... time, the united forces of the Camusot and Popinot families gained an easy victory in the world, for nobody undertook to defend the unfortunate Pons, that parasite, that curmudgeon, that skinflint, that smooth-faced humbug, on whom everybody heaped scorn; he was a viper cherished in the bosom of the family, he had not his match for spite, he was a dangerous mountebank whom nobody ought ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... to be fastened to a chain. He was held a slave by the man who, he says, treated him so finely. He was made to dance through fear of being touched up with a red-hot iron. In short, he is what men call a 'humbug.'" ...
— The Nursery, January 1877, Volume XXI, No. 1 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... our squadron, and its subsequent spell of idleness in Tunisian waters, had degenerated into a farce in which the ridiculous part fell to our share. So that when I took over the command of the squadron, with the prospect of seeing it undergo the same course of humbug again, I could not resist making some representations on the subject to M. Guizot, a resolute and large-minded man, as solicitous for his country's honour as for his own. That very year, as it happened, the Bey of Tunis had had to complain of intrigues ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... heap. But I needed none, and indeed, throughout the whole time was under one but twice. Tents are all very well, when you are quietly encamped for any length, of time; but when, as with us, you are on the more continually, I consider them a humbug and nuisance. You must carry half a one all day, and at night join it with your comrade's half. The common shelter tent, which is the only one that can be so carried, is a poor protection against heavy rain, for the water can beat in at the sides and form pools beneath you; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... much sense not to take a good offer,' said Mervyn, 'otherwise, it is all humbug his pretending to care for you. As to Robert's folly, have not I given up all that any rational being could stick at? I tell you, it is the giving up those houses that makes me in want of capital, so you are bound to ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... all humbug! Nothing you can say will make me hold my tongue," added Broom, with a ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... you think of them all?" said Mr. Wood, looking down at me. "A pretty fine-looking lot of horses, aren't they? Not a thoroughbred there, but worth as much to me as if each had pedigree as long as this plank walk. There's a lot of humbug about this pedigree business in horses. Mine have their manes and tails anyway, and the proper use of their eyes, which is more ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... knows nothing of your constitution, while I can soon set you on your feet again. I am sick of the Institute and of Moron-val, and never wish to see either more." Thereupon the doctor launched forth in a philippic against the school which supported him. Moronval was a thorough humbug, he never paid anybody, and every one was giving him up; the affair of Madou had done him great injury; and finally Dr. Hirsch went so far as to compliment Jack on ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... microscope, upon my parlor rug, With a very heavy quarto and a very lively bug; The true bug had been organized with only two antennae, But the humbug in the copperplate would have them ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... sympathy of a wily and experienced hand at business. I wonder if the average youth is equally adaptive! Probably not, for I suppose it means I was a good deal of a humbug. All I knew of business, so far, was what Sussex Street had shown me; and if I had been perfectly candid, I should have admitted that, so far from striking me as interesting, it seemed to me absurdly, incredibly dull and uninteresting; ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... and influential citizens of a colony came there originally in the humblest possible way; and how many of the dregs of colonial society—the occupiers of the lowest rung on the colonial ladder—reached their new home with all the pomp and circumstance of quarter-deck sublimity, and all the humbug and pretension of real or fancied aristocracy. Is the result we see—for these contrasts are to be found plentifully in all the colonies at the Antipodes—what it ought to be, or not? ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... terms and we got none. We did not object to go under the War Office. We did not make speeches calculated to humbug or deceive while ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... door? Well, you ken best what's been Between that door and you. It's crazy and old, But, it looks innocent, wooden-faced humbug: yet I don't trust doors myself; they've got a knack Of shutting me in. But you'll be snug enough In the other room: I'd advise you to lie down, And rest; you're looking trashed: and, come to think, I've a deal to say to ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... aloud with the confidence of ignorance, "Back to Nature!" Nature! ah, my friend, what mischief that cry has done me. Where was there an apostle apter to receive this doctrine, so convenient for me as it was—beautiful Nature, and all that humbug? It is nothing but that. Well, the world was watching; and it saw "The Piano," the "White Girl," the Thames subjects, the marines ... canvases produced by a fellow who was puffed up with the conceit of being able to prove to his ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... When force attacks humbug, when a private soldier takes the square cap off a first president, and throws it ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... braggart, not only in music, but in art generally, and such esprit as his art criticisms exhibit would be even more common than it unfortunately now is, if he were oftener equalled in conceit and arrogance. The pillorying of a humbug is so laudable an object that the reader will excuse the digression, which, moreover, may show what miserable instruments a poor biographer has sometimes to make use of. Another informant, unknown to fame, but apparently more trustworthy, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... there was only one Santa Claus, and even he was a humbug," cried Effie, astonished at ...
— The Louisa Alcott Reader - A Supplementary Reader for the Fourth Year of School • Louisa M. Alcott
... carriage among the expectant crowd. The clock struck the hour of noon, but the little Delaware skiff was nowhere to be seen; and, as the sun declined from the zenith, the people gradually dispersed, muttering, "Another humbug!" ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... he drew breath, would not give up the decision of the most important questions of government, and therefore this abdication, after all, was merely an excellent means of divesting himself of burdensome obligations, embellished with a certain amount of humbug. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... true emotion and particular facts, as opposed to general terms, and implicitly recognize it in the repulsion they feel toward any one who professes strong feeling about abstractions—in the interjectional "Humbug!" which immediately rises to their lips. Wherever abstractions appear to excite strong emotion, this occurs in men of active intellect and imagination, in whom the abstract term rapidly and vividly calls up the particulars it ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... address to Mugs by a Humbug. That's what it ought to be called. I was looking forward to having a good crack with you the night, but sure a newspaper man need never hope to have ten minutes to himself. I've given Miss Squibb orders to ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... at savage life was that of the harmless humbug who called himself the hermit. In a great tree, close by the highroad, he had built himself a little cabin after the manner of the Swiss Family Robinson; thither he mounted at night, by the romantic aid of a rope ladder; and if ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Corporal, after he had communicated from his own pipe the friendly flame to his comrade's; "tell you what—talk nonsense; the commander-in-chief's no Martinet—if we're all right in action, he'll wink at a slip word or two. Come, no humbug—hold jaw. D'ye think God would sooner have snivelling fellow like you in his regiment, than a man like me, clean limbed, straight as a dart, six feet one ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... consultations became more frequent, however, he began to perceive, what other men were not slow to tell him, that Mr Silver thought him a bore. And the moment this flashed upon him, with his unfortunate antipathy to any thing like humbug, he began another war of independence. He selected crabbed passages; got them up carefully by the help of translations, scholiasts, and clever friends; and then took them up hot to Mr Silver. And when he detected him slurring a difficulty ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... himself a magician from beyond the land where the sun rose, and rejoiced in the name of Doctor Capricornus, A.V.G.T., and M.U.H.S., which the great learning of Herr Schwein interpreted by A Very Great Traveller, or Thief, and Member of the Universal Herbage or Humbug Society. Now, the feats displayed by this new candidate for public favour were of the stupidest order (remember, this is not the statement of a disinterested party), consisting merely in pointing out any pebble on the ground that any one of the crowd should have ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... And after making due allowance for those indescribable differences of taste which separate us from our fathers in every region of art—and even admitting, what is by no means sure, that sixty years ago rascality, snobbery, and humbug were more rampant in society than nowadays—we are still disposed to regret that a writer whose best work is superlatively good should have dwelt so persistently in his earlier stories upon the dreary and ignoble side of English life. From ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... now what it was that had happened to her. She could no longer humbug herself into insisting that it hadn't happened. The thing had been secret and treacherous with her, and she had been secret and treacherous with it. She had refused to acknowledge it, not because she had been ashamed of it but ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... hokkerben, to humbug them. I suppose he had oils rubbed on his heels. But when he had drawn the rats away and asked for his money, they would not give it to him. So then, what ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... sitting among the fat ones. Reichstag was nothing but a club of heavy-weights. All were eager to have the ministers tickle them under the arms; that meant some service to be rendered, and this again brought marks of honor and perhaps a decoration. Everything was humbug. Workingmen should help themselves and throw out all that reactionary mob, army, clergy and aristocracy; otherwise there could be no change ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... Admiral Bell replied that he might go and be d——d, if he liked, and that he considered him a swab and a humbug, and appealed to Jack Pringle whether he, Jack, ever saw such a sanctified ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... inurbane, uncivil, rude, disrespectful, pert, saucy, impertinent, impudent, insolent. Importance, consequence, moment. Impostor, pretender, charlatan, masquerader, mountebank, deceiver, humbug, cheat, quack, shyster, empiric. Imprison, incarcerate, immure. Improper, indecent, indecorous, unseemly, unbecoming, indelicate. Impure, tainted, contaminated, polluted, defiled, vitiated. Inborn, innate, inbred, congenital. Incite, instigate, stimulate, impel, arouse, goad, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... "It is humbug. I am not in a humour now to stand picking my words. I have been infernally badly used—badly used ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... sainted associations, from these pious opposers of our national characteristics, and the noblest institution of our country, the foundation stone of our honour and glory, the established church of England. There is (in my opinion) more mischief to be apprehended to the state from the humbug of piety than from all the violence of froth, political demagogues, or the open-mouthed howl of the most hungry radicals. Let it be understood I speak not against toleration in its most extended sense, but war only with hypocrisy and fanaticism, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... subject. I am a mortal enemy to every description of humbug; and I believe there is as much in the medical world as in any other. Madeira wine had for a century been in high and deserved reputation, when on a sudden some fashionable physician discovers that it contained more ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... in their daily life were like squirrels in a cage, and because they moved, they thought they were progressing. In them scepticism had killed belief; religion, family, country, were, as they phrased it, all humbug. They had only one aim, one passion—to enjoy themselves. Their watchword was "pleasure." All those who did not perish of consumption ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... he was a kind of a humbug," said Calvin Green, who, with his wife, had come up close behind. "See how he kept dragging in his morals, jes like overhauling a trawl and taking off a haddock, ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... abroad is also now fairly developing. The discovery was at first looked upon as a humbug, but this view is giving way before the facts presented in the local papers. The leading journals of the country have sent special correspondents to write up the subject. The New York Tribune and Herald, Harper's Weekly, the Springfield Republican ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.
... unfavourable, and he explains that this bad showing is the result of a deliberate plot. The boys who obtain high marks, Page declares, secure them usually by cheating or through the partisanship of the professors; a high grade therefore really means that the recipient is either a humbug or a bootlicker. Page had therefore attempted to keep his reputation unsullied by aiming at a low academic record! The report on that three months' work, which still survives, discloses that Page's conspiracy against himself did not succeed, for his marks are all high. ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... Sir Thomas. "Harry, you are my brother, and I am only a guest here, but you are a humbug, sir." ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... goodness lands, Seemed like he had a dozen hands. Well, afterwhile they stopped the fuss, An' some one kindly parted us. All beat an' cuffed an' clawed an' scratched, An' needin' both our faces patched, Each started hum a different way; An' what o' Liza, do you say, Why, Liza—little humbug—dern her, Why, she 'd ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... the birthright of every American, and who, nevertheless, has ground us down to a state where we would not reduce our negroes, who tortures and sneers at us, and rules us with an iron hand! Ah! Liberty! what a humbug! I would rather belong to England or France, than to the North! Bondage, woman that I am, I can never stand! Even now, the Northern papers, distributed among us, taunt us with our subjection and tell us "how coolly ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... opened the dining-room for her to pass out, she touched his shoulder affectionately and laughed. "Hammer and tongs to Sophie Zobraska! Oh, Paul, aren't you a bit of a humbug?" ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... be up awful early, and pick the last cherries off that tree. I wanted to get ahead of him, so I sneaked down before light to humbug him, for I was going a-fishing, and we have to be off ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag, Vol. 5 - Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... affairs of others, and totally repudiates self. From early manhood he had roughed life in the very roughest and wildest scenes of the wilderness, and was now returning to those scenes after a short visit to his native land. The doctor was a nondescript; a compound of gravity, fun, seriousness, and humbug—the latter predominating. He had been everywhere (at least, so he said), had seen everything, knew everybody, and played the fiddle. It cannot be said, I fear, that he played it well; but, amid the various vicissitudes of his chequered life, the doctor had frequently found himself ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... No humbug, you know," he added, raising his eyes, and for a moment looking William searchingly in ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... to those Of Hydra presence and Stymphalian beak, Whose quarry is unseasoned youth, who seek By subtle snares the Infant's steps to trip, And catch the Minor in their harpy grip. To his Twelve Labours, against monsters grim, Who might have lived in safety but for him, To snare, to slay, to humbug, and to cozen, Herschelles, just to make a baker's dozen, Adds a Thirteenth! A wily, wicked wight, Dwelling in noxious nooks as dark as night, Beyond the radius of the housemaid's broom, And thence ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, April 2, 1892 • Various
... illustrating Gay's fable of the foolish young cock, who ne'er had been in that condition, but for his mother's prohibition: moreover, how is it, that so captivating a form of intoxication is so little rife among our drunken journeymen? queries, however, as to this; and whether or not the humbug of teetotalism (a modern speculation, got up by and for the benefit of grocers and sugar-planters on the one side, schismatics and conspiring demagogues on the other,) has already substituted opium-eating, drinking, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... abbes which they have borne in their time—the human mind becomes affected in no ordinary degree. Some human minds heave a sigh for the glories of bygone days; while others, considering rather the lies and humbug, the vice and servility, which went framed and glazed and enshrined, creaking along in those old Juggernaut cars, with fools worshipping under the wheels, console themselves for the decay of institutions that may have been ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... boarding-school Miss in her teens. She appears to us a kind of strong-minded old maid, but with her strong-mindedness greatly modified by the presumption as well as the sentimentality of romantic humbug. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... can guess from the trifling sort of things he has done, to have a capital notion of the principles of grouping. Now these things are valuable in themselves, but they are doubly, trebly valuable as possessed by a person of real comic humour; and a total despiser of that Venerable Humbug which almost all the artists of our day seem, in one shape or other, to revere as the prime god of their idolatry. Nobody, that has the least of an eye for art, can doubt that Cruikshank, if he chose, might design as many annunciations, ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... man blankly, "what a ridiculous old humbug it is! And how he used to frighten me in the old days with his confounded cavalry bluster! I rather think I will look him up: and I'll dine with him three times a week if he likes. Meanwhile, it's time for me to go and meet old Rainham, ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... hark ye, Senor Viscount. You will then learn what a mighty fine thing a debate in the English Parliament is! No Continental humbug there. Not but that the Court has a trouble to keep 'em in their places sometimes; and I would it had been one in the Lords instead. However, Sheridan says he has been learning his speech these two days, ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... notion of any sort of "economy." I don't know that he had ever taken up political science seriously, or that he had any preference for one kind or form of government over another. I repeat,—his radicalism was that of a humorist. He despised big-wigs, and pomp of all sorts, and, above all, humbug and formalism. But his radicalism was important as a sign that our institutions are ceasing to be picturesque; of which, if you consider his nature, you will see that his radicalism was a sign. And he did service to his cause. Not an abuse, whether from the corruption of something old, or the injustice ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... of the days when my mind misgives me whether the pictorial art be not a humbug, and when the minute accuracy of a fly in a Dutch picture of fruit and flowers seems to me something more reliable than the master-touches of Raphael. The gallery was considerably thronged, and many of the visitors appeared to be from the country, ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... view to tricking the people into entrusting them with power. The only possible way by which politicians as a class can be improved is the political and psychological education of the people, so that they may learn to detect a humbug. In England men have reached the point of suspecting a good speaker, but if a man speaks badly they think he must be honest. Unfortunately, virtue is not so widely diffused as this ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... sorrowful. To come back to your godmamma, who will teach you how to walk and be happy—happy and get all you want. Also, since she is now poor, you would do well to send her a little money to this address in Italy, since that old humbug of a Pasteur, whom she cannot harm because of the influences round him, still prevents her from returning to Switzerland, where she has friends. Now that big plum, it is very nice and you desire it much. Come to your godmamma and she will show you how to get it off ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... VERY angry, and, taking Harry with me, went at once to the address the old rascal gave me, a dirty court out of Hanover Street No such person had ever lived there, and my white-haired saint was a humbug. Harry laughed at me, and Mamma forbade me to bring any more thieves to the house, ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... gasped the yellow hen, in amazement; "if the copper man can do half of these things he is a very wonderful machine. But I suppose it is all humbug, like ...
— Ozma of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... hint that, on arriving at Tripoli, there would be exhibited a good deal of fantazia, ("humbug[10]") by the health-office department. Accordingly, after we had been an hour in port, the health officer came alongside, and affected great surprise at our not having passports, and asked me, with great pomposity, what was my "reverito nome?" The Turks always adopt and caricature the worst parts ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... which we have both taken. With respect to the Finance plan, I feel convinced that it must end where it ought to have begun, in an appropriation of part of the Sinking Fund, and that this will be done with more or less disguise and humbug, but that no regard for consistency will be sufficient to prevent a measure ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... these things sometimes, doctor, and though a great deal of it seems to be humbug, it is as you say—I know some are sincere, and I know there is a right way. I have been more than half tempted many times during the last few weeks to discover for myself the secret of power, but I am deterred by certain considerations, which ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... cities, and were far more astonishing animals than they. I thought that would silence them; but they just turned round, and informed me that my diatoms were plants, not animals,—so my story was all humbug. Then I was mad; and couldn't get over the fact that these little rascals had done what we, the kings of the sea, couldn't do. I wasn't content with being the biggest creature there: I wanted to be the most ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... almost inexplicable that honest men should neglect one of the greatest and, as God knows, one of the most threatening problems of this age and country, and waste words and precious moments over that most arrant humbug—Civil Service Reform. The People are more important than the Government: for to-day the Government ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... foods may perhaps be more liable to go sour, but I am far from considering sour milk an unwholesome food; whole nations have no other food and are none the worse, and all the array of absorbents seems to me mere humbug. There are constitutions which do not thrive on milk, others can take it without absorbents. People are afraid of the milk separating or curdling; that is absurd, for we know that milk always curdles in the stomach. ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... a little fool! Do as I tell you. It isn't a lie—only a piece of conventional humbug which everybody understands. There, please!" His tone of entreaty was more disagreeable to her than his roughness. All the pride and rigidity of her Puritan temperament was up in arms against the indefinable something which it had long ago ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... not knowingly publish any humbug, and I have placed a Brush in the hands of Mayor Cooper and Postmaster James of New York, as a guarantee of my ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... is no quality of the mind so essential to the even-balance as humour. The schoolmaster without this humanising virtue never yet won your love and admiration, and to miss your affection and loyalty is to lose one of life's chiefest delights. You are as quick to detect the humbug who hides his mediocrity behind an affectation of dignity as was dear old Yorick, of whom you will read when you have got to know the sweetness of Catullus. This Yorick it was who declared that the Frenchman's epigram describing gravity as "a mysterious carriage of the body to cover ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... "You old humbug!" exclaimed Tom. "You know perfectly well that we've all decided what we are going to do. It is merely the question of putting it in words. In some way or other we intend to regard the case of Rex v. Wilhelm as one in which we personally ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... Caesars. I would indeed make that the essential thing in my reckoning of the war. It is a drama without a hero; without countless incidental heroes no doubt, but no star part. Even the Germans, with a national predisposition for hero-cults and living still in an atmosphere of Victorian humbug, can produce nothing better ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... prejudiced and so used to humbug that for the most part they do not in the least know their own motives for what they do. I will go to ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... should have thought no more of it, had we not observed the following notice editorial in the N, Y. Farmer and Mechanic. We copy the article entire, that our readers may judge for themselves whether the style and statements savor most of reality or humbug. ...
— Scientific American magazine, Vol. 2 Issue 1 • Various
... fellow," said he as they walked down Fifth Avenue in the gathering dusk of the early winter evening, "ever since I've begun to suspect that damned old humbug of a father of hers, I've been congratulating myself that there isn't the remotest chance of his ever becoming my father-in-law. And, by George, you'll never know how near I was to leaping blindly into the brambles. What a close call ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... don't care anything about fortune-tellers—I never saw one that wasn't a humbug—but you may depend upon it that I cannot be deceived, and I will not be trifled with. You can go home now and tell your brother to come over here ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... on the following day, spent in idling in the forest and about the hamlet, conversing with the cottagers, we were told that our old man was a bit of a humbug; that he was a great talker, with a hundred schemes for the improvement of his fortunes, and, incidently, for the benefit of his neighbours and the world at large; but nothing came of it all and he was now fast sinking into the lowest depths of poverty. ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... writes in his usual frank and above-board manner: "If the Indians are to audit accounts against the Indians (agreeably to the Senate's alteration of the treaty), there will be a pretty humbug made of it; then he that has most whisky ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... giving way to this libidinous humbug last night when he leaned back and said to me, 'This is all very well, Doctor; and I'm glad to have had the experience. But do you know what I want at ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... unflinchingly to live up to them in season and out of season is about as sensible as to expect him perpetually to live up to the photographs and anecdotes), we may take them as his ideal. He dislikes humbug: he tries to be polite. Could one sketch a sounder scaffolding on which to build all the odd divergencies—crankinesses and heroisms, stupidities and engagingnesses—which may go to make the edifice of an average decent soul's ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... shameful episode in the English annals. Thinking this, you will not consider my opinion good for anything, and therefore I need not inflict it upon you. Humbugs, however, will explode in the present state of the atmosphere, and the Austrian humbug, for instance, is at last, God be praised for it, exploding. John Bull, I suppose, will work himself into a fine fever about that; but he will think none the worse of the old ladies in Downing Street who are made fools of: and will be none the better disposed ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... I'll suddenly discover that He does exist. In that case, Mr. Savva, I thank you, but I'd rather not. Why should I? I live a nice, quiet existence. Of course, it's all a humbug, an imposition. But what business is it of mine? The people want to believe—let them. It wasn't ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... not going to lose you like this. I'm not going to let you slip a second time. I was awake about it all last night. I don't care where you are, what your people are, nor very much whether you've kept quite clear of this medium humbug. I don't. You will in future. Anyhow. I've had a day and night to think it over. I had to come and try to find you. It's you. I've never forgotten you. Never. I'm not going to be ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... thing that there's fower places staunin' in Millar's Level," said Jamie Lauder, "an' I'm telt there's five or six staunin' in the Black Horse Dook. It's a' a bit of humbug, an' I think we should try an' put ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... enough in its way. Neither can it be said to interfere with the happiness of foreigners either in or out of China that Chinese medical, astrological, geomantic, and such works, pretend to a knowledge of mysteries we know to be all humbug. On the other hand, they ought to keep their lying to themselves and for their own special amusement. They have no right to circulate written and verbal reports that foreigners dig out babies' eyes and use them in their pharmacopoeia. ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... would also caution my readers against those who will sell you "extra large layers, for immediate bearing," and whose "plants are better than those whom anybody else may grow," as their advertisements will term it. It is time that this humbug should cease; time that the public in general should know, that they cannot, in nature and reason, expect any fruit from a plant transplanted the same season; and that those who pretend it can be done, without vital injury to the plant, ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... sulphate of ammonia. Two or three pounds on a square rod will do good, but if you put half of it on a square yard, it will burn up the crop, and the other half will be applied in such a small quantity that you will see but little effect, and will conclude that it is a humbug. Judging from over thirty years' experience, I am safe in saying that not one man in ten can be trusted to sow these manures. They should be sown with as much care as ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... the dollars that'll do the trick. Miss Tuppence put me wise to that right away. There's no humbug about her. We ought to ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... Servant, and the people did not prove congenial to her—especially Mademoiselle Therese. Though she seemed to be a clever teacher, Barbara could never be sure that she was speaking the truth, and in writing home she described her as "rather a humbug." ...
— Barbara in Brittany • E. A. Gillie
... conference would most need would be "common sense," and because, in his opinion, Count Munster had "lots of it," some of the count's utterances astonished me. He now came out, as he did the day before in his talk with me, utterly against arbitration, declaring it a "humbug," and that we had no right to consider it, since it was not mentioned in the first proposals ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... the semi-darkness. For an instant she was paralyzed with terror, and it was only the audience's delight at finding Frances arrayed as Scrooge's irrepressible nephew that covered the gap between "Merry Christmas, Uncle," and "Bah! Humbug!" ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... professor. They took the head of one beetle, the body of another of a totally different species, the wings of a third, the legs of a fourth. These members they carefully pasted together. Then they asked the professor what kind of bug the creature was. He answered promptly, "A humbug." Just such a monstrosity is trouble—especially future trouble. Some things about it are real, but the whole combined menace is only an illusion, not a thing which actually exists at all. Face the trouble itself; give ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... fine girls, and they will have a million apiece. I want 'em to be sensible and marry Chicago men, but, they both go in for coronets and all that humbug." The laughing Major extricated himself from the social tentacles of the honest old boy, mentally deciding to play off Miss Genie against Mad-ame ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... ashamed of sentiment. It simply gives temper to the blade, and mellowness to the intellect. Sensibility, on the other hand, is full of shivers and shakes and falsetto notes and squeaks. It is, in fact, all humbug, just as sentiment ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... from beside the day's accumulations of papers upon his heaped-up desk. He laid upon himself the burden of labor, examining and cross-examining men for hours upon a single point of essential fact—quick to detect fraud and intolerant of humbug,— but infinitely patient with those who were merely dull, evading no drudgery, and, above all, never evading the dear pains of building-up and ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... turning it into a wild, wonderful, remote, fairy-land region, where all sorts of poetical things may take place without the slightest difficulty. Of course Shakespeare would not have done thus, but that he saw quite through the grand critical humbug which makes the proper effect of a work of art depend upon our belief in the actual occurrence of the thing represented. But your "critic grave and cool," I suppose, is one who, like Wordsworth's "model ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... patriot, this rigid moralist, this unbending censor, the Right Honourable Joseph Chamberlain, flaunts his Radical and levelling doctrines before the astonished democrats of Newcastle. 'Vanity of Vanities,' saith the preacher, 'all is vanity.' 'Humbug of Humbugs,' says the Radical, 'all ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... Kirkbank,' he said, confidentially. 'The dear soul never pretends to be any better than the rest of us. She gambles, and we all know she gambles; she pegs, and we all know she pegs; and she makes rather a boast of being up to her eyes in debt. No humbug about dear old Georgie.' ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... You humbug! And you pretended to help me look for it." She gazed at him almost with respect. "I never knew you were so deep and snaky. I'm discovering all sorts ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... accomplished manner and gave full value in the general scheme to a character which the author made a person when he might have been content with a peg. Mr. DION BOUCICAULT'S physician was as bland a humbug as ever coined guineas in Mayfair. Mr. MARTIN LEWIS, as a profoundly silly ass, played a difficult hand without fault. Miss NINA SEVENING, as a consoler of handsome men in trouble, and Miss FLORENCE LLOYD, as Caroline's maid, competently rounded ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... London before we can build a bridge. But rather a million times submit to expense and inconvenience than hand the country over to a set of thieves who'd sell us to-morrow. We're not such fools as ye take us for. Don't we know these heroes? And when we see them and Gladstone and Morley and Humbug Harcourt with his seventeen chins, all rowling together in Abraham's bosom (as ye may say)—Harcourt licking Harrington's boots, when only yesterday Tim was spittin' in his eye—we say to ourselves 'Wait yet awhile, my Boys, wait yet awhile.' But when ye've finished yer slavering ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... Mr. Barnum's secrets of success is his unique methods of advertising, and we can readily understand how he can bear to be denounced as a "Humbug," because this popular designation though undeserved in the popular acceptation of it, "brought grist to his mill." He has constantly kept himself before the public—nay, we may say that he has been kept before the public constantly, ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... from memory than any drunkard. He woke to his romance as a child wakes to the renewed wonder of the world. It was so real to him that, however hardly you judged him, you couldn't think of him as a humbug or a hypocrite.... No. He was not that. He was not that. His mind truly lived in a glorious state for which none of his disgraceful deeds were ever done. It created a sort of innocence for him. She could forgive him (even after yesterday), she could almost believe ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair
... de end. Er sauft. De Englishman, he sits down fresh and intends to get fuddled; but he is a hypocrite. He does not say de truth to hisself nor to nobody, he says, I will get fresh, when he means de odder ding. Big humbug. ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... is, that what has put Byron out of favour with the public of late has been not his faults but his excellences. His artistic good taste, his classical polish, his sound shrewd sense, his hatred of cant, his insight into humbug above all, his shallow, pitiable habit of being always intelligible—these are the sins which condemn him in the eyes of a mesmerising, table-turning, spirit-rapping, spiritualising, Romanising generation, who read ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... now produced some famous wine, that had been eleven years in bottle. We were unusually merry, and fell into toasts and speeches. I felt as if I had been his intimate friend for years, for he had not one atom of Levantine "humbug" in his composition. Poor fellow, little did he think, that in a few short weeks from this period his blood would flow as freely as the wine which he ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... not urgent, and consented to the delay. The curious thing was that he assumed it to himself. It is a tact—not incredible to those who know that nobody, not the most accomplished master in flattery, can humbug us so completely as we can and do humbug ourselves—that Mr. Furze, ten minutes after the letters were posted, was perfectly convinced that he had foreseen the necessity of each one—that he had personally and thoroughly controlled the whole day's operations, and that ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... said Atherley, "was the American one. I really admired old Stamps, and old Stamps admired me; for she knew I thoroughly understood what an unmitigated humbug she was. She had a fine sense of humour, too. How her eyes used to twinkle when I asked posers at ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... may be a hard taskmaster, but I strive to be a good one. When I am through with you, you will know architecture from the ground up. You will know its virtuous reality and you will know the fake and the fraud and the humbug. I will spare nothing—for your sake. I will stir up the cesspool to its utmost depths of stench, and also the pious, hypocritical virtues of our so-called architecture—the nice, good, mealy-mouthed, suave, dexterous, diplomatic ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... said in her severe way, "She is a virtuous woman, a youth like you should not utter ignorant jokes about women, especially about the humbler classes, to whom good reputation is everything." I began to see plainer than ever, that I could humbug mother ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... It was awful humbug that the commandant reeled off to his silent audience—hypocrisy garbed in paternal phrases, and interlarded with buncombe about Germany's mission to ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... three flag-staffs before the church; that he passes me a slatternly woman and a frowzy girl or two through the Piazza occasionally; and that he calls down the flocks of pigeons hovering near. I fancy the latter half ashamed to show themselves, as being aware that they are a great humbug, and unrightfully ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... him with loud shouts, by the eager uproar of which—now near, now in the centre, now on the outskirts of the division, and now sweeping back towards us in a great volume of sound—we could trace his progress through the ranks. If he is a coward, or a traitor, or a humbug, or anything less than a brave, true, and able man, that mass of intelligent soldiers, whose lives and honor he had in charge, were utterly deceived, and so was this present writer; for they believed in him, and so did I; and had I stood in the ranks, should have shouted with the lustiest ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... really sick," explained the boy; "and there's no humbug about his ailment, either. I heard the doctor tell my mother that it was partly due to a lack of substantial food for years. You see, the woman herself was ill for a long time, and her husband worked himself to skin and bone trying to provide for her. Then she got over ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... been known to behave like a wolf to his own species. Scratch his master and you will find the caveman. But the scratch must be a sharp one: I am thickly veneered. Outwardly, I am as gentle as you, gentle reader. And one reason for our delight in fire is that there is no humbug about flames: they are frankly, primaevally savage. But this is not, I am glad to say, the sole reason. We have a sense of good and evil. I do not pretend that it carries us very far. It is but the tooth-brush and nail-scissors ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... all sciences; when truth fails them and they are at fault, they fill up the hiatus with supposition; which is, as you term it, humbug." ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... intellectual power. But alas, in spite of all this, when I had read that speech I thought with a heavy heart that there was one more thing that I had to add to the list of the specially English things, such as kippers and cricket; I had to add the specially English kind of humbug. In France things are attacked and defended for what they are. The Catholic Church is attacked because it is Catholic, and defended because it is Catholic. The Republic is defended because it is Republican, and attacked because it is Republican. But here is the ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... not discouraged as you are, and the present government pleases me, because it has no principle, no metaphysics, no humbug. I express myself very badly. Moreover you deserve a different response, ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... pause, he proceeded: "But I hear it is very much the same thing with you. I have often longed to go to America, just for the sake of that social emancipation which it has seemed to promise. But they tell me that in your big cities a good deal of the same humbug prevails." I assured him that he was fatally right; but I did not proceed to say, as I might have done, that our "aristocracy" rarely patronizes first nights at theatres, holding most ladies, and gentlemen connected with the stage in a position somewhere between their scullions ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... it of his? I'm not going to stand his impudence, as I'll precious soon let him know. A likely story! He didn't buy me body and soul for his paltry salary, though he seems to think it. The old humbug in a cassock! It's a great deal of preaching and very little practice ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... admission," he cried. "What more do you want? The fellow is a self-confessed humbug. We have only to return home and report him as the brazen imposter that ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to her. "Don't you go getting caught by that sweep who runs their chapel up in London. He's a humbug if ever there was one—you mark my words. I know a thing or two. He's done your aunts a lot of harm, and he'll have his dirty fingers on you ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... did not instigate Ravaillac, their doctrine of regicide inspired him. They can creep into any kingdom, any institution, any household, because they readily accept any terms and subscribe to any conditions in the certainty that by the adroit use of flattery, humbug, falsehood, and corruption, they will soon become masters of the situation. In France they are the real Morbus Gallicus. In Italy they are the soul of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... that this thought came to Mr. Ford it seemed to him more repugnant. First, that he should have blamed Tavia without investigating the matter himself; next that he should have allowed a man like Squire Sanders to "humbug" him. ...
— Dorothy Dale • Margaret Penrose
... transported last year, and took the prize for Devons at the Great Mesopotamian Agricultural with a brindled bull. We remember his weeping at the wedding-breakfast over the loss of his eldest treasure, and wonder if he was an arrant humbug, or only a foolish, fond old man, inclining morosely toward the former opinion. We don't seem to care much about Sir Roland de Vaux, the celebrated geologist, whom we shall have the privilege of meeting this evening. What are strata to us, when our thoughts ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... placed another tub of water in the room at two or three o'clock, or else taken all of the ice out of the first one, the process of freezing and giving out heat would have gone on rapidly again, and none of the plants would have suffered. I have heard people say that putting water in a cellar was all a humbug—that the water froze and the vegetables also. Of course the vegetables froze after the water congealed, or the cellar may have been so defective that both froze at the same time. The latent heat given out by a small amount of freezing water cannot counteract ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... rule circumstances," said Jack dryly, sitting down in his own room, and taking up Carlyle. "What an amount of humbug is talked in this world,—yes, ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... my boy, is it?' said Joe. 'What! are you glad to have me, old chappie? No humbug about yer, are ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... been delighted. But he shunned Dudley. Partly because he was afraid of compromising his own respectability, and partly because he had sense enough to see that Dudley's honest eyes looked through him, and saw what a humbug he was. ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... Carlton, would you really have the Negroes enjoy the same rights with ourselves?" "I would, most certainly. Look at our great Declaration of Independence; look even at the constitution of our own Connecticut, and see what is said in these about liberty." "I regard all this talk about rights as mere humbug. The Bible is older than the Declaration of Independence, and there I take my stand. The Bible furnishes to us the armour of proof, weapons of heavenly temper and mould, whereby we can maintain our ground against all ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... and standing in the middle of it was—a figure. Both place and figure ought to have been somewhere else by rights. Judy's surprise, however, was quite momentary; swift, bird-like understanding followed it. Place was a sham and humbug really; already, without leaving the schoolroom carpet, she and Tim had been to the Metropolis and even to the East. This was merely another of these things she didn't know she knew; she understood another thing ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... of others, and they highly approve its sentiments. They, with you, are fully of the opinion that it is high time to take a firm stand against the no-government doctrine. They are far from regarding it merely as a humbug." John A. Collins, the Anti-slavery agent referred to, founded a community at Skaneateles, N. Y., based upon the following dictums: A disbelief in any special revelation of God to Man, in any form of worship, in any special regard for ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... am a humbug?" said Florence. A look came into her eyes which he could not quite fathom. It was a hungry look. They lit up for a moment, then faded, then an expression of resolve crept round ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... words and with a certain amount of youthful eloquence. As for Eva, she was simply intent on preserving the lees of her father's life, and had been heard to express an opinion that the college was "all humbug," and that people ought to be allowed to live as long as it pleased God to let them. Of course she had with her the elderly ladies of the community, and among them my own wife as the foremost. Mrs Neverbend had never made herself prominent before in any public question; but on this she seemed ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... Candor!' said Abel. 'It's your own proposal, Hollins. Suppose it's evil to swear: isn't it better I should express it, and be done with it, than keep it bottled up, to ferment in my mind? Oh, you're a precious, consistent old humbug, you are!' ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... in possessing an 'ideal' is that, lodging in you as it does, it insists upon the interior being furnished by your personal satisfaction, and not by the blindness or stupidity of the outer world. Thus, in one direction, an ideal precludes humbug. The ladies might desire to cloak facts, but they had no pleasure in deception. They had the feminine power of extinguishing things disagreeable, so long as nature or the fates did them no violence. When these forces sent ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... you are, either. I liked the way you stood up to that poor faggot of hereditary superstitions and prejudices who was trying to frighten you into being as big a humbug as himself. He'll never get over it. I daresay he'll make things very unpleasant for you in his charming Christian way. How old are ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... and penalty; the phantasms and fatuities, and ten-years' corn-law debatings, that shall walk the earth at noonday, must needs be numerous! The universe being intrinsically a perhaps, being too probably an 'infinite humbug,' why should any minor humbug astonish us? It is all according to the order of nature; and phantasms riding with huge clatter along the streets, from end to end of our existence, astonish nobody. Enchanted St Ives' workhouses ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... or of attempting to bamboozle the public into buying what neither he nor the public really cares for. If he does his best he may feel that he is as fairly earning his livelihood as his fellow workmen, the blacksmith and the stonecutter, and is as little dependent as they upon either charity or humbug. The best that government has done for art in France is the commissioning of the great decorative paintings of Baudry and Puvis. In this country, also, governments, national, State, or municipal, are patronizing art in the best possible way, and in making buildings splendid for the people are ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... to run. And the healthier the world becomes, the more they are compelled to live by imposture and the less by that really helpful activity of which all doctors get enough to preserve them from utter corruption. For even the most hardened humbug who ever prescribed ether tonics to ladies whose need for tonics is of precisely the same character as the need of poorer women for a glass of gin, has to help a mother through child-bearing often enough to feel that he is ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... Braid [609] duly honoured and think that perhaps a word might be said of 'Electro-biology,' a term ridiculous as 'suggestion' and more so. But Professor Yankee Stone certainly produced all the phenomena you allude to by concentrating the patient's sight upon his 'Electro-magnetic disc'—a humbug of copper and zinc, united, too. It was a sore trial to Dr. Elliotson, who having been persecuted for many years wished to make trial in his turn of a little persecuting—a disposition ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... swept the Northern States in 1857 De Bow's Review, the leading financial journal of the South, declared: "The wealth of the South is permanent and real, that of the North fugitive and fictitious. Events now transpiring expose the fiction, as humbug after humbug explodes[655]." On March 4, 1858, Senator Hammond of South Carolina, asked in a speech, "What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? I will not stop to depict what everyone ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... procession, said nothing. Irma alone remained gay, thinking it all very funny. And, with a caressing gesture, she leant against the shoulder of the derided painter, and whispered softly in his ear: 'Don't fret, my boy. It's all humbug, ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... parson. His decent reticence is branded as hypocrisy, his circumlocutions are roundly called lies, and his silence is vilified as treachery. And on the strength of peccadillos, reprehensible in an author, but excusable in a son, the Anglo-Saxon race is accused of prudishness, humbug, pretentiousness, deceit, cunning, and bad cooking. Personally I think it was rash of Mr. Strickland, in refuting the account which had gained belief of a certain "unpleasantness" between his father and mother, to state that Charles Strickland in a letter written from Paris had described ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... course that beats you. It's Cossar I What can you hope to do now? What good is it to do anything now? You will breathe it in the dust of every street. What is there to fight for more? Rules of war, indeed! And now Caterham wants to humbug me to help him bargain. Good heavens, man! Why should I come to your exploded windbag? He has played his game ... murdered and ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... them, and he said he would like to. I asked him then to please discourage all cheering, noise, or any sort of confusion; that we had had enough of it before Bull Run to ruin any set of men, and that what we needed were cool, thoughtful, hard-fighting soldiers—no more hurrahing, no more humbug. He took my remarks in the most perfect good-nature. Before we had reached the first camp, I heard the drum beating the "assembly," saw the men running for their tents, and in a few minutes the regiment was in line, arms presented, and ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... both are too well known to require announcement. How incongruous become the associations as we proceed; old Pere la Chaise cheek by jowl with the American Presidents; Cagliostro, who died before the word his career incarnated had become indispensable to the English tongue—the apotheosis of humbug; Marmontel, dear to our novitiate as royal leaders; and near to the original Pamela; Chateaubriand's ancestor the Marshal; Bisson going below to ignite the magazine, rather than "give up the ship;" and the battered war dog, with ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... of Mr. Wilbur. Homers, democratic ones, plums left for. Hotels, big ones, humbugs. House, a strange one described. Howell, James, Esq., story told by, letters of, commended. Huldah, her bonnet. Human rights out of order on the floor of Congress. Humbug, ascription of praise to, generally believed in. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... "You humbug!" said Clover, while Katy seized Rose and pulled her into the room. "There, sit on the bed, you ridiculous goose, and put on my gray cloak. How can you be so absurd as to say you won't? You know we want you, and you know ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... bending the violet eyes of hers upon a piece of Moorish silk, let me clear my mind of humbug. I am no sentimentalist in this matter. I am not certain, yet, that "my lady" of to-day is the sole repository of every virtue; neither am I dogmatic about "necessary vice," the "irreducible minimum," and such-like large viewpoints. I have, indeed, nursed a theory that our floating population ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... Jacobin of my own? Haven't you one, too? But mine is a different problem from that white-haired humbug of yours. He is a genuine article. There must be plenty like him about. He has scores to settle with half a dozen people, he says, and he clamours for revolutions to ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... right too, pap but if yo' can't make me tote dese clothes home, don't bring de mess up. Yo'se abstifically a humbug. ...
— Three Plays - Lawing and Jawing; Forty Yards; Woofing • Zora Neale Hurston
... Earl of Durham, that this stern patriot, this rigid moralist, this unbending censor, the Right Honourable Joseph Chamberlain, flaunts his Radical and levelling doctrines before the astonished democrats of Newcastle. 'Vanity of Vanities,' saith the preacher, 'all is vanity.' 'Humbug of Humbugs,' says the Radical, ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... revelation. But I don't have any faith in modern spiritual seansys. They seem to me,—and I would say it in a polite, courtous way, for I wouldn't hurt your feelin's for the world,—all mixed up with modern greed and humbug." ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... younger man blankly, "what a ridiculous old humbug it is! And how he used to frighten me in the old days with his confounded cavalry bluster! I rather think I will look him up: and I'll dine with him three times a week if he likes. Meanwhile, it's time for me to go and ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... hedonist. The latter school, the C[a]rv[a]kas, the so-called disciples of Brihaspati, have, indeed, a philosophy without religion. They simply say that the gods do not exist, the priests are hypocrites; the Vedas, humbug; and the only thing worth living for, in view of the fact that there are no gods, no heaven, and no soul, is pleasure: 'While life remains let a man live happily; let him not go without butter (literally ghee) even though he run into debt,' etc.[1] Of sterner stuff was ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... Mrs. Palmer had a full share of both these manly excellences, and practiced them in thoroughly feminine fashion. She was essentially true, hating humbug in all its disguises.... Her love of plainness and distaste for affectation were forms of veracity. But in narrative of hers one got much besides plain realities. These had their significance heightened by her eager emotion, and their picturesqueness by her happy artistry.... Of course the warmth ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... sorry for Ralph. It seemed to her he was talking as a blind and had little heart in what he said. "I don't know what's the matter with you," she observed to him once; "but I suspect you're a great humbug." ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... their professor. They took the head of one beetle, the body of another of a totally different species, the wings of a third, the legs of a fourth. These members they carefully pasted together. Then they asked the professor what kind of bug the creature was. He answered promptly, "A humbug." Just such a monstrosity is trouble—especially future trouble. Some things about it are real, but the whole combined menace is only an illusion, not a thing which actually exists at all. Face the trouble itself; give ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... Uncle Nathan rather sharply, to discover any mischief which might lurk in his expression. Perceiving that he looked perfectly sincere, and was innocent of any intention to quiz him, he merely uttered, in the most contemptuous tone, the single word "Humbug!" ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... catchee no havee,' I think we may leave these two last out of consideration. Under ordinary circumstances, I should have barred jumping on the chest of a man who is afflicted with blindness; but as this particular individual has seen fit to humbug me to the top of his bent, I shall waive that scruple. Senor Taltavull, I'm with you in this to anything short ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... "Oh, humbug," said Mr. Stacy; "that is putting it too strong, Harriet—as if I couldn't pay money or ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... myself. There is not one gleam of light in all the sad landscape, and the abyss seems waiting at my feet to swallow me up with everything that I cherish. It is no use saying to this demon of the darkness that I know he is a humbug, a mere Dismal Jemmy of the brain, who sits there croaking like a night owl or a tenth-rate journalist. My Dismal Jemmy is not to be exorcised by argument. He can only be driven out by a little ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... various epithets, which they apply to him; The Dear, dear Man! The Life-enjoying Man! The All-sided One! The Representative of Poetry upon earth! The Many-sided Master-Mind of Germany! His enemies rush into the other extreme, and hurl at him the fierce names of Old Humbug! and Old Heathen! ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... religious and anti-slavery cant, and merely wanted a little of the teetotal nonsense to be a perfect specimen of humbug. ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... returned, "don't you be a humbug. This is a perfectly plain case, and you are going in for a very risky affair with your eyes open. You shall not ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the days when my mind misgives me whether the pictorial art be not a humbug, and when the minute accuracy of a fly in a Dutch picture of fruit and flowers seems to me something more reliable than the master-touches of Raphael. The gallery was considerably thronged, and many of the visitors appeared to be from the country, ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... indeed. Come, Belle, make up your mind, and let us be off to America; and leave priests, humbug, learning, ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... easy to humbug those who are so eager to be humbugged as people are in this world of humbug—We show ourselves ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... fellow, rot! You think he's going, to guess that snake's riddles. Rot! Stuff and nonsense! Humbug! Get ...
— Turandot, Princess of China - A Chinoiserie in Three Acts • Karl Gustav Vollmoeller
... When pressed on these matters it seemed to them sufficient to say that they "thought they were good ideas." This engendered much vexation amongst the Australian officers, more especially as the Brigadier very often did not see his way clear to withstand the innovations. The immediate result was to humbug officers and men and negative many of the sound lessons ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... plausible tale with a view to tricking the people into entrusting them with power. The only possible way by which politicians as a class can be improved is the political and psychological education of the people, so that they may learn to detect a humbug. In England men have reached the point of suspecting a good speaker, but if a man speaks badly they think he must be honest. Unfortunately, virtue is not so widely diffused ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... your experience must have taught you that witchcraft is all humbug (imfeketu), and that before the English rule, the witch-doctor was simply the instrument of the chief for suppressing people who became ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... You are rushing into the fiery furnace, my good fellow, and you haven't the loins to run out again. There's a thousand francs; just let me take it in hand and manage the affair.' Very good! The banker then convokes the traders: 'My friends, let us go to work: write a prospectus! Down with humbug!' On that they get out the hunting-horns and shout and clamor,—'One hundred thousand francs for five sous! or five sous for a hundred thousand francs! gold mines! coal mines!' In short, all the clap-trap of commerce. We ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... picked it up, and turned it over to look at the title, at sight of which she said, with a little laugh, 'What a humbug you are, mother! You know you've never read a single ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... humbly thankful, are perhaps a little too apt to celebrate their joy in the face of the afflicted ones who have it not; and the afflicted ones only follow a general law in protesting that it is a very worthless thing, if not a complete humbug." This spirit of exclusiveness on the one side and of irascibility on the other may be greatly deplored, but who is there among us, I wonder, wholly innocent of blame? Mr. Saintsbury himself confesses to a silent chuckle of delight when he thinks of the dimly veiled censoriousness with which Peacock's ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... the villagers thought it had "burst," others that it had "burned out." Betsy said: "Whatever it was, it was a humbug;" and the wisest man in Whitefield could neither tell whence it came nor whither it went. One thing, however, was certain: Farmer Lathem said that never, since his orchard began to bear, had he gathered such a crop of apples as he did, despite ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... Anaheim who were enamored by the Misses Bimpa were skeptical of this, and affirmed that it was a "humbug," but this question will be settled in the evening. Meanwhile, the commotion around the circus is increasing each moment. From among the long, low wooden buildings surrounding the canvas circus there comes the roar of the lions and elephant; the parrots, fastened to rings hanging to the huts, ...
— Sielanka: An Idyll • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... part," said Sylvie, "a man tried to humbug me at the market wanting to know if I had seen him put on his shirt. Such bosh! There," she cried, interrupting herself, "that's a quarter to ten striking at the Val-de-Grace, and ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... should have heard the stuff he told me; the way in which he vouched for the truth of it all too, solemnly staking the lives of his children on his veracity! I stared at him in amazement, not knowing what to make of it: one moment I thought he must be out of his mind; the next I concluded he had been a humbug all along, an ape in a lion's skin. Oh, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... On my knees and fowl I fall: For greater grace and better gravy call. Vive l'Humbug!—that's to say, God bless ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... decoying the simple, the ignorant, well-intentioned, but deceived neighbours, to add their signatures to cases of which they know nothing, and of which the details are a series of bombast, falsehood, ignorance, and humbug. There are many of the cases which I have related to which I could have obtained the signatures of clergymen, Members of Parliament, magistrates, and other persons high in rank and station in life, without saying ...
— Observations on the Causes, Symptoms, and Nature of Scrofula or King's Evil, Scurvy, and Cancer • John Kent
... unknown man—too old to be able to refute the charge of senility were any one disposed to question the value of my statements—could announce to the world my great discovery a thousand times a day, and very properly the world would decline to believe in me. The world would cry humbug, and I should have been unable, had I failed to find you, to convince the world that I was not a humbug. With the discovery of your eye, all that is changed. I shall have an ally in you, and that is valuable for the reason ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... almost laughed in her face, and the black diamond eyes twinkled furiously as they turned away to hide their scornful amusement—so strong was the nun's conviction that the new benefactress was a humbug. The Princess looked at the names quite calmly after she had written them—Sister Saint Paul, Sister Giovanna, and Sister Marius—and asked whether she had seen any of them during her visit. But the Mother Superior answered that ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... that in the least," said Vernon with some heat. "I meant that if I hadn't met her she would have gone on being bored, and so should I. Don't think me a humbug, Miss Desmond. I am more sorry than I can say that I should have been the means of causing ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... and caution. In very truth a delightful bundle of paradox. Quick-witted and impatient, she had yet infinite toleration for the simpleton, and could on occasion suffer fools with a gladness quite unshared by her much gentler daughter or her husband. But the snob, the sycophant, and, above all, the humbug met with short shrift at her hands, and the insincere person hated her heartily. She spoke her mind with the utmost freedom on every possible occasion, and as she had plenty of brains and considerable shrewdness her remarks ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... him to a fresh effort, and he cried: "It's no good your trying to humbug me—none at all. I've got evidence—plenty of evidence! And I'm going to act on it, too. I'm going to hound you out of the Army and that jade of a wife of mine out of decent society. Do you think, because I don't spend four or five months every year ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... SCROOGE. Bah! Humbug! (He works at ledger. Finally drops his head on his arms and sleeps. The light of his candle goes out. Note: Scrooge might blow it out unseen ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... Moundbuilder immortal, would be perpetuated. But the cherished hopes of Mr. Moundbuilder in this respect will never be realized, for the day is not far distant when earthly mortals will be able to reason and then he will be recognized simply as a vain-glorious old humbug. ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... Servants of ev'ry degree, In livery or out of it, listen to me! See what comes of lying!—don't join in the league To humbug your master or ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... mark out the really excellent boys. Ti'a is the man who has just been fined half his wages; he is a beautiful old man, the living image of 'Fighting Gladiator,' my favourite statue - but a dreadful humbug. I think we keep him on a little on account of his looks. This sign o marks those who have been two years or upwards in the family. I note all my old boys have the cross of honour, except Misifolo; well, poor dog, he does his best, I suppose. You should see him scour. It is a ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... were a monk and alone, possibly; but living in the world!—And then who but the Saints would prefer death to the smallest sin? Why then humbug Him ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... of Bulgaria is not a genuine thing; and he represents the whole part played by Prussia in these ancient disputes. That part is the very reverse of genuine; it is a piece of ludicrous and transparent humbug. If Prussia had any religion, it would be a northern perversion of Protestantism utterly distant from and indifferent to the controversies of Slavonic Catholics. But Prussia has no religion. For her there is no God; and Ferdinand is ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... be, in spite of toil or of fatigue, That humbug of all humbugs, the staid, inveterate "dig." Poem before Iadma of ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... is commonly supposed to be: it is hard work—harder than any but a growing boy can understand; it requires attention, and you are not strong enough to attend to your bodily growth, and to your lessons too. Besides, Latin and Greek are great humbug; the more people know of them the more odious they generally are; the nice people whom you delight in either never knew any at all or forgot what they had learned as soon as they could; they never turned to the classics after they were ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... himself had been the chief managing editor, tenor, Jack-of-all-trades, canard-seller, camarillist, politician, premier-Paris, fait-Paris, detache-attache, pamphleteer, translator, critic, euphuist, bravo, incense-bearer, guerillero, angler, humbug, and even, what was more serious, the banker of a paper of which he was the only, unique, and perpetual gendelettre, and which, so admirably written, cleverly conducted, and signed with so great a name, did not ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... delegates of the Georgia Convention. When I said that I hoped the day would soon come in which school-houses would be as numerous in Georgia as in Massachusetts, one of them answered: "Well, I hope it'll never come,—popular education is all a d—n humbug in my judgment"; whereunto the other responded, "That's my opinion, too." These are exceptional cases, I am aware, but they truly index the situation of thousands of persons. It is this general ignorance, and this general ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... to it. I think she was quite right. There were several wicked Witches who caused a lot of trouble; but now they are all out of business and only the great Sorceress, Glinda the Good, is permitted to practice her arts, which never harm anybody. The Wizard of Oz, who used to be a humbug and knew no magic at all, has been taking lessons of Glinda, and I'm told he is getting to be a pretty good Wizard; but he is merely the assistant of the great Sorceress. I've the right to make a servant girl for my wife, you ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... the whole project a humbug, and refusing to have anything to do with it, equipped himself with club and cutlass, and started off on a solitary excursion towards the south-easterly part of the island, which we had not yet explored. He returned in the afternoon with a glowing account ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... Oz was announced, and a dried-up, little, old man, clothed all in black, entered the drawing-room. His face was cheery and his eyes twinkling with humor, so Polly and Button-Bright were not at all afraid of the wonderful personage whose fame as a humbug magician had spread throughout the world. After greeting Dorothy with much affection, he stood modestly behind Ozma's throne and listened to the lively prattle ...
— The Road to Oz • L. Frank Baum
... true, but out of it hardly rises above the conceptions of a boarding-school Miss in her teens. She appears to us a kind of strong-minded old maid, but with her strong-mindedness greatly modified by the presumption as well as the sentimentality of romantic humbug. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... do who has stood grape-shot. Then they circulated reports about his having got drunk on different occasions, and having been caught drinking in secret; and some believed them, being of the same mind with the distiller, who asserted it to be mere humbug that any man could live without whiskey, and that wherever the croaking cold water society men did not drink in the daytime, they made up for it by drinking at night. These evil reports, however, fell dead after a little, and nobody ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... love with a man who didn't care a straw for me, and that I'm dying of love for him? And this is said to me by my own sister, who imagines that...that...that she's sympathizing with me!...I don't want these condolences and humbug!" ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... Newman, "if the old man turns out a humbug, you may do what you please. I wash my hands of the matter. For the girl herself, you may be at rest. I don't know what harm she may do to me, but I certainly can't hurt her. It seems to me," said Newman, "that you are very well matched. You are ...
— The American • Henry James
... Maybe some day I'll suddenly discover that He does exist. In that case, Mr. Savva, I thank you, but I'd rather not. Why should I? I live a nice, quiet existence. Of course, it's all a humbug, an imposition. But what business is it of mine? The people want to believe—let them. It wasn't I who ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... pretend to anything are the reverse of that which they pretend to. A man who sets up for a saint is sure to be a sinner, and a man who boasts that he is a sinner is sure to have some feeble, maudlin, sniveling bit of saintship about him which is enough to make him a humbug.—Bulwer-Lytton. ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... which Tommy Atkins is unanimous. Whether he lives up to them or not (and to expect him unflinchingly to live up to them in season and out of season is about as sensible as to expect him perpetually to live up to the photographs and anecdotes), we may take them as his ideal. He dislikes humbug: he tries to be polite. Could one sketch a sounder scaffolding on which to build all the odd divergencies—crankinesses and heroisms, stupidities and engagingnesses—which may go to make the edifice of an average decent soul's material, mental and ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... looks to de moment, and not beyond. Il boit. De German, he looks to de end. Er sauft. De Englishman, he sits down fresh and intends to get fuddled; but he is a hypocrite. He does not say de truth to hisself nor to nobody, he says, I will get fresh, when he means de odder ding. Big humbug. You understand?" ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... he learned to work. When he departed he carried away with him a list of his family, with his own name printed by his own hand at the bottom. I should add that he was plainly much of a humorist, and not a little of a humbug. He told us, for instance, that he was a person of exact sobriety; such being the obligation of his high estate: the commons might be sots, but the chief could not stoop so low. And not many days after he was to be observed in a state of smiling and lop-sided imbecility, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... passed indifferently well. An Englishman rarely suffers from ennui, and then only in his own country, when required to conform to what he calls "the humbug of society"; and the two officers, with their similar tastes, ideas, and dispositions, got on together admirably. It is not to be questioned that they were deeply affected by a sense of regret for their lost comrades, and astounded beyond measure ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... "economy." I don't know that he had ever taken up political science seriously, or that he had any preference for one kind or form of government over another. I repeat,—his radicalism was that of a humorist. He despised big-wigs, and pomp of all sorts, and, above all, humbug and formalism. But his radicalism was important as a sign that our institutions are ceasing to be picturesque; of which, if you consider his nature, you will see that his radicalism was a sign. And he did service to his cause. Not an abuse, whether from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... inside her bar; the truth was, the good widow was perfectly well aware that her snug little free-hold and thriving little trade were quite as great objects of attraction as her delectable self, and acting on the same principle as that old humbug 'Elizabeth,' insanely called 'the good Queen Bess,' viz: the balancing opposite interests, she drew custom to her house and grist to her mill, without troubling herself as to selection from her numerous admirers, which, besides displeasing the others, would place another in authority ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite
... ludicrous. Indeed, my mother was amused—she had no Manx blood in her—but my father accepted U.T.'s assurance with the utmost confidence. His chivalrous nature, more deeply tinged than hers with Celtic tenderness, or the very finest kind of Celtic make-believe (Anglice—humbug; oh those English!), had no difficulty in accepting U.T.'s "passionately." Passion in U.T.! Well, to us it was a splendid joke. I sometimes wonder whether the vicar, too, at times, had lucid intervals of the bare, naked reality. He had a fine ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... not speak. He saw the light burning from his windows as he looked up from below. He was regretful and angry. At Terrapin's room he drank much raw brandy and sang a song. He even called the astute Terrapin a humbug, and toward midnight grew quarrelsome. They escorted him to his hotel door; the light was still burning in his room. He was sober and repentant when he had ascended the long stairs, though he counterfeited profound drunkenness ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... infected him. He had long since passed the stage in which women were a mystery to him: he had long since realized that unless a man's passions intervene, there is nothing more mysterious about women than about men. It was all humbug—all this mummery about intuitions and unerring perception and inscrutability. Women are all alike—all human—all susceptible to sheer, blatant flattery. The only difference in women is in the particular brand of flattery to which, as ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... linsey-woolsey, can only deal with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free and may call a spade a spade. It cannot, even if it would, become merely aesthetic or merely classical like literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dissolved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the contemporary groove into the open fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like schoolboys out of school. And it is in talk alone that we can learn our period and ourselves. In short, the first duty of a man is to speak; that ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... you like this. I'm not going to let you slip a second time. I was awake about it all last night. I don't care where you are, what your people are, nor very much whether you've kept quite clear of this medium humbug. I don't. You will in future. Anyhow. I've had a day and night to think it over. I had to come and try to find you. It's you. I've never forgotten you. Never. I'm not going to be sent back ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... relief to see the Abbe mount the pulpit stairs, portly but lightfooted, his black clerical surtout buttoned closely up to his chin, his round cleanshaven face wearing a pious but suggestive smile, his eyes twinkling with latent satire, and his whole aspect expressing, "Welcome excellent humbugs! I, a humbug myself, will proceed to expound Humbug!" His sermons were generally satires on religion,— satires delicately veiled, and full of the double-entendres so dear to the hearts of Parisians,—and their delight in him arose chiefly from never quite knowing what he meant to imply, or to enforce. Not ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... now and then broke forth; such as odious, horrid, detestable, shocking, HUMBUG. This last new-coined expression, which is only to be found in the nonsensical vocabulary, sounds absurd and disagreeable, whenever it is pronounced; but from the mouth of a lady it is, "shocking, ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... triennial, instead of septennial Parliaments; but not one word of any alteration in the suffrage;—not one of this faction was then bold or honest enough to support the Burdettite faction, even in their humbug of householder suffrage; and the consequence was, that the Burdettites, or little shopkeeper faction, made a great parade about how much further they were disposed to go than the Waithmanite, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... been pained by hearing the words 'humbug,' 'great advertizing establishment,' etc., applied to the New York Fair, as well as to fairs in general. Now, nothing could be more unjust than the first term; and as to the latter, we have only to say that, if human nature were perfect, fairs would be unnecessary, and a ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... your latest biographer; and one scarcely marvels at the inveteracy of their malice. It was not individual vanity alone, but the whole literary class that you assailed. "As a literary people," you wrote, "we are one vast perambulating humbug." After that declaration of war you died, and left your reputation to the vanities yet writhing beneath your scorn. They are writhing and writing still. He who knows them need not linger over the attacks and defences of your personal character; he will ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... my man! Do you think that this is a performance in a booth, and that I am to be taken in by all the humbug of the professional mesmerist? Do as I tell ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... Things as They Ought to Be is a humbug. There is but one God, and He is the God of Things ...
— 21 • Frank Crane
... shredded biscuit from beside the day's accumulations of papers upon his heaped-up desk. He laid upon himself the burden of labor, examining and cross-examining men for hours upon a single point of essential fact—quick to detect fraud and intolerant of humbug,— but infinitely patient with those who were merely dull, evading no drudgery, and, above all, never evading the dear pains of building-up ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... Allen a hero or a humbug? a patriot or a pretender? Ask Vermont and she cries "Nulli secundus!" Ask New York and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... said the professor. "There's no imposition there. The Arabs would have nothing to find out, and their suspicions would be allayed at once. Then, too, you could humbug them grandly with a few of your modern doctors' tools—one of those double-barrelled stethoscopes, for ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... resided Charles Incledon, the rival of his neighbour Braham, whose singing he was wont to designate as "Italianised humbug;" declaring that no one but himself, Charles Incledon, knew how to sing a British ballad: and it must be admitted, that "The Storm" and "Black-eyed Susan," as sung by Incledon, produced a deep impression on the public mind. He was a native of Cornwall, and the ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... dozen hands. Well, afterwhile they stopped the fuss, An' some one kindly parted us. All beat an' cuffed an' clawed an' scratched, An' needin' both our faces patched, Each started hum a different way; An' what o' Liza, do you say, Why, Liza—little humbug—dern her, Why, she 'd gone home ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... fool! Do as I tell you. It isn't a lie—only a piece of conventional humbug which everybody understands. There, please!" His tone of entreaty was more disagreeable to her than his roughness. All the pride and rigidity of her Puritan temperament was up in arms against the indefinable something which it had long ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... may perhaps be more liable to go sour, but I am far from considering sour milk an unwholesome food; whole nations have no other food and are none the worse, and all the array of absorbents seems to me mere humbug. There are constitutions which do not thrive on milk, others can take it without absorbents. People are afraid of the milk separating or curdling; that is absurd, for we know that milk always curdles in the stomach. This is how it becomes sufficiently solid to nourish ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... turning into domestic beings, would be a failure, a trouble, an interruption, a desecration, and a bore; to get married merely to go on as they were at present, would, in the eyes of Alfieri, have been a profanation of the poetry of their situation, a perfectly unnecessary piece of humbug. ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... sympathies, and at the same time turning it into a wild, wonderful, remote, fairy-land region, where all sorts of poetical things may take place without the slightest difficulty. Of course Shakespeare would not have done thus, but that he saw quite through the grand critical humbug which makes the proper effect of a work of art depend upon our belief in the actual occurrence of the thing represented. But your "critic grave and cool," I suppose, is one who, like Wordsworth's "model of ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... pleasure and edification, particularly as it seems to us to be strongly contrasted with an appearance, in all the other chimneys, of an indefinable something, only to be expressed by the interesting word "humbug." Fig. 7 a is a chimney of Cumberland, and the north of Lancashire. It is, as may be seen at a glance, only applicable at the extremity of the roof, and requires a bent flue. It is built of unhewn stones, in the same manner as the Westmoreland cottages; ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... they were called, they almost missed being married altogether. Bibi-the-Smoker having disappeared. Boche discovered him outside smoking his pipe. Well! They were a nice lot inside there to humbug people about like that, just because one hadn't yellow kid gloves to shove under their noses! And the various formalities—the reading of the Code, the different questions to be put, the signing of all the documents—were ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... collecting materials for new bows and arrows, whips, boats, guns, and four-in-hand harness, against the return of Ulysses. Little did they dream that the hero, once back from Troy and all its onsets, would scornfully condemn their clumsy but laborious armoury as rot and humbug and only fit for kids! This, with many another like awakening, was mercifully hidden from them. Could the veil have been lifted, and the girls permitted to see Edward as he would appear a short three months hence, ragged of attire and lawless of tongue, a ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... you after, then. Seriously, what are you going to those barbarous islands for—putting friendship and all such regards out of the question? Wheat takes you there,—without humbug? You must excuse me—but you are a very extraordinary person to look ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... society wagged their wise heads, and cast mingled glances of pity, wonder, ridicule or disdain upon the poor deluded victim of the "latest humbug." Even the select circles heard of it as a report finally reached the daily paper, which appeared with a glaring head and ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... among the people of Southern Khorassan is to offer one's food in turn to everybody present and say, "Bis-millah," before commencing to eat it yourself. Although a ridiculous piece of humbug, it is generally my custom to fall in with the peculiar ways of the country, and for days past have invariably offered my food to scores of people whom I knew beforehand would not take it. The lack of courtesy at this hamlet in exacting payment in advance would seem naturally to preclude ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... any of that professional humbug, Pepps," rejoined her ladyship. "You doctors know a common disorder as soon as you see it, only you think it looks wise not to ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... along the river-banks. Even the mayor of the city was present in his carriage among the expectant crowd. The clock struck the hour of noon, but the little Delaware skiff was nowhere to be seen; and, as the sun declined from the zenith, the people gradually dispersed, muttering, "Another humbug!" ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... nothing of your constitution, while I can soon set you on your feet again. I am sick of the Institute and of Moron-val, and never wish to see either more." Thereupon the doctor launched forth in a philippic against the school which supported him. Moronval was a thorough humbug, he never paid anybody, and every one was giving him up; the affair of Madou had done him great injury; and finally Dr. Hirsch went so far as to compliment Jack on ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... forgetfulness, and Plato has the added glory of that acquired beauty, that bust of the Indian Bacchus which is now indissolubly mingled with his tradition. They have passed into the world of the ideal, and every humbug takes his freedoms with their names. But Machiavelli, more recent and less popular, is still all human and earthly, a fallen brother—and at the same time that nobly dressed and nobly ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... deferential to your little whims; will unhesitatingly accept your report of your own sensations and your hypotheses as to their cause; and, Esmeralda, when once your eyes behold that model man, be content, and go and take lessons of another, for either he is a pretentious humbug, careless of everything except his fees, or he ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... we know who was selling us to the Tuxedo people, we can protect ourselves hereafter," declared Mr. Wheatcroft. "And in spite of your trying to humbug me into believing you guilty, Major, I'm willing to let your son ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... in the subject abroad is also now fairly developing. The discovery was at first looked upon as a humbug, but this view is giving way before the facts presented in the local papers. The leading journals of the country have sent special correspondents to write up the subject. The New York Tribune and Herald, Harper's Weekly, the Springfield Republican and other papers, ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.
... bit of a humbug with it. I thought so, and the doctor endorses my ideas. He likes being ill and nursed and petted with the best food, so as to keep out of the hard work. I don't like the fellow a bit. There, you've talked enough now, ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... Repeal," 'Twas merely to teach them the "Right about wheel," By the word of command from the Saxon to run, As your leader would fly from a bailiff or dun; In short, since a miss is as good as a mile, Swear the whole was a humbug for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... whether I ever get to know anything—but I want to work out something in figures—something that hasn't got to do with human beings. I don't want people particularly. In some ways, Henry, I'm a humbug—I mean, I'm not what you all take me for. I'm not domestic, or very practical or sensible, really. And if I could calculate things, and use a telescope, and have to work out figures, and know to a fraction where I was wrong, I should be perfectly happy, and I believe ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... intimate friend of mine, and used to dine with me regularly every Sunday in Edinburgh. He was a Lake poet, a profound metaphysician, and one of the most virtuous men that ever lived. As a metaphysician, Dugald Stewart was a humbug to him. Brown had real talents for the thing. You must recognize, in reading Brown, many of those arguments with which I have so often reduced you to silence in metaphysical discussions. Your discovery of Brown is amusing. Go on! ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
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