"Tediousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the same way, with, it seemed, the same snags in the water under it, and the same cottonwoods growing on it; and opposite each headland was the same stony bluff, wind- and water-carved in the same way: until at last we cried out against the tediousness of the oft-repeated story, wondering whether or not we were continually passing the same point, and somehow slipping back to pass ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... sound of musick; and during eight days every one, that resided in the valley, was required to propose whatever might contribute to make seclusion pleasant, to fill up the vacancies of attention, and lessen the tediousness of time. Every desire was immediately granted. All the artificers of pleasure were called to gladden the festivity; the musicians exerted the power of harmony, and the dancers showed their activity before the princes, in hope that they should pass their lives in this blissful captivity, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... are devoted to strictly pastoral interests, is but evidence of the felicity of construction, by which Jonson, while keeping the pastoral plot as the mainspring of the piece, nevertheless avoided the tediousness almost inseparable from pastoral action and atmosphere, and threw the burden of stage business upon the more congenial personages of Maid Marian, Robin Hood and his merry men, the Witch of Paplewich, and Robin Goodfellow. It remains ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... may be a sufficient reason for me to keep me as I am, lest having thus tired you singly, I should deal worse with, a whole congregation, and spoil all the patience of a parish; for I myself do not only see my own tediousness, but now grow offended with it, that has hindered me thus long from coming to the last and best period of my letter, and that which must now chiefly work my pardon, that I am your true and ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... of his many biographers a problem which each has sought to solve after his own fashion. Of materials for forming our conclusions there is certainly no lack. In his Autobiography he has related in detail, even to tediousness, the events and experiences of his life in Leipzig. Contemporary testimony, also, we have in abundance. We have the letters of friends who freely wrote their impressions of him, and from his own hand we have poems which record the passing feelings of the hour; we have two plays ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... her. He had nothing to do but to wait for her return. The passage and staircase was dark, but there was a broad light in the room from the casement, and this light streamed from under the door of the room. A shade crossing the light, attracted Vanslyperken's attention, and to while away the tediousness of waiting, he was curious to see what it was; he knelt down, looked under the door, and perceived the key which Smallbones had placed there; he inserted his finger and drew it forth, imagining that his mother had slid it beneath ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... said with a slight laugh, 'to be frank, people never bore me. The moment they become tedious they are of interest to me as a study in tediousness.' ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... Fuller, our Church historian, having occasion to speak of some famous divine that was lately dead, exclaims, "Oh the painfulness of his preaching!" If we did not know the former uses of 'painfulness', we might take this for an exclamation wrung out at the recollection of the tediousness which he inflicted on his hearers. Far from it; the words are a record not of the pain which he caused to others, but of the pains which he bestowed himself: and I am persuaded, if we had more 'painful' preachers in the old sense of the word, that is, who took pains themselves, we should ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... are Ptolomaeus, Plotinus, Hippocrates. Scaliger exercitat. 224, scoffs at this censure of his, calls some of them carpenters and mechanicians, he makes Galen fimbriam Hippocratis, a skirt of Hippocrates: and the said [455]Cardan himself elsewhere condemns both Galen and Hippocrates for tediousness, obscurity, confusion. Paracelsus will have them both mere idiots, infants in physic and philosophy. Scaliger and Cardan admire Suisset the Calculator, qui pene modum excessit humani ingenii, and yet [456]Lod. Vives calls them nugas Suisseticas: ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... his back would guide him straight to Captain Kerns' quarters, where he would hand out papers and letters. The women and children would flock thither to see if it meant news for them. Often they were disappointed and talked a great deal about the tediousness of the Mexican War and the delays of Captain Fremont's company. They wanted the war to end, and their men folk back so that they could move and get to farming before it should be too late to grow garden truck for ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... and with it two goblets. My lord broke off in the midst of an account of the morning's bear-baiting which the tediousness of the Indians had caused us to miss. "Who knows if we three shall ever drink together again?" he said. "To honor this bout I use my most precious cups." Voice and manner were free and unconstrained. "This gold cup "—he held it up—"belonged to the Medici. Master Pory, who ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... hours that succeeded their departure, and few were the occupations that could beguile the tediousness of time. Adrian had outgrown his boyish amusements, and found himself very scantily provided with substitutes for them. He had naturally some taste for literature, but though, as has before been said, it was sometimes assisted by his father, it had never ...
— The Flower Basket - A Fairy Tale • Unknown
... 1328, and died about 1380; and although he had, both in Scotland and England, contemporaries and immediate successors, no one of them can be compared with him for a moment. The "Moral Gower" was his friend, and inherited his tediousness and pedantry without a sparkle of his fancy, passion, humour, wisdom, and good spirits. Occleve and Lydgate followed in the next generation; and although their names are retained in literary histories, ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... Sir, perhaps not without some tediousness of detail, shown, if I am in error on the subject of internal improvement, how, and in what company, I fell into that error. If I am wrong, it is apparent ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... accompany a gentleman of my acquaintance, who wished to travel post to Frankfort: and had no reason to regret having left the Diligence, with the tediousness of which I was heartily tired. We set out accordingly in a sort of cabriolet, resembling a covered curricle, for Stutgard. We found much less delay at each post than we were led to expect; and part of the time was employed in greasing and examining the wheels ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... that he might never be out of sight; but where our Charles was, there must that lord also be; and what Charles did, that must he be privy unto: until that this lord, perceiving that it came because of this enchanted ring, for very pain and tediousness took and cast it into a well at Acon [Aix la Chapelle], in Dutchland. And after that the ring was in the well, the emperor could never depart from the town; but in the said place where the ring was cast, though it were a foul morass, yet he built a goodly monastery in ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... in the spirit to free yourself from this mud, cast away for a few moments the memory of your imperfections and your troubles, and follow her. See then how experienced she is in the domain of the supernatural, how, in spite of her repetitions and tediousness, she explains wisely and clearly the mechanism of the soul unfolding when God touches it. In subjects where words fail and phrases crumble away, she succeeds in making herself understood, in showing, making felt, almost making visible, the inconceivable sight of God buried in the soul, and ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... greatest pity for him, he was almost bitter upon him. He said that poor Frederick—ha hum—drivelled. There was no other word to express it; drivelled. Poor fellow! It was melancholy to reflect what Amy must have undergone from the excessive tediousness of his Society—wandering and babbling on, poor dear estimable creature, wandering and babbling on—if it had not been for the relief she had had in Mrs General. Extremely sorry, he then repeated with ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... since in his political one is not known. He was afterwards sent to this capital to execute a commission, of which he acquitted himself very ill; exposing himself rashly, without profit or service to his employer. Frederick II., dreading the tediousness of a proposed congress at Augsburg, wished to send a private emissary to sound the King of France. For this purpose he chose Edelsheim as a person least liable to suspicion. The project of Frederick was to idemnify ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... fatal of all faults; negligence or errors are single and local, but tediousness pervades the whole; other faults are censured and forgotten, but the power of tediousness propagates itself. He that is weary the first hour is more weary the second, as bodies forced into motion, contrary to their tendency, pass more and more ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... to have heard that observation before, Ernest. It has all the vitality of error and all the tediousness of an old friend. ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... appeared miraculously to improve, he employed the slim, gray, uninteresting spinster who slept now a few doors away from her. There were hours when it seemed to her that she had never learned the meaning of tediousness until the plain but hopeful Miss Spencer came to ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... the passing of the one marked the passing of the other—symbolic as you might say. Formerly, too, the major had also excelled mightily in miscellaneous conversation, dominating it by sheer weight of tediousness. Now he sat silent while these youngsters with their unthatched lips—born, most of them, after he reached middle age—babbled the jargon of their trade. He considered a little ravelly strip along one of ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... lest some disaster might happen during his absence, considering that he had left the colony in great want of necessaries; and though he strongly solicited and pressed the necessity of speedy succours, such was the tediousness and delay of business in that court, that ten or twelve months elapsed before he could procure the equipment of two ships, which were sent out in February 1498, under the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... drove from the door; for with Miss Tilney she felt no restraint; and, with the interest of a road entirely new to her, of an abbey before, and a curricle behind, she caught the last view of Bath without any regret, and met with every milestone before she expected it. The tediousness of a two hours' wait at Petty France, in which there was nothing to be done but to eat without being hungry, and loiter about without anything to see, next followed—and her admiration of the style in which they travelled, of the fashionable chaise and four—postilions handsomely liveried, rising ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... a Residence in Iceland, 1814-15. By Henderson. 2 vols. 8vo.—The state of society, manners, domestic habits, and religion, are here treated of; but there is too much minuteness, and a tediousness and dryness of style ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... say) assuaged the tediousness of his labors, which he sustayned in open and common games, with playing. This Hercules, I say, being an incomparable warriour, and the sonne of Jupiter and Latona, made himselfe a playfellowe with boys. Euripides the poet introduceth, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... hand, disproportionately weak compared with the stimulus, and in spite of the extravagance of the expression it quickly passes over or remains with an excessive obduracy for a disproportionately long time. Notwithstanding the apparent intensity of the outbreak in the former and its tediousness in the latter case, these emotional upsets almost always lack real depth. They are usually very superficial, insufficiently grounded, rather dependent upon accident; transitions from one extreme to the other make up the daily ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... disappeared, and those who have no taste for abstruse metaphysics will greatly prefer the earlier dialogues to the later ones. Plato is conscious of the change, and in the Statesman expressly accuses himself of a tediousness in the two dialogues, which he ascribes to his desire of developing the dialectical method. On the other hand, the kindred spirit of Hegel seemed to find in the Sophist the crown and summit of the Platonic philosophy—here is the place at which Plato most nearly ...
— Sophist • Plato
... Herrfurth, who was reputed to be well informed, particularly in statistics, should instruct him about internal questions. The Prince agreed and invited Herrfurth to lunch, but afterwards told Bismarck he could not stand him, "with his bristly beard, his dryness and tediousness." Could Bismarck suggest some one else? The Chancellor mentioned Privy Councillor von Brandenstein. The Prince did not object, had the Baron several times to meals, but paid so little attention to his explanations that Brandenstein lost patience and begged for some other employment. ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... each and thinking of the various individual arrow-heads or mats of the same type, would become aware of the different effect which such shapes had on the person who looked at them. Some of these shapes would be so dull, increasing the tediousness of chipping and filing or of laying strand over strand; others so alert, entertaining and likeable, as if they were helping in the work; others, although equally compatible with utility, fussing or distressing one, never doing what one expected their lines and ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... happens that the general reception of a doctrine obscures the books in which it was delivered. When any tenet is generally received and adopted as an incontrovertible principle, we seldom look back to the arguments upon which it was first established, or can bear that tediousness of deduction, and multiplicity of evidence, by which its author was forced to reconcile it to prejudice, and fortify it in the weakness of novelty ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... school of Roman gladiators, but at any rate it points the better way. The speech itself has a close, direct, sinewy quality, a complete freedom from anything vague or involved; and shows for the first time a perfect mastery of the art of handling detail upon detail without an instant of tediousness, and holding the attention of listeners sustained and unbroken. It was a remonstrance against false allegations of the misbehaviour of the planters since the emancipating act, but there is not a trace of backsliding upon the great issue. 'We joined in passing the measure; we declared a belief ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... without repeating myself to tediousness, enter at present into proper consideration of the mountain drawing of other modern painters. We have, fortunately, several by whom the noble truths which we have seen so fully exemplified by Turner are also deeply felt ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... office anybody may hold,—he and his mates are commissioned in the common task, and should the thing come up for judgment, everybody does his best. The difference here is not due to temperamental freshness or tediousness; the result depends only upon a correct or incorrect psychological handling of the participants. The latter must in every single case be led and trained anew to interest, conscientiousness and co-operation. In this need lies the educational ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... thoughts I take note of a little scene of comedy, or perhaps of a farcical kind, which is going on near me, in which two 'Harrys' of the purest kind were engaged, and whose oddities lightened the tediousness of the passage. One had seen foreign parts, and was therefore regarded with reverence ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... This conception of "humours," based on a physiology which was already obsolescent, takes heavily from the realism of Jonson's methods, nor does his use of a careful vocabulary of contemporary colloquialism and slang save him from a certain dryness and tediousness to modern readers. The truth is he was less a satirist of contemporary manners than a satirist in the abstract who followed the models of classical writers in this style, and he found the vices and follies of his own day hardly adequate ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... these reliques of antiquity will require great allowances to be made for them.' And again:— 'To atone for the rudeness of the more obsolete poems, each volume concludes with a few modern attempts in the same kind of writing; and to take off from the tediousness of the longer narratives, they are everywhere intermingled with little elegant pieces of the lyrical kind.' In short, he could not trust that large child, the people of England, to take its dose of powder without the conventional treacle. To vary ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... lieu of Rotting requires but three hours for its completion. It takes the Flax as it came from the field, only somewhat dryer and with the seed beaten off, and renders it thoroughly fit for breaking. The plant is allowed to ripen before it is harvested, so that the seed is all saved, while the tediousness and injury to the fiber, not to speak of the unwholesomeness, of the old-fashioned Rotting processes are entirely obviated. Where warmth is desirable in the fabrics contemplated, the staple is made to resemble Wool quite closely. Specimens dyed red, blue, ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... the debate and washed his hands in a basin held by a servant. Then he wrote the sentence and made Misandro read it. The trial lasted a whole hour, the intention being, I suppose, to reproduce that tediousness which is so characteristic of ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... this, and on approaching the corner of the salt mountain, we had an incident to enliven the tediousness of the hot journey. A party of Arabs came in sight. Our men discovered them first, and running forwards, primed their guns, or lighted the match of the lock, drew their swords and screamed, making bare the right arm, as if prepared for awful deeds. The others ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... name stands deservedly high (notwithstanding his tediousness and want of taste) among bibliographical and typographical antiquaries. Of his "Nachrichten von Kunstlern und Kunst-Sachen," Leipzig, 1768, 8vo., two vols., (being "New Memoirs upon Artists and the objects of Art"—and which is frequently referred to by foreigners,) I never saw a copy. ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... libel:—"Never was mountain delivered of such a mouse; the fiercest Tories have been ashamed to defend this piece; they who have any sparks of wit among them are so true to their pleasure, that they will not suffer dulness to pass upon them for wit, nor tediousness for diversion; which is the reason that this piece has not met with the expected applause: I never saw a play more deficient in wit, good characters, or entertainment, than ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... to the suspicions of people, who were unable or unwilling to look after their own affairs. His very great friendship for the rector had induced him to take this office upon himself, though he well knew the trouble and tediousness attending it, and the ingratitude with which it was always repaid. He had several times in his life played the fool in the same way, and had always ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... is puzzling and disagreeable in hard unmeaning rules, with all that is dull and uninteresting in grave thoughts beyond the reach of the young idea. He is to us now rather the interpreter of mysteries, the pleasant companion who shows us the way to science, and beguiles its tediousness. If there is now no "royal road," certainly its opening defiles are made easier for the ascent of the little feet of the youthful scholar. The memory is not the chief faculty which receives a discipline in the present system of things. The "how," the "why," are ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... could not succeed in the attempt to make allegory interesting. It was in vain that he lavished the riches of his mind on the House of Pride and the House of Temperance. One unpardonable fault, the fault of tediousness, pervades the whole of the Fairy Queen. We become sick of cardinal virtues and deadly sins, and long for the society of plain men and women. Of the persons who read the first canto, not one in ten reaches the end of the first book, and not one in a hundred perseveres ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Jeffrey, in reviewing' Marmion, 'fixed on this narrative of the Abbess as a passage marked by 'flatness and tediousness,' and could see in it 'no sort of beauty nor elegance of diction.' The answer to such criticism is that the narrative is direct and practical, and admirably suited to ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... defatigation^; lassitude &c (fatigue) 688; drowsiness &c 683. disgust, nausea, loathing, sickness; satiety &c 869; taedium vitae &c (dejection) 837; boredom, ennui. wearisomeness, tediousness &c adj.; dull work, tedium, monotony, twice-told tale. bore, buttonholer, proser^, wet blanket; pill [Slang], stiff [Slang]; heavy hours, the enemy (time). V. weary; tire &c (fatigue) 688; bore; bore to death, weary to death, tire to death, bore out of one's skull, bore out of ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... wherever they pleased beyond it.[3] They will now be able to plunder at home, since our tribunals have been introduced to worry prosecutors and their witnesses to death by the distance they have to go, and the tediousness of our process; and thereby to secure impunity to offenders, by making it the interest of those who have been robbed, not only to bear with the first loss without complaint, but largely to bribe ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... will that the auditor and governor resolve and determine them, so that they may be concluded and finished. And inasmuch as the factor and overseer must give account of certain things in kind and products of great weight and tediousness, we order that that account be examined every three years, and that the concluding and settling of the doubts and remarks shall be made in the form declared. And we order that when the said accounts of the said islands are completed and the net balances struck, they shall ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair
... milk-and-water and a bun! What popguns of jokes have these ears tingled to hear let off at him, what asinine sentiments, what impotent conclusions, what spelling- book moralities, what adaptations of the orator's insufferable tediousness to the assumed level of his understanding! If his sledge-hammers, his spades and pick-axes, his saws and chisels, his paint-pots and brushes, his forges, furnaces, and engines, the horses that he drove at his work, and the machines that drove him at his ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... battalion routine affairs. By this time several ceremonies had taken place at which decorations were bestowed upon N.C.O.s and men for bravery in the Field and gallantry in action. Esprit de corps was stronger than ever, and the tediousness of trench labours was relieved by the establishment of special strong posts, by minor raids on the Bosche, and when out of the line by football and such recreations as the circumstances permitted. This type of campaigning was experienced ...
— The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion) - Record of War Service, 1914-1918 • Various
... to a long story,"[95] says Pentheus, "that our anger might consume its strength in its tediousness. Servants! drag him headlong, and send to Stygian night his body, racked with dreadful tortures." At once the Etrurian Acoetes, dragged away, is shut up in a strong prison; and while the cruel instruments of the death that is ordered, and the iron and the fire are being made ready, the report is ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... thirty years. John leaps, as it were, into the arena full grown and full armed. His work is described by one word—'preaching'; out of which all modern associations, which have too often made it a synonym for long-winded tediousness and toothless platitudes, must be removed. It means proclaiming, or acting as a herald, and implies the uplifted voice and the brief, urgent message of one who runs before the chariot, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... of the little party had borne himself well in the face of peril, now each one found himself in the utter exhaustion that follows unusual stress of mind or body. It was no longer possible to lighten the tediousness of travel by conversation, and for this reason the remainder of the journey seemed long and exceedingly wearisome. Had conditions been other than they were both Peggy and Sally would have noticed the broad morasses which bisected the wide plains they ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... In connection with these studies he read habitually the works of Butler, Bossuet, Tillotson, Massillon, Atterbury, and Watts. With such an ardor for knowledge, and universality in its pursuit, it is not surprising that he should say, as on one occasion he did, "I feel nothing like the tediousness of time. I suffer nothing like ennui. Time is too short for me, rather than too long. If the day was forty-eight hours, instead of twenty-four, I could employ them all, if I had but eyes and hands to read ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... impracticable wish, it seems, was more than they could conceive. Swift has hit off this part of their character, namely their love of truth, in his biting way, but with an illiberality that necessarily confines the passage to the margin.[2] The tediousness of these people is certainly provoking. I wonder if they ever tire one another!—In my early life I had a passionate fondness for the poetry of Burns. I have sometimes foolishly hoped to ingratiate myself ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... is always pleasing, and ingenious minds can never be satiated with contemplating the marvellous and diversified works of God in nature: Therefore, that the reader may take the more pleasure in these my writings, or at least may experience less tediousness in reading them, I have thought good to set down such things as I have seen more at large. It is therefore to be understood that the reason of no great quantity of aloes or Laserpitium being brought to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... fond of telling long stories, and of doling out advice, to the small profit and great annoyance of his friends. As I have a great horror of becoming the oracle, or, more technically speaking, the "bore," of the domestic circle, and would much rather bestow my wisdom and tediousness upon the world at large, I have always sought to ease off this surcharge of the intellect by means of my pen, and hence have inflicted divers gossiping volumes upon the patience of the public. I am tired, however, of writing volumes; they do not afford exactly the relief I require; there ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... a fierce expression of disgust at the surgeon, that indicated his sense of the tediousness of the other's remarks; while Miss Peyton, with a slight hesitation, as if fearful of ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... gate was opened to the sound of music; and during eight days every one that resided in the valley was required to propose whatever might contribute to make seclusion pleasant, to fill up the vacancies of attention, and to lessen the tediousness of time. Every desire was immediately gratified. Such was the appearance of security and delight which this retirement afforded that they to whom it was new always desired that it might be perpetual; and as those on whom the iron gate had once closed were never suffered to return, the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... "Harry Lorrequer," put him back in the bookcase to make an incident, then began actively waiting for the return of the playgoers. Reference to his watch at short intervals intensified their duration, added gall to their tediousness. But so convinced was he that they "would be here directly" that it was at least half-an-hour before he reconsidered this insane policy and resumed his chair with a view to keeping awake in it. He was convinced he was succeeding, had not noticed he was dozing, when he was suddenly wrenched ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... advertised it as the last and most enlightened example of wholesale, industrial housing. But as Archie felt about it, the place was worse really than the more celebrated slums of older cities in its pretentious cheapness, its dreary monotony and colorlessness, its very respectability and smug tediousness. A life dropped into its maze and growing up in it must be lost for good and all—must become just another human ant crawling over Clark's Field, with the habits and coloring of all the other human ants striving there for life and happiness. Archie, ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... observed in his sermon, that this was unpardonable, as people did it with their eyes open. Wrapt up in the admiration of his own discourse, he did not observe that from its tediousness his audience one by one had slipped away, until there only remained a natural. Lifting up his eyes, he exclaimed, "What! All gone, except this poor idiot!" "Aye," says the lad, "and if I had not been a poor idiot ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... amalgam with the mercury, occasions it easily to part from the dross or earthy matters of the stone or matrix. This is a great advantage to the gold-miners, as they every day know what they get; but the silver-miners often do not know how much they get till two months after, owing to the tediousness of their operation, as ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... introduce into their homes those enlivening, those spirit-stirring influences which it denies to them when they are away from home doing their work. Hence a strange thing. The unemployed hours of the evening, which should be such a boon, are a time of blank and disconsolate tediousness, and when the longer days of the year come round many a man in the valley who ought to be glad of his spare time dodges the wearisome problem of what to do with it by putting himself to further work, until he can go to bed without ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... already got in; therefore, the Voltaire might be hourly expected. At length she was reported below; and at this period the river Delaware suffered much, in comparison with the river Hudson, owing to the tediousness of its navigation from the capes ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... a preposterous matter at all damns a person, in my thinking, as a supreme fool. And yet this is, par excellence, the sort of tediousness in which devotees of culture complacently wallow. As if it mattered where Byron slips in "the great Renaissance of Wonder"; or where Rossetti drifts by, ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... hardened. "That's not true," he thought; "and she knows it, and I know it." Aloud he said: "Very prettily spoken, Lucy! But I am aware of my own tediousness and I won't detain you long. Will you sit down?" and he offered her an easy-chair, into which she sank with the soft slow grace of a nestling bird. "I only want to say just a few words,—such as your father might say to you if he were so ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... navigator emptied the whole into a dish, laid a plate over the top, his coat over the plate, and his hat over his coat. Thus completely stopping in the appetizing smell, he sat down to await events. He was relieved from the tediousness of doing this by hearing voices outside; and in a minute ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... double duty was an appalling task. And it would have been impossible if it wasn't for Copper. Her quick fingers, keen eyesight, and uncanny memory made the work seem simple, and neither the tediousness of repairing miles of circuitry nor the depressing environment of Olympus Station seemed to bother her. While he worked with the men on the project she restored and reassembled circuits in his quarters and at night they replaced them in ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... during this long expedition, excited in me the wish to publish it; the certitude of the usefulness of my work decided me. My heart is filled with an inexpressible satisfaction when I think of the infinite number of unhappy persons to whom I am now able to offer an assured resource against the tediousness and vexations of life. The delight one finds in travelling in one's own room is a pure joy, exempt from the unquiet jealousies of men ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... Thus, for instance, two whole pages of the Miroir, or some forty or fifty lines, are taken up with endless playings on the words mort and vie and their derivatives, such as mortifiez, and mort fiez, mort vivifiee and vie mourante. The sacred comedies or mysteries have the tediousness and lack of action of the older pieces of the same kind without their naivete; and pretty much the same may be said of the profane comedy (which is a kind of morality), and of the farce. Of La Coche, what has been said of the long sacred poems may be said, except that here we go back to the ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... should be received and treated with the utmost courtesy. But if a tiresome fellow, after wearying all his friends, becomes weary of himself, and arrives to bestow his tediousness upon you, pull out your watch with restlessness, talk about your great occupations and the value of time. Politeness is one thing; to be made a ...
— The Laws of Etiquette • A Gentleman
... the dangers and tediousness of which can hardly be described. Stanley and his men were often obliged to wade through swamps filled with alligators. Crawling on hands and knees, they forced their way through miles of tangled jungle, breathing in as they went the sickening odor of decaying vegetables. They ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... the contrary, similarity of feeling and of heart is that bond which binds our affections together. Where both similarities are combined, we may be most happy in the society of our counterpart; but where the link between the hearts is wanting there will always be great tediousness in great similarity. ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... gestures, that that was well, and indicated to Grimaud, by pointing to a turret that resembled a pepper caster, that he was to stand as sentinel. Only, to alleviate the tediousness of the duty, Athos allowed him to take a loaf, two cutlets, and a ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... not care for these geological questions, except in their direct bearing upon art, may, without much harm, miss the next seven paragraphs, and go on at the twenty-first. Yet there is one point, in a Turner drawing presently to be examined, which I cannot explain without inflicting the tediousness even of these ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... standard by which time can be measured but the succession of our thoughts and the changes that take place in the external world. From the latter I was totally excluded. The former made the lapse of some hours appear like the tediousness of weeks and months. At length, a new sensation recalled my rambling meditations, and gave substance to my fears. I now felt the cravings of hunger, and perceived that, unless my deliverance were speedily effected, I must suffer a tedious ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... the shores of this sea are absolutely unprovided with wood even for fuel. These vessels spent a complete year in their voyage, that is, sailed one year, sojourned another, and did not return till the third. This tediousness was owing first to their cruising from port to port, as they do at present; secondly, to their being detained by the Monsoon currents; and thirdly, because, according to the calculations of Pliny and Strabo, it was the ordinary practice among the ancients to spend three years ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... still sufficiently in fruit to afford us some refreshment. Occasionally we met with long stretches of small dead trees, probably killed by bush fires, alternating with Bricklow thickets: and then again crossed small plains and patches of open forest ground, which much relieved the tediousness of the ride through thick scrubs, which we had frequently to penetrate with both hands occupied in protecting the face from the branches. We also crossed chains of water-holes surrounded by a coarse stargrass; these now changed into creeks with deep ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... age of rapid and easy transition from place to place, it is difficult to form a just conception of the tediousness, hardships, and duration of those early emigrations to the West. The difference in conveyance is that between a train of cars drawn by a forty-ton locomotive and a two-horse wagon, without springs, ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... which we feel for our blunders and our shortcomings restrained me; besides, there was nothing in my "Diary" that could have compromised me in any way. And if I have destroyed it now it is due solely to my desire to throw my past into oblivion and to save my reader from the tediousness of long complaints and moans, from the horror of sacrilegious cursings. May it rest ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... way, he informeth you of the particularities; as well of the tediousness of the way, as of the pleasant lodging you shall have when your journey is ended, as of the many by-turnings that may divert you from your way. But this is to no man but to him that will read him, and read him with attentive ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... Whitcomb Riley went to Europe last summer. On the return voyage an incident happened which is well worth telling of. To beguile the tediousness of the voyage it was proposed to give a concert in the saloon of the ship—an entertainment to which all capable of amusing their fellow-voyagers should contribute. Mr. Riley was asked to recite some of his original poems, and of course he cheerfully agreed to do so. Among the ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... amusement, thou hast, in these close pages, the fruits of my tediousness; and truly, I think, writing history (one's self being the subject) is as amusing as reading that of foreign countries, ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... catalogue of 500 new nebulae, though extremely valuable to the practical astronomer, leads to no general conclusions of importance, and abounds with the defects which are peculiar to the Doctor's writings—a great prolixity and tediousness of narration—loose and often unphilosophical reflections, which give no very favorable idea of his scientific powers, however great his merit may be as an observer—above all, that idle fondness for inventing names without any manner of occasion, to which we have already alluded, ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... purpose to the Guianians, and that he sought to sack and conquer the empire, for the hope of their so great abundance and quantities of gold. He passed by the mouths of many great rivers which fell into Orenoque both from the north and south, which I forbear to name, for tediousness, and because they are more pleasing ...
— The Discovery of Guiana • Sir Walter Raleigh
... to certify him of the arrival of a strange nation, and withal to know his pleasure concerning them. Which message was very welcome unto him, insomuch that voluntarily he invited them to come to his court. But if by reason of the tediousness of so long a journey they thought it not best so to do, then he granted liberty to his subjects to bargain and to traffic with them. And further promised that if it would please them to come to him, he himself would bear the whole charges of post-horses. In the ...
— The Discovery of Muscovy etc. • Richard Hakluyt
... stanzas is that imported from Italy and called ottava rima, abababcc. It has been charged with tediousness, and tedious it may become if not sedulously varied. It was introduced, along with so much else from Italy, by Wyatt, and was then employed for different purposes by Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, and others.[57] At the close of the eighteenth century it enjoyed a rebirth. ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... her room she stood dazzled by the rays of the declining moon, and stifled by the sweetness of the night. The clock in the valley struck one, as if marking the end of a time that had been interminable in its tediousness and bleakness. In the mirror she saw her pale brown eyes, skin and tresses invested with a new ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... when you have been at work upon the book, that I was sure it would be; and I shall insist on that debt being due to you (though there will be no need for insisting about it) as long as I have any tediousness and obstinacy to bestow on anybody. Lastly, I never will hear the biography compared with Boswell's except under vigorous protest. For I do say that it is mere folly to put into opposite scales a book, however amusing and curious, written by an unconscious coxcomb ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... best circumstances could do little to lighten the insufferable tediousness of his confinement. Probably, however, such changes and modifications as may have been in progress in his nature, attained quicker and easier development by reason of his physical prostration. The alteration in his bodily habits and conditions paved the way for an analogous moral and mental ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... third day, Byron relented from his rapt mood, as if he felt it was out of place, and became playful, and disposed to contribute his fair proportion to the general endeavour to while away the tediousness of the dull voyage." ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... descriptions of these festive devices have come down to our times. They were conducted on a scale of grandeur and expense which may still surprise; but taste as yet was in its infancy, and the whole was characterized by the unmerciful tediousness, the ludicrous incongruities, and the operose pedantry of ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... have taken notice, that in this whole Treatise, I purposely decline (as far as I well can) the mentioning of Elaborate Chymical Experiments, for fear of frighting you by their tediousness and difficulty; but yet in confirmation of what I have been newly telling you about the possibility of Varying the Colours of Liquors, better than the Water-drinkers are wont to do, I shall add, that Helmont ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... conceive what your feelings would be after spending a month's holiday with a merely mellifluous man. If an author's style has pleased you, but done nothing except make you giggle, then reflect upon the ultimate tediousness of the man who can do nothing but jest. On the other hand, if you are impressed by what an author has said to you, but are aware of verbal clumsinesses in his work, you need worry about his "bad style" exactly as much and exactly as little as you would worry about the manners of a kindhearted, ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... lawful excuse and cause of this sudden departure unto Sir John Gilbert, by the boat of Dartmouth, and from thence the Golden Hind departed and took harbour at Weymouth. All the men tired with the tediousness of so unprofitable a voyage to their seeming, in which their long expense of time, much toil and labour, hard diet, and continual hazard of life was unrecompensed; their captain nevertheless by his great charges impaired greatly thereby, yet comforted in the goodness of God, and His undoubted ...
— Sir Humphrey Gilbert's Voyage to Newfoundland • Edward Hayes
... prerequisites, from the best and most judicious of Latin writers! In some places, where either the fancy or the words were his, or any other's, I have noted it in the margin, that I might not seem a plagiary; in others I have neglected it, to avoid as well tediousness, as the affectation of doing it too often. Such descriptions or images well wrought, which I promise not for mine, are, as I have said, the adequate delight of heroic poesy; for they beget admiration, which is its proper object; as the ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... divisions in my feet behind; that these were too soft to bear the hardness and sharpness of stones, without a covering made from the skin of some other brute; that my whole body wanted a fence against heat and cold, which I was forced to put on and off every day, with tediousness and trouble: and lastly, that he observed every animal in this country naturally to abhor the Yahoos, whom the weaker avoided, and the stronger drove from them. So that, supposing us to have the gift of reason, he could not see how it were possible to cure that natural antipathy, which every creature ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... more easy to heap up authorities on this article than to excuse the prolixity and tediousness of producing any at all in proof of a point which, though too often practically denied, is in its theory almost self-evident. For Suarez, handling this very question, Utrum de ratione et substantia legis esse ut propter commune bonum feratur, does not hesitate ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... inconsequential dialogue, by-play, and mutual trickery of sundry 'lewd fellows of the baser sort'? When it extended its sphere from the castle banqueting-hall to the street or inn-yard no greater excellence was expected from it. Its brevity saved it from tediousness, and the Virtues, whom the lingering influence of religion upon the drama saved from the wreck of the Morality Plays, were given a more and more subordinate place. In this play they serve to point the moral by showing ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... an idle, ungrateful libertine for a man of genius and virtue. The talents of a biographer are often fatal to his reader. For these reasons the public often judiciously countenance those who, without sagacity to discriminate character, without elegance of style to relieve the tediousness of narrative, without enlargement of mind to draw any conclusions from the facts they relate, simply pour forth anecdotes, and retail conversations, with all the minute prolixity of a gossip in ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... and he discovered nothing to rouse his suspicions, although he regarded us closely for a long time. He finally sat down, lit his pipe and commenced smoking. After puffing away for half an hour, which seemed to drag by with the tediousness of a week, he laid his tomahawk (which contains the pipe) by his side, and after nodding for some time he again stretched himself upon the rough floor, and soon his deep snoring fell upon our ears. O! what music was that sound to us. I again drew the knife from my pocket, and with desperation freed ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... willingly decline, since it has been lately written by Goldsmith, a man of such variety of powers, and such felicity of performance, that he always seemed to do best that which he was doing; a man who had the art of being minute without tediousness, and general without confusion; whose language was copious without exuberance, exact without constraint, and ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... the fruit: and how [Greek text] can be, without being moved to practise, it is no hard matter to consider. The philosopher showeth you the way, he informeth you of the particularities, as well of the tediousness of the way and of the pleasant lodging you shall have when your journey is ended, as of the many by-turnings that may divert you from your way; but this is to no man, but to him that will read him, and read him with ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... gay and lively tone of the conversation which ran on around our bivouac fire, with the dry monotony and prosaic tediousness of my first military dinner at Cork, I felt how much the spirit and adventure of a soldier's life can impart of chivalrous enthusiasm to even the dullest and least susceptible. I saw even many who under common circumstances, would have possessed no interest nor ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... drum or the gong, and he who happens to hold the nosegay when the instrument ceases must drink a cup of wine. Many other methods still more childish are resorted to, in order to pass the time and to give a zest to their wine; but the usual resource here, as well as elsewhere, against the tediousness of time, is gaming. An attachment to this vice accompanies the lowest Chinese wherever he goes. It is said that in one of our eastern colonies, where Chinese are encouraged to settle, they pay to the government the annual sum of ten thousand dollars for a licence to ...
— 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
... and delightful enjoyment of conversation with Lady Cecilia. Something very entertaining caught her ear every now and then; but, with her eyes fixed in the necessary direction, it was impossible to make it out, through the aid-de-camp's never-ending tediousness. She thought the sitting after dinner never would terminate, though it was in fact rather shorter ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... laughing at myself, while I write this, for I am not an empty hopper, and if I could "find it in my heart to bestow all my tediousness upon you," you would laugh at me too. Ay, but in what sense would you laugh? That is the question. I laugh at myself, proudly, for calling myself empty; and you, perhaps, would laugh at me piteously, on ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... wealth and power to aid in his path. Did he fall from his high estate, did prosperity dim the lustre of his promise, (and methinks some gentle maiden asks, how sped he in his love.) If thou hast borne with our tediousness, and hast not fainted—fear not, we will ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite
... Gertrude of Wyoming, on the habits of reviewers in general. "We are perfectly aware," he says, "that, according to the modern canons of criticism, the Reviewer is expected to show his immense superiority to the author reviewed, and at the same time to relieve the tediousness of narration, by turning the epic, dramatic, moral story before him into quaint and lively burlesque." (Quarterly, May, 1809.) In his review of the Life and Works of John Home he speaks of "the hackneyed rules of criticism, which, having crushed a hundred poets, will never, it may be ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... You are young, amiable, unconventional; you suit me and will save me from the tediousness ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... deserved praise for its equity and moderation. Yet in the first days of his reign, he put to death four consular senators, his personal enemies, and men who had been judged worthy of empire; and the tediousness of a painful illness rendered him, at last, peevish and cruel. The senate doubted whether they should pronounce him a god or a tyrant; and the honors decreed to his memory were granted to the prayers of the pious ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... consists of forty-six iambics followed by eighty-seven hexameters, and describes the collection under the symbolism no longer of a flower-garden, but of a feast to which different persons bring contributions ({ou stepsanos alla sunagoge}), a metaphor which is followed out with unrelenting tediousness. The piece is not worth transcription here. He says he includes his own epigrams. After a panegyric on the greatness of the empire of Justinian, and the foreign and domestic peace of his reign, he ends by describing the contents of the collection. ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... subjects—these things tend to make all but the most independent and unfettered minds shrink from such an ordeal as the 'honour' of dining with kings. It must, however, be conceded that the kings themselves are fully aware of the tediousness of their dinner parties, and would lighten the boredom if they could; but etiquette forbids. The particular monarch whose humours are the subject of this 'plain unvarnished' history would have liked nothing better than ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... to follow Fred through the tediousness of the following week. His father strictly carried out the punishment to the letter No one came near him but Ellen, though he heard the voices of his sisters and the usual happy home ...
— The Errand Boy • Horatio Alger
... enumerated, consider the art of rhetoric in different points of view, and thus receive from each other mutual support and illustration, while they prevent the tediousness which might else arise, if they were moulded into one systematic treatise on the general subject. Three are in the form of dialogue; the rest are written in his own person. In all, except perhaps the Orator, he professes to have availed ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... It is written (Wis. 8:16): "Her," i.e. wisdom's, "conversation hath no bitterness nor her company any tediousness; but joy and gladness." Now the conversation and company of wisdom are found in contemplation. Therefore there is no sorrow contrary to the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... soon," replied Lady Stanley, and she went away to seek the truant sister, leaving her husband to beguile the tediousness of the time by engaging in conversation with his brother. Sir Thomas was in high glee, and could find no sympathy with the miserable forebodings of his ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... to allow," answered Mr Monckton, "that an eccentric genius, such, for example, as yours, may murmur at the tediousness of complying with the customs of the world, and wish, unconfined, and at large, to range through life without any settled plan or prudential restriction; but would you, therefore, grant the same licence to every one? ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... morning calls, while the old gentleman sat in his office to attend to any that might seek his services. This particular morning happened to be an unfortunate one, for there were no ague-shaken patients to be seen, and there was not even a case of minor surgery to relieve the tediousness of the morning office hour. Perhaps it was for this reason, perhaps it was for the sake of old acquaintance, that he gave Hubert a most cordial reception, and launched at once into a sea of vivacious talk. Cornelia, who was in the office, excused herself on the ground that she was cramming ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... well. 'The Grey Ghost Story Book' would be a favourite. At a very early age I read a number of advertisements of books, and wept because I could not buy dozens of them, and somebody gave me a book on Botany! It looked all right, nicely bound in green cloth, but within it was full of all manner of tediousness. ...
— The Olive Fairy Book • Various
... large barrack room, fancifully decorated with Indian arms, and trophies, and war dresses, and the skins of various wild animals, and hung round with pictures of Indian games and ceremonies, and scenes of war and hunting. In a word, the captain was beguiling the tediousness of attendance at court, by an attempt at authorship; and was rewriting and extending his travelling notes, and making maps of the regions he had explored. As he sat at the table, in this curious apartment, with his high bald head of somewhat foreign ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... as a Position which will seldom deceive, that when a Man cannot bear his own Company there is something wrong. He must fly from himself, either because he feels a Tediousness in Life from the Equipoise of an empty Mind, which, having no Tendency to one Motion more than another but as it is impelled by some external Power, must always have recourse to foreign Objects; or he must be afraid of the Intrusion of some unpleasing Ideas, and, perhaps, is ...
— The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750) • Samuel Johnson
... much charmed with seeing his wife so happy, that, forgetting all his fears of tediousness, he partook the enjoyment of her anticipations. He was the first, when they came in sight of a mountain, to lift Johnnie on his knee and tell him it was Helvellyn; and mamma's resentment at the grievous error was one of the prettiest and ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... deep a knowledge of life, and a corresponding satiety of its pleasures, that all the ordinary routine events of existence have no longer any power to interest the mind. Ennui is not weariness nor tediousness, as described in the dictionary; neither is it boredom, for the latter differs therefrom in its not necessarily being the outcome of a high degree of civilization, ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... but wraps her rebuke in a compliment. Art, so-called, in speech, was much favoured in the time of Elizabeth. And as a compliment Polonius takes the form in which she expresses her dislike of his tediousness, and her anxiety after his news: pretending to wave it off, he yet, in his gratification, coming on the top of his excitement with the importance of his fancied discovery, plunges immediately into a very slough of ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... to assist at these obsequies of his past life, and yet he could not tear himself away. He felt fascinated, as it were, by some supernatural power, and forced to remain in the house and attend this horrible ceremony. In the tediousness of his lonesome, inactive, idle misery, it was a species of diversion to him, something to arouse him from his dull rumination, to be present at this disintegration and ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... the small events which occurred in that Arcadian parish, would be to overstep the bounds of permissible tediousness. In such places all events move slowly and take long to develop to their results. The passions which in our own quickly moving world spring up, flourish, wither and are cut down in a month require, when they are not stimulated ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... now they thought there was no difference between the Parthians and the Armenians or Cappadocians, whom Lucullus grew weary with plundering, and had been persuaded that the main difficulty of the war consisted only in the tediousness of the march, and the trouble of chasing men that durst not come to blows, so that the danger of a battle was beyond their expectation; accordingly, some of the officers advised Crassus to proceed no further at present, but reconsider the whole enterprise, amongst whom in particular was Cassius, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... cheeringly averred, through and out. Photography, steam, and electricity make us otherwise, and Patience has fled to the spheres; therefore, if feasible, shall "brevity be the soul of wit," and we will eschew "tediousness and outward flourishes" in compressing 'The Flower and the ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... opinion of strange eyes. She either seldom Or never walks abroad but in your company. And then with such sweet bashfulness, as if She were venturing on crack'd ice, and takes delight To step into the print your foot hath made, And will follow you whole fields; so she will drive Tediousness out of time, with ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... lieutenant-colonel, its major, and its quartermaster, with seven captains besides, and twenty subalterns, and as each horse-regiment, consisting of six troops, had its colonel, its major, four captains besides, six lieutenants, six cornets, and six quartermasters, one may guess the tediousness of this process of approving nominations and delivering commissions. About 1200 persons had to be approved and commissioned, or, if we throw in chaplains, surgeons, &c., about 1400 in all. Nevertheless, with certain arrangements for delivering commissions ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... health. But the chief cause was the change from their natural climate, coming as they did out of shady and hilly countries, abounding in means of shelter from the heat, to lodge in low, and, in the autumn season, very unhealthy ground; added to which was the length and tediousness of the siege, as they had now sat seven months before the Capitol. There was, therefore, a great destruction among them, and the number of the dead grew so great, that the living gave up burying them. Neither, indeed, were things on that account any ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... him to Chili, and, as he was a cavalier of birth, and possessed of some truly noble qualities, he had gained deserved ascendency over his commander. Alvarado had frequently visited Hernando Pizarro in his confinement, where, to beguile the tediousness of captivity, he amused himself with gaming,—the passion of the Spaniard. They played deep, and Alvarado lost the enormous sum of eighty thousand gold castellanos. He was prompt in paying the debt, but Hernando Pizarro peremptorily declined to receive the money. By this politic generosity, ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... beating heart and suspended breath, to await the entrance of the truant. But, no! it was not him. The wanderer had hastened onwards to some happier home. The street was quiet again. She would take a book and strive to beguile the tediousness ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... to characterize our President's messages by a word civilly compromising between long and tedious, so as not to endanger the peace of the two countries by wounding our national sensitiveness to British criticism." Lengthy is used chiefly of discourses or writings, and implies tediousness. Long is used ...
— Practical Exercises in English • Huber Gray Buehler
... in Delavigne's steps: these were d'Avrigni and Soumet. By the former appeared, in 1819, a tragedy in five acts and in verse; it was performed at the Theatre Francais. Soumet's play was also acted; it almost equals d'Avrigni's in length and tediousness. ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... therefore finds other reasons natural enough; but the first of these reasons, "his own good," is not especially characteristic of Macbeth, and the second, while perhaps characteristic, is absurdly inadequate: men don't murder out of tediousness: ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... time in this brief life of ours, whilst I asked a question or two about the "capital of capitals," to indicate my eagerness to enter the walls of Timbuctoo. Mami-de-Yong, who was a man of tact as well as humor, smiled at my insinuation, and apologizing like a Christian for the natural tediousness of all old travellers, skipped a degree or two of the wilderness, and at once stuck his buffalo-horn snuff-box into the eastern margin of the sand, to indicate that he was ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... impunity; and it does appear that in our common view of these matters we have closed our eyes to certain grave facts of experience, and have given the fatalist a vantage ground of real truth which we ought to have considered and allowed. At the risk of tediousness we shall enter briefly into this unpromising ground. Life and the necessities of life are our best philosophers if we will only listen honestly to what they say to us; and dislike the lesson as we may, it is cowardice which refuses ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... an uneasy laugh, which was merely the outlet for his disgust. Not that he was specially disgusted with Clara, for indeed marriage had assuaged a little the tediousness of some of her mannerisms, even if it had taken away from her charm. He was disgusted more comprehensively by the tradition, universal in his class and in most classes, according to which relatives could not be formally polite to one another. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... fresh in my mind, when, for want of some less noble quarter wherein to bestow my tediousness, I repaired to St. John. As I crossed the hall to his apartment, two men, just dismissed from his presence, passed me rapidly; one was unknown to me, but there was no mistaking the other,—it was Montreuil. I was greatly startled; the priest, ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was not less odious to the nobles, whom he adopted, than to the plebeians, whom he deserted. All that yet remained of treasure, or luxury, or art, was exhausted on that solemn day. Rienzi led the procession from the Capitol to the Lateran; the tediousness of the way was relieved with decorations and games; the ecclesiastical, civil, and military orders marched under their various banners; the Roman ladies attended his wife; and the ambassadors of Italy might loudly applaud ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... that, as a rule, details, and especially those of a political nature, are dry reading; but once take into consideration the fact that they all aid in giving a clearer idea of how one nation begins hostilities with another, and much of the tediousness ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... their brother, without whose protecting presence they declared it utterly impossible to pass another night in the apartments. For the remainder of this night they resolved to watch. To beguile the tediousness of the time they endeavoured to converse, but the minds of Emilia and Julia were too much affected by the late occurrence to wander from the subject. They compared this with the foregoing circumstance of the figure and the light ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... shall quote against me with a sneer Lilly's "Euphues" itself, I shall only answer by asking—Have they ever read it? For if they have done so, I pity them if they have not found it, in spite of occasional tediousness and pedantry, as brave, righteous, and pious a book as man need look into: and wish for no better proof of the nobleness and virtue of the Elizabethan age, than the fact that "Euphues" and the "Arcadia" were the two popular romances of the day. It ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... to the greater number may be questioned. To state that it is farthest from the practice of O. Henry invites a logical and inevitable conclusion. He wrote two hundred stories averaging about fifteen pages each. Whether it may be greater literature is another matter; if it escapes tediousness it may impress by its weight. If the Committee had selected for publication all the longest stories in the list of thirty-two, this volume would contain the same number of words, but only ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... is long to relate, 'tis weariness of mind, 'tis confusion of the senses, 'tis tediousness to hearers, 'tis superfluity of narration to go over the same things twice. But the folk of the Hostel came forth in order, and fought their combats with the reavers, and fell by them, as Fer rogain and Lomna ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... disagreeable or misleading atmosphere about them, though their strict meaning makes their use correct enough; faults of repetition of the same word in differing senses in the same sentence or paragraph; faults of tediousness of phrasing or explanation; faults of lack of clearness in expressing the exact meaning; faults of sentimental use of language, that is, falling into fine phrases which have no distinct meaning—-the most discordant ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody |
