"Meretricious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... believe, my cousin about sixteen times removed, but as she is the only person of rank with whom my family can claim the most distant relationship, we stick to the cousinship and send her every year cheap presents, which she reciprocates with still more meretricious bonbons. When I was ushered into her drawing-room, I found her taking afternoon tea with two old gentlemen, also a mild young man, and a priest. A "Lady of the Faubourg," who has any pretensions to beauty, but who is of Cornelia's mood, always ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... his boyhood in the pursuit of arms, and loving his mother with all the force of his great nature, the man had cared little for other women, turning with scorn from the meretricious charms of those he encountered in camp or among his comrades, and finding no time or inclination to seek others, so that except for the light fancies of an hour, or the calm affection for his cousin Barbara, whom he found on one ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... of its darkest ingredients, and dressed up, in their theological works, in false and meretricious pretentions to truth and purity, it exhibited a dogma only calculated to exert a beneficial influence on mankind, and to prove a source of morality and usefulness. But oh, as with all ideals, ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... the intellectual and sensitive part of our natures. It can be no dispute, supposing both these means put in practice with equal abilities, to which we ought to give the preference: to him who represents the heroic arts and more dignified passions of man, or to him who, by the help of meretricious ornaments, however elegant and graceful, captivates the sensuality, as it may be called, of our taste. Thus the Roman and Bolognian schools are reasonably preferred to the Venetian, Flemish, or Dutch schools, as they address themselves to our ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... literary tricks find little place in our serious verse, and the finer Latin poets rarely indulge in them. They seem to be especially out of place in an epitaph, which should avoid studied effects and meretricious devices. But writers in the early stages of a literature and common people of all periods find a pleasure in them. Alliteration, onomatopoeia, the pun, and the play on words are to be found in all the early Latin ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation—as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she that it must be Jim's. It was like him. Quietness and value—the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... How I thank thee, great Times, For teaching that phrase! 'Tis delicious! Fiction! The haunt of mad follies, crass crimes, Fads futile, and tastes meretricious. Oh, joy, to transport to that Limbo of Fools, Upon trial and honest conviction, The plagues of our Parties, our Churches, our Schools, Who ought to "retire ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 5, 1891 • Various
... hair's point, their high arch when to close Half o'er the swimming orb, and when to raise, Disclosing all the artificial blaze Of unfelt passion, which alone can move Him, whom the genuine eloquence of love Affected never, won with wanton wiles, With soulless sighs and meretricious smiles, By nature unimpress'd, uncharm'd by thee. Sweet goddess of my ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... the old man's back hair and bark in his ear. The old gentleman complained mildly about these familiarities, at last, and when he got through with his statement he said that such a dog as that was not a proper animal to admit to bed with tired men, because he was "so meretricious in his movements and so organic in his emotions." ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... excellence to the fashionable world was undisputed. No doubt the Scottish painter would be attracted by the technical accomplishment of Lawrence's work; but he was between fifty and sixty years of age and little likely to be influenced by an art, which, for all its brilliance, was meretricious in many respects. Yet it is possible that the adulation lavished by society upon his contemporary's style may have induced him to consider if something of the elegance for which it was esteemed so highly could not be added with advantage to his own. On the other hand, ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw
... as the meanest of mankind, but in our century he has been transmuted into a kind of hero. The theory is of German origin; but it was presented to the English public by De Quincey, who adorned it with all the persuasiveness of his meretricious genius. ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... correggiosity was at times overpowering. His vocabulary overcame him often, bore him away from his thought and landed him in some swamp out of which he was wont to extricate himself, to the great delight of the semi-educated reader by some quip or quirk equally meretricious and mephitic. Thus would he, metaphorically, throw filth at himself. He felt all the time that he was pursuing the best course, bending things he despised and loathed to better purposes. Mr. Brann believed that the country was, if ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... that it was added by the hand of art. That this was false was evident, for the weather was so hot that had rouge been used it would have inevitably been detected; but the island damsels trusted to their good figures and features, and their lively manners and conversation, rather than to any meretricious charms, to win admiration. Stella was generally considered the most charming of the maidens present, as undoubtedly she was the most blooming, and she seemed to enjoy the ball as much as any one. She danced with Captain Hemming, and went through a quadrille ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... every other painter, D. Maclise, R.A., has most gallantly disregarded. If there be effect, it certainly is not in the right place, or rather there is no concentration of effect; it possesses the glare of a coloured print, and that too of a meretricious sort—incidents there are, but no plot—less effect upon the animate than the inanimate. The toilet-table takes precedence of the lady—the couch before the sleeper—the shadow, in fact, before the substance; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 12, 1841 • Various
... advantageous illustration from the repulsiveness of his theme. That a subject is dull, however unfortunately it may operate for the impression which he seeks to produce, must at least acquit him of seeking any aid to that impression from alien and meretricious attractions. Is a subject hatefully associated with recollections of bigotry, of ignorance, of ferocious stupidity, of rancour, and of all uncharitableness? In that case, the reader ought to be persuaded that nothing less than absolute consciousness—in that case he ought ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... her feet in the character of a votary. Under the influence of the Medici the churches of Florence were filled with pictures of the Virgin, in which the only thing aimed at was an alluring and even meretricious beauty. Savonarola thundered from his pulpit in the garden of San Marco against these impieties. He exclaimed against the profaneness of those who represented the meek mother of Christ in gorgeous apparel, with head unveiled, and under the features of women too well and publicly known. ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... critical Jeremiahs so despairingly to lift up their voices, and so strenuously to bewail the condition of the literature of the time. The literature of the time is very well, as they would see could they but turn their fascinated gaze from the meretricious and spectacular elements of that literature to the work of Thomas Hardy and George Meredith. With such men among the most influential in modern letters, and with Barrie and Stevenson among the idols ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... the schools of composition. That which he had he gathered with a catholicity of taste from all the renowned masters. Not one of his immediate ancestors had stirred beyond the confines of their simple home. Well for him was it so. No late meretricious Neapolitan tinsel could exist in the quiet, calm beauty of his Thuringian dwelling-place. Nature lay before him. "Come," she said, "seek to understand me. I have treasures that ye know not of, treasures that can only be gathered by the pure in heart and patient in spirit. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... of hands on the canvas carrying out the vigorous lines of the composition, and the unforgettable felicity of those brutally red lips as the one ringing note of color. As for life-likeness, what's the old dame talking about! I never saw such eyes! Not a hint of meretricious emphasis on their luster and yet ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... their way, but are merely the incidents and measures by which the truth of the matter is reached. The client looks puzzled at the argument and the decision, the jurors have a not very clear conception of what is going on, the lawyers have a meretricious feeling that perhaps they are cheapening themselves a little by making so many motions, yet they, nevertheless, have a legal right to do so and they must take advantage of every legal right for the protection ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... as in the other, all meretricious ornamentation should be avoided, whether public or private. All money available for such improvement should be spent in securing perfect neatness. In fact, the two radical requirements of good taste in all such cases are an absence of obvious money-spending, and the ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... illustrious exceptions, be too faithfully characterized as claiming to be poetical for no better reason than that it would be intolerable in conversation or in prose." Wordsworth, unfortunately, in protesting against the meretricious garb of mean thoughts, wished to deny verse its more splendid clothing altogether. If we accepted his theories we should have to condemn his Ode, the greatest of his sonnets, and, as Coleridge put it, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... voluntarily abandoned her father's roof for the house of her mother's brother, Morley Brown; has preferred the fleshpots of Egypt to the virtuous frugalities of her own home, and has discarded the humble friends of her youth, and the associates of her father, for the meretricious and slavish sympathy of wealth and position. In lieu thereof, and as compensation therefor, I do hereby give and bequeath to her my full and free permission to gratify her frequently expressed wish for another guardian in place of ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... performers, whatever their origin, received the treatment of samurai, and their dainty posturing in the dance became a model for the lords of the Bakufu Court, so that the simple demeanour of military canons was replaced by a mincing and meretricious mien. Another favourite dance in Yedo Castle was the furyu. A book of the period describes the latter performance in these terms: "Sixteen youths made their appearance; they all wore wide-sleeved robes and purple figured ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... heightened by the character of the, locality where the gloomy show was to be presented. The great square of Brussels had always a striking and theatrical aspect. Its architectural effects, suggesting in some degree the meretricious union between Oriental and a corrupt Grecian art, accomplished in the medieval midnight, have amazed the eyes of many generations. The splendid Hotel de Ville, with its daring spire and elaborate front, ornamented ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... plates and the chatter of high-pitched Argentine voices, as a noisy string-band played selections from the latest Paris operette. It was difficult to realise that this ostentatiously modern town, with its meretricious glitter, and its population of pale-faced town-breds, was only a hundred miles from the place where, amongst brown, sunburnt folk, we had been living a primitive life tempered ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... superficially resembles that at Chewton Mendip, those of the belfry being reproduced in the stage below; but the lower pair are not an exact repetition of the pair above. It will be noted that the string courses are carried round the buttresses. The elaborate cresting is rich but meretricious. The interior, Perp. throughout, is lofty and spacious, but the general effect is spoilt by the timber supports which are found necessary to shore up the chancel arch. Note externally (1) bell-cot above chancel (cp. Wrington), (2) groined S. porch with parvise above: internally ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... first two phrases in this eulogy may, perhaps, balance one another; though, when Mr. Lecky admits that "Lord Chatham's taste was far from pure, and that there was much in his speeches that was florid and meretricious, and not a little that would have appeared absurd bombast but for the amazing power of his delivery," he makes a serious deduction from his claim to the best style of eloquence which no one ever made from the speeches of his son. But Grattan's assertion that the man who, ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... the cultivator. The fault lies in the general reader himself, whose very opposition to poetry because it is poetry makes him a difficult person to write for. Commercialized minds, given over to convention, denying their sentiment and idealism, or wasting them upon cheap and meretricious literature, do not make a good audience. Our few poets in English who have possessed some universality of appeal have had to make concessions. Kipling has been the most popular among good English poets in our time; but he has had ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... must beg you to listen to me carefully. If you get confused and don't keep a sharp look-out, your children, brought up upon harp and guitar playing, will be abandoning their parents, and running away secretly. Depend upon it, from all that is licentious and meretricious something monstrous will come forth. The poet who wrote the "Four Sleeves" regarded it as the right path of instruction to convey a warning against vice. But the theatre and dramas and fashionable songs, if the moral that they convey is missed, are a very great mistake. Although you may ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... bookshelves, lying softly on brown Russia leather and milk-white vellum, lighting up the delicate gold of the tooling, glowing in the blood-red splashes of the lettering pieces; it fell slant-wise on the black chimney piece, chiselling afresh the Harden motto: Invictus. There was nothing meretricious, nothing flagrantly modern there, as in that place of books he had just left; its bloom was the bloom of time, the beauty of a world already passing away. Yet how he had loved it; how he had given ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... saw of Popery the closer I clung to Protestantism; doubtless there were errors in every church, but I now perceived by contrast how severely pure was my own, compared with her whose painted and meretricious face had been unveiled for my admiration. I told him how we kept fewer forms between us and God; retaining, indeed, no more than, perhaps, the nature of mankind in the mass rendered necessary for ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... past life—that she was a slave in Athens who saved her people by singing to the Tyrant; and Ian had made her sing to him, in a voice quite in keeping with her personality, delicate and fine and wonderfully high in its range, bird-like in its quality, with trills like a lark—a little meretricious but captivating. He had also written for her two verses which were as sharp and clear in her mind as the letter he wrote when she had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of the uliuli faithfully pictured by the artist reproduces a specimen that retains the original simplicity of the instrument before the meretricious taste of modern times tricked it out with silks and feathers. (For a further description of ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... might have made of a complete translation. What a brilliant thing a version of Lucretius, in the style of the "Essay on Man," would have been! And his "Rape of the Lock" proves that he had considerable sympathy with the elaborate fancy, although not with the meretricious graces of Ovid. But with Homer, the severely grand, the simple, the warlike, the lover and painter of all Nature's old original forms—the ocean, the mountains, and the stars—what thorough sympathy could a man have who never saw a real mountain or a battle, ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... his side, saying little and looking less, get nigher his heart. I have seen in his face a far different expression from that which hardens it now while she is so vivaciously accosting him; but then it came of itself: it was not elicited by meretricious arts and calculated manoeuvres; and one had but to accept it—to answer what he asked without pretension, to address him when needful without grimace—and it increased and grew kinder and more genial, and warmed one like a fostering sunbeam. How will she manage to please him when they are married? ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... arts of blandishment and dalliance, which they accompany with expressions adapted to every description of person, insomuch that strangers who have once tasted of their charms, remain in a state of fascination, and become so enchanted by their meretricious arts, that they can never divest themselves of the impression. Thus intoxicated with sensual pleasures, when they return to their homes they report that they have been in Kinsai, or the celestial city, and pant for the time when they may be enabled to revisit ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... poetry—merely meretricious glitter; there is no heart in it. That a man should like to have a nice mistress, a girl he is really fond of, is simple enough, but lamentation over the limbo of unborn loveliness is, to my ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... run of people even nowadays mean something more and something different when they say "God." They intend a personality exterior to them and limited, and they will instantly conclude I mean the same thing. To permit that misconception is, I feel, the first step on the slippery slope of meretricious complaisance, is to become in some small measure a successor of those who cried, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians." Occasionally we may best serve the God of Truth by ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... sins against good taste and propriety. One wishes that he had allayed the heat of his fancy with some cooling drops of discretion. Even his colouring so admired in general, has something florid and meretricious to my ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... style and feats of invention and cunning of construction are so many superfluities of naughtiness. It is well for the truth to have all these, and shine in them, but for falsehood they are merely meretricious, the bedizenment of the wanton; they atone for nothing, they count for nothing. But in fact they come naturally of truth, and grace it without solicitation; they are added unto it. In the whole range of fiction I know of no true picture of life—that is, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... evidence upon which is attempted to predicate a conviction for grand larceny. I am confident that in spite of all the attempts that have been made by a shameless wanton and her pretended husband, to crush this man, despite the meretricious trickery and villainous conspiracy which instigated, concocted and carried out this persecution, relying as I do, on your sense of justice, your strict integrity, and the independence of an American ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... believe, but digest—not only hear, but understand. The words of our morning service, how beautiful, how apposite, how intelligible they were, when read with simple and distinct decorum! But how much of the meaning of the words was lost when they were produced with all the meretricious charms of ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... these external aids to spiritual worship, and that few things more weaken the power of the Gospel that Paul preached than the lowering of the flag in conformity with desires of men of sense, and substituting for the simple glory of the preached Word the meretricious, and in time impotent, and always corrupting, attractions of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... trouble to define more expressively. Dick says in "The Light That Failed" that an old device for an unskilful artist is to stick a superfluous bunch of flowers somewhere in a picture where it will cover up bad drawing. I'm afraid writers are apt to use stock phrases in the same meretricious fashion. ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... place to whitewash and stucco. In the Ducal Palace, side by side with the masterpieces of the Renaissance, are to be found the overcrowded canvases of Vicentino, Giovanni Contarini, Pietro Liberi, Celesti, and others like them. Some of the poor and meretricious mosaics in St. Mark's are from designs by Palma Giovine and Fumiani. Carlo Ridolfi, who was a painter himself, as well as the painter's chronicler, has an "Adoration of the Magi" in S. Giovanni ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... appreciate the beauty and delicacy of a style which to our eighteenth century ancestors was mere barbaric mediaevalism; has taught us to admire its exquisite purity, and to dislike the obstrusive introduction into its midst of incongruous and meretricious ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... habits and customs of the lesser clergy, were greatly appreciated. Some of the furniture did not wholly commend itself to Rosamund. There were certain settees and back-to-backs, certain whatnots and occasional tables, which seemed to stamp the character of the Dean's widow as meretricious. But these could easily be "managed." Rosamund was enchanted with the house, and went from room to room with Canon Wilton radiantly curious, and almost as ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... immediately by the female sex, and mediately by the male, and as it is received according to forms, it follows, that this sphere, which in its origin is holy, may in the subjects be turned into what is not holy, yea may be even inverted into what is opposite. The sphere opposite to it is called meretricious with such women, and adulterous with such men; and as such men and women are in hell, this sphere is from thence: but of this sphere there is also much variety, and hence there are several species of it; and such a species is attracted ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... the metropolis, like a devouring monster, exhibited its equivocal and meretricious beauties, its extensive manufactories, its aspiring churches and towers, and other innumerable edifices. Westminster Abbey stood prominent, at once reviving the recollection of its superstitious origin, ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... either literature or art, they either read nothing or read stories that are neither true nor decent. They respond only to what is highly spiced and have nothing in their minds to counter balance the meretricious attractions of suggestive stories and undesirable films. The truth about the people who are fond of "blue" stories is often (though not always) that those stories accurately indicate their intellectual level. And the uneducated ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... is select and chaste—the promiscuous intermingling with the world meretricious and contaminating. The mother not trained to the appreciation and discharge of the domestic duties, was never the mother of a great representative mind; because she is incapable of imparting those stern principles of exalted morality and ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... severely simple. What Lowell called 'the grand simplicities of the Bible,' with which he was so familiar, were reflected in his discourse. . . . It was marvellous to see how this untutored man, by mere self-discipline and the chastening of his own spirit, had outgrown all meretricious arts, and found his way to the grandeur and ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... severe simplicity here," observed Patching, "No meretricious effects. Nothing but strokes of green paint, up and down, representing the density of an African jungle. Yet how admirably these seemingly careless strokes, laid on by the hand of genius, convey the idea of DEPTH! You do not fail to ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... on the pediment. The Gardes-Meubles, two buildings, which line one entire side of the Place Louis Seize, or de la Concorde, as it is now termed, and which are separated by the Rue Royale, are among the best structures of the town. Some of their ornaments are a little meretricious, but the prevalent French features of their architecture are more happy than common. Only one of these edifices belongs to the public, and is now the hotel of the Admiralty, the other having been erected for symmetry, though occupied as private dwellings, and actually ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... in the tragedy of "Romeo and Juliet." Charlotte Cushman was now at the summit of her art. She was universally allowed to be the greatest tragedienne of the day. And this recognition was due to her fine genius. She owed nothing to artifice or meretricious attraction. Nothing was left to chance, for the indomitable spirit and zealousness with which she had sustained herself under adverse circumstances had done not a little to elevate her in the regard of her countrymen and admirers. This was the first of a series of "farewell engagements," ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... musicians in support of their own. But the valorous editor "ventures to assure the distinguished critics and the publishers that there will be no difficulty in pointing out a hundred palpable faults, and an infinitude of meretricious uglinesses, such as, to real taste and judgment, are intolerable." Three more letters appeared in the following numbers—two for (Amateur and Professor) and one against (Inquirer) Chopin; the editor continuing to insist with as much violence ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... by lay students of the art of the past has one chief object; namely, to train them to understand the works of the masters in order that they may discriminate between what is beautiful and what is meretricious in the art of the present day; to learn the lessons of art from the monoliths of Egypt, the tawny marbles of ancient Greece, the balanced thrusts of the Gothic cathedral, the gracious and reverent ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... forgive him at once, and tell him so? Not if she knew all. And then, in hideous contrast to her pure stately beauty, there rose before him faces and figures which had shared his orgies during the past months, gay with paint and jewels, and meretricious ornament. There was a deeper horror in those mocking shapes than in the most loathsome phantasms of corporeal corruption that feverish dreams ever called up from the grave-yard. If his lips were unworthy, months ago, to touch Constance's cheek or hand, what were they ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... I've come to hear? If there is anything more degrading, immoral, unnatural, than another in my life, it is this meretricious contract with Arabella which has been called doing the right thing! And you too—you call yourself Phillotson's wife! HIS ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... to a subordinate position and places under effective control. It is the inertness, the apathy, the low vitality of the average child of fourteen, which is the cause of his undoing. His taste for false and meretricious excitement—a taste which may lead him far along the downward path—is the outcome of his very instinct to live, an instinct which, though repressed by the influences that have choked its natural channels, cannot resign itself to extinction, and at last, in its despairing effort to energise, ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... is so absurd for the old man to have left instructions for all this meretricious romance to surround his end. As for old Girtle, he seems to delight in it, and goes about the house rubbing his ...
— The Dark House - A Knot Unravelled • George Manville Fenn
... in our business patronage—Manton Marble and Hurlbut, gentlemen, scholarly, wise leaders, conscientious teachers, with barely living financial income; or their successors, parvenus, superficial, meretricious, false guides, time-serving leaders, a thousand dollars a day of clear profit, housed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... an art to have so much judgment as to apparel a lie well, to give it a good dressing; that though the nakedness would show deformed and odious, the suiting of it might draw their readers. Some love any strumpet, be she never so shop- like or meretricious, in good clothes. But these, nature could not have formed them better to destroy their own ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... came wafted through an off-channel of his trade. He did an intermittent business in the gilding of small idols, to be shipped overseas and traded as objects of worship among the negroes of the American plantations. Jewellery, however, was his stand-by. In the manufacture of meretricious ware he had a plausibility amounting to genius, in the disposing of it a talent for hard bargains; and the two together had landed him in affluence. Well, sir, being headed off my boyhood's dream by the geographical inconvenience of Warwickshire—for a lad may run away ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... No, nor my voice. It's just ear. Mrs. P—— a friend of maine says I've got a very quick ear." Every now and then Sally was betrayed into Nosey-like refinement. She fought against it from an instinctive feeling that it was meretricious. But at the same time she was speaking with instinctive care, so as to avoid Cockney phrases, and pronunciations, and tones. She wanted him to think her—something that she called "nice." They walked the length of Regent Street, chatting thus; and at last reached the gilded Rezzonico, where ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... here touches of execrable taste, such as the punning trick with man and manners, suggesting a false antithesis; or the opposition of the words deprave and deprive; but we have in them only an instance of how the meretricious may co-exist with the lovely. The passage is fine and powerful, notwithstanding its faults ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... an opportunity for instructing the Italians was not thrown away. False liberty was already strewing their path with its meretricious allurements. "As true liberty diffuses around it peace and grace and calm, so does false liberty disseminate, wherever it is implanted, terror, dismay and horror. The brows of one are illuminated with the splendid halo of order, and ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... manacled behind him, looked like formidable hammers capable of striking a man down dead at one blow; his whole aspect was repulsive and terrible—there was no redeeming point about him—for even the apparent fortitude he assumed was mere bravado—meretricious courage—which the first week of the galleys would crush out of him as easily as one crushes the juice out of a ripe grape. He wore a nondescript costume of vari-colored linen, arranged in folds that would have been the admiration ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... were fitted up in the style of Louis XV., which was worthy of the degenerate nobles and crapulous financiers for whom it was invented, and was, in fact, a sort of Byzantine of the boudoir, which succeeded the nobler and simpler manner of the age of Louis XIV., and tormenting every straight line into meretricious curves, ended ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... me through several big rooms downstairs before we got to his own particular quarters above. The furnishing of these rooms impressed me at the time; but I know, now, that they were heavy and clumsy when they were meant to be rich and massive, and were meretricious when they were meant to be elegant. It was all of the Second Empire, qualified by an erratic, exaggerated touch that was natively American. I am afraid I found it rather superb and was made uncomfortable—was even intimidated by ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... thick with rage. Her face is convulsed. Her eyes are burning coals. She has never been so nearly a great actress, this meretricious little dancer and comedian, as in this moment ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... they find it difficult to ply their trade unless under the influence of alcohol. Turning to the man's point of view, there is quite a considerable proportion of young men who, however strong their sexual impulse, object to meretricious intercourse at once on ethical and aesthetic grounds. The ethical ground is that intercourse with a prostitute infringes the elementary principle of civilised morals, that one human being should not use another as a mere means to the ends of the former, but that each of us must treat all human ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... helped to instruct her understanding; for by a kind of intuition she could appreciate all that was beautiful and elevated. Her unvitiated and guileless taste had a logic of its own: no schoolman had ever a quicker penetration into truth, no critic ever more readily detected the meretricious and the false. The book that Evelyn could admire was sure to be stamped with the impress of the noble, the ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book II • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... more cultured peoples, he does so at the expense of construction and adaptability to use. An example of such work is presented in Fig. 290, a weak, useless, and wholly vicious piece of basketry. Other equally meretricious pieces represent goblets, bottles, and tea pots. They are the work of the Indians of the northwest coast and are executed in the neatest possible manner, bearing evidence of the existence ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... him. The champ and gallop of the horses, and Clymer's vociferous enjoyment of his own wit, blended with it; and for a moment or two Hyde was under a physical exhilaration as intoxicating as the foam of the champagne they had been drinking. In the height of this meretricious gaiety, a carriage, driving at a rather rapid rate turned into the road; and Cornelia suddenly raised her eyes to the festive young men, and then dropped them with ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... in the Palazzo Arconati, on the Grand Canal, Venice. The room itself is beautiful in its decayed grandeur, but the furnishings and hangings are either tawdry and meretricious or avowedly modern. The three windows at the back open on to a narrow covered balcony, or loggia, and through them can be seen the west side of the canal. Between recessed double doors on either side of the room is a fireplace out of use ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... of taste, independently of historical diversities, sculpture presents every degree of the meretricious, the grotesque, and the beautiful,—more emphatically, because more palpably, than is observable in painting. The inimitable Grecian standard is an immortal precedent; the Medival carvings embody the rude Teutonic truthfulness; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... other he did not take in this country, and quitted it, leaving behind him very beautiful studies strangely undervalued, and sold for little. The fact is, he was too true to the solemnity and sobriety of nature to please a public led away by gaudy display and meretricious colouring. Yet was he a man of more genius—in landscape—than any nine out of ten of our best artists that have, these last ten years, attempted to show nature or art upon our academical walls. Poor Fearnley! We have heard that elsewhere he was appreciated ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... railway arch was a congestion of workmen's dwellings. The road from Surbiton and Epsom ran under the arch, and, like a bright fungoid growth in the ditch, there was now appearing a sort of fourth estate of little red-and-white rough-cast villas, with meretricious gables and very brassy window-blinds. Behind the Avenue was a little hill, and an iron-fenced path went over the crest of this to a stile under an elm-tree, and forked there, with one branch going back ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... his "Thirty Years' Musical Recollections," rebukes the bigotry which sees nothing good but in its own kind: "I have never been able to understand why this [referring to the Rossinian richness of melody] should be contemned as necessarily false and meretricious—why the poet may not be allowed the benefit of his own period and time—why a lover of architecture is to be compelled to swear by the Dom at Bamberg, or by the Cathedral at Monreale—that he must abhor and denounce Michel Angelo's church or the Baths of Diocletian at Rome—why ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... was remarkable for its clearness and elegance, and his correspondence and prose pieces show extensive information. To great genius and capacity, he united the rarest and more important gifts of sound judgment and common sense. It is usually the misfortune of genius to invest ordinary objects with a meretricious colouring, that perverts their forms and purposes, to make its possessor imagine that it exempts him from attending to those strict rules of moral conduct to which others are bound to adhere, and to render him neglectful of the sacred assurance ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... this being so, was it not strange that a young matron who had led, for some four years out of the eight years her married life had lasted, so wholly womanly and domestic an existence as had fallen to the lot of Flossy, should have been led astray by the meretricious allurements of unlawful love?—Maud's striking ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... the spectacle of the human body—even to-day after generations have inculcated the notion that it is an indecorous and even disgusting spectacle—is witnessed by the eagerness with which they seek after the spectacle of even its imperfect and meretricious forms, although these certainly possess a heady and stimulating quality which can never be found in the pathetic simplicity of naked beauty. It was another spectacle when the queens of ancient Madagascar at the annual Fandroon, or feast of the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Embankment. He always walked near to the dingy river when he could. The contrast of its life to the town's life through which it flowed had a perpetual fascination for him. In the early evening, too, the river presents many Dore effects. It is dim, mysterious, sometimes meretricious, with its streaks of light close to the dense shadows that lie under the bridges, its wailful, small waves licking the wharves, and bearing up the inky barges that look like the ferry-boat of the Styx. Henley loved to feel vivaciously despairing, and he hugged himself in the belief ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... were, more by itself, while in elegant it is blended as part of the whole. Tasty is an inferior word, used colloquially in a similar sense. Chaste (primarily pure), denotes in literature and art that which is true to the higher and finer feelings and free from all excess or meretricious ornament. Dainty and delicate refer to the lighter and finer elements of taste and beauty, dainty tending in personal use to an excessive scrupulousness which is more fully expressed by fastidious. Nice and delicate both refer to exact adaptation to some standard; ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... Voices" waltz, and tell a girl to keep her feet still; as if one were to lend "Robinson Crusoe" to a boy, and warn him not to think of running away to sea. Still, I must even add my voice to the orthodox chorus, and affirm that warfare is bad, brutal, fraudful, a thing of meretricious gauds, a clay idol, fetish of humbug and havoc, whose feet are soaking in muddy gore and salt tears; yet in the privacy of my own study I might sadly admit that the Millennium is remote, that the Parliament of Nations exists but in ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... person," he observed. "Nobody but you ever accused me of such a thing. Marriage concerns the race and a man's whole future. If the children of the marriage are likely to be unsatisfactory, the marriage will certainly be so. We moderns bedeck and bedrape us in all sorts of meretricious togas, till a pair of fine eyes and a dashing manner pass for beauty; but when life tries the metal—when nature applies her inevitable test—the degenerate or neurotic type goes ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... of congestion. But in his words and voice I detected lapses into other moods, into some other state of being; they gave me the impression as of two different individuals addressing me. The man did not ring true, altogether; he was mentally disorganized, disharmonious; those meretricious reasonings about justice, for example, ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... pages, but a perpetual, everlasting gorgeousness of deep-colored sunset radiance. For merit of style all these novels are well worthy of commendation and of study. Education and extensive reading have preserved them from faults of gaudiness and meretricious ornament. They are chastened by good taste and regulated by gentlemanly cultivation. They are written by a scholar, and not by a scribbler; and while reading their magnificent pages we need have no misgiving that we are admiring the flashy ornaments of wordy ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... are the keynotes of her poetry. The troubadour sang because he was a professional poet, but the lady who composed poetry did so from love of the art or from the inspiration of feeling and therefore felt no need of meretricious adornment for her song. The five poems of the Countess which remain to us show that her sentiment for Raimbaut was real and deep. "I am glad to know that the man I love is the worthiest in the world; ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... taste, which, in that solemn commemoration of the death of their king, the service solennel for Louis XVI. contrived to introduce a species of affected parade,—a detailed and theatrical sort of grief,—a kind of meretricious mummery of sorrow, which banished all the feelings, and almost completely destroyed the impression which such a scene in any other country would inevitably have produced. Any thing, it may be easily imagined, which ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... light—the very earthly light which, in great cities, flares out when the light of heaven dies, to walk the streets, with much else of doubtful loveliness, till it is shamed by the cold chastity of dawn. And along with that outflaring, a certain meretricious element introduced itself into the aspect of Trimmer's Green. Across the roadway, the gaslamps showed cones of vivid yet sickly brightness, bringing at regular intervals the sharply indented leaves of the plane trees and the shivering silver ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... appropriate to the subject, and rise with the thought or emotions to be conveyed. Who can tell what would be the effect of such a church music? What a feeling of earnestness and sincerity would it not lend to services now often marred by the shallowness or meretricious glitter of their musical portions? The range is wide, the field broad; there is scope for grandeur, sublimity, power, jubilation, the brightest strains of extatic joy, mourning, pathos, and the passionate pleading of the human soul severed from its highest good; ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... and adorned with a series of very quaint and vivid little paintings of the "Dance of Death," quite in the Holbein manner; the new sends up a painful glare from its white limestone, and is ornamented with candelabra in a meretricious imitation of platinum. As an almost professional cherisher of the quaint I ought to have chosen to return at least by the dark and narrow way; but mark how luxury unmans us. I was already demoralised. I crossed ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... reading together Balzac's "Recherche de l'Absolu," your objecting to the character of Madame de Claees, and very justly, a certain meretricious taint which Balzac seldom escapes in his heroines, and which in some degree impaired the impression that character, in many respects beautifully conceived and drawn, would have produced? Well, there is a vein of something ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... begins to know Thackeray rather better than it did two years or even a year ago, but as yet it only half knows him. His mind seems to me a fabric as simple and unpretending as it is deep-founded and enduring—there is no meretricious ornament to attract or fix a superficial glance; his great distinction of the genuine is one that can only be fully appreciated with time. There is something, a sort of "still profound," revealed in the concluding part of Vanity Fair which the discernment of one generation ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... expression of maudlin resentment, that distorted her handsome but besotted features into something that was calculated to shock those who looked upon her. There she passed, a licentious homily upon an ill-spent life—upon a life of open, steady, and undeviating profligacy; there she passed the meretricious angel of his death-bed, actually chased by the presence of men from the delirious depravity ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... many refused to rise above the "popular" standard, there is no doubt that he succeeded in elevating the taste of the general public. Year by year he was bringing his audiences nearer to himself, and year by year he was winning new converts from the love of the meretricious and flashy to that of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... may be carried yet further; for had not Dryden stooped to call to the aid of his poetry the auxiliaries of scenery, gilded truncheons, and verse of more noise than meaning, it is impossible his plays could have been drawn into comparison with those of Settle. But the meretricious ornaments which he himself had introduced were within the reach of the meanest capacity; and, having been among the first to debauch the taste of the public, it was retributive justice that he should experience their inconstancy. Indeed Dryden ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... let your fabric rise, And with attractive majesty surprise; Not by affected meretricious arts, But strict harmonious symmetry of parts; Which through the whole insensibly must pass, With vital heat to animate the mass: A pure, an active, an auspicious flame; And bright as heaven, from whence ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... 'I have very nearly solved it,' the Rational Person said, in genteel triumph, 'but this evening grows too dark for any further ciphering, and again I must wait until to-morrow. I regret, sir, that you have elected to waste the day, in pursuit of various meretricious Lepidoptera.' ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... of ignorance, false taste, and pretension, which assumes the dignity of classical feeling, that it may be able to abuse whatever is above the level of its understanding, but bursts into genuine rapture with all that is meretricious, if sufficiently adapted to the calibre of ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though possibly a meretricious, effect. Now, it was not really difficult, by an inspection of the groove between your left forefinger and thumb, to feel sure that you did NOT propose to invest your small capital in the ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in my heart was resentment. That my name should be prostituted by the foul mouths of such wretches, and my money be squandered for the gratification of a meretricious vagabond, were indignities not to be endured. I was carried involuntarily towards my brother's house. I had lost all that awe in his presence and trepidation at his scorn which had formerly been so ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... convention—to the Rule of Numbers, the daily journal is destined, if it survives as a power, to become the teacher—the very Bible—of the people. The people are already beginning to distinguish between the wholesome and the meretricious in their newspapers. Newspaper owners, likewise, are beginning to realize the value of character. Instances might be cited where the public, discerning some sinister but unseen power behind its press, has slowly yet surely withdrawn its confidence and support. However impersonal ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... closed, except in the early morning, and visitors are admitted by the custode on ringing a door bell under the portico. The interior is dark and solemn, with much less gilding and meretricious ornament than is usual in Roman churches. It contains, in the side chapels, many objects of interest; frescoes and altar-pieces by Annibale Caracci, Pinturicchio, and Peruzzi; and splendid sepulchral monuments. Of the last the most conspicuous are the marble tomb of Alessandro Guidi, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... require to be read "off the reel." As a book in two volumes I think it would have good claims to success, and good chances of obtaining success. But I suppose the polishing I have hinted at (not a meretricious adornment, but positively necessary to good work and good art) to ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... tea ceremonies, as we have badly translated the "Cha'-no-yu," but which might be preferably rendered as "The Fine Art of Welcome and Hospitality," have been a strong influence in preventing them from drifting into the meretricious gaudiness so blatantly en evidence in restaurants like the Carlton, and minister to that purity and simplicity of taste which is so characteristic of Japanese art. Five is considered by them the best number for a dinner-party, as with a larger number separate conversational groups ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... needle in her hand, who never goes to church, and never entertains one serious idea of duty of any kind, when got up in Pompadour style, has, to say the truth, the good taste and merit of appropriateness. Her dress expresses just what she is,—all false, all artificial, all meretricious and unnatural; no part or portion of her from which it might be inferred what her Creator originally designed her ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... old medicament, Whose fusty vials have long dried impotent, Why prop ye meretricious things, Denounce the sane as vicious things, And ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... abuse of his function. We know a conscientious artist on the organ who would no more perjure his instrument than his lips, but go to the stake sooner than turn his keys into tongues to captivate a meretricious taste or transform one breath of the air under his fingers into sympathetic lying, though thousands should be ready to resound their delight. So was it with the noble Christian Jew, an Israelite of harmony indeed. The most sympathetic of vocations, whose appeal more than any other is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... things were tolerated only for necessity? No, but they remain still as a very affront to marriage. The haunting of those dissolute places, or resort to courtesans, are no more punished in married men than in bachelors. And the depraved custom of change, and the delight in meretricious embracements, (where sin is turned into art,) maketh marriage a dull thing, and a kind of imposition or tax. They hear you defend these things, as done to avoid greater evils; as advoutries, deflowering of virgins, unnatural lust, and the like. But they say this is a preposterous ...
— The New Atlantis • Francis Bacon
... marrying wealth and dignity, and providing for the greatness of his house, and, as often happens in such marriages, he forgot to ask for a certificate of character, forgot to ask what sort of mother he was providing for his children. She came with all her meretricious splendour covering one of the most fiendish natures that ever wore a woman's form. She developed, if she did not bring with her, all imaginable vices—her vindictive passion revelled in blood; her religion was the filthiest licentiousness; ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... previously existing writings of Watts and Doddridge, has been greatly improved, in at least the composition, by the emendations of Morrison and Logan. With all its faults, we know of no other collection equal to it as a whole. The meretricious stanzas of Brady and Tate are inanity itself in comparison. True, the later Blair, though always sensible, was ofttimes quite heavy enough in the pieces given to him to render—more so than in his prose; though, even when first introduced ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... great services which he rendered to the cause of free-trade. None but those immediately cognizant of his efforts could conceive his herculean labours to promote the repeal of the corn laws. His eloquence was characterised by intelligence, directness, the absence of all meretricious ornament, and an eagerness to convince and carry his hearers with him, which was singularly effective. His addresses were not only free from all ambition as to ornate or attractive language, but also as to original or characteristic thought. There was ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... which he gave him, to a majestic being, who rode in a chariot, after the rest of the company. The young man did as he was directed; and saw a company of all ages, sexes, and ranks, on horse and on foot, some joyful and others sad, pass along; among whom he distinguished a woman in a meretricious dress, who, from the tenuity of her garments, seemed almost naked. She rode on a mule; her long hair, which flowed over her shoulders, was bound with a golden fillet; and in her hand was a golden rod, with which she directed her mule. In the close of the procession, a tall majestic figure ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... tasked his managerial arts to thwart him in his theatrical enterprise. For this purpose he undertook to build up Hugh Kelly, Goldsmith's boon companion of the Wednesday Club, as a kind of rival. Kelly had written a comedy called False Delicacy, in which were embodied all the meretricious qualities of the sentimental school. Garrick, though he had decried that school, and had brought out his comedy of The Clandestine Marriage in opposition to it, now lauded False Delicacy to the skies, and prepared ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... light of a single candle on the deserted top floor of a "business house," dark under the roof and scintillating exceedingly with lights and cut glass at the level of the street like a fairy palace. That meretricious splendour was the only one to be met in Mrs Verloc's visions. She remembered brushing the boy's hair and tying his pinafores—herself in a pinafore still; the consolations administered to a small and badly scared creature by another creature nearly ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... just this present Germany, which is a factory town with a garden attached, surrounded by an armed camp. I deny the contradiction. I have tried to analyze and to give the reasons for Germany's development along these meretricious and disappointing lines, but I am the last to admit that the outcome is satisfactory, or that the rest of the world should look to Germany to point out the way of salvation. A steaming orchid-house is not the place to go to learn to grow the fruits of the earth in their due ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... Tuileries during the period of the classical mania, is too small for its present surroundings, since the removal of the Palace. The north wing, visible to your right, is purely modern, of the age of the First and Second Empire and the Third Republic. The meretricious character of the reliefs in its extreme west portion, erected under the Emperor Napoleon III., and restored after the Commune, is redolent of the spirit of that gaudy period. The south wing, to your left, forms ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... in hospitals, and prisons, and are unclaimed by their friends. The graceful new cemetery, at no great distance from it, though yet unfinished, has already many graves among its shrubs and flowers, and airy colonnades. It might be reasonably objected elsewhere, that some of the tombs are meretricious and too fanciful; but the general brightness seems to justify it here; and Mount Vesuvius, separated from them by a lovely slope of ground, ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... filled her lungs. It was a still, moonless night, and the stars hung low down, like diamonds on a canopy of black velvet. They made the flaring lights of the terrace of the Hotel and Cafe de Paris look tawdry and meretricious. ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... a trite consideration of criticism. The treatment of mythology is particularly conclusive on this point. Throughout the 'Augustan' era, mythology was approached as a mere treasure-house of pleasant fancies, artificial decorations, 'motives', whether sumptuous or meretricious. Allusions to Jove and Venus, Mercury, Apollo, or Bacchus, are of course found in every other page of Dryden, Pope, Prior, Swift, Gay, and Parnell. But no fresh presentation, no loving interpretation, ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... intimation to break the magic and the mystery of the early morning, unless it be the small tinkling of bells like frogs in a brook; a complete shifting or rather change of scene noiselessly wrought; a foul city purified, whitened, sparkling, and glorious, like a Scarlet Lady who emerges with her meretricious charms in chaste robes, chaste as Diana. She taketh the veil. The virgin-snow is unsullied upon her bosom, just as it dropped softly out of heaven, undefiled by footsteps, dazzling only to conceal. 'Tis but the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... traveled gentlemen, with a variety of elegant accomplishments, the chief of which is a disgust for their own language and customs. This, indeed, seems to be a characteristic of several other nations—an inordinate desire to become denationalized by imitating whatever is meretricious and absurd in other people; and you need not be surprised should you fail to recognize even your unpretending friend and correspondent on his return to California; for although I still pretend to write a little English, I no longer speak it ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... the fault she determines to avoid, as the very sentence in which she announces this determination proves. Despite her sincerity, she is affected, and her arguments are often weakened by meretricious forms of expression. No one can for a moment doubt that her feelings are real, but neither can the turgidity and bombast of her language be denied. She borrows, unconsciously perhaps, the "flowery diction" which she so heartily condemns. Her style, instead of being ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... if fond of music many musicians, if lovers of learning many men of letters, and many athletes if fond of gymnastics, so the man who has an eye for female charms teaches his wife to dress well, the man of pleasure teaches his meretricious tricks and wantonness, while the true gentleman makes ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... flower-boxes which were outside nearly all the windows, and did not talk any nonsense about them; even the creepers seemed to be greener than usual in the sunlight of the afternoon. In the chapel somebody was playing the organ, which may have been a meretricious effect, but it pleased Nina, and that was all I cared about. The whole college was most wonderfully peaceful, no one could imagine that the quadrangle had ever been made hideous by Bacchanalian yells. ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... of the Trocadero has nothing meretricious about it. It is, like the building of which it is the finest ornament, of Jura marble, while much of the adjacent work is of artificial stone so admirably made that one cannot tell the difference, and is disposed to give the preference to the latter as evincing greater ingenuity ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... station on the great highway between the seas; a place where curious and irreverent Gentiles stopped to gaze in wonder at and perhaps to mock the Lord's chosen; a place that would become but one link in a chain of Gentile cities, that would be forced to conform to the meretricious customs of ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... so. Now you must know that this alguazil was on intimate terms with an attorney; and the two were connected with a pair of wenches not a bit better than they ought to be, but quite the reverse. They were rather good looking, but full of meretricious arts and impudence. These two served their male associates as baits to fish with. Their dress and deportment was such that you might recognise them for what they were at the distance of a musket shot; they frequented the houses of entertainment for strangers, ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... knows To a hair's point, their high arch when to close Half o'er the swimming orb, and when to raise, Disclosing all the artificial blaze Of unfelt passion, which alone can move Him whom the genuine eloquence of love Affected never, won with wanton wiles, With soulless sighs, and meretricious smiles; By nature unimpress'd, uncharm'd by thee, Sweet goddess ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent |
