"Pompous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and visible household that an ordinary person, say, a visitor who came to lunch on Sunday after church, would have noticed. It was the upper layer; but there was an under layer too. There was Thompson, the old pompous family butler; they trusted him because he was silent and rarely smiled, winked at their mischief, pretended not to see them when he caught them in his pantry, and never once betrayed them. There was Mrs. Horton, the fat ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... months of December and January, 1877-78, that he was able to transact business daily with the cardinals, heads of congregations and other prelates. It was for him the revival—the lucid interval—which so often precedes the final scene. Notwithstanding the pompous obsequies which the late king had prepared for Pius IX., the venerable Pontiff still lived, and was able to protest against the pretensions of the successor of that king, and to defend against his usurpation the Church and ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... so called because descended from a baker who supplied Cromwell's army with bread. Bettesworth is termed the player, from his pompous enunciation.] ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... enjoyed the joke perpetrated by Madaline, in her suspicion of a possible goat farm being tucked away in the mountains, thence Maid Mary and the pompous Reda were wont to lug the roots; at the same time she felt unequal to a better guess at the puzzle, for it was now conspicuously clear that roots, all kinds of roots, were being gathered continuously by the little girl ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... preaches like a lecturer; the angel who lifts up, and the sorceress who pulls down. We recall the misers we have scorned, and the hypocrites whom we have detested. We see on her canvas the vulgar rich and the struggling poor, the pompous man of success and the broken-down man of misfortune; philanthropists and drunkards, lofty heroines and silly butterflies, benevolent doctors and smiling politicians, quacks and scoundrels and fools, mixed ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... in the wet streets, and hearing with him in a penny gaff that venerable piece, The Ticket-of-Leave Man. It was one of his first visits to a theatre, against which places of entertainment he had a strong prejudice; and his innocent, pompous talk, innocent old quotations, and innocent reverence for the character of Hawkshaw delighted me beyond relief. In charity to myself, I dwell upon and perhaps exaggerate my pleasures. I have need of all conceivable excuses, when ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... ample expanses of bare legs; they had no notion of riding, but managed to stick on somehow by clinging to pommel and mane, banging here into a sedate Judge of the High Court, with an apologetic "Sorry, sir, but this swine of a pony won't steer;" barging there into a pompous Anglo-Indian official, as they yelled to their ponies, "Easy now, dogs-body, or you'll unship us both;" galloping as hard as their ponies could lay legs to the ground, cannoning into half the white inhabitants ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... may ask you to consider, but for a moment, the relation which all the other perfection of the divine nature have to this central and foundation one. There are all those pompous names, 'Omnipresence' and 'Omniscience' and the like, which are but the negations of the limitations of humanity or of finite creatures. There are the more spiritual and moral thoughts of Wisdom and Righteousness and the like. These are but the fringes of the glory: I was going ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... same thing. One need only to take a ride in a bus or street car to find the certain symptoms of self-display. These may consist in nothing more serious than a peculiarly conspicuous collar or hatband, or particularly high heels. It may consist in a loud voice full of pompous references to great banquets recently attended or great sums recently spent. It may be in a raised eyebrow or a disdainful smile. There are people among every one's acquaintance whose conversation is largely ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... a most splendid monument to her departed lord over the family vault of the Bluebeards. The rector, Dr. Sly, who had been Mr. Bluebeard's tutor at college, wrote an epitaph in the most pompous yet pathetic Latin: "Siste, viator! moerens conjux, heu! quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui meminisse"; in a word, everything that is usually said in epitaphs. A bust of the departed saint, with Virtue mourning over it, stood over the ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... his manner so that, while a very few people laugh at him, he does things that the town would resent in any one else. He doesn't go round with the boys, and they look up to him for it. He isn't pompous, but he's acquired a kind of stateliness of manner that's made Greenville call him 'Mister Ransom' instead of 'Hec.' You probably think that his request to the National Committee only shows he's got all the nerve in the world; but I believe, on my soul, that if it had been granted ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... lineament was expressed a profound belief in himself, and an equally profound scorn for the opinions of any one who might possibly presume to disagree with him. He smiled condescendingly as he met Theos's half-surprised, half-inquiring look, and saluted him with a gravely pompous air, which however, was not without a saving touch of that indescribable, easy grace which seemed to distinguish the manners of all the inhabitants of Al-Kyris. Theos returned the salutation with equal gravity, whereupon the new-comer ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Over the rail appeared a blue helmet, and an instant later a big and very pompous police officer leaped to the deck. He was followed by the wharf watchman, who ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... leaned at various angles, none was vertical. They were obviously headstones of graves, though the graves themselves no longer existed as either mounds or depressions; the years had leveled all. Scattered here and there, more massive blocks showed where some pompous tomb or ambitious monument had once flung its feeble defiance at oblivion. So old seemed these relics, these vestiges of vanity and memorials of affection and piety, so battered and worn and stained—so ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... States, it simply becomes matter for derision. One might as well set the gentlemen detained in the public prisons to trying each other. This investigation is likely to be like all other Senatorial investigations—amusing but not useful. Query. Why does the Senate still stick to this pompous word, 'Investigation?' One does not blindfold one's self in order ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... idolatrously-minded might not find their paths. And since the pulling down of those churches wanted neither this happy intent not happy event, I must say that the bitter invectives given forth against it, by some who carry a favourable eye to the pompous bravery of the Romish whore, and have deformed too much of that which was by them reformed, are to be detested by all such as wish the eternal exile of idolatrous monuments out of the Lord's land, yet let these Momus-like spirits understand that their censorious ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... guide—an ancient and somewhat pompous individual—to a large and very pleasantly situated room in the north wing of the castle, from whence, through an opening between the trees, a glimpse of the sea was to be obtained; the foreground being occupied ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... into effect, and the few partisans the British have found, when they marched out into the country. But though we wish these matters to be understood, yet I am far from recommending it to you to make a pompous display of them. Your own judgment will direct you on this subject. Your having been long in a public character, will naturally lead those who wish to be informed to inquire the state of our affairs from ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. VIII • Various
... hats were everywhere. In stately mansions and in dreary attics real tears of sorrow were shed. The good princess was dead. In the palace, in a grand apartment all draped in black, lay her silent, wasted body, on a pompous funeral bier. Throngs of the loftiest and the noblest of the land passed slowly by, in solemn procession, to pay their last respects to the humble princess and the true-hearted woman who had gone to her reward. Rough peasants and the poor of the city came too, with their tribute of real mourning, ...
— The Golden House • Mrs. Woods Baker
... slender, perhaps, yet sharp and elastic as the blades of Toledo; and as they have galloped up and down in the lists, gaily caparisoned and cheery, it has done our hearts good to see how they have hurled into the dust the pompous, sleepy ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... The pompous flatulence of the language touched bathos. He thought of the thousands who had read both columns and preened themselves upon that leader. He thought how they would pride themselves upon the latest contrivance for speeding their inert bodies from one point to another "annihilating distance"; ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... and their vassals. He began with the storming of Kalat er-rum, a fortress on the Upper Euphrates in the neighbourhood of Bireh, the possession of which was important both for the defence of Northern Syria and for attacks on Armenia and Asia Minor. In spite of many pompous declarations that this was only the beginning of greater conquests in Asia Minor and Irak, he retired as soon as the Ilkhan Kaikhatu sent a strong detachment of troops against him. Later on he threatened the Prince of Armenia-Minor with ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... a very small station where our Civil Surgeon was an Eurasian. He was a pompous little fellow, but a capital doctor, ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... Parody, like those of Wit, If well contrasted, never fail to hit; One half in light, and one in darkness drest, (For contraries oppos'd still shine the best.) When a cold Page half breaks the Writer's heart, By this it warms, and brightens into Art. When Rhet'ric glitters with too pompous pride, By this, like Circe, 'tis un-deify'd. So Berecynthia, while her off-spring vye In homage to the Mother of the sky, (Deck'd in rich robes, of trees, and plants, and flow'rs, And crown'd illustrious with an hundred tow'rs) O'er all ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... introduced me to the Greek and Roman historians, to as many at least as were accessible to an English reader. All that I could find were greedily devoured, from Littlebury's lame Herodotus, and Spelman's valuable Xenophon, to the pompous folios of Gordon's Tacitus, and a ragged Procopius of the beginning of the last century. The cheap acquisition of so much knowledge confirmed my dislike to the study of languages; and I argued with Mrs. Porten, that, were I master of Greek and Latin, I must interpret ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... which does as little as possible for God, and magnifies that little into importance, Little Abe knew nothing about, and he is a poor, pompous, pitiable thing that does; the open heart, the willing hand, the ready feet, are among the few things that God Almighty is pleased to see among His people; the penitent that sheds his tears by the dozen, the man that goes ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... said the pompous distributor of justice, addressing young Purcel, "how do you do? Take a seat—by the way, is it true that your father and my excellent friend, Dr. Turbot, ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... and the Norman Feudal Court. But in matters of State its "counsel" was scarcely asked or given; its "consent" was yielded as a mere matter of form; no discussion or hesitation interrupted the formal and pompous display of final submission to the royal will. The Church under its Norman bishops, foreign officials trained in the King's chapel, was no longer a united national force, as it had been in the time of the Saxon kings. The mass of the people was of no account in politics. The trading class ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... This pompous servant showed extraordinary affability and politeness toward me, which caused me to wonder how I should have been received by him had I been a shoemaker, a carpenter, or some other honest son of toil, whose labor increases the wealth of the world, instead of a moneyed ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... was a very pompous man, and the document he had just discovered on the priest added to his sense of self-importance. When, therefore, a large, carefully folded paper was produced from the neighbourhood of Valeria's lovely bosom his eyes sparkled with admiration. "Ho, ho!" he exclaimed, as he clutched it eagerly, ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... jutted out from the mountain was the eagle's nest, made of rude sticks of wood gathered from the forest. Sitting beside the nest was Mrs. Eagle, larger and more pompous even than her husband, while squatting upon the edge of the nest were two half-grown eaglets with enormous claws and heads, but rather skinny bodies that were covered with loose and ragged feathers. Neither the nest nor the eaglets appeared to be very clean, ...
— Policeman Bluejay • L. Frank Baum
... magnificent architectural design; and wonderful studies of perspective to the right and left, in the long lines of receding groups. On the whole, it is a most skilful piece of work; but to my taste much like a theatrical decoration,—pompous without being animated. ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... promise not to shout and awake the echo. David readily promised this, and so they sat down. David proposed to keep a school, and cut a hazel wand from a bush, and began to lord it over his two scholars in a very pompous manner. The two sisters pretended to be much afraid, and to read very diligently on pieces of flat stone which they had picked up. And then David became a sergeant, and was drilling them for soldiers, and stuck pieces of fern into their hair for cockades. And then, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... and pompous. I longed for a fussy practitioner who would have got over the ground in half ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... extravagant, wild, His caustic merciless mirth Was leveled at pompous shams. Doubt not behind that mask There dwelt the soul of a man, Resolute, sorrowing, sage, As sure a champion of good As ever rode ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... writes, 'and have spent about an hour with him. He is completely confined to his bed, but talks hopefully of leaving it again when the summer comes round. I am afraid that it will not be leaving it as he plans, poor old man! He is touchingly softened by illness; but still talks in his pompous way, and mingles moral remarks and somewhat stale sentiments with his conversation on ordinary subjects.' This is severe, but after all it was a literary woman who wrote it. On the whole we may safely assume, with the evidence ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... have no doubt (for he had a sense of humour), the manner of my address, which nervousness had made somewhat pompous. ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... through the halls and chambers on his way to the state dining room, he was escorted by the seneschal and twelve pages; and the sides of each room, as well as the aisles, were lined with servants in pompous liveries. ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... scarcely describable as immaculate: Villon thieved, Kit Marlowe left a wake of emptied bottles, and Will Sommers was notoriously a fool; Matthiette was vain, and Adelais self-seeking, and the tenth Marquis of Falmouth, if you press me, rather a stupid and pompous ass: and yet to each in turn it was granted to love greatly, to know at least one hour of magnanimity when each was young in ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... Having sounded England and Italy, and learned that they were willing to arbitrate, and knowing also that neither of them schemed to take territorial payment for their bills, he directed his diplomatic attack straight at the Kaiser. When the German Ambassador, Dr. von Holleben, one of the pompous and ponderous professorial sort of German officials, was calling on him at the White House, the President told him to warn the Kaiser that unless he consented, within a given time—about ten days—to arbitrate the Venezuelan dispute, the American ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... hurriedly, Deforrest Young met his brother-in-law face to face as the latter rounded the corner of the house. At the sight of this pompous person, whose meddling threatened so much trouble to his dear ones, the indignation which Tessibel's words had in a measure quieted, flared up anew. He wanted to fight, to pound, and if possible to kill with his hands the man in front ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... enviously of the faith which could find comfort in the issue of such documents; for herself she would be content to remain silent for ever if a share of personal happiness were granted her. She read Mr. Clacton's statement with a curious division of judgment, noting its weak and pompous verbosity on the one hand, and, at the same time, feeling that faith, faith in an illusion, perhaps, but, at any rate, faith in something, was of all gifts the most to be envied. An illusion it was, no doubt. She ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... standing rebuke to the "viper brood"; succumbing to the sapping current it had toppled prone to earth. The ghoulish flood had exhumed the poor, decayed pine coffin, which now lay half-exposed, in pitiful contrast to the pompous monolith which, like a giant note of ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... she would have found that State dinner as dreary as it was pompous. The Rajah was occupied with discussing the laws of British sport with Colonel Bradlaw who regarded himself as an authority on such matters, and expressed his opinions ponderously and ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... volleys of musketry pouring down the banks, their horses and artillery swallowed in the mud, the wounded swept away by the current or buried alive in the quagmires. The air resounded with German, Spanish, Italian, and Flemish voices. Torches illuminated the great arquebuses, the pompous plumes, the strange, blanched faces. The battles seemed to be fantastic funerals. They were, in fact, the funerals of the great Spanish monarchy, which was slowly drowned in Dutch waters, smothered with mud and curses. One who is weak enough to feel an excessive ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... had gone by, however, for such display to have the anticipated effect. The Virginian legislators penetrated the intention of this pompous ceremonial, and regarded it with a depreciating smile. Sterner matters occupied their thoughts; they had come prepared to battle for their rights, and their proceedings soon showed Lord Botetourt how much he had mistaken them. Spirited resolutions were passed, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... he might carry on secret communications if necessary, persuaded the government, that it would be proper to pave the way for the commissioners by a previous step; and in consequence he addressed a letter of congratulation to the Duke of Wellington, in which he entreated him with pompous meanness, to bestow on France his suffrage ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... acid way that he supposed we should now—i.e. in two days time—be off into the country. The truth was that Woloda, though pleased at my matriculation, did not altogether like my becoming as grown-up as himself. St. Jerome, who also joined us at this moment, said in a very pompous manner that his duties were now ended, and that, although he did not know whether they had been well done or ill, at least he had done his best, and must depart to-morrow to his Count's. In replying to their various remarks I could feel, in spite of myself, a pleased, agreeable, faintly ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... the chief," Toppington said. "If his tigers make a meal off anybody, it'll be—" He nodded in the direction of the other side of the chamber, where Wilton Joyner, short, bald, pompous, and Harvey Graves, tall and cadaverous, stood in a Rosencrantz-Guildenstern attitude, surrounded by half a dozen ...
— Null-ABC • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... most violent efforts of despotism are insufficient to extirpate a whole people, or to subdue their religious prejudices. Desirous of repairing the mischief that he had occasioned, he published in his own name, and in those of Licinius and Constantine, a general edict, which, after a pompous recital of the Imperial titles, proceeded in ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... them have gone down to the bottom of the great deep, where the seaweed is their winding sheet, the coral their only tombstone. One sleeps in Helena till the sound of the last trumpet arouse her; and when she comes up she will be attended by a retinue ten thousand times more pompous and more splendid than ever surrounded the maddened emperor who had his grave in that island. His tomb was there, and after a few years, when it was opened, his military dress was wrapped around him as when he was ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... Mrs. Grantham, though pompous, were a kindly pair: and Mrs. Grantham, entering the library where Mr. Wesley and his daughter awaited her, and observing that the girl seemed frightened or depressed (she could not determine which), rang the bell at once and sent a maid ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... so big they had to hoop him to keep him from bursting," remarked one, who remembered how pompous Philip had been. ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... them by its movement, its colouring, its youthfulness. They made scarcely any distinction between Victor Hugo, Dumas, or Bouchardy, and the diction was no longer to be pompous or fine, but ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... traits of the French character were effaced during the reign of Louis XIV.; that "literature, in ages which are called classical, loses in originality what it gains in correctness"; that the French tragedies are full of pompous affectation; and that from the middle of the seventeenth century, a constrained and affected manner had prevailed throughout Europe, symbolised by the wig worn by Louis XIV. in pictures and bas-reliefs, where he is portrayed sometimes ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... orators, such as Cato and the Gracchi, spoke simply, too simply for the taste of Cicero. Those who followed them in the first century learned in the schools of the Greek rhetors the long oratorical periods and pompous style. The greatest of all was Cicero, the only one whose works have come down to us in anything but fragments; and yet we have his speeches as they were left by him and not ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... notice that he "didn't ripre-sent nobody," he proceeded to do, taking a dozen or more gigantic strides, and hastily retired again behind the safe bulwark of Jeff's back. As he stood there in his shrunken condition, he about as much resembled the pompous and arrogant duellist of a half-hour previous as a wet and bedraggled turkey does the strutting, gobbling cock of the flock. The Major, with an objurgation at him for stepping "as if he had on seven league boots," stepped off the distance himself, explaining to Lawrence that ten paces ...
— "George Washington's" Last Duel - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... with the pompous vanity peculiar to him. But on the other hand—to use the phrase of Figaro—it is the truest truth of all he has ever uttered in his life. He destroys and he builds. Only the mystery of his "destruction" reveals itself completely ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... public gardens are now overgrown with grass. Sea-breezes sweep the rambling convent with its double walls, tiled courtyard, and its Spanish well. The new church, never to be finished, but with pompous front, illustrates the relaxing power of Rome. Goats, carabaos, and ponies graze on the neglected plaza shaded with widespreading camphor-trees. The two school buildings bearing the forgotten Spanish arms are on the road to ruin and decay; no signs of life in the disreputable municipio; ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... matron—put into the short skirts, spangles, and mischievous peering glances of Colombina. Belviso would have sustained it had he been present. Adone, his understudy, took his place. My own share in the mummery was humble and confusing. In toga and cothurnus I had to read a pompous prologue, and did it amid shouts of "Basta! basta!" from the audience. I don't believe that I was more thankful than they were when I had done. The less I say about the rest of the evening and night the better. The people of Certaldo more ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... suddenly spinning round in a wild dance of triumph on the floor, and then as suddenly stopping and falling into an attitude before us. "Monsieur, if you will help us, I have the richest jest ever played. Pierre, listen. You, gentlemen all, listen! We will pretend that he is changed. He is a pompous man; he thinks the Mayor of Bottitort equal to the Saint Pere. Well, Pierre shall be M. Grabot, Mayor of Bottitort. You, monsieur, that we may give him enough of mayors, shall be the Mayor of Gol, and I will be the Mayor of St. Just. This gentleman shall swear to us, so shall the servants. For ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... "disturbing element." Hon J. Quinn Thornton was chairman of that committee. In his report he declared all delegations to be satisfactory (including those from the penitentiary) except the women whom he styled "setting hens," "belligerent females," etc., after which he subsided with pompous gravity. All eyes were turned upon me, and I felt as I fancy a general must when the success or failure of an army in battle depends upon his word. "Mr. President," I exclaimed, as soon as I could get ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... chump evidently doesn't like me interfering. Silly old pompous ass!" Nevertheless his attitude towards the huffy landlord, if ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... its infancy, the high-sounding name of 'Theory of the Earth.' Starting from a small number of facts, badly observed, connecting them by fantastic suppositions, it pretended to go back to the origin of worlds, to, as it were, play with them, and to create their history. Its arbitrary methods, its pompous language, altogether seemed to render it foreign to the other sciences, and, indeed, the professional savants for a long time cast it out of ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... rather an insolent tone with his customers. He was, however, tolerated as a sort of privileged person, and his impertinence was not only overlooked but was considered as rather a good joke. He was a pompous fellow, with a considerable vein of ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... year Savonarola composed another poem, this time on the Ruin of the Church. In his boyhood he had witnessed the pompous shows which greeted AEneas Sylvius, more like a Roman general than a new-made Pope, on his entrance into Ferrara. Since then he had seen the monster Sixtus mount the Papal throne. No wonder if he, who had fled from the world to the Church for purity ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... she, (sighing once more,) you have just cause to believe this rich and pompous prison cannot be otherwise than a most wearisome abode; the most charming place in the world being nowise delightful when we are detained in it contrary to our will. It is not possible but you have heard of the great Epitimarus, king ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... villains and butts. People like to believe that Nell Gwynne has every amiable quality and the Bishop's wife every odious one. Poor Mr. Pecksniff, who is generally no worse than a humbug with a turn for pompous talking, is represented as a criminal instead of as a very typical English paterfamilias keeping a roof over the head of himself and his daughters by inducing people to pay him more for his services than they are worth. In the extreme instances of reaction against convention, female ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... delineated by some of their actions and adventures, and introduced to us merely as the agents in those particular transactions; while in the Hymns, from those ascribed to Orpheus and Homer, down to those of Callimachus, we have little but pompous epithets and invocations, with a flattering commemoration of their most famous exploits—and are never allowed to enter into their bosoms, or follow out the train of their feelings, with the presumption ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... whole system of official values: the ignobility of fashionable life; the infamies of empire; the spuriousness of the church, the vain conceit of the professions; the meannesses and cruelties that go with great success; and every other pompous crime and lying institution of this world. To all patience with such things his experience has been for him a perroanent ministry ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... she could mimic anyone from the young Italian at "Correlli's" to pompous Mrs. Belmont Nevill, who owned millions that she didn't know how to use. So now she had brought Miss Peabody before her guardian so vividly that the latter added, in surprise, "That must be a recent accomplishment, Lucy. You ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... a pompous fellow dropped in. We recognized him as Brainerd, one of the leading business men of a small city. His story was this: He had built up a big enterprise during the pioneer boom days of easy money and negligible competition. Now, when margins ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... days. Chase was not at all like Seward in his appearance. Tall and of commanding figure, he was a man of perfect physique. He had an expressive face and an excellent voice, well adapted to out-door speaking. In manner, he appeared somewhat pompous, and the impression he left on the mind of the listener was not so agreeable as that retained of the ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... fixed moral fibre must always be some moral idea. When a man lives up to a real, not a pompous, dignity some ideal must inform it. Memba Sasa's ideal was that of ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... and bow'd from side to side; But as in graceful act, with awful eye, Conpos'd he stood, bold Benson thrust him by: On two unequal crutches props he came, Milton's on this, on that one Jonson's name. The decent Knight retir'd with sober rage, Withdrew his hand, and clos'd the pompous page: But (happy for him as the times went then) Appear'd Apollo's may'r and aldermen, On whom three hundred gold-capt youths await, To lug the pond'rous volume off in state. "When Dulness, smiling—'Thus revive the wits! ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... pompous monument of Egyptian greatness, and one of the most bulky works of manual industry," said Imlac, "are the Pyramids: fabrics raised before the time of history, and of which the earliest narratives afford us only uncertain ...
— Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia • Samuel Johnson
... that afternoon, and first told him what he had seen, offering no solution. The captain, on that occasion, was in an amphibious state; neither wet nor dry; and his reply was altogether exceptional. He received the communication with pompous civility; then swore a great oath, and said he would put the mate in irons. "Confound the lubber! he will be through ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... England. But the successors of Mr Pitt were strong; they thought the Fitz-Warenes had already been too rapidly advanced; it was whispered that the king did not like the new man; that his majesty thought him pompous, full of pretence, in short, a fool. But though the successors of Mr Pitt managed to govern the country for twenty years and were generally very strong, in such an interval of time however good their management or great their luck, there were inevitably occasions when they found themselves ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... mouldering relic of Spanish stateliness; at Hondaye, at Irun, at Renteria, and finally at San Sebastian. At all of these wayside towns the houses show marks of Alphonsist bullets (the region was strongly Carlist); but to be riddled and battered seems to carry out the meaning of the pompous old escutcheons carven above the doorways, some of them covering almost half the house. It seemed to me, in fact, that the narrower and shabbier was the poor little dusky dwelling, the grander and more elaborate was this noble advertisement. But it stood for knightly prowess, ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... and pompous vanity were aroused. "Tink dis nigger can't shoot, eh? You-alls just watch an' Chris will show you ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... he cantered heavily away, not forgetting to wave a pompous farewell to Angele. De la Foret was smiling as he turned to Angele. She looked wonderingly at him, for she had felt that she must comfort him, and she looked not for this sudden change ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... amused, yet bewildered, through the wide archway into the more brilliantly lighted drawing-room. It was a magnificent apartment, containing a half dozen people. The one nearest the entrance was a man of middle age, exceedingly pompous and dignified, who immediately arose to his feet, expectantly. Miss Coolidge cordially extended her ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... a walk, and talk to her about it. He would be interested in it all, and he would laugh at her account of the undertakers, and he would break into elementary socialism when the cost of the whole pompous pageant ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... never tired of waltzing." Mme. Lefebvre was aware of how costly were such drawing-room triumphs as she imaged in her ambitious soul, and where the supplies of booty could be found; Davout and Lannes and Ney were still faithful and efficient; Augereau in action was utterly uncertain, in morals pompous and wrong-headed; Murat knew where and how the great prizes were to be found, and was as dashing and venturesome as he was selfish and worldly-wise. The Russian generals were plodding disciples of routine. Bennigsen was an able Hanoverian mercenary, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... is diverting in the extreme to observe the pompous grandiloquence in the advertisements of the amusement-furnishing public, about Christmas and New-Year. Sublimity glares from the theatrical hand-bill, and the menagerie affiche. Curiosities, then, have a 'most magnanimous value.' ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... Boys," who attended the meeting in a body—or a gang!—could hardly be restrained from arising in their might and smiting the pompous Forquer, hip ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... Jenny?" cries poor Amelia, who runs forward to meet her old friend, and finds a pompous, frigid-looking personage in an enormous hoop, the very pink of the fashion; to which Mrs. James answers, "Madam, I believe I have done what was genteel," and wonders how any mortal can live up three pair of stairs. "Is there," says ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... London was more tedious and engrossing than I had expected. Even a New York lawyer has much to learn of the law's delay in those pompous old offices amid the fog. Had I been working for myself, I should have thrown up the case in despair, but advices from our office said "Stick to it," and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... Mocquart possessed romantic recollections. He might by age, and perhaps otherwise, have been the father of Louis Bonaparte. He was a lawyer. He had shown himself quick-witted about 1829, at the same time as Romieu. Later on he had published something, I no longer remember what, which was pompous and in quarto size, and which he sent to me. It was he who in May, 1847, had come with Prince de la Moskowa to bring me King Jerome's petition to the Chamber of Peers. This petition requested the readmittance of the banished Bonaparte family into France. I supported it; a good action, and a fault ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... deposition of arms in Simiti, and the establishment of federal authority in Don Mario, that always pompous official rose in his own esteem and in the eyes of a few parasitical attaches to an eminence never before dreamed of by the humble denizens of this moss-encrusted town. From egotistical, Don Mario became insolent. From sluggishness and torpidity of thought and action, he rose suddenly into ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... set out ceremoniously. My sisters marched on ahead, arm in arm. They were of marriageable age and had to be displayed. I walked on the left of my mother and my father on her right. I remember the pompous air of my poor parents in these Sunday walks, their stern expression, their stiff walk. They moved slowly, with a serious expression, their bodies straight, their legs stiff, as if something of extreme importance depended ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... I can't," was the answer. Hearing which, Jim became pompous, and the widow judged that she might tell her news without unduly rousing ...
— The Widow O'Callaghan's Boys • Gulielma Zollinger
... pulse as if merely caressing the slender wrist. Then he began to describe his bailiff's cottage, with woodbine round the porch, the farm-yard, the bee-hives, the pretty duck-pond with an osier island, and the great China gander who had a pompous strut, which made him the droll est creature possible. And Sophy should go there in a day or two, and be as happy as one of the bees, but not so busy. Sophy listened very earnestly, very gravely, and then sliding her hand from the Mayor, caught hold of her ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... village to inquire. The headman, evidently one of a former Casembe school, came to us full of wrath. "What right had we to come that way, seeing the usual path was to our left?" He mouthed some sentences in the pompous Lunda style, but would not show us the path; so we left him, and after going through a forest of large trees, 4-1/2 hours south, took advantage of some huts on the Kifurwa River, ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... to know these things, and so when Brownwell, who, since his marriage, had taken up his abode at the Culpeppers', hinted at his "extravagant family," the town refused to take him seriously. And the strutting, pompous little man, who referred grandly to "my wife," and then to "the madame," and finally to "my landlady," in a rather elaborate attempt at jocularity, laughed alone at his merriment along this line, and never knew that no ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... slunk back like one who hesitates to confront the unknown. The stairs were there before him; he began to descend, his right hand held forth, his eyes fastened in horror upon it. Then, as he heard the distant hum of voices below, once more pompous and erect he swung down the last broad treads between the landing ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... first time I told you they were,' he said, and opened a despatch given him by his porter, a tall, black, elderly negro with gray hair. I pushed my way in and asked him, in my most dulcet tone, if I could get an upper berth to New Orleans. I called him 'Captain', thinking him a pompous old fellow. He was just beginning to speak to someone else, but I caught him and he looked across the crowd and said 'New Orleans!' My heart sank at the tone, and he went on talking to some other man. 'I told you that I would give ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... principal chief, who said he had some important business to discuss, and demanded a council with the capitan. After consent had been given, he assembled his principal men, and, going through the usual preliminary of taking a big smoke, he arose, and with a great deal of ceremony commenced his pompous and flowery speech, which, like all others of a similar character, amounted to nothing, until he touched upon the real object of his visit. He said he had traveled a long distance over the prairies to see and have a talk with his white brothers; that his people were very hungry and naked. ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... or the jocular LAWSON, or the robustious T. W. RUSSELL, or the astute CAINE) and then, walking across the room to a well-remembered pigeon-hole, took thence an official-looking scroll, sat down, formally unfolded it, cleared his throat, and began with pompous complacency to read aloud its title, preamble, clauses, and provisions, compulsory regulations, and peremptory prohibitions to the apparently ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 25, 1893 • Various
... left behind him few manuscripts. Not one of any consequence, except an account of the peace of Utrecht, which he called 'An History of the four last Years of Queen Anne.' The title of an history is too pompous for such a performance. In the historical style, it wants dignity and candour: but as a pamphlet it will appear the best defence of Lord Oxford's administration, and the clearest account of the Treaty of Utrecht, that has hitherto ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... ancient sat a dignified gentleman and a sickly vacant-looking little girl. Every event of that day is so indelibly marked on my memory, that I remember, not only this man's pompous look and manner, but even the words he addressed to the poor squalid little creature by his side. When I entered the omnibus, he was telling her in a loud voice how she ought to dispose of her frock ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... The distinguished and pompous Senator, at home in the hut, walked up and down with uneasy strides and anxious wandering eyes, just as he had done when a thin cub of a boy. The Senate Chamber evidently was but as narrow a cage for this alien beast as the life of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... There was one who had led armies in the field, who had staked his life upon the family enterprise, a man of action and experience, of the open air, the camp, the court, the council-room; and he was to accept direction from an old, pompous gentleman in a home in Italy, and buzzed about by priests? A pretty king, if he had not a martial son to lean upon! ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... how poor Religion's pride, In all the pomp of method and of art, When men display to congregations wide Devotion's every grace, except the heart! The Power, incensed, the pageant will desert, The pompous strain, the sacerdotal stole; But haply, in some cottage far apart, May hear, well pleased, the language of the soul; And in His Book of ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... capacity as owner of the Sylph I had merely undertaken to furnish Major Stanleigh with passage to Muloa and back, but the events of the last three days had made me a party to the many conferences, and I was now on terms of something like intimacy with the rather stiff and pompous English gentleman. How far I was from sharing his real confidence I was to discover later when Eleanor Stanleigh gave ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... hearty oath would relieve you, don't mind me," said Henry. His chin was squarer than usual, and his eyes were harder. "You can see what happened, can't you? Aunt Mirabelle railroaded him through—and the pompous old fool looks the part—and she let him promise money she expects to get in August. And I'll bet it hurt him just as much to promise it as it ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... tombstone is beneath our feet. That great portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds is responsible for the position and design of Goldsmith's medallion, which spoils the architecture, and is so high that even classical scholars rarely attempt to decipher Dr. Johnson's pompous inscription. The cynical English lines, which the poet Gay wrote for his own tablet close by, are far more ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... to each other at their first meeting; and it grew with further acquaintance. To Mike, Mr. Downing was all that a master ought not to be, fussy, pompous, and openly influenced in his official dealings with his form by his own private likes and dislikes. To Mr. Downing, Mike was simply an unamiable loafer, who did nothing for the school and apparently had none of the instincts which should be implanted in the healthy boy. Mr. Downing was ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... The khans of the Keraites were most probably incapable of reading the pompous epistles composed in their name by the Nestorian missionaries, who endowed them with the fabulous wonders of an Indian kingdom. Perhaps these Tartars (the Presbyter or Priest John) had submitted to the rites ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... mean. Quite good and God-fearing and all that, but with one of those dreadful clematis moustaches which cling half over the face, beginning at the nostrils and curling under the chin, a form which undulates in the region of the waistcoat, and a slow and pompous conversation (mainly devoted to the discussion ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... the rule; and when at the commencement of the present winter term a new junior master had come to take charge of the Third Form, it was evident from the first that before long there would be trouble. Mr. Grice was a very short man, with a pompous, hectoring manner, which was, somehow, especially exasperating to fellows who stood a good head and shoulders taller than the master. His rule was founded on the fear of punishment, and the sceptre which he ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... could deliver his judgment in this stilted style of pompous word-building, in such circumstances as were then existing, would have required a powdered footman in spotless plush to precede him out of a house on fire. I must confess to a little misgiving as to the authenticity of this speech. It looks much more likely ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... thought, looked not a little sheepish, though he tried to brazen it out by as pompous a manner as he could assume. For want of sufficient courage and energy he was not only losing three thousand pounds, which he would have received on arriving in England, but allowing a number of other people to lose the hard-won wealth which might have been theirs. It ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... disease, caused him rapidly to decline. He was now confined to his chamber and his bed, and his death was hourly expected. He hated the French, and all his sympathies were with Austria. Some priests entered his chamber, professedly to perform the pompous and sepulchral service of the church of Rome for the dying. In this hour of languor, and in the prospect of immediate death, they assailed the imbecile monarch with all the terrors of superstition. They depicted the responsibility which he would incur should he entail ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... gratuitous and trivial insult, and we shall very soon have occasion to mark the simple eloquence with which the thirty-eight Spanish standards of Turnhout, hung up in the old hall of the Hague, were made to reply to the pompous rhetoric of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the cook, attired in a dress spotlessly clean, a bright red bandanna tied around her head, was more pompous and dictatorial than ever. Her helpers had been increased for the event, and she issued her commands with a force which would have done credit to a skipper on a quarter-deck. Often she scolded those around her, but her anger was more apparent than real, and while she smote right and left with one ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... entered Garman's grounds, he saw Garman, the Senator and a man in long black coat and broad-brimmed black hat in conference upon the verandah. At his appearance Garman, lolling in a lawn chair, chuckled lazily; the Senator became as cold and pompous as the statue he hoped some day would commemorate his services to the Republic, and the black-hatted stranger closed his eyes ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... got a little phial, and filled it up with spirits of turpentine; he then mixed in with the gaping auditory of this Irish itinerant physician, who was in the midst of them, mounted on his steed adorned with a pompous curb-bridle, with a large parcel of all-curing medicines in his bags behind him, and was with a great deal of confidence and success, AEsculapius like, distributing health around him: we must observe, that our physician ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... personae are like so many statues "stept from their pedestal to take the air." They come on the stage only to utter pompous sentiments of morality, turgid declamation, and frigid similes. Yet there is throughout, that strength of language, that heavy mace of words, with which, as with the flail of Talus, Johnson lays every thing ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... a good deal of pompous benevolence, driven up on his outside-car to fetch Miss Rorke from the tumbled-down cabin which had been hitherto the only home she had known, that young lady, instead of being properly grateful, ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... singular personage were in unison with his writings: he gives a pompous description of a most unimportant government which he obtained near Marseilles, but all the grandeur existed only in our author's heated imagination. Bachaumont and De la Chapelle describe it, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... plan I wish to tell John Barton," said a pompous, careful-speaking man, "and I should like him for to lay it afore the Honourable House. My mother comed out o' Oxfordshire, and were under-laundry-maid in Sir Francis Dashwood's family; and when we were little ones, she'd tell us stories of their ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... as he thought she might understand. He did it more to ease his own heart because of the love he bore her than because he supposed that it made any difference in the sight of God whether she heard him or not. He was past the prime of life, and had fallen into pompous and ministerial habits of manner, but in his heart he was always pondering to find what the realities of life might be; he seldom drew false conclusions, although to many a question he was content to find no answer. He wore a serious look—people seldom knew what was passing in ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... designate the Sub-Prior as one who had fallen at one time under such delusions. Upon these occasions, it required all the votive obedience of a monk, all the philosophical discipline of the schools, and all the patience of a Christian, to enable Father Eustace to endure the pompous and patronizing parade of his honest, but somewhat thick-headed Superior. He began himself to be desirous of leaving the Monastery, or at least he manifestly declined to interfere with its affairs, in that marked and authoritative manner, which ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... till they covered his fingers. Davies had, even while in common conversation, as much of the old school of acting in his manner as his friend Gibson had upon the stage; though he is said not to have been so pompous as Berry, to whose parts he succeeded; and Berry, in this respect, was thought to ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... dignity and courtesy of the Indian queen. She was the first woman ruler they had met in their wanderings. She was tall, finely formed, and had great beauty of countenance. She was both gracious and graceful. All this is set down in the most pompous way by the Spanish chroniclers; but the truth seems to be that De Soto and his men cared nothing for the courtesy and hospitality of the queen, and that they were not moved by her beauty and kindness. The Spaniards crossed the river in canoes furnished by the queen's ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... with a pompous manner, and stood twirling the chain of his eye-glasses. "Yes, yes, I have heard of your brother. His name is well known already," he answered. "I congratulate, sir," he added, "not the 'man who got rich quickly,' ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... of the leading masks, stock characters, in Italian impromptu comedy. Doctor Graziano, or Baloardo Grazian, is a pedant, a philosopher, grammarian, rhetorician, astronomer, cabalist, a savant of the first water, boasting of his degree from Bologna, trailing the gown of that august university. Pompous in phrase and person, his speech is crammed with lawyer's jargon and quibbles, with distorted Latin and ridiculous metaphors. He is dressed in black with bands and a huge shovel hat. He wears a black vizard with wine-stained cheeks. From 1653 until his death ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... Gabriel and the most pious mother one admires branches with such fruit and twigs that nature does not make them more true. And this is specially admirable, that through the dull colour of their leaves they seem to have been taken from the tree scarcely a day ago." And then he praises in a pompous fashion the folds of the Virgin's and the Angel's drapery, the silk veil over a chalice, and the perspective of a flight of steps which support the feet of the Madonna, &c. One of his first works was done for S. Mark's, ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson
... admitted. "And there again is another sign of wisdom. Your ponderous fool talks pompous sense always. He sees life in only one facet. Your lover sees its many sides, its infinite variety. He can laugh and weep; his imagination lights up dry facts with whimsical fancies; he dives through the crust of conventionality to the realities of life. 'Tis the lover keeps ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... Dudley and tell him I meant to leave La Chance. But I did not tell him, for when I thought of leaving my dream girl to him it would not come to my tongue. An obstinate, matter-of-fact devil got up in my heart instead and prompted me to stay just where I was. I looked at Dudley—little, fat, pompous, and so self-opinionated that it fairly stuck out of him—and thought that if I had a fair chance I could take my dream girl from him. I might be dark as an Indian and without a cent to my name except the ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... practical and social. He had organized from the congregation societies of various sorts to relieve the poor; Bible classes and evening reunions which the members of the parish were urged to attend in order to become acquainted. Mr. Glynn's manner was both hearty and pompous. To him there was no Church in the world but the Church of England, and it was obvious that as one of the clergy of that Church he considered himself to be no mean man; but apart from this serious intellectual foible with respect to his own ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... year, so that even now it was taking its place among the nations of the earth. But Mrs Meddlechip was far too ladylike and fashionable for troubling about such things—oh dear, no—she left all these dry facts to Ebenezer, who could speak about them in his own pompous, blatant style ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... A grand parade, With marching train-band, guild, and trade: The burgomaster in robes arrayed, Gold chain, and mace, and gay cockade, Great keys carried, and flags displayed, Pompous marshal and spruce young aide, Carriage and foot and cavalcade; While big drums thundered and trumpets brayed, And all the bands of the canton played; The fountain spouted lemonade, Children drank of the bright cascade; Spectators ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... which is embellished with golden roses and FLEURS-DE-LIS: in this, too, is that very large banqueting-room, seventy-eight paces long, and thirty wide, in which the Knights of the Garter annually celebrate the memory of their tutelar saint, St. George, with a solemn and most pompous service. ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... so royal and private that it is a prison offense to trespass on it without written permission. Because of his official call at the Residency, and of his card left on the Sultan, wires had been pulled, and a pompous individual whose black face sweated greasily, and whose palm itched for unearned increment, called on Monty very shortly after breakfast with intimation that the wharf had been placed at our disposal, since His Highness the Sultan desired to do ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... to a great, pompous, stylish, crowded, "up-town boarding-house," that Ford's return was to take him. There was no wonder at all that wise people should wish to get out of such a place in such hot weather. Still, it was the sort ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... no speaker had spoken with more force, more caustic satire, or more fluent eloquence. I had to admit, also, that there was a flavor of good sense and practicability about much that he said, though I was loath to admit it. He began ponderously, with pompous tones; but as he went on his voice changed until it became at times high ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... faithful study of one's self reveals a high order of natural gifts, it is not needful to imitate the son of the Emerald Isle who always lifted his hat and made an obsequious bow when he spoke of himself or mentioned his own name. George Eliot hits off pompous self-conceit happily when she likens its possessor to "a cock that thinks the sun rises in the ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... so impatiently expected; and news was brought the queen of Philip's arrival at Southampton.[*] A few days after they were married in Westminster; and having made a pompous entry into London, where Philip displayed his wealth with great ostentation, she carried him to Windsor, the palace in which they afterwards resided. The prince's behavior was ill calculated to remove the prejudices which the English nation had entertained against him. He ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... carried out his thoughtlessly formed plan. I fear it must be conceded that his motive was not a wholly chivalrous one. He saw the chance for humiliating the man for whom he felt only unmitigated contempt. He had not a whit of respect for the pompous Bambos, but the ponderous nuisance had not insulted him and his unpardonably. No doubt had the opportunity come to the President of the Zalapatan Republic, he would have acted with similar dishonor, but in the affairs of this world, men are judged by their deeds instead of their motives. ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... enquiring and philosophical? During the whole period we speak of, poetry and criticism—in nature near akin—with occasional complaints and quarrels, have flourished amicably together, side by side. Both have been strong, healthy, and good. Prigs of both kinds—the pert and the pompous—will keep prating about the shallowness and superficiality of periodical criticism—deep enough to drown the whole tribe in its very fords. They call for systems. Why will they not be contented with the system of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... an hour upon the asking of questions which the fair patient's maid might as well have asked, and the suggestions of remedies which any intelligent abigail could as easily have suggested. Elderly ladies believed in him because he was pompous and ponderous, lived in an expensive neighbourhood, and drove a handsome equipage. He wore mourning-rings left him by patients who never had anything particular the matter with them, and who, dying of sheer old age, or sheer ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... costly and pompous establishments, apart from the Inns of Court. Sir Thomas More's house stood in the country, flanked by a garden and farm, in the cultivation of which ground the Chancellor found one of his chief sources of amusement. In Aldgate, Lord Chancellor Audley built his town mansion, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... conveying it to him. Duroc once told me that they had all great difficulty in preserving their gravity when the cure of a parish in Abbeville addressed Bonaparte one day while he was on his journey to the coast. "Religion," said the worthy cure, with pompous solemnity, "owes to you all that it is, we owe to you all that we are; and I, too, owe to ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... says Pliny the Younger, "that those who sought the public dignities should regard Rome and Italy not as an inn to put up at in travelling, but as their home." And Pliny the Elder, going as a philosophical observer to the very root of the evil, says, in his pompous manner, "In former times our generals tilled their fields with their own hands; the earth, we may suppose, opened graciously beneath a plough crowned with laurels and held by triumphal hands, maybe because those great men gave to tillage the same care that they ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... riot followed this pompous declaration, and at its conclusion Jack carried Alex off to introduce him to his pigeons and chickens, and other former treasures of the ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs
... Sikhs at the pompous Kaiserish entrance gate, and got out on to front steps that brought to mind one of those glittering hotels at German cure-resorts—bad art, bad taste, bad amusements ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... offensive. Self-respect is a thoroughly worthy feeling; self-esteem is a more generous estimate of one's own character and abilities than the rest of the world are ready to allow. Vainglory is more pompous and boastful than vanity. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... tortuous, cobble-paved streets, between rows of old, old houses with faded frescoes on their plastered walls and with dim, echoing arcades. And so into the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele—there is no more charming little square in Italy—with its fountain and its two stone giants and the pompous statue of an incredibly ugly King astride a prancing horse and a monument to Peace set up by Napoleon to commemorate a treaty which was the cause of many wars. At the back of the piazza, like the ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... interest her in his pursuit, cherished her first little morsel of curiosity, and nursed it into a very proper desire for further information. Then he brought out books on the subject, and translated the slightly pompous and technical language into homely every-day speech. Molly had come down to dinner, wondering how the long hours till bedtime would ever pass away: hours during which she must not speak on the one thing that would be occupying her mind to the exclusion of all others; for she ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Lovat, by his son Lord Simon, who suffered on Towerhill. It is of free-stone, and, I suppose, about thirty feet high. There is an inscription on a piece of white marble inserted in it, which I suspect to have been the composition of Lord Lovat himself, being much in his pompous style: ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... had caused his first trouble in his new home. Chad laughed with fearless gladness, and Margaret tossed her head. It was Georgie now who blackened and spread the blot on Chad's good name, and it was Georgie to whom Chad—fast learning the ways of gentlemen—promptly sent a pompous challenge, that the difficulty might be settled "in any way the gentleman saw fit." Georgie insultingly declined to fight with one who was not his equal, and Chad boxed his jaws in the presence of a crowd, floored him with one blow, and contemptuously twisted his nose. ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... defective models being at the head of the stage. Till Garrick, led on by Nature herself, introduced her school, the theatre presented a stage on which scarce a vestige of the human character as it really existed, was to be seen. But pompous monotony of speech held the highest praise, and "DECLAMATION ROARED ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... but—well, I hope he did.' At this moment another person entered the garden. He did not come with the graceful motion, and the easy tread of Roland Gray; but moved wily a pompous stride, swinging his arms almost at right angles with his body. His air you could only describe by the word 'howling'; and he was just the man to immediately catch the attention of a vulgar girl. His hair was as dark as a crow's; and it was as coarse as the bristles of a hog. He was short and rather ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... The fare was luxuriant, and the bride, in her white dress and orange blossoms (for, be it known, such things are sometimes seen, even in this region of spruce and pine), looked as all brides do, bashful and beautiful. The "grave and pompous father," and busy-minded mother, had a look which, though concealed, told that at heart they rejoiced to see their "bairn respeckit like the lave," and "all indeed went merry as a marriage bell." We and some others left ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan |
