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More "Tawdry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... we read: "Do you know what it is that I love in Uhland's imperfect dramas? It is the pure, vital, German-dramatic poetry, which, piercing the tawdry veneer of culture and the prevailingly wretched appearances of our life, strikes fire from the bed-rock of spiritual life itself, and with its divining rod points to the golden veins in the foundations of the national character. German-dramatic! that is the right word! and this is saying a great ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... besmirched with spilled snuff, and the lees of a thousand quart pots. The bands of his profession were ever awry upon a tattered shirt. His ancient wig scattered dust and powder as he went, while a single buckle of some tawdry metal gave a look of oddity to his clumsy, slipshod feet. A caricature of a man, he ambled and chuckled and seized the easy pleasures within his reach. There was never a summer's day but he caught upon his brow the few faint gleams of sunlight that penetrated ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... states that she went up to hear the orator at Bloody Brook; and, in two pages of very coarse, unmeasured language, states "that all her sympathies were baffled, and that she was deeply disgusted;" that the orator "offered them shreds of tawdry sentiment, without the intermixture of one sound thought or simple and natural feeling, simply and naturally expressed." I have the Address of Governor Everett before me. To insert the whole of it would be inconvenient; but I do most unequivocally deny this, as I must, I am afraid, ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... the tragedy which my good friend, Master Crebillon, made of the most exalted subject of antiquity. With the adroit hands of a tailor he stitched up a monkey-jacket out of the purple toga, and adorned it with the miserable tawdry trifles of a pitiful lore and pompous Gothic verse! Crebillon has written a French Catiline. I, sire, have written a Roman Catiline! You shall see, sire, and you shall admire! In one of my most wretched, sleepless nights, the devil overcame me, ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... tawdry rubbish, I have no doubt," was her aunt's reply; "only fit for flighty young girls, not for ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... The bungalow is tawdry but cheerful; it is built entirely of wood, with an oil lamp fixed in the wall over the occasional table. The room is comfortably furnished, though in fussy and eccentric Victorian taste; stuffed birds, Highland cattle in oils, antimacassars, and wax fruit are unobtrusively ...
— Night Must Fall • Williams, Emlyn
... were still more to be pitied. Their heads were fast in the holes made, and partially closed again in the centre, so that they were unable to escape from the rain which deluged the whole affair. The water fell in torrents over the gay bonnets, caps, crinolines, etc., until they became a mass of tawdry, and the bare pates of those under them came ludicrously into view. It required the assistance of a carpenter and his aids to get the poor fellows free from their bondage, and enable them to seek safety in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... waistcoat, and trousers flung on them. Then a large elbow-chair covered with dirty-white dimity, with my cravat and shirt collar thrown over the back. Then a chest of drawers with two of the brass handles off, and a tawdry, broken china inkstand placed on it by way of ornament for the top. Then the dressing-table, adorned by a very small looking-glass, and a very large pincushion. Then the window—an unusually large window. Then a dark ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... my impression was not so much disillusionment concerning all things theatrical as realisation of my worst forebodings. In that one moment all glamour connected with the stage fell from me, nor has it since ever returned to me. From the tawdry decorations of the auditorium to the childish make-belief littered around on the stage, I saw the Theatre a painted thing of shreds and patches—the grown child's doll's-house. The Drama may improve us, elevate us, interest and teach us. I am sure it does; long may it flourish! ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... human race—the child had climbed back on the chair that made it tall and had forgotten its tumble. And I was wondering again that I, so short a time before, had been crude enough to be fascinated and fooled by those tawdry posings and pretenses. For the man, as I now saw him, was obviously shallow and vain, a slave to those poor "man-of-the-world" passions—ostentation and cynicism and skill at vices old as mankind and tedious as a treadmill, the commonplace ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... vulgarity. No person of good taste ever goes to a theatre to look at the fronts of the boxes. Comfortable and roomy seats, perfect cleanliness, decent and fitting curtains and other furniture, of good stuff, but neither costly nor tawdry, and convenient, but not dazzling, light, are the proper requirements in the furnishing of an opera-house. As for the persons who go there to look at each other—to show their dresses—to yawn away ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... the West. On an elevation overlooking the rapids, around which modern enterprise has built two ship-canals, St. Lusson erected a cross and post of cedar, with the arms of France, in the presence of priests in their black robes, Indians bedecked with tawdry finery, and bushrangers in motley dress. In the name of the "most high, mighty, and redoubted monarch, Louis XIV. of that name, most Christian King of France and of {178} Navarre," he declared France ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... instruments. He had been telling the detailed story of the preparations made at the camp some ten miles distant from the city, and the supervision of whose affairs Kars had left in his hands. As he ceased speaking Kars turned from his contemplation of the tawdry white and gold of the Elysian Fields which stood out in full view from the ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... even greater pleasure than the proceedings which celebrated the centenary of his chief discovery. The kindly heart would be moved, the high sense of social duty would be satisfied, by the spectacle of well-earned wealth, neither squandered in tawdry luxury and vainglorious show, nor scattered with the careless charity which blesses neither him that gives nor him that takes, but expended in the execution of a well-considered plan for the aid of present and ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... unhappy creature. Her hair was half-down her back, and her lips swollen and bleeding from Jimmie's brutal blow. The cheap rouge on her face; the heavy pencilling of her brows, the crudely applied blue and black grease paint about her eyes, the tawdry paste necklace around her powdered throat; the pitifully thin silk dress in which she had braved the elements for a few miserable dollars: all these brought tears to the ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... freshness seemed holy and sacred, in after years, stripped of their disguise of false sentiment and the aureole with which they were invested by youthful imagination, become absolutely loathsome—just as when we see tamely by daylight the tawdry stage which last night made a world for us full of all the paraphernalia of high romanticism—silver and velvet robes, plumed hats, dim woodland vistas and the echo of a distant high note, youthful beauty, rope-ladders, balconies, daggers, poison, and passionate love-strains. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... an uninteresting place. It has but two objects of interest (in Persian eyes)—the lighthouse (occasionally lit) and a palace of the Shah, built a few years since as a pied-a-terre for his Majesty on the occasion of his visits to Europe. It is a tawdry gimcrack edifice, painted bright blue, red, and green, in the worst possible taste. The Shah, on returning from Europe last time, is said to have remarked to his ministers on landing at Enzelli, "I have not seen ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... despise his literary reputation; and in this, perhaps, the great Congreve was not far wrong. A touch of Steele's tenderness is worth all his finery; a flash of Swift's lightning, a beam of Addison's pure sunshine, and his tawdry playhouse taper is invisible. But the ladies loved him, and he ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... had attracted the attention of what Cassatt called "a fancy lady" who lived two floors below them. She made sometimes as much as nine or ten dollars a week and slept all day or lounged comfortably about in showy, tawdry stuff that in those surroundings seemed elegant luxury. She was caught by the boy's young beauty and strength, and was rapidly training him in every vice and was fitting him to become a professional seducer ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... Art," with which this beautiful edifice at Milan may fully compare. Some of the windows illustrate the life of the Saviour, and the Revelations of St. John at Patmos. The whole Cathedral impresses the mind greatly with its beauty and solemnity, so essentially different to the too frequently tawdry decorations of most ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... fool!" she cried to him at last. "I am a fool, too, that I have ever wasted my thoughts and time upon you. Why can't I make you see? In every other way, heaven knows, you are clever enough! And yet there comes this vulgar, commonplace, tawdry little woman from heaven knows where, and makes such a fool of you that you are willing to fling away your career—to hold your wrists ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in the world, did I fondly think, had I less reason to fear than Mrs. Waring. Her character excited not the slightest apprehension for my own safety. She was upwards of forty, nowise remarkable for grace or beauty; tawdry in her dress; accustomed to render more conspicuous the traces of age by her attempts to hide them; the mother of a numerous family, with a mind but slenderly cultivated; always careful to save appearances; ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... thoughts, and as the root and the source of them, had ever the quivering consciousness that he was and must be in the presence of an unloved Judge; have you not there the naked bones of a very dreadful thing, which does not need any tawdry eloquence of man to make it more solemn and more real? The unloving heart is always ill at ease in the presence of Him whom it does not love. The unloving heart does not love, because it does not trust, nor see the love. Therefore, the unloving heart ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... were scrupulously clean. Sacred vessels, for cooking and washing, were stowed away out of reach of defilement. Above his bed the simple-hearted soldier had nailed a crude coloured print of the Kaiser-i-Hind in robes and crown; and on the opposing wall hung a tawdry looking-glass, almost as dear to ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... was finally brought to a mooring just across the canal from the tented field where the circus was pitched. The dirty brown canvas of the large and small tents showed that the circus had already had a long season. Everything was tarnished and tawdry about the show at this time of year. Even the ornate band wagon was shabby and the vociferous calliope seemed to have the croup whenever ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... anything, but she proved that she was uninjured by getting on her feet. She stared at her disturber bewilderedly, then, perceiving her bonnet, stooped to pick it up, and stood for a moment trying sleepily to poke it into shape and readjust its tawdry plumage. But all of a sudden she gave a start and began looking around her with recovered energy. She missed something, evidently. Gorham followed the direction of her gaze as it shifted, and as his glance met the line of the road he perceived ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... 13th.—Visited the town again to-day. Called at the houses of a couple of the princes, in which I found everything dirty, with an attempt at tawdry finery. A black houri was set to fan me. We were served with rose syrup. Walked to the prince's garden—a beautiful wilderness of cocoa and betel nuts, sweet orange and mango, with heterogeneous patches of rice, sweet potatoes and beans, and here and there ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... House of Usher," and in another, of "The Murders in the Hue Morgue;" and it was not to be expected that he should, Only too often did he sink to the grade of the ordinary "Tale from 'Blackwood,'" which he himself satirized in his usual savage vein of humor. Yet even in his flimsiest and most tawdry tales we see the truth of Mr. Lowell's assertion that Poe had "two of the prime qualities of genius,—a faculty of vigorous yet minute analysis, and a wonderful fecundity of imagination." Mr. Lowell said also that Poe combined "in a very remarkable manner two faculties which are seldom ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... into fussy opulence. He wrote for the rabble, and he who writes for the rabble has a ticket to Limbus one way. The Rossettis made their appeal to the Elect Few. Dickens was sired by Wilkins Micawber and dammed by Mrs. Nickleby. He wallowed in the cheap and tawdry, and the gospel of sterling simplicity was absolutely outside his orbit. Dickens knew no more about art than did the prosperous beefeater, who, being partial to the hard sound of the letter, asked Rossetti for a copy of "The Gurm," and thus supplied ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... down, and all its old ornaments stript and carried away to the owner's other house, where they were set up, and looked as awkward as if some one were to carry away the old tombs they had seen lately at the Abbey, and stick them up in Lady C.'s tawdry gilt drawing-room. Here John smiled, as much as to say, "That would be foolish indeed." And then I told how, when she came to die, her funeral was attended by a concourse of all the poor, and some of the gentry too, of the neighborhood for many miles round, to ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... (according to history) the only method yet discovered, then we shall have helped, not only to save innumerable souls from sin, and from that misery which is the inevitable and everlasting consequence of sin, but we shall have helped to save them from a specious and tawdry barbarism, such as corrupted and enervated the seemingly civilized masses of the later Roman empire; and to save our country, within the next century, from some such catastrophe as overtook the Jewish monarchy in spite of all ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... the praise of its Hofbrau and Munich beers. He entered. He found the interior dark and gloomy, though outside the sun shone brilliantly. He ordered a stein of Hofbrau, and carried it into the main hall, which was just off the bar-room. It was much lighter here, though the hall had the tawdry appearance of a theater in the day-time; and the motes swam thickly in the beams of sunshine which entered through the half-closed shutters. It was only at ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... carried straw in their shoes as a sign to inform the public where a false oath might be procured for half a crown, sharpers, receivers of stolen goods, clippers of coin, forgers of bank notes, and tawdry women, blooming with paint and brandy, who, in their anger, made free use of their nails and their scissors, yet whose anger was less to be dreaded than their kindness. With these wretches the narrow alleys of the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... without an apoplectic tendency. Moreover, there are sham Metaphors, which overhanging that same Thought's-Body (best naked), and deceptively bedizening, or bolstering it out, may be called its false stuffings, superfluous show-cloaks (Putz-Mantel), and tawdry woollen rags: whereof he that runs and reads may gather ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... girls, just landing from one of the whalers, their beautiful forms hid under old greasy red or checked shirts, generally put on with the hind parts before. In some cases the sailors, knowing their taste for finery, bring out with them, from London, old tawdry gowns, and fierce coloured ribands. And thus equipped, they come on shore the most grotesque objects imaginable, each highly delighted with ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... cast around one thrilling glance at this magnificent panorama, and then passed to the vestibule, where, if he had not been previously informed, he would immediately perceive that he was entering the house of no common man. In the spacious and lofty hall which opens before him, he marks no tawdry and unmeaning ornaments, but before, on the right, on the left, all around, the eye is struck and gratified with objects of science and taste, so classed and arranged as to produce their finest effect. On one side, specimens of sculpture set out in such order as to exhibit ... ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... leaning, and who appeared hugely delighted with the enchantments of the garden. Lord, how he stared at the fireworks! Gods, how he huzzayed at the singing of a horrible painted wench who shrieked the ears off my head! A twopenny string of glass beads and a strip of tawdry cloth are treasures in Iroquois-land, and ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... expected to see; it is a Basque rather than a French church, has a very high chancel and altar and no transepts, and the altar is marked by a striking profusion of color and of gilding, which does not degenerate into the tawdry and which lights up vividly under the entering noon light. The chapels at the sides are similarly decorated. Dark oaken balconies, elaborately carved, run in three tiers along the upper part of the nave. The seats in these are ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... handed down from the Ark. Coats and trousers, equipped for their last adventure with mysterious darns and patches, cheated the eye like a painted beauty at a ball. Women's finery lay in disordered heaps—silk blouses covered with tawdry lace, skirts heavy with gaudy trimming—the draggled plumage of fine birds that had come to grief. But here buyer and seller met on level terms, for each knew to a hair the value of the sorry garments; and they chaffered with crafty eyes, each searching for the silent thought ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... nothing but new methods of arranging the hair, and patterns of gowns. The new, exaggerated toilettes of the actresses, their gait, even the spurious elegance of their speech, which seemed to her of the highest distinction, and with it all the tawdry magnificence of the gilding and the lights, the gaudy placard at the door, the long line of carriages, and all the somewhat unwholesome excitement that springs up about a popular play; that was what she loved, that was what ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... work to ferment his blood. How small and close the room was! He leaned out on the sill, as far out as he could, in the sun. It was shining full down the street now, gilding the canal-like river at the foot, and throwing over the tall, dingy houses on the opposite side, a tawdry brightness, which, unlike that of the morning with its suggestion of dewy shade, only served to bring out the shabbiness of broken plaster and paintless window; a shamefaced yet aggressive shabbiness, where high-arched ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... the room. Long, low, with four tawdry glass and gilt chandeliers hanging from the not over-clean ceiling, cushions spreading all over the floor excepting in the middle where lay an exquisite Persian carpet, long mirrors on all sides, little inlaid tables, and ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... opportunities are denied them. They would always rather play than be played to; they would rather, where early labor has not sapped vitality, play outdoors than sit in a fetid atmosphere watching tawdry spectacles. But play, the idealization of life's experiences, they will find somewhere. To this need the home must minister by the provision of space, time, opportunity, and the means of play. If through either sloth, selfishness, preoccupation, or a ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... it. There was no heavy closeness of greasepaint, no scent of soiled and tawdry costumes which years before had revolted her behind the scenes of a musical comedy. This work was done in the clean mornings; the appurtenances seemed rich and gorgeous and new. On a set that was joyous with Manchu hangings a ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... told me that the street was not quite awake; it was waiting for the outpourings from the taverns and mug-houses. I bade him hurry me to the "Red Slipper" as soon as possible, for never have I had any stomach for these tawdry evils, fit as they are only ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... movement towards her, then, checked himself abruptly and stood looking down at her in silence. From the ball-room there floated out the strains of the latest fox-trot, sounding curiously cheap and tawdry as they cut across the deep, almost solemn intensity that prevailed in the quiet room where a man had just stripped his soul naked to the eyes of the woman he loved and now stood as one ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... crude and tawdry thing compared to the real drama so many of us play in every moment ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... after nightfall. In summer it is less dismal; there are gardens and restaurants, dancing gipsies and Hungarian Tziganes, but even then the entertainment is generally so poor, and the surroundings so tawdry, that one is glad to leave them at an early hour ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... been very busy looking about for the last two days, and have been in fifty houses if I have been in one. I want some place with a decent address, cheap, and beyond all things, clean. The dirty holes that some of these lodgings are! such tawdry finery and such servants, with their faces and hands not merely dirty, but absolutely macadamised. And they all make this confounded great Exhibition a plea ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... strike harder than he knows or intends. He may be careful to put on his boxing-gloves, and yet forget, that, the older they grow, the more plainly may the knuckles inside be felt. Moreover, in the heat of contest, the eye is insensibly drawn to the crown of victory, whose tawdry tinsel glitters through that dust of the ring which obscures Truth's wreath of simple leaves. I have sometimes thought that my young friend, Mr. Biglow, needed a monitory hand laid on his arm,—aliquid sufflaminandus erat. I have never thought it good husbandry to water the ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... purpose lies deeper than that which inspires a water-colour sketch. We must learn when and why that house was built; we must see how the facts reconcile its somewhat tawdry, its somewhat suburban aspect, with the richer and more romantic aspects of the park. The park is even now, though it be the middle of autumn, full of blowing green, and the brown circling woods, full of England and English home life. That single tree ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... straightway converted him. My friend bade me look at the picture, and, kneeling down beside me, I know prayed with all his honest heart that the truth might shine down upon me too; but I saw no glimpse of heaven at all. I saw but a poor picture, an altar with blinking candles, a church hung with tawdry strips of red and white calico. The good, kind W—— went away, humbly saying 'that such might have happened again if heaven so willed it.' I could not but feel a kindness and admiration for the good man. I know his works are made to square with his faith, that he dines on a ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Mayor's show. The other boys could stand on stools and see it all. They could hold horses at the gate of the inn at the September fair, and so see all the farces. They could see the famous Norwich puppet-play. But he—what pleasure did he ever have? A tawdry pageant by a lot of clumsy country bumpkins at Whitsuntide or Pentecost, or a silly school-boy masque at Christmas, with the master scolding like a heathen Turk. ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... one of a row of tawdry modern buildings, the lower floors of which were utilized as shops—an undistinguished sort of place, in an undistinguished street. They climbed upstairs and wandered through two or three rooms, all alike save ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... tastefully fitted up. There was no show, however—no empty glare to catch the eye; on the contrary, the whole concern was marked by an air of solid, warm comfort, that was much more indicative of wealth and independence than tawdry embellishment would ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... and admirable writer had one constant fault, which is so vulgar and trivial that it remains as much of a wonder as it is of an offence. He seeks emphasis by the expedient of big type and small type, of capitals and small capitals, of italics and black letter, and of tawdry little illustrations. Long before the reader arrives at the point at which it is intended that his emotions shall be stirred, his eye warns him that the shock is coming. He knows beforehand that the rhetorical bolt is to fall just there, ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... Romance and mystery were in her smile; and yet what had life held for her, she mused now, except the frustrated hope, the blighted fruit, the painted lily? Her beauty had brought her nothing that was not tawdry, nothing that was not a gaudy imitation of happiness. She had given herself for what? For the shadow of reality, for the tinted shreds of a damaged illusion. The past, in spite of her many triumphs, had been worse than tragic; it had been comic—since it had left her beggared. Looking back ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... taking Jane by the hand he led her around behind the monster and up the broad tail to the great, horned back. "Now will we ride in the state that our forebears knew, before which the pomp of modern kings pales into cheap and tawdry insignificance. How would you like to canter through Hyde Park on ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... imperial precedency, and astonished weak minds by the feudal powers which I hinted to be lurking constructively in the charters of this proud establishment. Once I remember being on the box of the Holyhead mail, between Shrewsbury and Oswestry, when a tawdry thing from Birmingham, some Tallyho or Highflier, all flaunting with green and gold, came up alongside of us. What a contrast to our royal simplicity of form and color is this plebeian wretch! The single ornament on ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... end to end, almost cheek by jowl with the royalties; the M.-A. was quite jubilant when she heard we had had such "good places." Hundreds of gondolas swarmed round; many of them in the old Carpaccio rig-outs, very gorgeous though a little tawdry when taken out of the canvas. Hut the rush and the collisions, and the sound of many waters walloping under the bellies of the gondolas, and the blows of fighting oars—regular underwater wrestling matches—made it as vivid and amusing as a prolonged Oxford and Cambridge boat-race ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... down into an interior that is small, very usually planned, and much defaced by XVII century gilt—yet is essentially dignified and impressive. Eliminate the tawdry altars, take away the stucco Saints and painted Virgins, let the chapels be mere shadowy corners in the dark perspective, and the little church appears like the meeting-place of the Faithful of an early Christianity. Its nave and ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... for a moment at the mentionable facts of this child's daily routine of life and see if such an existence justifies the use of the term 'slavery.' After she had furnished a night of servitude to the brutal passions of vile frequenters of the place, she was then compelled each night to put off her tawdry costume, array herself in the garb of a scrub-woman and, on her hands and knees, scrub the house from top to bottom. No weariness, no exhaustion, ever excused her from this drudgery, which was a full day's work for ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... in 1893 and in the men who went aimlessly seeking work in the streets of Chicago in that year there were none of these signs. Like the coal mining town from which Beaut McGregor had come, the city lay sprawling and ineffective before him, a tawdry disorderly dwelling for millions of men, built not for the making of men but for the making of millions by a few ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... excellent pictures in water-color on the walls, and the absence of all tawdry decoration was conspicuous. Even the bed, the chair, and the table, plain enough, goodness knows, had an air of belonging to a man ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... quip would leave us cold. The "Isles of Greece" seem rather tawdry too; but on the "Address to the Ocean," or on "The Dying Gladiator," ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hand whetting his scythe. Through a rift in the trees appeared a patch of delicate blue sky and the edge of a rosy cloud. Mrs. LeMasters came to the wistful end of an alluring and musty reminiscence and gazed regretfully at the tawdry beauties of the present. Then she turned her eyes upon Joe, and with a sigh that was sodden with romance: "How could you ever bear ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... thin and feeble on the canvas. Details no longer fascinated him, but were annoying and depressing. In fact, he ignored them and began to paint in a broad, slap-dash style. Thus, instead of a clear, powerful portrayal of life, the picture became ever more plain of a tawdry, slovenly female. There was nothing original or charming about such a dull stereotyped piece of work, so he thought; a veritable imitation of a Moukh drawing, banal in idea as in execution; and, as usual, Yourii became sad ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... dignity in her face. Two soft, pink spots of color began to bloom out in her cheeks, and her eyes took on a twinkle of amusement. She was watching the visitor as if she were a passing Punch-and-Judy show come in to play for a moment for her entertainment. She lay and regarded her and her tawdry display of finery with a quiet, disinterested aloofness that was beginning to get on ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... honor which he had been declaring himself too advanced to accept blindly. Suddenly his boyhood ideals and his mature ideas fell into the parallel of contrast—and beside that which he had inherited, his acquired thought seemed tawdry. Of course, charging a field gun was an easy and uncomplicated thing in comparison with his own problem, but his father would have met the larger demand, too, with the same obedience ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... of Jack, there had recently been enacted, on the public square of this southern city, a tawdry little tragedy in brown and coffee color, having to do with the fascinations of a certain damsel known in her own circles as the "gold-tooth girl." The latter had, in her earlier days, drifted northward, ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... stood so I presently became aware of a current of air passing across the room in the direction of the open door. It came from a window before which a tawdry red curtain had been draped. Either the window behind the curtain was wide open, which is alien to Chinese habits, or it was shattered. While I was wondering if Harley intended ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... poor exile's table, which pleased the eye as well as taste. And the very utensils, plain Wedgewood though they were, had a classical simplicity, which made Mrs. Hazeldean's old India delf, and Mrs. Dale's best Worcester china look tawdry and barbarous in comparison. For it was a Flaxman who gave designs to Wedgewood, and the most truly refined of all our manufactures in porcelain (if we do not look to the mere material) is in the reach of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... idea came upon her that when this happy time should arrive, no one would claim her necklace from her, and that the man at the stables would not be so disagreeably punctual in sending in his bill. "'All-beautiful in naked purity!'" What a tawdry world was this, in which clothes and food and houses are necessary! How perfectly that boy-poet had understood it all! "'Immortal amid ruin!'" She liked the idea of the ruin almost as well as that of the immortality, and the stains quite as well as the purity. As immortality ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... the streetS Asserts a joyless goal— Re-echoed clang where traffic meets, And drab monotony repeats The hour-encumbered role. Tinsel and glare, twin tawdry shams Outshine the evening star Where puppet-show and printed lie, Victim and trapper and trap, deny Old truths that always are. So fare ye, fare ye well, old roofs! The syren warns the shore, The flowing tide sings overside Of far-off beaches where abide ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... single gentleman, not a little finical and ceremonious, and a mighty beau, though of the tawdry sort, and affecting foreign airs; as if he was afraid it would not be judged by any other mark that he ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... mouth and a tremulous movement of his right eye-lid showed plainly that he had not yet forgotten the fun and frolic of youth. His dress was of richer and more gaudy material, but at the same time more tawdry and tattered, than that of the others. Altogether he looked like an artiste in distressed circumstances, and such he really was. At a word and a sign from the host he laid aside his bone and drew from ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... commotion. It is long since the first two came out, but they are always so well adorned and so smart, that they are in great request as partners. They have as much success as the younger sisters, almost as much as the mother in former days; moreover they carry off their tawdry jewelry and finery so well, and have such charming easy manners, with the giddy laugh of spoilt children, and such a Spanish way of flirting with a fan. Nevertheless they do not get married. No admirer has ever been able to get over the sight of that singular home. The wasteful ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... indicated her proclivities in art. But Miss Stanley took no notice of these things. She walked straight across to the wardrobe and opened it. There, hanging among Ann Veronica's more normal clothing, was a skimpy dress of red canvas, trimmed with cheap and tawdry braid, and short—it could hardly reach below the knee. On the same peg and evidently belonging to it was a black velvet Zouave jacket. And then! a garment that was conceivably a ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... in comparison. The prison was crowded with colored people of all complexions, and almost every form of human vice and misery was huddled together there with the poor victims of misfortune. Thieves, murderers, and shameless girls, decked out with tawdry bits of finery, were mixed up with modest-looking, heart-broken wives, and mothers mourning for the children that had been torn from their arms in the recent sale. Some were laughing, and singing lewd songs. Others sat still, with tears trickling down their sable cheeks. Here and there the fierce ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... whose language is exuberant but not exact, and to whom we should never think of referring for precise information or for well-digested thought and experience. His argument continually slides into wholesale assertion and vague declamation, and in his love of ornament he frequently becomes tawdry. For example, he tells us ("Apoc. Sketches," p. 265) that "Botany weaves around the cross her amaranthine garlands; and Newton comes from his starry home—Linnaeus from his flowery resting-place—and Werner and Hutton from ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... be made for tawdry accessories and repeated coats of shiny oleaginous paint—very disagreeable where it has peeled off and almost more so where it has not. What work could stand against such treatment as the Valsesian terra-cotta figures have had to put up with? Take the Venus of ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... sees only in East London. Their pale faces were dominated by that most unlovely of human expressions, the cunning and shrewdness of the bargain-hunter who starves if he cannot make a successful trade, and yet the final impression was not of ragged, tawdry clothing nor of pinched and sallow faces, but of myriads of hands, empty, pathetic, nerveless and workworn, showing white in the uncertain light of the street, and clutching forward for food which was already ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... life, perhaps—to open, and to read them. And what have we to do with books? The Herr Doctor might perhaps be asked for his advice; but we have no index expurgatorius in Gruenewald. Had we but that, we should be the most absolute parody and farce upon this tawdry earth." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ex-Governor, and last of all and most imposing, Monsignor Francisco Saenz de Urturi, the Archbishop, in his robes, purple cap and gold chain, followed by his suite. Him, General Shafter, came forward to meet, and the two shook hands under the tawdry chandelier. It was a strange enough sight. By many and devious and bloody ways had the priest and the soldier come to meet each other on ...
— The Surrender of Santiago - An Account of the Historic Surrender of Santiago to General - Shafter, July 17, 1898 • Frank Norris
... superb creation had conquered him. It would be a piece of audacity on his part, he felt, even to think of imitating such a gown. Why, it was not a gown. It was a dream, a fantastic vision—without a bodice, without puffs or frills or tawdry trimmings of any sort. Simplicity itself ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... piece to the spectacle which the so-called Park-hill affords. It is Naples' "Largo dei Castello," with its dancing apes, shrieking Bajazzoes, the whole deafening jubilee which has been transported to a northern wood. Here also, in the wooden booths, large, tawdry pictures show what delicious plays you may enjoy within. The beautiful female horse-rider stands upon the wooden balcony and cracks with her whip, whilst Harlequin blows the trumpet. Fastened to a perch, large, gay parrots ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... was Jose Querida who dominated the whole show, flooding everything with the splendour of his sunshine so that all else in the same room looked cold or tawdry or washed out. His canvas, with its superbly vigorous drawing, at once became the sensation of the exhibition. Sunday supplements reproduced it with a photograph of Querida looking amiably at a statuette of Venus which he held in his long, tapering fingers; magazines tried to print it ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... task extended itself to the innocent object of his protection, and he internally said to himself, as he surveyed her scornfully: "A proper queen of beggars to walk the streets of Perth with, and I a decent burgher! This tawdry minion must have as ragged a reputation as the rest of her sisterhood, and I am finely sped if my chivalry in her behalf comes to Catharine's ears. I had better have slain a man, were he the best in Perth; and, by hammer and nails, I would have done ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... back, and a tremendous three-footed clay-pot sat on his head and shoulders, swallowing him so as he too went darkling led by his sweetheart three foot high. When they were gone by, and we had both laughed lustily, said I, 'Natheless, master, my bowels they yearn for one of that tawdry band, even for the poor wife so near the downlying, scarce able to drag herself, yet still, poor soul, helping the weaker ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... morals," and that his character inspired "disesteem, nay, repugnance." Bulwer-Lytton he thought a consummate novel-writer, but "his was by no means a perfect nature"—"a strange mixture of what is really romantic and interesting with what is tawdry and gimcracky." Villette he pronounced "disagreeable, because the writer's mind contains nothing but hunger, rebellion, and rage, and therefore that is all she can put into her book." Of Harriet Martineau, ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... woman, in a dress rather tawdry and rumpled, here drew her veil well down and rose; but, marking every eye upon her, thought it advisable, upon the whole, to ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... the pattern for us. That thought is not a subject to be decorated with tawdry finery of eloquence, or to be dealt with as if it were a sentimental prettiness very fit to be spoken of, but impossible to be practised. It is the duty of every Christian man and woman, and they have ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... room to rise; For praise too dearly loved, or warmly sought, Enfeebles all internal strength of thought, 270 And the weak soul, within itself unblest, Leans for all pleasure on another's breast. Hence ostentation here, with tawdry art, Pants for the vulgar praise which fools impart; Here vanity assumes her pert grimace, 275 And trims her robes of frieze[32] with copper lace; Here beggar pride defrauds her daily cheer, To ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... of thing when they're rich. It's the national Geschmack to stick little tawdry fribbles all over the face ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... gilded mantle and flowing plumes, in his tribute to Gloriana, The Faery Queen, who is none other than Elizabeth herself. Literature partakes of the fierce polemic and religious enthusiasm which mark the troublous times of the Civil War; it becomes tawdry, tinselled, and licentious at the Restoration, and develops into numerous classes and more serious instruction, under the constitutional reigns of the house of Hanover, in which the kings were bad, but the nation prosperous because the rights of ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... his eyes to the futility of his life. His failure to Natalie and her failure to him. Graham, made a man by war and by the love of a good woman. Chris, ending his sordid life in a blaze of glory, and forever forgiven his tawdry sins because of his one ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... diffuses itself, in a great measure, among the women also. Its effects are visible both in their constancy in love and friendship, in which respects they are the very reverse of the French women. Their affections are not to be gained by a bit of sparkling lace, or a tawdry set of liveries. Their deportment is rather grave and reserved; and, on the whole, they have much more of the prude than the coquette in their composition. Being more confined at home, and less engaged in business and pleasure, they take ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... seen—a shabby-looking woman, dressed in soiled and worn garments, which had once been bright and stylish. Her appearance, apart from her dress, was far from attractive; her lean face had dull red blotches upon it, her eyes looked wild and shining, and her gray hair straggled out from her tawdry bonnet. It scarcely needed the evidence of a strong smell of spirits to prove that ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... French, who said she had lately recovered from a serious illness in Paris; the nature of her malady she did not specify; it had left her haggard and thin, but by no means deficient in vivacity. She was dressed with tawdry extravagance, wore a mass of false yellow hair, had her eyebrows dyed black,—piquant contrast,—and her cheeks and lips richly carmined. No veritable information as to her past and present could be gleaned from the mixture of French and English which she ceaselessly gabbled. She had come over ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... the simple, cheaply furnished and somewhat tawdry little room in the Rue St. Jacques was luxury. She was proud of it. She was perfectly contented with ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... the smouldering fire in her eyes proclaimed it. Her long, rather narrow face was gripped between her hands; her elbows rested upon the brick parapet. She gazed at that world of blood-red mists, of unshapely, grotesque buildings, of strange, tawdry colors; she listened to the medley of sounds—crude, shrill, insistent, something like the groaning of a world stripped naked—and she had all the time the air of one who hates the ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... by his writings is due to their flashes of reality. Of course the man was a poseur, a most horrid mountebank and ego-maniac. His tawdry scraps of misused idea, of literary smartness, of dog-eared and greasy reminiscence, repel us. The world of men remained for him as his audience, and he did to civilized society the continuous compliment of an insane self-consciousness ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... works of greatness, of goodness, will be the last things that he will see; for seldom indeed will they be presented to his sight. For the pure, the sweet, the graceful, the dignified, he will have thrust before his eyes gaudy, tawdry caricature and grimace; and, worse still, perhaps wholly vulgar obscenities. Were he in his boyhood given a present in the pictorial line, it would be of an Opera-dancer or a race-course, or an abomination of London low life. What ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... he became thoroughly disgusted with the life he had chosen for himself. The bright sunshine made the shabby carpet and tawdry furniture and soiled mirrors intolerably vulgar. They had just finished a badly cooked, crossly served, untidy dinner, and Roland had no cigar to mend it. Denasia had not eaten at all; she lay on the bright blue sofa with shut eyes, and her faded ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... me go, and wear a beautiful dress. I don't like this dress a bit!" said Cherry, plucking nervously at the coarse and tawdry calico frock Mrs. Ginniss had thought it quite a triumph to obtain and ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... came into it from all quarters on Sundays, and I understood. As a show it lacked convincingness—except the delicatessen-shop, whose sights and odors silenced criticism. It had the further disadvantage, by reason of its tawdry appeals of color and light, of making one feel like a tourist. Above a certain level of culture, no man who is a tourist has the intellectual honesty to admit to himself that he is a tourist. Such honesty is found only on the lower levels. The detective ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... the worst inn's worst room, with mat half hung, The walls of plaster, and the floor of dung; The George and Garter dangling from the bed, Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red, Great Villiers lies; alas, how changed from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... name derives from a saying of Mohammed (of which there are many variants), "Between my tomb and my pulpit is a garden of the Gardens of Paradise" (Burckhardt, Arabia, p. 337). The whole Southern portico (not only a part) now enjoys that honoured name and the tawdry decorations are intended to ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... Lisbon has sometimes been called "The Sultana of the West," and the comparison is apt enough, for like many a sultana her first appearance is conspicuously beautiful, but she will not bear too close inspection. Her jewels are often mere colored glass, her embroideries tawdry, and her garments ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... which is to be found in almost every house in Russia. These obrazye are made of different patterns, but generally take the form of a picture of saints or of the Trinity. They are executed in silver-gilt or brass relief, and adorned with tawdry fringe or other gewgaws. The repeated bows and crosses made by the peasantry before these idols is very surprising to an Englishman, who may have been told that there is little difference between the Greek religion and his own; but if this is the case, ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... through the supper to which Brown treated the company at his hotel. There were about twenty people present, nearly all men; Joan wondered where they had been collected from, and she did not quite like the look of any of them. Fanny was making a great deal of noise, and how funny and tawdry their faces looked under the bright light. After supper there was a dance, the table was pushed aside, and someone—Joan saw with surprise that it was Daddy Brown—pounded away at a one-step on the piano. Everyone danced, the men, ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... the statement. The woman and the girl looked at each other in the tawdry, frowsy, lamp-lit room. Miss Spencer nervously patted her yellow hair into shape, as if gradually recovering her composure and equanimity. The whole affair seemed like a dream to Nella, a disturbing, sinister nightmare. She was a little uncertain ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... the taste in the accompaniments of this funeral. It was an inconsistent attempt at show, a tawdry imitation of more expensive funeral observances. About the wasted face of the once beautiful girl were arranged, not the delicate white blossoms with which affection sometimes loves to surround what was lovely in life, but gaudy flowers of every hue. The dress, too, was fantastic and ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... we leaned over one of the side balconies to watch the crowd streaming down the marble staircases. It is a scene that I never tire of. There is something so fantastically tawdry in the coloured marble of the architecture. It is for all the world like a triumph of ornamental soap work; one expects to smell the odours. And the torrent of humanity pouring liquidly aslant through the mirror-like ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... artist of fairyland, because he recognises its practical possibilities, and yet does not lose the glamour which was never on sea or land. No artist could give more cultured notions of fairyland. In his work the vulgar glories of a pantomime are replaced by well-conceived splendour; the tawdry adjuncts of a throne-room, as represented in a theatre, are ignored. Temples and palaces of the early Renaissance, filled with graceful—perhaps a shade too suave—figures, embody all the charm of the impossible country, with ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... only can tell you that presently she bared her face, her nerves trembling, for the half-hour was nearly over, but with a brave, still light in her hazel eyes. The change had come of which every soul is susceptible. Very bitter tears may have come after that; her life was but a tawdry remnant, she might still think, for that foul lie of hers long ago; but she would take up the days cheerfully, and do ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... touch it, but he stooped and read the title, The Language of Flowers, and saw that—purely by accident of course—a leaf was doubled down as if to mark a place. He straightened himself again, and his proud lip curled in disgust as he glanced from the tawdry flowers to the tawdry book. And from below came suddenly the jingling notes of Lydia's piano and Lydia's voice—not exactly harsh and only occasionally out of tune, but with something hopelessly vulgar in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... best time of all in Thebes of the Hundred Gates is at fall of night, when the shadows cast a seemly cloak over the vulgarity of the modern buildings, and give an air of romance even to the glittering lights of the appalling esplanade, which flaunts its tawdry modernity cheek by jowl with the quay, built by one of the Ptolemies, and in use even to ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... had done naught but wonder and stare. The trip had been a great delight, but she had never desired to linger or to dwell there. Certain sordid effects came over her; reminiscences of the muddy streets, the tawdry shops, ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... now with a strange sense of its superiority. The better to show its attractions, Clinton Grey had placed the figure near a full-length, gold-framed mirror, beside a marble-topped table. Yet how cheap and tawdry these splendors showed beside this work of art! How cruel was the contrast of their own rough working clothes to this miracle of adornment which that same mirror reflected! And even when Clinton ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... her face. She watched it herself with dim half consciousness as it changed before her in the tawdry mirror above the mantelpiece, half longing that he might look up and see it, half terrified lest ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... favours past: For, since without desert he got a name, He fears to lose it now with greater shame. Fame, like a little mistress of the town, Is gained with ease, but then she's lost as soon: For, as those tawdry misses, soon or late, Jilt such as keep them at the highest rate; And oft the lacquey, or the brawny clown, Gets what is hid in the loose-bodied gown,— So, fame is false to all that keep her long; And turns up to the fop that's brisk and young. Some wiser poet now would leave fame first; But elder ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... she had never spent, Mrs. Linton felt; and now the fan was hanging down among the brocaded flowers of her dress, making them look tawdry as she left the box, and noticed how at least two men were lying in wait for her party. There was, however, a frankness in Herbert Courtland's strategy which George Holland's did not possess. Mr. Courtland was looking directly at her; Mr. Holland was pretending to be engrossed ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... execution of the sentence need not occupy us long. Belshazzar so little realised the facts, that he issued his order to deck out Daniel in the tawdry pomp he had promised him, as if a man with such a message would be delighted with purple robes and gold chains, and made him third ruler of the kingdom which he had just declared was numbered and ended ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... in his black cut-away coat, snuff-coloured trousers, and high-crowned felt hat with its ornamental band. This receded to the back of his head as he grew hotter. The harp was slung from his shoulder, the gilding looking tawdry in the open day. Twice during the walk, once in a round clearing fringed with birches, and once in a pine-glade, he stopped, put the harp down and played, sitting on a felled tree. Hazel, quite intoxicated with excitement, danced between the slender boles till her hair ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... tainted circle, by the miserable, poverty-stricken appearance of the whole district. The people crowd around him, losing all sense of manly dignity or mental degradation in the anxiety for gain. Skinny shrivelled hands touch his clothes in the hope of arresting his progress; worn-out tawdry finery is thrust before him, in the hope of tempting him to purchase. No shop, or rather store, is devoted to any particular object of gain. Butter, dates, olives, broken and pawned articles, are mixed ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... bizarre cafes, like the d'Harcourt, crowded at night with noisy women tawdry in ostrich plumes, cheap feather boas, and much rouge. The d'Harcourt at midnight is ablaze with light, but the crowd is common and you move on up the boulevard under the trees, past the shops full of Quartier ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... taken into another room, a small back room, bare except for a table and sofa and a tawdry ikon in the farthest corner. And there we waited fully fifteen minutes in absolute silence. How silent that house was, full of invisible horrors! The headquarters of the secret police—why shouldn't it be terrifying when you think of the ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... un-bend to kiss their children. If one of them lived in my house I should stick pins in him. Morality and goodness that lie no deeper than "behavior" are like the veneering they put on cheap tables—very tawdry and ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... a love of distinction, among the lowest dregs of society, as there is also a love of plush and other insignificant tawdry among our more wealthy republicans. Few would have thought of one inebriate affecting superiority over another, (the vote-cribber was an inebriate, as we shall show,) but so ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... me. The blight of anticipated evil even weighed upon me ere I passed yonder hall, and when I knew no reason why I should not find you loving of heart and humble of desire as in other days. Is it all gone? Are you no longer the same? This tawdry velvet in which I found you arrayed—is it the type of a something equally foreign to your nature, and which imperial Rome has thrown about you to aid in crushing out the better feelings ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... told his age; just turned of thirty-one. He is also of an ancient family; but, in his person and manners, more of what I call the coxcomb than any of his companions. He dresses richly; would be thought elegant in the choice and fashion of what he wears; yet, after all, appears rather tawdry than fine.—One sees by the care he takes of his outside, and the notice he bespeaks from every one by his own notice of himself, that the inside takes up the least of his attention. He dances finely, Mr. Lovelace says; is a master of music, and singing is one of his principal ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... me out the programme of the coming Promenade Concert season? I would give anything to hear Wagner and Beethoven once more. My allegiance to these giants, as to Shakespeare and Milton, grows stronger every day. The appalling tawdry trash that passes for music nowadays, and the degradation of art and literature which seems to be the feature of the twentieth century, intensify my loyalty to great musicians and noble writers. What is the cause of this decadence? There is surely enough inspiration for genius in ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... was evidently more than half a joke. Anti-Smith was more good-humouredly in evidence than the winning party. Just this touch of buffoonery completed our sense of the farce-comedy character of the situation. The town was tawdry in its preparations—and knew it; but half sincere in its enthusiasm—and knew it. If the crowd had been composed of Americans, we should have anticipated an unhappy time for Smith; but good, loyal Canadians, by the limitations of temperament, could get no further than a spirit ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... aim of which will be to shew this extraordinary people in their proper colours, not as their own moral maxims would represent them, but as they really are—to divest the court of the tinsel and the tawdry varnish with which, like the palaces of the Emperor, the missionaries have found it expedient to cover it in their writings; and to endeavour to draw such a sketch of the manners, the state of society, the language, literature and fine arts, the sciences and civil institutions, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... of her wealth, but of her mental attainments. It is from such a community that we come to-day to write upon your visitors' book the name of Brooklyn. In our way we are as proud of our homes as was the old Roman matron of her two sons, although we may be as poorly decked with tawdry jewels as she was. We are as proud of our independence in politics as Philadelphia should be ashamed of her regularity. Boston is credited with being the Athens of America. Brooklyn deserves the title, but would leave to Boston her pedantic ways. We are sincere in our speech and simple ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... is a challenge all must meet, And nobly must we dare; Its gold is tawdry when we cheat, Its fame a bitter snare If it be stolen from life's clutch; Men must be true to ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... stood ready on the steps of the portal to grant us admittance; and, throwing open the valves, we entered the chapel and were struck by the justness of its proportions, the simple majesty of the arched roof, and the mild solemn light, equally diffused over every part of the edifice. No tawdry ornaments, no glaring pictures, disgraced the sanctity of the place. The high altar, standing distinct from the walls, which were hung with a rich velvet, was the only object on which many ornaments were lavished, and even there the elegance of the workmanship concealed the glare ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... his stirred imagination the sublimity of the Desert dwarfed humanity. These people had been wiser to choose another place for the flaunting of their tawdry insignificance. Any minute this Wilderness, "huddled in grey annihilation," might awake and notice ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... waxed tiles, without carpets or mats, and the furniture was tawdry. We got into our beds, which fatigue could scarcely render it possible to endure, on account of the bugs. A more infernal night I never passed, and I have often thought since, how hazardous it is to trust to first impressions. This ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... dwelt there solitarily and blissfully, looking forward to Sunday's walk round the park, looking back on it. Proudly she could tell herself that her dreams of the Prince of the island had not been illusions as far as he was concerned; for he had a great soul. He did not aim at a tawdry glory. He was a loss to our army—no loss to his country or the world. A woman might clasp her feeling of pride in having foreseen distinction for him; and a little, too, in distinguishing now the true individual distinction from the feathered uniform ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... ranks of the congregation kneel, stand, fall prostrate, and press the brow upon the ground with a rhythm so reverential and so dignified that the watcher forgets for a time the torn or tawdry raiment, the grime of the factory, the dust of the streets, and feels that each fresh attitude of devotion is indeed the true posture of prayer. It is as a sea troubled by the breath of some unseen spirit,—wave upon wave rising, ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... there were manifold traces of hasty and temporary arrangement; new carpets and old hangings; old paint, new gilding; battalions of odd French chairs, squadrons of queer English tables; and large tasteless lamps and tawdry chandeliers, evidently true cockneys, and only taking the air by way of change. There was, too, throughout the drawing-rooms an absence of all those minor articles of ornamental furniture that are the offering of taste to the home we love. There were no books neither; few flowers; ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... bit of drowned finery! Oh, Little Billee, I thought you were poetical! No poet could keep such a tawdry ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... beautiful teeth, and, as I observed, has the peculiar grace of one whose eyes smile in harmony with her lips. Nothing could be more obliging than her manners, and I could scarce think it possible that the tawdry, noisy Mrs Wickham could be her sister. Her eyes are dark and animated, with long eyelashes which soften their somewhat alarming brilliance. ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... as long as 'carent vate sacro,' who will, forsooth, do them the honour to make poetry out of a little of them (and of how little!) by translating them into words, which he himself, just in proportion as he is a good poet, will confess to be clumsy, tawdry, ineffectual? Was there no poetry in these Puritans because they wrote no poetry? We do not mean now the unwritten tragedy of the battle-psalm and the charge; but simple idyllic poetry and quiet home-drama, love-poetry of ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... shall hear no more of the bread and cheese and onions, pot-house scores, and low company, with which you have so unceremoniously taxed our lordship. You will drive your jumped-up coach, with your awkward wives and dowdy daughters, and your tawdry liveries, all the way from Russell Square to the Green Park, to catch the chance of a glimpse of our lordship. You find out from our lordship's footman that our lordship wears a particular collar to his coat, and you will move heaven and earth to find out our lordship's tailor. When ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... most of the time, speaking when she was spoken to but without any of her characteristic freshness and boldness. She was the schoolgirl that Clowes expected her to be. Her very dress irritated Lawrence, as if he had seen a fine painting in a tawdry frame, or a pearl of price foiled by a spurious setting. He had not felt any glow at all, and was left to suppose his fancy had played him a trick. Disappointing! and now there was no chance of revising his impression, for apparently she had gone away with Laura—who should have ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... the "tinsel-slippered feet" to Thetis, the goddess of the sea. How comparatively poor an epithet this 'tinsel-slippered' sounds for those who know of 'tinsel' only in its modern acceptation of mean and tawdry finery, affecting a splendour which it does not really possess. But learn its earlier use by learning its derivation, bring it back to the French 'etincelle', and the Latin 'scintillula'; see in it, as Milton ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... she said sorrowfully, without a bit of anger, so that I was softened in a trice. "But the ladies of New York, even, are no such tawdry make-believes as this.—Heaven knows, I would give ten years of life for a sight of the fine ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... was smouldering on a couple of fire-dogs on the hearth. And on the chimney-piece above stood a foggy mirror and a modern clock with an inlaid wooden case; Fraisier had picked it up at an execution sale, together with the tawdry imitation rococo candlesticks, with the zinc beneath showing through ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... ferment his blood. How small and close the room was! He leaned out on the sill, as far out as he could, in the sun. It was shining full down the street now, gilding the canal-like river at the foot, and throwing over the tall, dingy houses on the opposite side, a tawdry brightness, which, unlike that of the morning with its suggestion of dewy shade, only served to bring out the shabbiness of broken plaster and paintless window; a shamefaced yet aggressive shabbiness, where high-arched doorways and wide entries spoke to better days, and also to a subsequent decay, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... Church of Rome make herself attractive also? If she knows better how to do this than Protestant churches do, small blame to her for that. For the people delight in these graven images. Listen to the hushed "oh bel!" which falls from them as they peep through grating after grating; and the more tawdry a chapel is, the better, as a general rule, they are contented. They like them as our own people like Madame Tussaud's. Granted that they come to worship the images; they do; they hardly attempt to conceal it. The writer of the authorised ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... the foreigner's whole energies might be devoted to the honest endeavour to raise conditions in his country to a level approaching the British standard. Any contention against the existing order, and, above all, anything against Britain, appealed directly to these rather tawdry people. ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... in a horrid little private box, with a vulgar drop-scene staring me in the face. I looked out from behind the curtain, and surveyed the house. It was a tawdry affair, all Cupids and cornucopias, like a third-rate wedding cake. The gallery and pit were fairy full, but the two rows of dingy stalls were quite empty, and there was hardly a person in what I suppose they called the dress-circle. Women went about with oranges ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... bizarre and extravagant contrast; an effect, too, of luxury, though in truth it was furnished for the most part with stuffs and objects picked up at no very great expense in San Francisco shops. Nevertheless, there was nothing tawdry and, here and there, something really precious. Draperies on the walls, furniture made by Wen Ho and Prosper, lacquered in black and red, brass and copper, bright pewter, gay china, some fur rugs, a gorgeous Oriental ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... of Charity. The London creches have a night school for working girls and grown women in connection with the principal part of the institution; also a Sunday school for children. Among the rules is one which forbids the wearing of artificial flowers or any tawdry finery during school-time. But in another part of London artificial flowers in a Sunday bonnet are a sign of a reclaimed female drunkard, as the clergyman has hit on the ingenious method of advising the women to leave off drinking, that they may be able ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... London. Their pale faces were dominated by that most unlovely of human expressions, the cunning and shrewdness of the bargain-hunter who starves if he cannot make a successful trade, and yet the final impression was not of ragged, tawdry clothing nor of pinched and sallow faces, but of myriads of hands, empty, pathetic, nerveless and workworn, showing white in the uncertain light of the street, and clutching forward for food which was already unfit ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... immigrant importer and pearl merchant, with Lying Bill, McHenry, Hallman, and Landers, the latter only recently back from Auckland. I was immediately aware of the sad contrast with Tautira. The club-room looked mean and tawdry after so many weeks among the cocoas and breadfruits; the floor, tables, and chairs ugly compared with the grass, the puraus, the roses, and the gardenias, the endearing environment of that lovely village. The white ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... ambition, and all the swarm of distracting desires will be driven from the soul in which the lamp of faith burns bright. Ordinary human motives will appeal in vain to the ears which have heard the tones of the heavenly music, and all the pomps of life will show poor and tawdry to the sight that has gazed on the vision of the great white throne and the crystal sea. The most ignorant and erroneous 'religious sentiment'—to use a modern phrase—is mightier than all other forces in the world's history. It is like some of those terrible compounds of modern ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... limited, but I could just make out the girl I had followed sitting upon a bed; while leaning against the wall, a dirty clay pipe in her mouth, was the vilest old woman I have ever in my life set eyes on. She was very small, with a pinched-up nut-cracker face, dressed in an old bit of tawdry finery, more than three sizes too large for her. Her hair fell upon her shoulders in a tangled mass, and from under it her eyes gleamed out like those of a wicked little Scotch terrier ready to bite. As I bent down to ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... room in the Palazzo Arconati, on the Grand Canal, Venice. The room itself is beautiful in its decayed grandeur, but the furnishings and hangings are either tawdry and meretricious or avowedly modern. The three windows at the back open on to a narrow covered balcony, or loggia, and through them can be seen the west side of the canal. Between recessed double doors on either side of the room is a fireplace ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... their very realism and truth of expression, to the vague and happily unexplained monsters, the rigid gods and hieratic princes, who are given new names by each succeeding generation. A knowledge that behind painted masks and gilded, tawdry gew-gaws are the remains of a once living person gives even the mummy a human interest denied to the most exquisite ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... harshness of the judgment that is passed upon her. This woman is Marie Louise, Empress of France, consort of the great Napoleon, and archduchess of imperial Austria. When the most brilliant figure in all history, after his overthrow in 1814, was in tawdry exile on the petty island of Elba, the empress was already about to become a mother; and the father of her unborn child was not Napoleon, but another man. This is almost all that is usually remembered of her—that she was unfaithful to Napoleon, ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... height and strong make. His hair, of which he had a great profusion, was red and hung in disorder about his face and shoulders. His face was pale, his eyes glassy and protruding. His dress was green, clumsily trimmed here and there with gaudy lace. A pair of tawdry ruffles dangled at his wrists, while his throat was nearly bare. His hat was ornamented with a cluster of peacock's feathers, limp, broken, and trailing down his back. Girded to his side was the steel hilt of an old sword, without blade or scabbard; and a few knee-ribbons ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... forth fresh treatises, aroused fierce controversies, subsided into new sects; and day by day they altered more and more the once noble aspect of the ancient basilica. They hung their nauseous relics on its mighty walls, they stuck their tiny tapers about its glorious pillars, they wreathed their tawdry fringes around its massive altars. Here they polished, there they embroidered. Wherever there was a window, they curtained it with gaudy cloths; wherever there was a statue, they bedizened it with artificial ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... of Dumas, George Sand, and Scribe. And, though but a small part of the sixty works can be called good, the inferior work is not discreditable: it is free from affectation, extravagance, nastiness, or balderdash. It never sinks into such tawdry stuff as Bulwer, Disraeli, and even Dickens, could indite in their worst moods. Trollope is never bombastic, or sensational, or prurient, or grotesque. Even at his worst, he writes pure, bright, graceful English; he tells us about wholesome men and women in a manly tone, and if he becomes dull, he ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... sure of that, Bristles?" asked Fred, upon hearing his chum make such an astonishing assertion with regard to that tawdry breastpin picked ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... his first derangement was over, he was glad to see her. Tira might not come. If she did, he could do something. He could even, at a pinch and with Tira's consent, put the knowledge of the tawdry business into Nan's hands. But she would not sit down. Plainly she had received a setback. She was refusing to accept his hospitality to any informal extent. And he saw he had hurt her. He was always reading the inner minds of people, and that was where his disastrous sympathy was forever ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... a nation of painters, but a nation of picture-lovers, though in Holland, as in other countries, one not seldom sees upon walls from which better would be expected tawdry art, about which all that can be said is that it was bought cheap. The country possesses a number of good public galleries, and much is done in this way and by the frequent exhibition of paintings to foster the love of the artistic. The principal exhibitions ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... murderer could be seen from the stream of blood that ran slowly from Mrs. Jasher's breast. Apparently she had been stabbed in the lungs, for the wound was on the right side. There she lay, poor woman, in her tawdry finery, crumpled up, battered and bruised, dead amongst the ruins of her home. Jane immediately began ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... Beneath his limbs her broidered garments spread; Aloft her elegant pavilion bends, And living shade of vegetation lends, With ever propagated bounty blessed, And hospitably spread for every guest: No tinsel here adorns a tawdry woof, Nor lying wash besmears a varnished roof; With native mode the vivid colours shine, And Heaven's own loom has wrought the weft divine, Where art veils art, and beauties' beauties close, While central grace diffused throughout ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... the place was filled with the drifting smoke of indifferent tobacco. Oleographs, barbaric in color and drawing, hung about the roughly-boarded walls, and any critical stranger would have found the saloon comfortless and tawdry. ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... attainments. It is from such a community that we come to-day to write upon your visitors' book the name of Brooklyn. In our way we are as proud of our homes as was the old Roman matron of her two sons, although we may be as poorly decked with tawdry jewels as she was. We are as proud of our independence in politics as Philadelphia should be ashamed of her regularity. Boston is credited with being the Athens of America. Brooklyn deserves the title, but would leave to Boston her pedantic ways. ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... show! In truth the condition of poverty of Joseph and his espoused, and the like poor condition of the shepherds who were now shortly to be used of the Lord, was the only fitting way that we should expect the Lord would have it. All the pomp and glory of earthly preparation would have been but tawdry tinsel, detracting from the glorious things that were shortly to follow. Each one of the earthly players whom Jehovah had assigned to perform a part upon this stage was humble, meek, and possessed of faith in the promises of God. In heaven there was a host of angels that should participate in ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... mind to see what might be in the Pep Boys' store, far down the hill and along traffic-filled M Street. Somehow the tawdry bustle of this street, with its many shops, appealed to the boy who carried misery inside him like a cold, heavy stone. Running, he started down the hill between the lines of old brick houses, left Rock Creek Park behind him, and ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... desert. It was near Samarra that he suffered defeat and died of wounds. For twenty miles round, in Beit Khalifa, Eski Baghdad, and elsewhere, is one confused huddle of ruins. It is hard to believe that such tawdry magnificence as Harun's successors intermittently brought to the town during the precarious times of Abbasid decay is responsible for all these arches and caverns and tumbled bricks. Major Kenneth Mason, already mentioned as having identified Xenophon's Sittake, has collected good reasons ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... floor alike were scrupulously clean. Sacred vessels, for cooking and washing, were stowed away out of reach of defilement. Above his bed the simple-hearted soldier had nailed a crude coloured print of the Kaiser-i-Hind in robes and crown; and on the opposing wall hung a tawdry looking-glass, almost as dear to ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... spilled snuff, and the lees of a thousand quart pots. The bands of his profession were ever awry upon a tattered shirt. His ancient wig scattered dust and powder as he went, while a single buckle of some tawdry metal gave a look of oddity to his clumsy, slipshod feet. A caricature of a man, he ambled and chuckled and seized the easy pleasures within his reach. There was never a summer's day but he caught upon his brow ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... well nigh dark before the foremost reached the ford—a scout in worn and tawdry buckskin, wearied and impassive. He gave his despatch to the care of the first officer to accost him and took the way to the store, briefly saying in reply to questions, that he was "too dry to speak the truth." So they flocked, at respectful distance, about the major as he read the hurried ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... clustered about the Mission. But much had been added. The Keiths found themselves in an immense confusion. Screaming signs cried everywhere for attention—advertising bear pits, cock fights, theatrical attractions, side shows, and the like. Innumerable hotels and restaurants, small, cheap, and tawdry, offered their hospitality, the liquid part of which was already being widely accepted. Men were striking pegs with hammers, throwing balls at negroes' heads thrust through canvas, shooting at targets. A racecourse was surrounded. ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... under the big bandstand, and the priest was looking up at it with a curiosity that had something rather odd about it, his head a little on one side, like a bird's. It was the conventional, rather tawdry kind of erection for its purpose: a flattened dome or canopy, gilt here and there, and lifted on six slender pillars of painted wood, the whole being raised about five feet above the parade on a round wooden platform like a drum. But there was something ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... alone and had found the King at the table, writing. Henri bowed and waited. They were not unlike, these two men, only Henri was younger and lighter, and where the King's eyes were gray Henri's were blue. Such a queer setting for a king it was—a tawdry summer home, ill-heated and cheaply furnished. But by the presence of Belgium's man of all time ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... every feature of her well-shaped face. She was taller than her diminutive husband, and, in every detail of expression, his antithesis. She wore a dress with some pretensions to display, and suggesting a considerable personal vanity. But it was of the tawdry order that was unconvincing, and ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... valiant little band of thinkers, would light a pure white flame to flush America's spiritual darkness. He would be a vital influence, teaching men and women to cultivate life for its own sake. For the cheap and tawdry extravagance of our national boasting he would substitute a chastening knowledge of our spiritual inferiority to the older nations. America was uncreative; he would release and nurse its raw creative intelligence till it should be free to function, breaking new intellectual paths, ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... we have witnessed the rapid creation of a new metropolitan quarter, built solely for the aristocracy by an aristocrat. The Belgrave district is as monotonous as Mary-le-bone; and is so contrived as to be at the same time insipid and tawdry. ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... the persecution of Domitian, was banished, and wrote the book of the Revelations. The island now bears the name of Patino and Palmosa, but a natural grotto in the rock is still shown as the place where St. John resided. "In and around it," says Mr. Turner, "the Greeks have dressed up one of their tawdry churches; and on the same site is a school attached to the church, in which a few children are taught ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... criticism here. But on all sides in the social conversation of the young people of this day, it seems to be agreed to give good, plain, strong English the go-by and to indulge in the embroidery of adjectives. Tawdry adjectives such as 'beautiful', 'lovely,' 'horrid', 'awful', and the like worn tinsel. I suppose I might venture the assertion without fear of contradiction, that this is the stock in trade in most young girls in qualifying ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... clutched at the tawdry mercerised silk of her blouse. There was a rip, and her arms and throat were free. She panted as she tugged at something that gave with a short "click-click," as of steel fastenings; something fell against the fender.... These ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... prison—constructively—and he leaped from squalor into fussy opulence. He wrote for the rabble, and he who writes for the rabble has a ticket to Limbus one way. The Rossettis made their appeal to the Elect Few. Dickens was sired by Wilkins Micawber and dammed by Mrs. Nickleby. He wallowed in the cheap and tawdry, and the gospel of sterling simplicity was absolutely outside his orbit. Dickens knew no more about art than did the prosperous beefeater, who, being partial to the hard sound of the letter, asked Rossetti for a copy of "The ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... hunter's stew, scout style, patent applied for. And notwithstanding the slurs which Roy had cast at the sky it was pleasant to see that vast bespangled blackness over head. In the solemn night the neighboring shacks were divested of their tawdry cheapness, the loose and flapping strips of tar-paper and the broken windows were not visible, and the buildings seemed clothed in a kind of sombre dignity—silent memorials of the boys who had made those old boards and rafters ring with their shouts and laughter. Not a sound was there ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... brought to a mooring just across the canal from the tented field where the circus was pitched. The dirty brown canvas of the large and small tents showed that the circus had already had a long season. Everything was tarnished and tawdry about the show at this time of year. Even the ornate band wagon was shabby and the vociferous calliope seemed to have the croup whenever it ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... amidst a number of silken pillows, lay Madame de Staemer. The theme of the room was violet and silver, and to this everything conformed. The toilet service was of dull silver and violet enamel. The mirrors and some of the pictures had dull silver frames, There was nothing tawdry or glittering. The bed itself, which I thought resembled a bed of state, was of the same dull silver, with a coverlet of delicate violet I hue. But Madame's decollete robe was trimmed with white fur, so that her hair, dressed ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... regarded me wistfully and reproached me, but I would not heed them, but turned my own eyes away. And again I saw the menacing negro faces and the burning sunlight and the strange flag that tossed and whimpered in the air above my head, the strange flag of unknown, tawdry colors, like the painted face of a woman in the street, but a flag at which I cheered and shouted as though it were my own, as though I loved it; a flag for which I ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... another room, a small back room, bare except for a table and sofa and a tawdry ikon in the farthest corner. And there we waited fully fifteen minutes in absolute silence. How silent that house was, full of invisible horrors! The headquarters of the secret police—why shouldn't it be terrifying when you think of the men and women who have ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... later they were married; and in that lonely little cottage she would have been bored to death but for the tawdry future that she foresaw. The man's dream of awakening her tenderness was speedily dispelled; he had been accepted as the means to an end, and he was held fast to the compact. She grudged him every hour in which he idled by her side. Driven from her arms by her impatience, ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... luxury and fine raiment; she brought away from it nothing but new methods of arranging the hair, and patterns of gowns. The new, exaggerated toilettes of the actresses, their gait, even the spurious elegance of their speech, which seemed to her of the highest distinction, and with it all the tawdry magnificence of the gilding and the lights, the gaudy placard at the door, the long line of carriages, and all the somewhat unwholesome excitement that springs up about a popular play; that was what she loved, that was what ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... those log barriers that our eyes encountered scenes of the greatest interest,—a mingling of tawdry decoration and wild savagery, where fierce denizens of forest and plain made ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... underlying the thin veneer of saint this and saint that, which superstitious piety has given to every bay and cape and natural object in gulf and on river, you find the old Basque names of places and things—the solid oak beneath the tawdry coating applied by priestly brush for churchly purposes. There is Basque harbor, Basque island, and old Basque fort, and a place known as the spot where these old-time whalers boiled their blubber and cured their catch ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... to render them perfect. It is, perhaps, some excuse for the affectation of my style that it was the fashion of the age in which I wrote. Even the eloquence of Tacitus, however nervous and sublime, was not unaffected. Mine, indeed, was more diffuse, and the ornaments of it were more tawdry; but his laboured conciseness, the constant glow of his diction, and pointed brilliancy of his sentences, were no less unnatural. One principal cause of this I suppose to have been that, as we despaired of excelling ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... of the life here I looked upon as only an incident. The gay tawdry had faded; I realized how much more enduring were the rough, uncouth but genuine products like my friend Mr. Jenks and those of that ilk, who spoke me well instead of merely fair. Health of mind and body ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... food for himself. While it was being brought he sat down in the very chair that he had used so often—for he had been ushered into his old parlor—and gazed about him. There were the same tawdry ornaments on the mantel-piece, and the same books on the dusty shelf. Nothing was altered except the tenant of that room; but how great a change had taken place in him! What a face the dingy mirror offered him in place of that which it had shown him last! When the ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... slowly, on to the brick floor. Then two small chairs, with my coat, waistcoat, and trousers flung on them. Then a large elbow-chair covered with dirty-white dimity, with my cravat and shirt collar thrown over the back. Then a chest of drawers with two of the brass handles off, and a tawdry, broken china inkstand placed on it by way of ornament for the top. Then the dressing-table, adorned by a very small looking-glass, and a very large pincushion. Then the window—an unusually large window. Then a dark old picture, which ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... last, Makes our sad poet mourn your favours past: For, since without desert he got a name, He fears to lose it now with greater shame. Fame, like a little mistress of the town, Is gained with ease, but then she's lost as soon: For, as those tawdry misses, soon or late, Jilt such as keep them at the highest rate; And oft the lacquey, or the brawny clown, Gets what is hid in the loose-bodied gown,— So, fame is false to all that keep her long; And turns up to the fop that's brisk and young. Some wiser poet ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... unanticipated call from Miss. Fanny French, who said she had lately recovered from a serious illness in Paris; the nature of her malady she did not specify; it had left her haggard and thin, but by no means deficient in vivacity. She was dressed with tawdry extravagance, wore a mass of false yellow hair, had her eyebrows dyed black,—piquant contrast,—and her cheeks and lips richly carmined. No veritable information as to her past and present could be gleaned from the mixture of French and English which she ceaselessly ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... exact, and to whom we should never think of referring for precise information or for well-digested thought and experience. His argument continually slides into wholesale assertion and vague declamation, and in his love of ornament he frequently becomes tawdry. For example, he tells us ("Apoc. Sketches," p. 265) that "Botany weaves around the cross her amaranthine garlands; and Newton comes from his starry home—Linnaeus from his flowery resting-place—and Werner and Hutton from their subterranean graves at the voice of Chalmers, to ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... all the landlord's threats and vigour of arm to put an end ta By this time I was becoming tired of my company; now that the spae-wife had planted the seed of distress in my mind, those people were tawdry, unclean, wretched. They were all in rags, foul and smelling; their music was but noise demented. I wondered at myself there in so vicious a company. And Betty—home—love—peace—how all the tribe of them suddenly took up every corner of my mind. Oh! fool, fool, I called myself, to be ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... the determining factor of Victor Stott's life, I am constrained to pause and apologise. I have become uncomfortably conscious of my own limitations, and the feeble, ephemeral methods I am using. I am trifling with a wonderful story, embroidering my facts with the tawdry detail of ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... the gloss and brownness of ripe nuts, and your face is always pale. Your lips have a trick of falling apart in a half-smile when you listen. They told me before I knew you that you were pretty. Pretty! The word is cheap and tawdry. You are beautiful, with the beauty of a pearl or a star or ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... their freshness seemed holy and sacred, in after years, stripped of their disguise of false sentiment and the aureole with which they were invested by youthful imagination, become absolutely loathsome—just as when we see tamely by daylight the tawdry stage which last night made a world for us full of all the paraphernalia of high romanticism—silver and velvet robes, plumed hats, dim woodland vistas and the echo of a distant high note, youthful beauty, rope-ladders, balconies, daggers, poison, and passionate love-strains. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... Medici begins with Cosmo and expires with his grandson; that stream is pure only at the source; and it is in search of some memorial of the virtuous republicans of the family that we visit the church of St. Lorenzo at Florence. The tawdry, glaring, unfinished chapel in that church, designed for the mausoleum of the Dukes of Tuscany, set round with crowns and coffins, gives birth to no emotions but those of contempt for the lavish vanity of a race of despots, whilst the pavement slab, simply inscribed ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... the doors of our theatres. The French of the time of Louis XIV. must have been a much more refined people than the contemporary English. At least, Thalia in Paris was a vestal, compared with her tawdry, indecent, and drunken London sister. One is ashamed to be seen reading the unblushing profligacy of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... is a beauty which the artist has apprehended in spirit and which he would make actual. A work of art is the expression of an aspiration. The crude and tawdry images of the Madonna Set in the roadside cross are just as truly a work of art as the rapt saints of Giotto or the perfect Madonnas of Raphael in so far as they are expressive of what those poor, devout souls who fashioned them felt of worship and of love. ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... the cast-off garments of both sexes, and of every age, condition and clime, presents the appearance of a miniature city. Men's apparel, women's apparel, garments for children of all sizes, boots and shoes, hats and bonnets, tawdry finery of every description, sheets and blankets, carpets, tattered and stained, military accouterments, swords and belts, harness, old pots and kettles, and innumerable other articles, attract attention in the different stalls. There, on every side, sharp-faced and shrill-voiced dealers ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... world seemed to me so pathetic, so awry, so obstinate in its honest illusions, so silly in its dishonest pretences. "Have I been content with that?" I thought, staggered. And I was sorry for what I had been. I perceived that the ideals of my life were tawdry, that even the best were poor little things. And I perceived that it was the same with everyone, and that even the greatest men, those men that I had so profoundly admired as of another clay than mine, were as like the worst as one sheep was like another sheep. Weep—because nature had ejected ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... bloom out in her cheeks, and her eyes took on a twinkle of amusement. She was watching the visitor as if she were a passing Punch-and-Judy show come in to play for a moment for her entertainment. She lay and regarded her and her tawdry display of finery with a quiet, disinterested aloofness that was beginning to get on ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... and foresaw fortune in the facture of the sham. Then sprang into existence the tawdry, the common, the gewgaw, and what was born of the million went back to them and charmed them, for it was after their own heart.... And Birmingham and Manchester arose in their might—and Art was ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... had set up her school for the children in Newgate as early as 1817. Moll Brazen, Suky Tawdry, Jenny Diver, and the rest, are names borrowed from Gay's ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... she cried to him at last. "I am a fool, too, that I have ever wasted my thoughts and time upon you. Why can't I make you see? In every other way, heaven knows, you are clever enough! And yet there comes this vulgar, commonplace, tawdry little woman from heaven knows where, and makes such a fool of you that you are willing to fling away your career—to hold your wrists out for John ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... struggle on the mother's part; she stepped aside from governing, and became as like a servant as could be. An insolent servant-girl came, and she and Rodney's wife started a little drama of incompetency, which should end as the hotel-keeping ended. Wastefulness, cheap luxury, tawdry living, took the place of the old, frugal, simple life. But the mother went about with that unchanging sweetness of face, and a body withering about a fretted soul. She had no bitterness, only a miserable distress. But every ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... most nervous, theatric, sensuous composer of the present century. Measured by the highest standard, his style must be criticised as often spasmodic, tawdry, and meretricious. He instinctively adopts a bold and eccentric treatment of musical themes; and, though there are always to be found stirring movements in his scores as well as in his opera stories, he constantly offends refined ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... ever goes to a theatre to look at the fronts of the boxes. Comfortable and roomy seats, perfect cleanliness, decent and fitting curtains and other furniture, of good stuff, but neither costly nor tawdry, and convenient, but not dazzling, light, are the proper requirements in the furnishing of an opera-house. As for the persons who go there to look at each other—to show their dresses—to yawn away waste hours—to obtain a maximum of momentary excitement—or to say they ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... and the workhouse; while upon a few rags on the floor lay a girl, ugly, small-pox marked, hollow eyed, emaciated, her only bed clothes the skirt of a large handsome new riding-habit, at which two other girls, wan and tawdry, were stitching busily, as they sat right and left of her on the floor. The old woman took no notice of us as we entered; but one of the girls looked up, and, with a pleased gesture of recognition, put her finger up to her lips, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... indignation in his voice; "though but little given to run into the noise and chatter of the settlements, yet have I been into the towns in my day, to barter the peltry for lead and powder, and often have I seen your waxen dolls, with their tawdry clothes and ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... wear a beautiful dress. I don't like this dress a bit!" said Cherry, plucking nervously at the coarse and tawdry calico frock Mrs. Ginniss had thought it quite a triumph to obtain and to ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... things that strong men covet. That is what the game of politics means for strong men—that is why we fight so bitterly for office. I plan for myself some greater office than second fiddle in this tawdry republic along the Atlantic. I want the first place, and in a greater field! I will take my friends with me. I want men who can lead other men. I want men ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... the company at his hotel. There were about twenty people present, nearly all men; Joan wondered where they had been collected from, and she did not quite like the look of any of them. Fanny was making a great deal of noise, and how funny and tawdry their faces looked under the bright light. After supper there was a dance, the table was pushed aside, and someone—Joan saw with surprise that it was Daddy Brown—pounded away at a one-step on the piano. Everyone danced, the men, since there were not enough ladies to go ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... Biddy. She dropped the pillow and proceeded with her toilet. The dirty skirt with its tawdry flounces was surmounted by a bodice of the same ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... she answered me:- "Sir, I was sick with revelry. True, I have scarred the night with sin, A pale and tawdry heroine; But once I heard a voice that said 'Who lives in sin is surely dead, But whoso turns to follow ...
— Forty-Two Poems • James Elroy Flecker
... for fine grass cloth; and on almost every black man from Manyuema I have seen this native cloth converted into elegantly made damirs (Arabic)—short jackets. These countries are also very rich in ivory. The fever for going to Manyuema to exchange tawdry beads for its precious tusks is of the same kind as that which impelled men to go to the gulches and placers of California, Colorado, Montana, and Idaho; after nuggets to Australia, and diamonds to Cape Colony. Manyuema is at present the ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... stranger, the toil of a life, perhaps—to open, and to read them. And what have we to do with books? The Herr Doctor might perhaps be asked for his advice; but we have no index expurgatorius in Gruenewald. Had we but that, we should be the most absolute parody and farce upon this tawdry earth." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rather affected to despise his literary reputation; and in this, perhaps, the great Congreve was not far wrong. A touch of Steele's tenderness is worth all his finery; a flash of Swift's lightning, a beam of Addison's pure sunshine, and his tawdry playhouse taper is invisible. But the ladies loved him, and he was undoubtedly a ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... being the only American poet of note who blandly ignores Slavery, and takes part with the aristocrat, as against the lowly. The same spirit runs through all his writings. He has a range of about three notes: a flunkeyish koo-tooing to soap-bubble eminence; a tawdry sympathy with aristocratic woe; and a drivelling contempt for angular Poor Relations, in bombazine gowns. Bombazine, by-the-way, is a cheap, carpetty-looking fabric, built of shoddy, and generally used ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... and astonished weak minds by the feudal powers which I hinted to be lurking constructively in the charters of this proud establishment. Once I remember being on the box of the Holyhead mail, between Shrewsbury and Oswestry, when a tawdry thing from Birmingham, some "Tallyho" or "Highflyer," all flaunting with green and gold, came up alongside of us. What a contrast to our royal simplicity of form and colour in this plebeian wretch! The single ornament on our dark ground of chocolate colour was the ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... a gift which carried him triumphantly through all hampering difficulties. He never faltered in the task he set himself—the task of happiness. He began to preach his gospel as a child. He would not have his tawdry toy sword disparaged even by his father. "I tell you," he said, "the sword is of gold, the sheath of silver, and the boy who has it is quite contented." In the same manner he transformed a coddling shawl into a wrap fit for a soldier on a night march. To the end of his ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... of his day. Yet the speech on the Begums as given by Moore does not cast Webster's best work at all into the shade. Webster did not have Sheridan's brilliant wit, but on the other hand he was never forced, never involved, never guilty of ornament, which fastidious judges would now pronounce tawdry. Webster's best speeches read much better than anything of Sheridan, and, so far as we can tell from careful descriptions, his manner, look, and delivery were far more imposing. The "manly eloquence" of Fox seems to have resembled ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... highway, at the corners of which Margaret read the name of Chatham street. On each side of the way were shops of the strangest appearance—furniture, old and new, was piled up together, coats and cloaks hung out at the doors, watches and jewelry of a tawdry description made a show in the windows, and men with keen black eyes and hooked noses, and stooping backs which looked as if they had never been erect in their lives, stood at the entrances, trying to attract the attention of the passer-by. As Margaret looked at them, she ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... picked out with scarlet; but the paint that had looked brilliant in the sun of the harvest days looked tawdry and dirty now against the snow, and every patch or scar of rough usage was easily discernible. Now and then the wind came with a savage gust, carrying stray straws out of one of the waggons, though snow was collecting on the floor: on the other, ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... that the cruelty of the sea, its relentlessness and awfulness, rushed upon me. Life had become cheap and tawdry, a beastly and inarticulate thing, a soulless stirring of the ooze and slime. I held on to the weather rail, close by the shrouds, and gazed out across the desolate foaming waves to the low-lying fog-banks that hid San Francisco and the California coast. Rain-squalls were driving in between, and ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... sun shot its first rays into her eyes. David lay near by, breathing lightly, his face like a pale carven mask against the blanket's folds. Down below in the camp the fire burned low, its flame looking ineffectual and tawdry in the flushed splendor of the sunrise. Daddy John was astir, moving about among the animals and pausing to rub Julia's nose and hearten her ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... about tea excep' for lunch, and she don't have a collation—I presume she can't; too many people'd come, and I guess she has about enough. Now, those ladies that don't look exactly as if they was ladies," indicating the large birds of tawdry plumage and striking complexions, "they don't live here. Washington ladies don't dress like that. I guess they're the wives of men out West that have made their pile lately and come here to see the sights. First they look at all the public buildin's, and I guess they about walk ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... with a wonderfully soft and perfect accent,—the "person" had studied Homer and Shakespeare, and was conversant with the best literature,—and, bitterest sting of all, the "peasant" could give every woman in the room a lesson in deportment, grace, and perfect taste in dress. Every costume looked tawdry beside her richly flowing velvet draperies—every low bodice became indecent compared with the modesty of that small square opening at Thelma's white throat—an opening just sufficient to display her collar of diamonds—and every figure seemed ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... last week, he slopped down town with his cubs, and visited a poor little beggarly shed where were a dwarf, a fat woman, and a giant of honest eight feet, on exhibition behind tawdry show-canvases, but with nobody to exhibit to. The giant had a broom, and was cleaning up and fixing around, diligently. Joe conceived the idea of getting some talk out of him. Now that never would have occurred to me. So he dropped ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... better," said Lucia calmly. "That real piece of chain-armour too, I am glad I remembered Peppino had that. Marshall is cleaning it now, and it will give a far finer effect than the tawdry stuff they use in opera. Then I sit up very slowly, and wave first my right arm and then my left, and then both. I should like to practise that ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... things are rightly put together. The ostentation of the home, the tawdry luxury and profusion of fashionable society, creep into the church and set up their standards there, and the religion of Christ puts on a costume in which its Founder would never ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... there are sham Metaphors, which overhanging that same Thought's-Body (best naked), and deceptively bedizening, or bolstering it out, may be called its false stuffings, superfluous show-cloaks (Putz-Maentel), and tawdry woollen rags: whereof he that runs and reads may gather whole hampers,—and ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... in second-hand clothes, renovated with secret processes handed down from the Ark. Coats and trousers, equipped for their last adventure with mysterious darns and patches, cheated the eye like a painted beauty at a ball. Women's finery lay in disordered heaps—silk blouses covered with tawdry lace, skirts heavy with gaudy trimming—the draggled plumage of fine birds that had come to grief. But here buyer and seller met on level terms, for each knew to a hair the value of the sorry garments; and they chaffered with crafty eyes, each searching ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... acquired; and where children the most promising are presently transformed into vain, pert misses, who imagine that to perk up their heads, turn out their toes, and exhibit the ostentatious opulence of their relations, in a tawdry ball night dress, is ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... and dismal and tawdry everything seemed to her. Her little white dress, the dress in which she had lain by her mother's side, was soiled and tumbled, and the wreath of roses looked crushed and faded, as Rosalie took it from the box There was no mother to fasten it on her hair, no mother to ...
— A Peep Behind the Scenes • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... position gave him, he exercised a mischievous influence on the governor's measures. Almagro's poverty-stricken followers were the objects of his open ridicule, and he revenged the insult now offered him by riding before their young leader's residence, displaying a tawdry magnificence in his dress, sparkling with gold and silver, and with the inscription, "For the Men of Chili," set in his bonnet. It was a foolish taunt; but the poor cavaliers who were the object of it, made morbidly sensitive by their sufferings, had ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... (strange Fate that clings to all of Thine!) When most a Wit dost most a Poet shine. In Poetry thy Dunciad expires, When Wit has shot "her momentary Fires." 'Tis Tragedy that watches by the Bed "Where tawdry Yellow strove with dirty Red," And Men, remembering all, can scarce deny To lay the Laurel where ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... John's eve. "At twelve o'clock to-night," said H., "the spirits of all who are to die this year will appear to any who will go alone into the dark cathedral and summon them"! We were charmed with the interior. Twilight hid all the dirt, cobwebs, and tawdry tinsel; softened the outlines, and gave to the immense arches, columns, and stained windows a strange and thrilling beauty. The distant tapers, seeming remoter than reality, the kneeling crowds, the heavy vesper chime, all combined to realize, ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... a number of chairs with curved backs. The table was covered with a long and exquisitely embroidered Indian cloth, of which the prevailing colour was a brilliant orange-red, that glowed and had a sheen which was almost fiery. In the centre of this table stood a tawdry Japanese vase, worth, perhaps, five or six shillings. A lovely bracket of carved wood fixed to the wall held a ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... so large, so audacious and beplumed that it seemed to have a positive personality, a positive swagger of its own, and to be winking roguishly at the audience. Meanwhile Madame's muslin dress of the day before had been exchanged for something more appropriate to the warmth of her poetry—a tawdry flame-coloured satin, in which her "too, too solid" frame was tightly sheathed. Her coal-black hair, tragically wild, looked as though no comb had been near it for a month, and the gloves drawn half-way up the bare arms hardly remembered ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... lit by a few glazed apertures in the roof, was nearly crammed by men who sat on the low benches and leaned standing against the sidewalls. In the small and tawdry proscenium, behind a worn picture of the Bay of Naples, were silhouetted the figures of the men's leader and of several other officials. The leader was speaking in a quiet, mild voice, the other officials were seated on Windsor chairs. The smell of the place was nauseating, and yet the atmosphere ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... many of the peasant costumes, often as serviceable and durable as they were becoming, which she saw in Germany. She expressed the regret so often uttered by English travellers that English labourers and workers at handicrafts, in place of retaining a dress of their own, have long ago adopted a tawdry version of the fashions of the upper classes. Unfortunately the practice is fast becoming universal.] with flowers, music, and dancing to offer their good wishes. In the afternoon all was quiet again, and the Queen ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... in the bar. Dick had come prepared to enjoy himself after a day of arduous work, and by way of doing so, he ordered a drink or two that he did not really want. As a rule, he was abstemious, but the hall was very hot. It struck him as glaring and tawdry after the quiet dale where the water sparkled among the stones; and the pallid loungers with their stamp of indulgence differed unpleasantly from the hard, brown-faced ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... plain style, sometimes even to a bald style; but false brilliancy was his utter aversion. His muse had no objection to a russet attire; but she turned with disgust from the finery of Guarini, as tawdry and as paltry as the rags of a chimney-sweeper on May-day. Whatever ornaments she wears are of massive gold, not only dazzling to the sight, but capable of standing the severest test ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... hot, all the streets are made narrow, that they may be kept as much as possible in shade. The houses are mostly of good size, and the walls are very thick; they thus keep out the heat of the sun. The churches are also substantially built, and decorated in a very florid style—the interiors being tawdry in the extreme, calculated only to please the uncultivated taste of the negroes and of the lower order of whites. Railways have been formed in the Brazils, and one runs to Petropolis, a summer resort of the ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... wonder that they ever un-bend to kiss their children. If one of them lived in my house I should stick pins in him. Morality and goodness that lie no deeper than "behavior" are like the veneering they put on cheap tables—very tawdry and ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... indeed evil tidings in store for me. The blight of anticipated evil even weighed upon me ere I passed yonder hall, and when I knew no reason why I should not find you loving of heart and humble of desire as in other days. Is it all gone? Are you no longer the same? This tawdry velvet in which I found you arrayed—is it the type of a something equally foreign to your nature, and which imperial Rome has thrown about you to aid in crushing out the better feelings ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... assented nor objected. From the moment she had struck her hand into his, there in the tawdry "saloon" of the toll-house, and cried out, "Come!" she let him do as he chose. So he had carried her away to the city hall, where, like any other unclassed or unchurched lovers, they were married by a hurried ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... deliberately taking his job away from Slosson. You, too, feel that way about her? That is as it should be. It is the penalty they pay who, given genius, sympathy, and understanding as their birthright, trade them for the tawdry ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... other things, while I stood there gasping, staring, sick at heart. All my vinous joy was gone, leaving me a haggard, weary wretch of a man, disenchanted and miserable to the verge of—what? I shuddered. The lights seemed to have gone blurred and dim. The hall was tawdry, cheap and vulgar. The women, who but a moment before had seemed creatures of grace and charm, were now nothing more than painted, posturing harridans, their seductive smiles the leers of ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... Jews of Hungary, and Italians of Whitechapel mingled in the throng. Near East and Far East rubbed shoulders. Pidgin English contested with Yiddish for the ownership of some tawdry article offered by an auctioneer whose nationality defied conjecture, save that always some branch of his ancestry had drawn nourishment from the ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... the furrier's. Rich furs of all varieties hang there bathed in a downpour of artificial light. The general effect is of a background of magnificence cheapened and made grotesque by commercialism, a background in tawdry disharmony with the clear light and ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... I must confess that you bewilder me. You with your gifts and charm and really au fond—a wonderful sense of what's right. How could you have permitted yourself to plunge into such tawdry distractions? How could you have forgotten so far what you owed to yourself? Tell me, why did you let your life fall into ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... responsibility. Hence, drunkenness, immorality and disease go hand in hand: a dreadful three. But more than this. The drunken man takes much longer over the sex-act, thereby prolonging the risk of disease, and he runs risks which he would rule out instantly if the fumes of alcohol had not changed the tawdry girl into the glittering fairy. Worse than all, he neglects to apply disinfection properly and promptly—he falls asleep or forgets all about it till too late. Men who are determined to have a "night ...
— Safe Marriage - A Return to Sanity • Ettie A. Rout
... Reason protested, their Imagination was subjugated. I cannot say the same. Neither full procession, nor high mass, nor swarming tapers, nor swinging censers, nor ecclesiastical millinery, nor celestial jewellery, touched my imagination a whit. What I saw struck me as tawdry, not grand; as grossly ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... Swift, those spotless leaves I send; Small is the present, but sincere the friend. Think not so poor a book below thy care; Who knows the price that thou canst make it bear? Tho' tawdry now, and like Tyralla's face, The spacious front shines out with borrow'd grace; Tho' pasteboards, glitt'ring like a tinsell'd coat, A rasa tabula within denote; Yet if a venal and corrupted age, And modern vices should provoke thy rage; If, warn'd once more by their ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... to sing. In a poor little voice, feebler and shriller than the chattering of the monkeys, she sang a song about the "Grecian Bend," and enacted the same, walking round and round the stage whirling her tawdry finery. Then Anne, aged twelve, came in as a boy and joined her. Both the girls had rather pretty features, blue eyes, and tightly curling hair; both had pleasing faces; but Anne was solid and phlegmatic, while Gerty was keen ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the best time of all in Thebes of the Hundred Gates is at fall of night, when the shadows cast a seemly cloak over the vulgarity of the modern buildings, and give an air of romance even to the glittering lights of the appalling esplanade, which flaunts its tawdry modernity cheek by jowl with the quay, built by one of the Ptolemies, and in use even ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... it was all tawdry and vulgar and common, but a woman knelt in front of the Mother of Sorrows, praying, a poor woman in a ragged shawl; I heard a sob, and saw that she was weeping; she sought to restrain herself and in the effort ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... having come too late, were obliged to stay outside, saw in the distance, through the three open doors, a scene of which the tawdry decorations of our modern operas can give but a faint idea. Devotees and sinners, intent upon winning the favor of a new saint, lighted thousands of candles in his honor inside the vast church, and these scintillating lights gave a magical aspect to the edifice. ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... pattern for us. That thought is not a subject to be decorated with tawdry finery of eloquence, or to be dealt with as if it were a sentimental prettiness very fit to be spoken of, but impossible to be practised. It is the duty of every Christian man and woman, and they have not done their duty unless they have learned that the bond which unites them to men ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... put me off with a smaller fee, but even suggested that it should be paid by gradual instalments. The dignity of scenic decoration, of which he had not the smallest idea, was completely sacrificed to the most ridiculous and tawdry showiness. He imagined that pageantry was all that was really needed to secure my success. So he hunted out all the old fairy-ballet costumes from his stock, and fancied that if they only looked gay enough, and if plenty of people were bustling about on the stage, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... across injustice, and went out still in love and reverence. We never dreamed that our ideal England was dead and buried, that the actual England was not the marble goddess of our idolatry, but a poor Brummagem image, coarse lacquer-ware and tawdry paint! We never dreamed that the queenly mother of heroes was nursing 'shopkeepers' now, with only shopkeepers' ethics, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... D. Merle, heading his valiant little band of thinkers, would light a pure white flame to flush America's spiritual darkness. He would be a vital influence, teaching men and women to cultivate life for its own sake. For the cheap and tawdry extravagance of our national boasting he would substitute a chastening knowledge of our spiritual inferiority to the older nations. America was uncreative; he would release and nurse its raw creative intelligence ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... in different stations in England entertain different ideas of what is genteel, {314} but it must be something gorgeous, glittering, or tawdry, to be considered genteel by any of them. The beau-ideal of the English aristocracy, of course with some exceptions, is some young fellow with an imperial title, a military personage of course, for what is military ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... the bed was breathing heavily, his lips moving at every breath in a way to form a grimace. He made in this condition the whole room as tawdry as a tavern tap. And at the feet of this thing he was tossing his ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... were dirty, uncouth specimens of humanity, besmeared with yellow ochre and vermilion, dressed in red blankets, and bearing a hatchet in their hands, their only visible weapon. The women were dressed in tawdry colors,—striped government blankets and red flannel leggins, with a profusion of colored beads about their necks, and cheap jewelry on fingers and wrists; each one with an infant strapped in a flat ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... a thing bad enough To go out and fight for it, Work day and night for it, Give up your time and your peace and your sleep for it If only desire of it Makes you quite mad enough Never to tire of it, Makes you hold all other things tawdry and cheap for it If life seems all empty and useless without it And all that you scheme and you dream is about it, If gladly you'll sweat for it, Fret for it, Plan for it, Lose all your terror of God or man for it, If you'll simply go after that thing that you want, With all your ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... cannot say the same. Neither full procession, nor high mass, nor swarming tapers, nor swinging censers, nor ecclesiastical millinery, nor celestial jewellery, touched my imagination a whit. What I saw struck me as tawdry, not grand; as grossly ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... and looked around the room, breathing quickly. She felt the woman's foolish amusement at the old cradle with the rag doll tucked under the patchwork quilt, and at her pitiful attempts at adorning the tawdry walls. Without having seen more than the prints of her shoes in the path, Jean hated the woman who had blundered in here and had looked and laughed. She hated the man who ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... monotonous Babel had grown, or I should rather say swelled, with such a leap since my departure, that I must continually inquire my way; and the very cemetery was brand new. Death, however, had been active; the graves were already numerous, and I must pick my way in the rain, among the tawdry sepulchres of millionnaires, and past the plain black crosses of Hungarian labourers, till chance or instinct led me to the place that was my father's. The stone had been erected (I knew already) "by admiring friends"; I could now judge ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... a few glazed apertures in the roof, was nearly crammed by men who sat on the low benches and leaned standing against the sidewalls. In the small and tawdry proscenium, behind a worn picture of the Bay of Naples, were silhouetted the figures of the men's leader and of several other officials. The leader was speaking in a quiet, mild voice, the other officials were ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... mourn your favours past: For, since without desert he got a name, He fears to lose it now with greater shame. Fame, like a little mistress of the town, Is gained with ease, but then she's lost as soon: For, as those tawdry misses, soon or late, Jilt such as keep them at the highest rate; And oft the lacquey, or the brawny clown, Gets what is hid in the loose-bodied gown,— So, fame is false to all that keep her long; And turns up to the ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... of the sentence need not occupy us long. Belshazzar so little realised the facts, that he issued his order to deck out Daniel in the tawdry pomp he had promised him, as if a man with such a message would be delighted with purple robes and gold chains, and made him third ruler of the kingdom which he had just declared was numbered and ended by God. The force of folly could no further go. No wonder that the hardy ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... had been added. The Keiths found themselves in an immense confusion. Screaming signs cried everywhere for attention—advertising bear pits, cock fights, theatrical attractions, side shows, and the like. Innumerable hotels and restaurants, small, cheap, and tawdry, offered their hospitality, the liquid part of which was already being widely accepted. Men were striking pegs with hammers, throwing balls at negroes' heads thrust through canvas, shooting at targets. A racecourse was surrounded. ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... than that which inspires a water-colour sketch. We must learn when and why that house was built; we must see how the facts reconcile its somewhat tawdry, its somewhat suburban aspect, with the richer and more romantic aspects of the park. The park is even now, though it be the middle of autumn, full of blowing green, and the brown circling woods, full ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... to history) the only method yet discovered, then we shall have helped, not only to save innumerable souls from sin, and from that misery which is the inevitable and everlasting consequence of sin, but we shall have helped to save them from a specious and tawdry barbarism, such as corrupted and enervated the seemingly civilized masses of the later Roman empire; and to save our country, within the next century, from some such catastrophe as overtook the Jewish monarchy in spite ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... them, but turned my own eyes away. And again I saw the menacing negro faces and the burning sunlight and the strange flag that tossed and whimpered in the air above my head, the strange flag of unknown, tawdry colors, like the painted face of a woman in the street, but a flag at which I cheered and shouted as though it were my own, as though I loved it; a flag for which I would fight ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... come too late, were obliged to stay outside, saw in the distance, through the three open doors, a scene of which the tawdry decorations of our modern operas can give but a faint idea. Devotees and sinners, intent upon winning the favor of a new saint, lighted thousands of candles in his honor inside the vast church, and these scintillating lights gave a magical aspect to the edifice. The black arcades, the columns ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... Whitman shrine in Camden is the tomb in Harleigh Cemetery, reached by the Haddonfield trolley. Doctor Oberholtzer, in his "Literary History of Philadelphia," calls it "tawdry," to which I fear I must demur. Built into a quiet hillside in that beautiful cemetery, of enormous slabs of rough-hewn granite with a vast stone door standing symbolically ajar, it seemed to me grotesque, but greatly impressive. It is a weird pagan cromlech, with a huge triangular boulder ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... conscience. What this conscience seemed to press upon her notice with an insistence that startled her—Lady Caroline hesitated to accept the word, but it would keep on coming into her head—was that she was tawdry. ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... an imposing place, and very tawdry with gilt adornments and coloured glass. They turned into a road at the left, according to the direction given by the girl, and then followed a road which was scarcely more than a track, and that abounded in mud puddles of a ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... not having fully awakened to the commercial advantages of being a locale, had not yet stretched between itself and the rest of New York that gauzy and iridescent curtain of sprightly impropriety and sparkling intellectual naughtiness, since faded to a lather tawdry pattern. An early pioneer of the Villager type, emancipated of thought and speech, chancing upon No. 11 Grove, would have despised it for its lack of atmosphere and its patent conservatism. It did not go out into the highways and byways, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... here I looked upon as only an incident. The gay tawdry had faded; I realized how much more enduring were the rough, uncouth but genuine products like my friend Mr. Jenks and those of that ilk, who spoke me well instead of merely fair. Health of mind and body should ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... her he felt hotly the degradation of his silly uniform, of the striped sash around his waist, the tawdry braids, and the tasselled boots. He felt as he had often felt before, but now more keenly than ever, the prostitution of his art in this temple of the senses, this home of epicures, where people met to feast ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... chatting and planning the work for the morrow, and eating hunter's stew, scout style, patent applied for. And notwithstanding the slurs which Roy had cast at the sky it was pleasant to see that vast bespangled blackness over head. In the solemn night the neighboring shacks were divested of their tawdry cheapness, the loose and flapping strips of tar-paper and the broken windows were not visible, and the buildings seemed clothed in a kind of sombre dignity—silent memorials of the boys who had made those old boards and rafters ring with their shouts ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... Walcheren expeditions, Manchester massacres, Queen's trials. Every scrape of the government was a step in the ladder to the great borough-monger. The old king too had disappeared from the stage; and the tawdry grandeur of the great Norman peer rather suited George the Fourth. He was rather a favourite at the Cottage; they wanted his six votes for Canning; he made his terms; and one of the means by which we got a man of genius for ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... to collect fine editions of Don Quixote and Moliere, in Spanish and French, and luxuriantly bound copies of Juvenal and Persius and Cicero, nothing is read now but Longfellow and Hall Caine and Miss Corelli. Where good and roomy houses were built a hundred years ago, poor and tawdry houses are built now; and bad bookbinding, bad pictures, and bad decorations are thought well of, where rich bindings, beautiful miniatures, and finely-carved chimney-pieces were once prized by ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... marble, covered with Persian carpets. In my opinion, it is a great addition to its beauty, that it is not divided into pews, and incumbered with forms and benches like our churches; nor the pillars (which are most of them red and white marble) disfigured by the little tawdry images and pictures, that give Roman-catholic churches the air of toy-shops. The walls seemed to be inlaid with such very lively colours, in small flowers, that I could not imagine what stones had been made use of. But going nearer, I ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... worst room, with mat half hung, The floors of plaster and the walls of dung, On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw, With tape-tied curtains never meant to draw, The George and Garter dangling from that bed Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red, Great Villiers lies! Alas! how changed from him, That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim, Gallant and gay in Cliveden's proud alcove, The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love; There, victor ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... cheap, tawdry and unimposing procession wended its way through the back streets of Paris, its leader seeking to escape even the edges of the mob, lest the people should fall upon the somber little pageant and rend it into fragments. This was the funeral ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... my muse. For twenty years I have swelled with indignation at the tragedy which my good friend, Master Crebillon, made of the most exalted subject of antiquity. With the adroit hands of a tailor he stitched up a monkey-jacket out of the purple toga, and adorned it with the miserable tawdry trifles of a pitiful lore and pompous Gothic verse! Crebillon has written a French Catiline. I, sire, have written a Roman Catiline! You shall see, sire, and you shall admire! In one of my most wretched, sleepless ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... the moment, the circus appeared to him a rather tawdry and shoddy substitute for the glories of astronomy, and he wondered how he had come to fall in with ...
— Youth • Isaac Asimov
... I exaggerate, let him go and see. Let him lie for one hour off the Rosseau at Dominica. Let him sail down the leeward side of Guadaloupe, down the leeward side of what island he will, and judge for himself how poor, and yet how tawdry, my words are, compared with the luscious yet magnificent colouring of ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... ready at Dresden, and thither Wagner went in April, 1842. The opera was produced in October, with enormous success, and the name of Wagner became famous throughout Germany. Nowadays so much of the music appears so very cheap and tawdry that it is only after a severe mental struggle one can understand the enthusiasm the work aroused. We must put away all thought of the later Wagner; we must forget that when Rienzi was produced the Dutchman had already ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... am master here now of everything; so go and take off all that tawdry rubbish. You will never make a soldier, and I shall tame down all this bullying haughtiness. You never thought my day would come when I was forced to put up with the insults and jeers of a miserable cub of a boy. But every man has his day. Your party has gone down at last, ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... which one sees only in East London. Their pale faces were dominated by that most unlovely of human expressions, the cunning and shrewdness of the bargain-hunter who starves if he cannot make a successful trade, and yet the final impression was not of ragged, tawdry clothing nor of pinched and sallow faces, but of myriads of hands, empty, pathetic, nerveless and workworn, showing white in the uncertain light of the street, and clutching forward for food which was ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... dignity of the work accomplished in arts and crafts by the women of Germany, where it was exhibited together with that of men. In the one instance where women secluded themselves it was shown with appalling force that the result was tawdry and inharmonious. ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... wheel,—in short, keep clear of the machinery. And Hulia does so; for, at the last attack of Padre Doyaguez, she suddenly turns upon him and says, "Sir, you are a Doctrinary and a Propagandist." And the good Father suffers her to depart in peace. But first there is the chapel to be seen, with its tawdry and poor ornamentation,—and the dormitories of the scholars, with long double rows of beds and mosquito-nettings. There are two of these, and each of them has at one end a raised platform, with curtains and a bed, where rests and watches the shepherd of the little sheep. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... his heels. There was the squeak, squeak, squeak of a child's new boots coming up the first flight of stairs; and a squeak, squeak, squeak up the second flight of stairs; and a little girl, not twelve years old, resplendent in such tawdry finery as might have stepped out of an East End London pawn shop, presented herself framed in the doorway of the reporter's room. She plainly belonged to the immigrant section of Smelter City. The news-editor never took his eyes from Bat's copy. They were eyes ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... the new an Italianised one. There is a third, and what Oswald calls the old "Highland laddie," which pleases me more than either of them. It is sometimes called "Ginglin Johnnie;" it being the air of an old humorous tawdry song of that name. You will find it in the Museum, "I hae been at Crookieden," &c. I would advise you, in the musical quandary, to offer up your prayers to the muses for inspiring direction; and in the meantime, waiting for this direction, bestow a libation to Bacchus; and there ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... distracting desires will be driven from the soul in which the lamp of faith burns bright. Ordinary human motives will appeal in vain to the ears which have heard the tones of the heavenly music, and all the pomps of life will show poor and tawdry to the sight that has gazed on the vision of the great white throne and the crystal sea. The most ignorant and erroneous 'religious sentiment'—to use a modern phrase—is mightier than all other forces in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... that which we bought last month unapproved by the current style. If we obey the herd-instinct (and there is an intensity of stimulation on every hand for us to obey) we must gather in the new, the cheap, the tawdry, obeying the tradesmen's promptings, not our true appreciations—in clothing, house-building and furnishing—following the heavy foot-prints of the advertising demon, a ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... in front, with mingled feelings of hope and fear. She knew that her home was not empty; that the furniture looked very gay; but she could not help suspecting that her mother, and yet more the sage Mr. Learning, might think some of it tawdry and worthless. Flinging the door wide open to admit her guests, Matty ran in so hurriedly to put a piece of furniture straight, that her foot was caught in her unfastened carpet, and down she fell on ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... space of cropped meadow between the barn and the hedge stood a man and a woman, both young. The man was a well-set-up, comely fellow, with a fine head of chestnut hair tied in a queue by a broad bow of black satin. He was dressed with certain tawdry attempts at ostentatious embellishments, which did not prepossess one at first glance in his favour. His coat of a fashionable cut was of faded plum-coloured velvet edged with silver lace, whose glory had long since ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... the things that are, My heart is always merry; I laugh and tune my old guitar: Sing ho! and hey-down-derry. Oh, let them toil their lives away To gild a tawdry era, But I'll be gay while yet ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... house must be swept and garnished before the man of the house can dwell in it. You have read history, Such a purging has descended on the Church at many times, and the world has awakened to a new hope. It is the same in all religions. The temples grow tawdry and foul and must be cleansed, and, let me remind you, the cleanser has always come out of ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... considered more essentially feminine. As I did so I had a picture before me, in which I saw Priscilla crowned with love, the support and blessing of her three little sisters. The picture was a very bright one, Maggie, and your crown of bay looks quite tawdry beside the other crown which I hope to see ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... to see what might be in the Pep Boys' store, far down the hill and along traffic-filled M Street. Somehow the tawdry bustle of this street, with its many shops, appealed to the boy who carried misery inside him like a cold, heavy stone. Running, he started down the hill between the lines of old brick houses, left Rock Creek Park behind him, and turning to the right up M Street, reached ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... Caledonian" was reprinted, as the "Monthly Review" informs us, from a copy corrected by Mrs. Haywood not long before her death.[16] The review continues, "It is like the rest of Mrs. Haywood's novels, written in a tawdry style, now utterly exploded; the romances of these days being reduced much nearer the standard of nature, and to the manners of the living world." Realism is, indeed, far to seek in the brief but intricate tissue of incidents that made the novel of ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... had ever seen, the most agreeable Shape, the finest Neck and Bosom, in a Word, the whole Person of a Woman exquisitely Beautiful. She affected to allure me with a forced Wantonness in her Look and Air; but I saw it checked with Hunger and Cold: Her Eyes were wan and eager, her Dress thin and tawdry, her Mein genteel and childish. This strange Figure gave me much Anguish of Heart, and to avoid being seen with her I went away, but could not forbear giving her a Crown. The poor thing sighed, curtisied, and ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... Mr Poulter entered the room, wearing evening dress, dancing pumps, and a tawdry-looking ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... no drug-born dream of Poe could equal it for grisly fascination. Frankenstein, de Maupassant's "Horla," all the fantastic literary monsters of the past faded to tawdry, childish bogeys beside the actual observations of Stern, the engineer, the man of science ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... house had struck her aghast. She had done naught but wonder and stare. The trip had been a great delight, but she had never desired to linger or to dwell there. Certain sordid effects came over her; reminiscences of the muddy streets, the tawdry shops, the ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... did much damage, and some of the woodwork then introduced could well be "scrapped" and the church again restored to something of its previous simple dignity. The painting of the nave and chancel roofs has a peculiarly "cheap" and tawdry effect. ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... Garish, it might have been, and tawdry, in the full light of the sun. But on these weirdly unreal structures the sun's rays never shone; they were illumined only by the soft golden glow that diffused across this world from the cloud masses ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... danced up from behind one of the huts, daubed with colored clays, figged out with a thousand tawdry charms, and cinctured round the middle by a girdle of half-picked bones. He wafted an evil odor before him as he advanced, and he came up and stood with one foot on Kettle's breast in the ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... double-bitted axes of much the same pattern as those with which our forbears hewed through Norman mail caught the light of the polished brass lamps and flashed upon the wainscot, while even an odd cross-cut saw had been skillfully impressed into the scheme of ornamentation. But there was nothing pinchbeck or tawdry about them. Whirled high by sinewy hands, or clenched in hard brown fingers while a steady eye stared down the barrel, that a bridge might span a ravine where no bridge had been, or venison help to cut down the grocery bill and leave the more for the breaking of virgin soil, ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... "Poetry, chiefly in the Scottish Language" (Inverness, 1804), 2 vols. 12mo. Among some rubbish, and much tawdry versification, there is occasional power, which, however, is insufficient to compensate for the general inferiority. There are only a few songs, but these are superior to the poems; and those following are not unworthy of a place ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... and the players would begone, Out of this theatre of tinsel days And lights and tawdry glamour, out to face Even the blank of night, the icy stars, The vast abysses. What the gallery-gods Could give, they well have given; but deities Inscrutabler than they annul all gifts With one gift more—the restless mind that peers Past fame, friends, learning, fortune, to enquire: Whither? Whither? ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... source of them, had ever the quivering consciousness that he was and must be in the presence of an unloved Judge; have you not there the naked bones of a very dreadful thing, which does not need any tawdry eloquence of man to make it more solemn and more real? The unloving heart is always ill at ease in the presence of Him whom it does not love. The unloving heart does not love, because it does not trust, nor see the love. Therefore, the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... military instinct, which is the special mark of barbarism, is strong in him. It arises not alone from his love of fighting, for the boy is naturally as cowardly as the savage, but from his fondness for display,—the same that a corporal or a general feels in decking himself in tinsel and tawdry colors and strutting about in view of the female sex. Half the pleasure in going out to murder another man with a gun would be wanting if one did not wear feathers and gold-lace and stripes on his pantaloons. The law also takes this ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... poetry which seems full of the lively impression of delightful things recently seen. Genuine poetry, it is true, is always naturally sympathetic with all beautiful sensible things and qualities. But with how many poets would not this constant intrusion of material ornament have produced a tawdry effect! The metal would all be tarnished and the edges blurred. And this is because it is not always that the products of even exquisite tectonics can excite or refine the aesthetic sense. Now it is probable that the objects of oriental art, the imitations of it at home, in ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... fountain and my birds?' she continued, after a short pause. 'After Armine, Ducie appears a little tawdry toy.' ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... People in different stations in England entertain different ideas of what is genteel, {329} but it must be something gorgeous, glittering, or tawdry to be considered genteel by any of them. The beau-ideal of the English aristocracy, of course with some exceptions, is some young fellow with an imperial title, a military personage, of course, for what is military is so particularly genteel, with flaming epaulets, a cocked ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... an old and tawdry history. He has forgotten you, Melicent, as a wise man will always put aside the dreams of his youth. To Cynara the Fates accord but a few years; a wanton Lyce laughs, cheats her adorers, and outlives the crow. There is an unintended ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... wandered round muddy streets of Rione Monti, and entered some churches. S.S. Cosmae Damiano in Forum: it has got lost, so to speak, in the excavations, and you seek it through blind alleys and a long dark passage—a dirty, tawdry church, with a few frowsy, sluttish people; and behind the ballroom chandeliers above the altar, a Ravenna apse, gold and blue; and lambs in procession ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... of all the temples of Japan, those of the New-Jodo (or Monto) sect are at once the most handsome, the most frequented, and the most attractive to the European traveller. Everything here, too, is of a dignified and stately character; there is a striking absence of the tawdry and the puerile. Founded in the year 1262, this sect is, at the present day, foremost in learning, influence, and activity. Another purely Japanese development, it is—owing to differences about "church government"—composed of two sub-divisions, the Nishi-Hongwanji and the Higashi-Hongwanji, ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... Bristles?" asked Fred, upon hearing his chum make such an astonishing assertion with regard to that tawdry breastpin picked ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... counter finally decided upon the toys, ordered them sent to her home and looking scornfully at the cheap jewelry and tawdry ornaments passed out of the store. She was thinking what a nuisance cousins were, how ridiculous it was in her father to insist each year upon her remembering his poor relations at Christmas, just when she needed all her allowance for ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery
... grave beauty, an austerity almost, about this betrothal in the prison. Here was no room for the archnesses and coynesses of ordinary lovemaking. All that was not simple truth fell away from them both like tawdry ornaments, for which there was no use in that sad place. Soul to soul, unseparated by even the flimsiest veil of conventionality, of custom; soul to soul, clear-visioned, steadfast, as those may be who are quietly watching the approach of death, ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... accoutrements of the uniform in which the huge body was clothed. A great crowd pressed to the railing to gaze their fill and go away. Behind the division tall troopers in cuirasses mounted guard and moved carelessly about. It was all tawdry, but tawdry on a magnificent scale—all unlike the man in whose honour it was done. For he had been ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... retained for them. But it was the fashion to be late: to enter the theatre noisily, when the play was half over, and even then to pay little attention to the players. In Fielding's farce of "Miss Lucy in Town," produced in 1742, when the country-bred wife inquires of Mrs. Tawdry concerning the behaviour of the London fine ladies at the playhouses, she is answered: "Why, if they can they take a stage-box, where they let the footman sit the two first acts to show his livery; then they come in to show themselves—spread ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... do not," said Grace. "I think it is an imposture. This man was not a clergyman when he brought me the certificate; he was a man of business, a plain tradesman, a man of the world; he had a colored necktie, and some rather tawdry chains." ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... as if he had been blackleaded all over. He was a negro, Darby knew. He had seen a black man only once before, and he now stared at this boy as if he could not remove his gaze. The lad's clothes, too, were queer. He had on a dingy purple velvet jacket, covered with frayed gold lace, tawdry tinsel braid, tarnished gilt buttons, with long, wide red and white striped cotton trousers, from which his dusky ankles and bare flat feet flopped about like the fins ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... on a couple of fire-dogs on the hearth. And on the chimney-piece above stood a foggy mirror and a modern clock with an inlaid wooden case; Fraisier had picked it up at an execution sale, together with the tawdry imitation rococo candlesticks, with the zinc beneath showing through the lacquer ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... bared her face, her nerves trembling, for the half-hour was nearly over, but with a brave, still light in her hazel eyes. The change had come of which every soul is susceptible. Very bitter tears may have come after that; her life was but a tawdry remnant, she might still think, for that foul lie of hers long ago; but she would take up the days cheerfully, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... bewildered by the strangeness of her surroundings; then memory returned, and she looked about her with a shiver. In the cold slant of light reflected from the back wall of a neighbouring building, she saw her evening dress and opera cloak lying in a tawdry heap on a chair. Finery laid off is as unappetizing as the remains of a feast, and it occurred to Lily that, at home, her maid's vigilance had always spared her the sight of such incongruities. Her body ached with fatigue, and with the constriction of her attitude ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... twenty years old; rather spare, of a fair height and strong make. His hair, of which he had a great profusion, was red and hung in disorder about his face and shoulders. His face was pale, his eyes glassy and protruding. His dress was green, clumsily trimmed here and there with gaudy lace. A pair of tawdry ruffles dangled at his wrists, while his throat was nearly bare. His hat was ornamented with a cluster of peacock's feathers, limp, broken, and trailing down his back. Girded to his side was the steel hilt of an old sword, without blade or scabbard; and a few knee-ribbons completed his attire. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... Moreover, there are sham Metaphors, which overhanging that same Thought's-Body (best naked), and deceptively bedizening, or bolstering it out, may be called its false stuffings, superfluous show-cloaks (Putz-Mantel), and tawdry woollen rags: whereof he that runs and reads may gather whole hampers,—and ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... mischievous influence on the governor's measures. Almagro's poverty-stricken followers were the objects of his open ridicule, and he revenged the insult now offered him by riding before their young leader's residence, displaying a tawdry magnificence in his dress, sparkling with gold and silver, and with the inscription, "For the Men of Chili," set in his bonnet. It was a foolish taunt; but the poor cavaliers who were the object of it, made morbidly sensitive by their sufferings, ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... already shifting the significance out of Western Europe altogether, and we English cannot see it; we can see no further than Berlin, and these Germans can think of nothing better than to taunt the French with such tawdry effigies as this! Europe goes on to-day as India went on in the eighteenth century, making aimless history. And the sands ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... the banks of the Euphrates, lifted their voices in lamentation, the sublime music so transfigured the commonplaceness of the words, that they meant all deep and unutterable affliction, and for a while swept away whatever was false and tawdry in the show, and thrilled our hearts with a rapture rarely felt. Yet, as but a moment before we had laughed to see Nebuchadnezzar's crown shot off his head by a squib visibly directed from the side scenes,—at the point when, according to the libretto, "the thunder roars, and a bolt descends ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... disgusting spread-eagleism cannot be muzzled by law, but he may be rendered harmless by vacant chairs and empty halls. Real eloquence is not a thing of noise and exaggeration. Beginning speakers should avoid the tawdry imitation as ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... aristocracy, a love of distinction, among the lowest dregs of society, as there is also a love of plush and other insignificant tawdry among our more wealthy republicans. Few would have thought of one inebriate affecting superiority over another, (the vote-cribber was an inebriate, as we shall show,) but so ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... Bronte electrified the world by showing that an infinitely older and more elemental truth could be conveyed by a novel in which no person, good or bad, had any manners at all. Her work represents the first great assertion that the humdrum life of modern civilisation is a disguise as tawdry and deceptive as the costume of a bal masque. She showed that abysses may exist inside a governess and eternities inside a manufacturer; her heroine is the commonplace spinster, with the dress of merino and the soul of flame. It is significant to notice that ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... the door for Houston, and one of them entered with him. It was a small room, evidently a woman's, and its general squalor and dilapidation were made more apparent by tawdry, shabby bits of finery strewn here and there. Curtains of red damask, faded and ragged, hung at the window, excluding the daylight, and on a small table a kerosene lamp had burned itself out. But Houston took little notice of ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... but he stooped and read the title, The Language of Flowers, and saw that—purely by accident of course—a leaf was doubled down as if to mark a place. He straightened himself again, and his proud lip curled in disgust as he glanced from the tawdry flowers to the tawdry book. And from below came suddenly the jingling notes of Lydia's piano and Lydia's voice—not exactly harsh and only occasionally out of tune, but with something hopelessly vulgar in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... remained, so to say, in the nursery most of the time, speaking when she was spoken to but without any of her characteristic freshness and boldness. She was the schoolgirl that Clowes expected her to be. Her very dress irritated Lawrence, as if he had seen a fine painting in a tawdry frame, or a pearl of price foiled by a spurious setting. He had not felt any glow at all, and was left to suppose his fancy had played him a trick. Disappointing! and now there was no chance of revising his impression, for apparently she had gone away with ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... espoused, and the like poor condition of the shepherds who were now shortly to be used of the Lord, was the only fitting way that we should expect the Lord would have it. All the pomp and glory of earthly preparation would have been but tawdry tinsel, detracting from the glorious things that were shortly to follow. Each one of the earthly players whom Jehovah had assigned to perform a part upon this stage was humble, meek, and possessed of faith in ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... were of a kind to which his mind had a deadly antipathy. He could stoop to a plain style, sometimes even to a bald style; but false brilliancy was his utter aversion. His muse had no objection to a russet attire; but she turned with disgust from the finery of Guarini, as tawdry and as paltry as the rags of a chimney-sweeper on May-day. Whatever ornaments she wears are of massive gold, not only dazzling to the sight, but capable of standing the severest test ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... of it; the new, pretentious church, rising above the heaps, a brick-and-stucco building of the worst neo-Catholic taste, which has been so gashed and torn and broken, while still substantially intact, that all its mean and tawdry ornament has disappeared in a certain strange dignity of ruin; and last, the hanging Virgin, holding up the Babe above the devastation below, in dumb protest to God and man. The gilded statue, which now hangs at right angles to the tower, has, after its original collapse under ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... where she tried vainly to restrain them. Her face had altered too, like her voice, haggard lines suddenly appearing about the eyes and mouth as if they had just been pencilled there: the truth issuing from beneath her pinchbeck simulations, like a tragic mask revealed by the displacement of a tawdry covering. ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... air, She acts a palpable lie, She's as little a fairy there As unpoetical I! I hear you asking, Why— Why in the world I sing This tawdry, tinselled thing? ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... so obstinate in its honest illusions, so silly in its dishonest pretences. "Have I been content with that?" I thought, staggered. And I was sorry for what I had been. I perceived that the ideals of my life were tawdry, that even the best were poor little things. And I perceived that it was the same with everyone, and that even the greatest men, those men that I had so profoundly admired as of another clay than mine, were as like the worst as one sheep was like another sheep. Weep—because ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... sounds of a farm hand whetting his scythe. Through a rift in the trees appeared a patch of delicate blue sky and the edge of a rosy cloud. Mrs. LeMasters came to the wistful end of an alluring and musty reminiscence and gazed regretfully at the tawdry beauties of the present. Then she turned her eyes upon Joe, and with a sigh that was sodden with romance: "How could you ever bear ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... is fond of a militaristic drum-banging that is as blatant as the insularity he condemns. But a burning, if sometimes too simple faith, shines through his achievements. His best work reveals an intensity that crystallizes into beauty what was originally tawdry, that lifts the vulgar and incidental to the place of ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... crowd upon the market-place. They crowded in gaping delight around the tent of some strolling acrobats, where red and smoking lanterns lighted the performance which was just beginning. Rolling their muscular limbs in dirty wraps, and decorated from head to foot with tawdry ruffles of fur, the athletes—four boyish ruffians with vulgar heads—were ranged in line before the painted canvas which represented their exploits; they stood there with their heads down, their legs apart, and their muscular arms crossed upon their chests. ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... had attacked Mrs. Jasher was a murderer could be seen from the stream of blood that ran slowly from Mrs. Jasher's breast. Apparently she had been stabbed in the lungs, for the wound was on the right side. There she lay, poor woman, in her tawdry finery, crumpled up, battered and bruised, dead amongst the ruins of her home. Jane immediately ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... or native of the New England States, with whom I engaged for bed and board for eight dollars per week, I sallied forth to make my intended observations, preparatory to leaving for the west. Everything wore a novel aspect. The number of foreigners seen in the thoroughfares, the tawdry flimsily-built carriages, which strangely contrast with the more substantial ones seen in England, and the dresses of the people, all seemed strange to me. The habiliments of one or two in particular rivetted my attention. The first was a Kentuckian, who ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... Cleopatra serves to adorn a prudish tale and Lancelot to point a moral. Oh, Mother Nature, give us back our freedom, with its strength of sinew and its humour! For lack of it we perish in false shame, and our fig-leaves point our immodesty to all the world. Teach us that love is not a tawdry sentiment, but a fire divine in order to the procreation of children; teach us not to dishonour our bodies, for they are beautiful and pure, and all thy works are sweet. Teach us, again, in thy merciful goodness, that man is made ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... my kind Irishman, I took my place in the gallery to hear compline and Salve Regina, with which the Cistercians bring every day to a conclusion. There were none of those circumstances which strike the Protestant as childish or as tawdry in the public offices of Rome. A stern simplicity, heightened by the romance of the surroundings, spoke directly to the heart. I recall the whitewashed chapel, the hooded figures in the choir, the lights alternately occluded and revealed, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... could just make out the girl I had followed sitting upon a bed; while leaning against the wall, a dirty clay pipe in her mouth, was the vilest old woman I have ever in my life set eyes on. She was very small, with a pinched-up nut-cracker face, dressed in an old bit of tawdry finery, more than three sizes too large for her. Her hair fell upon her shoulders in a tangled mass, and from under it her eyes gleamed out like those of a wicked little Scotch terrier ready to bite. As I bent down to ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... cathedral. It was St. John's eve. "At twelve o'clock to-night," said H., "the spirits of all who are to die this year will appear to any who will go alone into the dark cathedral and summon them"! We were charmed with the interior. Twilight hid all the dirt, cobwebs, and tawdry tinsel; softened the outlines, and gave to the immense arches, columns, and stained windows a strange and thrilling beauty. The distant tapers, seeming remoter than reality, the kneeling crowds, the heavy vesper chime, all combined ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Horror was first made popular by Poe, and he has had almost no successful imitators. It is unhealthy and morbid, full of a terrible charm if well done, but tawdry and disgusting if bungled. It requires a daring imagination, a full and facile vocabulary, and a keen sense of the ludicrous to hold these two in check. The plot is used only to give the setting to the story. Most any of Poe's tales would serve ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... pain, - Yet Thou (strange Fate that clings to all of Thine!) When most a Wit dost most a Poet shine. In Poetry thy Dunciad expires, When Wit has shot "her momentary Fires." 'Tis Tragedy that watches by the Bed "Where tawdry Yellow strove with dirty Red," And Men, remembering all, can scarce deny To lay the Laurel where ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... hands with Parnell. He had made his name at the Irish Bar as Crown Prosecutor in the troubled period of Mr. Balfour's Chief Secretaryship, and this experience had bred in him a hearty detestation of the whining sentimentality, the tawdry and exaggerated rhetoric, and the manufactured discontent that found vent in Nationalist politics. A sincere lover of Ireland, he had too much sound sense to credit the notion that either the freedom or the prosperity ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... place of worship, Madeleine and I went in to look for her sister; but my mother kept the children outside. As soon as we entered we found ourselves almost in darkness, what little light there was proceeding from great wax candles; and there was a good deal of tawdry finery and trumpery all about, and a strong smell of incense. I was looking about me with curiosity and interest, mixed with a certain repulsion, when Madeleine, in an eager undertone, exclaimed, "There she is!" and pressed forward, I close following, to a little side-altar, ...
— Jacques Bonneval • Anne Manning
... party. The simulated indignation of the journalist found expression in phrases which caricatured the simplicity of sincere condemnation. "Never did shameless corruption...." Roberts could not read the stuff. Yet the feigned passion and tawdry rhetoric in some way stirred up his bile; he would see Hutchings and—but if he unpacked his heart's bitterness upon her father, he would hurt May. He must restrain himself; Hutchings would understand from his manner, and May would be ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... the ranks of the congregation kneel, stand, fall prostrate, and press the brow upon the ground with a rhythm so reverential and so dignified that the watcher forgets for a time the torn or tawdry raiment, the grime of the factory, the dust of the streets, and feels that each fresh attitude of devotion is indeed the true posture of prayer. It is as a sea troubled by the breath of some unseen spirit,—wave upon wave rising, bending, and finally casting itself low in humility and self- sacrifice ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... prepared to enjoy himself after a day of arduous work, and by way of doing so, he ordered a drink or two that he did not really want. As a rule, he was abstemious, but the hall was very hot. It struck him as glaring and tawdry after the quiet dale where the water sparkled among the stones; and the pallid loungers with their stamp of indulgence differed unpleasantly from the hard, ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... had seen long service, but it was neatly brushed and darned, and the ability to wear threadbare clothing with distinction was not the least of Edgar Poe's talents. Beside his worn, but cared-for apparel, costly dress often seemed tawdry. ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... arms of his master, in which the Boar's Head made a distinguished appearance, in blazonry, which in the opinion of the skilful was more showy than accurate. The rest of his dress—a dress always sufficiently tawdry—was overcharged with lace, embroidery, and ornament of every kind, and the plume of feathers which he wore was so high, as if intended to sweep the roof of the hall. In short, the usual gaudy splendour of the heraldic attire was caricatured and overdone. The Boar's ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... the garden. Lord, how he stared at the fireworks! Gods, how he huzzayed at the singing of a horrible painted wench who shrieked the ears off my head! A twopenny string of glass beads and a strip of tawdry cloth are treasures in Iroquois-land, and our savage valued ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... her well-shaped face. She was taller than her diminutive husband, and, in every detail of expression, his antithesis. She wore a dress with some pretensions to display, and suggesting a considerable personal vanity. But it was of the tawdry order that was unconvincing, and ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... tasteful lines of her wrapped figure, the gracefulness of her carriage and of the hand that caught up her skirts; and then she was gone and he was left staring at the two girls of the cannery, at their tawdry attempts at prettiness of dress, their tragic efforts to be clean and trim, the cheap cloth, the cheap ribbons, and the cheap rings on the fingers. He felt a tug at his arm, ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... indelicate than in the plays we see posted at the doors of our theatres. The French of the time of Louis XIV. must have been a much more refined people than the contemporary English. At least, Thalia in Paris was a vestal, compared with her tawdry, indecent, and drunken London sister. One is ashamed to be seen reading the unblushing profligacy of Wycherley, Cibber, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... iron cylinders and black swinging bars and wheels, all in swift, ponderous motion. It was enough to make a brain dizzy with the clanging thunder of the engines, the whizzing spindles of red and yellow, and the hot daylight glaring over all. The looms were watched by women, most of them bold, tawdry girls of fifteen or sixteen, or lean-jawed women from the hills, wives of the coal-diggers. There was a breathless odor of copperas. As he went from one room to another up through the ascending ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... Chinese of Chinatown lived on the ten thousand Chinese who came into it from all quarters on Sundays, and I understood. As a show it lacked convincingness—except the delicatessen-shop, whose sights and odors silenced criticism. It had the further disadvantage, by reason of its tawdry appeals of color and light, of making one feel like a tourist. Above a certain level of culture, no man who is a tourist has the intellectual honesty to admit to himself that he is a tourist. Such honesty is ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... And against the door there leaned a man puffing for breath and coughing spasmodically—a gross and monstrous bulk of flesh, unclean and unwholesome to the eye, attired in an extravagant array of coloured garments, tawdry silks and satins clinging, sodden, to ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... inconsistent with every monument of antiquity around, and in itself so clumsy at the same time and fantastic, that it may be likened to the decorations of Tom Errand the porter, in the Trip to the Jubilee, when he appears bedizened with the tawdry finery of Beau Clincher. Sed transeat ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... dress rather tawdry and rumpled, here drew her veil well down and rose; but, marking every eye upon her, thought it advisable, upon the whole, to sit ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... throughout Cambridgeshire. After following this lane about a quarter of a mile, we came upon a small, retired ale-house, surrounded by trees. As we approached the door a stout, vulgar-looking woman, dressed in rather tawdry finery, ran out to meet us; on coming nearer, however, she stopped short as if surprised, and then re-entered the house as quickly as she had left it, calling to some one within as she did so. After waiting for a minute or two she came back, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... sometimes (as in my own case) not without an apoplectic tendency. Moreover, there are sham Metaphors, which overhanging that same Thought's-Body (best naked), and deceptively bedizening, or bolstering it out, may be called its false stuffings, superfluous show-cloaks (Putz-Maentel), and tawdry woollen rags: whereof he that runs and reads may gather whole ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... arrived at the square, but the whole place was alive with earthly lights. High up to our left hung the church, outlined in fire—tawdry, I dare say, with its fairy lights of electricity, yet speaking to three-quarters of this crowd in the highest language they knew. Light, after all, is the most heavenly thing we possess. Does it matter so very much if it is decked out and arranged in what to superior persons ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson
... a husband then in the city; they bite rarely at a stale whore at this end of the town, new furbished up in a tawdry manteau. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... inclined to believe the statement. The woman and the girl looked at each other in the tawdry, frowsy, lamp-lit room. Miss Spencer nervously patted her yellow hair into shape, as if gradually recovering her composure and equanimity. The whole affair seemed like a dream to Nella, a disturbing, sinister nightmare. She was a little uncertain ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... ways. All her manners were that of a mad thing, but her play, her taste, her magnificence, even her general familiarity, made her the fashion. She soon declared the women's head-dresses ridiculous, as indeed they were. They were edifices of brass wire, ribbons, hair, and all sorts of tawdry rubbish more than two feet high, making women's faces seem in the middle of their bodies. The old ladies wore the same, but made of black gauze. If they moved ever so lightly the edifice trembled and the inconvenience was extreme. The King could not endure them, but master as he was of everything ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... towards her, then, checked himself abruptly and stood looking down at her in silence. From the ball-room there floated out the strains of the latest fox-trot, sounding curiously cheap and tawdry as they cut across the deep, almost solemn intensity that prevailed in the quiet room where a man had just stripped his soul naked to the eyes of the woman he loved and now stood ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... it is that! I've noticed, and I've noticed it many times, that a woman takes her color from the man she's walking with. The woman who looks an unquestionable lady when she's with a polished-up fellow, looks a mere tawdry imitation article when she's hobbing and nobbing with a homely blade. You sha'n't be treated like that for long, or at least your children sha'n't. You shall have somebody to walk with you who looks more of a dandy than I—please God ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... Chinese art, may be seen the presents which Louis XIV made to the Emperor when he wished to impress him with the splendour of Le Roi Soleil. Compared to the Chinese things surrounding them, they were tawdry and barbaric. The fact that Britain has produced Shakespeare and Milton, Locke and Hume, and all the other men who have adorned literature and the arts, does not make us superior to the Chinese. What makes us superior is Newton and Robert Boyle ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... against the brightness of the cheesecloth, but kept its dignity and kept up its claim to homage still. And the ugliness of the room was a thing to be discounted and forgotten, like some beautiful, full-blooded woman's tawdry, and ill-chosen clothes, because ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... his black cut-away coat, snuff-coloured trousers, and high-crowned felt hat with its ornamental band. This receded to the back of his head as he grew hotter. The harp was slung from his shoulder, the gilding looking tawdry in the open day. Twice during the walk, once in a round clearing fringed with birches, and once in a pine-glade, he stopped, put the harp down and played, sitting on a felled tree. Hazel, quite intoxicated with excitement, danced between the slender boles till her hair fell down and the long plait ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... she had gone led into the kitchen. The other two doors she found gave entrance to small bedrooms, neither having egress other than through the living room. The furniture in all the rooms was cheap and tawdry ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... they "issue forth from themselves" and are stirred and thoroughly interested. They quite simply adopt as their own, and imitate as best they can, all that they see there. In moments of genuine grief and excitement the words and the gestures they employ are those copied from the stage, and the tawdry expression often conflicts hideously with the fine and genuine emotion of which it is the inadequate ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... against a dense curtain of smoke, sitting at a table before an enormous glass goblet of beer. Then, as the haze drifted before the draught, I distinguished the outline of a long, low-ceilinged room, with small tables set along either side and a little bar, presided over by a tawdry female with chemically tinted hair, at the end. Most of the tables were occupied, and there was almost as much noise as ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
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