"Pompous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... England. He received commission in the course of a few months from the elector to visit England, having been warmly invited thither by some English noblemen. On his return to Hanover, at the end of six months, he found the dull and pompous little court unspeakably tiresome after the bustle of London. So it is not to be marveled at that he took the earliest opportunity of returning to the land which he afterward adopted. At this period he was not yet twenty-five years old, but already famous ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... Every Christmas, each servant, who had worked for me during the year, received a present of beef enough to keep each person a week, which was never noticed in any of the public newspapers, though they constantly teemed with pompous accounts of the generosity, benevolence, and charity of my more opulent neighbours, who never gave half so much; in fact, who never gave a twentieth part so much as myself, in proportion ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... his riding. At the next lurch of the old mare's heels he toppled over into the grass, and I slid off the sleek broad back to join him where he stood, rubbing his shoulder and sourly watching the rather pompous figure till it was ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... "Hydriotaphia, Urn-Burial; or a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk". It is refreshing to discover a modern reader who can still appreciate the quaint literature of the seventeenth century, and Miss Hoffman is to be thanked for her sympathetic review of the pompous, Latinised phrases of the old physician. "He and She", by Margaret A. Richard, is a thoroughly meritorious poem whose two "allowable rhymes", "fair-dear", and "head-prayed", would be censured only by a critic of punctilious exactitude. "At Sea", a witty bit of vers ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... shipwrecked sailor who was thrown up on an island inhabited by serpents with human natures; of the princess in the tower whose lovers spent their days in attempting to climb to her window,—and so on. The stories have no moral, they are not pompous: they are purely amusing, interesting, and romantic. As an example one may quote the story which is told of Prince Setna, the son of Rameses II. This Prince was one day sitting in the court of the temple of Ptah, when he saw a woman pass "beautiful exceedingly, there being ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... law-rock of Thingvellir. It is gone from every other Norse kingdom founded by the old sea-rovers among the Western Isles. Manxmen alone have held on to it. Shall we also let it go? Shall we laugh at it as a bit of mummery that is useless in an age of books and newspapers, and foolish and pompous in days of frock-coats and chimney-pot hats? I think not. We cannot afford to lose it. Remember, it is the last visible sign of our independence as a nation. It is our hand-grasp with the past. Our little nation is the only Norse ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... the Stile of Humour, one of which consists in the Use of that little pert Phraseology which I took Notice of in my last Paper; the other in the Affectation of strained and pompous Expressions, fetched from the learned Languages. The first savours too much of the Town; ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... comes up, puffing with surplus fat and official importance. Seeing three men stretched out, and learning that the odd-looking fellow then hurrying on board is the cause, he brandishes his club, striking Oswald on the shoulder, in pompous tones announcing his arrest. Oswald remonstrates, and attempts to explain that he is not the aggressor, but to all such, this swelling representative of the Crown's outraged ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... minstrelsy, which had a natural stimulus in the chivalric life of the troubadours and minnesingers of whom the mastersingers thought themselves the direct and legitimate successors. In its delineation of the pompous doings of the mastersingers, Wagner is true to the letter. He has vitalized the dry record to be found in old Wagenseil's book on Nuremberg, {1} and intensified the vivid description of a mastersingers' meeting ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the town, was to be the most impressive, the most imposing, the most unmitigatedly monumental. The bold young architect had loftily renounced all economies of space, time, material, and had imagined a grandiose facade with a long colonnade of polished blue-granite pillars, a pompous attic story above, and a wide flight of marble steps below. The inside was to be quite as overbearingly classical as the outside. There was to be a sort of arched and columned court under a vast prismatic skylight; lunettes, spandrels, friezes and the like were to ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... thing most important to mention, Metaphysics will claim your attention! There see that you can clearly explain What fits not into the human brain: For that which will not go into the head, A pompous word will stand you in stead. But, this half-year, at least, observe From regularity never to swerve. You'll have five lectures every day; Be in at the stroke of the bell I pray! And well prepared in every part; Study each paragraph by heart, So that you scarce ...
— Faust • Goethe
... eight, when slumber's chains had bound Mr. Magee in his New York apartments, he was awakened by a pompous valet named Geoffrey whom he shared with the other young men in the building. It was Geoffrey's custom to enter, raise the curtains, and speak of the weather in a voice vibrant with feeling, as of something he had prepared ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... Trafalgar; the sense that insularity was independence; the sense that anomalies are as jolly as family jokes; the general sense that old salts are the salt of the earth. It still lives in some old songs about Nelson or Waterloo, which are vastly more pompous and vastly more sincere than the cockney cocksureness of later Jingo lyrics. But it is hard to connect De Quincey with it; or, indeed, with anything else. De Quincey would certainly have been a happier man, and almost certainly a better man, ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... husband, in very just terms, as distinguished from those of his conceited and half-learned wife; and the whole reply of Pope seems very much as though he had been playing off a mystification on his grace. Undoubtedly the pompous duke felt that he had caught a Tartar. Now M. Dacier's Horace, which, with the text, fills nine volumes, Pope could not have read except in French; for they are not even yet translated into English. Besides, Pope read critically ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... insignificant a person as a midshipman from it; and the recollection that he had behaved not altogether in a becoming way to Adair did not probably cross his mind. Now the lieutenant had a peculiarly pompous air, and the habit, whenever he wished to blow his nose, of drawing his white cambric pocket-handkerchief from his breast pocket with what he thought peculiar dignity, and of flourishing it in his hand after each operation ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... say in pompous words, that a "young man shall feel" as much in an assembly of beauties, "as young men feel in the month of April," is surely to waste sound upon a very poor sentiment. I read, Such comfort as do lusty YEOMEN feel. You shall feel from the sight and conversation ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... the brows of the gorgeously attired Emperor and his eagle-visaged Captain-General as they listened to the pompous oratory of the foremost Jarmuthian, and in dark fury more than one Atlantean noble half drew his sword when the speaker fell ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... Captain Elkanah Daniels, prosperous, pompous, and unbending, crossed the threshold. Richest man in the village, retired shipowner, pillar of the Regular church and leading member of its parish committee, Captain Elkanah looked the part. He removed his hat, ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... their desks to see who might be passing. They caught a glimpse of a shiny carriage; the old dog bounded out, barking, but nothing passed the open door. The carriage had stopped; some one was coming to the school; somebody was going to be called out! It could not be the committee, whose pompous and uninspiring spring visit had taken place only ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... really we need not go back on all that. The whole affair has become quite an agreeable reminiscence. It is a pleasure, when it is all over, to have been thoroughly and wholesomely shown up, and to discover that one has been a pompous and priggish ass. And you and Amroth between you did me that blessed turn. I am not quite sure which of you I hated most. But I may say one thing, and that is that I am heartily glad to see you have ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Dacier's idolatry he seems to be the god: while the venerable Plutarch objects to him that he carried all his thoughts beyond nature; that he wrote not to men of character but to the mob; that his style is at once obscure, licentious, tragical, pompous and mean—sometimes inflated and serious to bombast—sometimes ludicrous, even to puerility; that he makes none of his personages speak in any distinct character, so that in his scenes the son cannot be known from the father—the citizen from the boor—the hero from the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... engagement was extended over three years. Letty Devine led a gay, careless life; her husband had plenty of money, and she was introduced to pleasures that made the frowsy life of home seem very repulsive. Devine was kind to her, and continued to play the lover in his pompous style. She was proud of her man, too. He played Claude Melnotte for his benefit once, and she longed to say to the ladies in the theatre, "He belongs to me. How could she help being fascinated with him? Where ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... will be surprised if it does not get one, and that which is singled out it follows "like a grim murderer still steady to his purpose." Now is the time for this, greatest of the three fishers, to, wax fat and become pompous, for its diet is to be varied with nutmeg pigeons, and the pigeons have come in their thousands and tens of thousands, and if the eaglets do lack and suffer hunger, it will be on account of the laziness of ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... not need to have been in a hurry, for the patty-maker was stopped before he reached the threshold, by a rather pompous individual in white and blue livery. Liveries were then worn far more commonly than now—not by servants only, but by officials of all kinds, and by gentlemen retainers of the nobles—sometimes even by nobles themselves. To wear a friend's livery was one of the highest compliments ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... range through the forests of Guiana, still, a gentleman given to natural history may do wonders for it in his own apartments on his native soil; and had Audubon, Swainson, Jameson, &c., not attacked me in all the pride of pompous self-conceit, I should have been the last man in the world to ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... Eyck spurred forward with his personal staff to meet them. With him came the infamous John Munro who, as a justice of the peace under commission from New York, was such a thorn in the flesh of the settlers. The sheriff was a very pompous Dutchman who believed without question in the validity of New York's jurisdiction over the Grants, and who, despite his bombastic manner, was personally ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... saying the same thing. One need only to take a ride in a bus or street car to find the certain symptoms of self-display. These may consist in nothing more serious than a peculiarly conspicuous collar or hatband, or particularly high heels. It may consist in a loud voice full of pompous references to great banquets recently attended or great sums recently spent. It may be in a raised eyebrow or a disdainful smile. There are people among every one's acquaintance whose conversation is largely made up of reminiscences ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... A pompous mulatto man in white cotton gloves and with a cluster of tuberoses in his buttonhole ushered the party down the aisle to the seats of honor reserved for the white folks. There were seventeen in the ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... Never had a pompous expedition ended more ignobly: they had started out to attack a fierce black bear, and unexpectedly were overturned by a large-sized pig, which resented ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... note-book which he carried in his breast pocket, young Shotwell could inform any grand lady or any pompous or fussy gentleman what was the "asking price" of any particular residence marked for sale upon the diagrams of ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... shirt-fronts, reticence, and pompous bows make me feel as if they saw through me and ridiculed my ways. They make me feel as if my expensive clothes ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... Jerusalem, Nero, and the Rival Queens. The titles of these pieces indicate their character. Their heroes were great historic personages. Subject and treatment were alike remote from nature and real life. The diction was stilted and artificial, and pompous declamation took the place of action and genuine passion. The tragedies of Racine seem chill to an Englishman brought up on Shakspere, but to see how great an artist Racine was, in his own somewhat narrow way, one has but to compare his Phedre, or Iphigenie, with ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Daughter of Indulgence home; Tragedians all, and well-arranged in black! Who nature, feeling, force, expression lack; Who cause no tear, but gloomily pass by, And shake their sables in the wearied eye, That turns disgusted from the pompous scene, Proud without grandeur, with profusion, mean The tear for kindness past affection owes; For worth deceased the sigh from reason flows E'en well feign'd passion for our sorrows call, And real tears for mimic miseries fall: ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe
... great ones of the earth is so intimately known to us as the magnificent histrion, whose tinselled grandeur and pompous egoism have been laid bare by the Duke of St. Simon, prince of memoirists. Never has the frippery of a court been shrivelled by such fierce and consuming light, glaring like a fiery sun on its meretricious splendours. And what a court it ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... the schoolmaster, pompous and kind, "That's a valuable thing you have there, But it might get broken out of doors, It should ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... had better pay, sir," said the pompous looking man with an air of disgust. "I took your part, because I supposed you ...
— The Erie Train Boy • Horatio Alger
... in a manly and somewhat pompous address what has before been mentioned, namely, that he has seen the fatal way in which the hospitality of England has been perverted hitherto, accapare'd by a few cooks with green trays. (He must use a good deal of French in his language, for that is considered ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... next, when her death took place, she helped by every means in her power those who had suffered from fighting for a cause that was dear to their hearts. She always remembered what she herself had gone through. "Full of years, and of good works," as her somewhat pompous epitaph has it, Lady Grisell Baillie died in December 1746, and was buried at Mellerstain on the day upon which she should have celebrated her eighty-second birthday. And surely the angels who, on that first Christmas Eve, long, long ago, sang of "Peace on earth—goodwill towards men," must have ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... or rank, and appear in society simply as "Mr. John Brown," to take his chances in the social world strictly on his own merits; assured that if he has any merit, other people will discover it without an ostentatious reminder of it in the shape of a pompous visiting-card. Of course this suggestion of democratic simplicity refers to the engraving of one's own card; other people address the man properly by his official or honorary title, with all due respect for the worth which the world recognizes—even ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... the Pope. Paul utterly repudiated the agreement which had been entered into between the Legate and the Parliament; he demanded the restoration of every acre of Church property; and he annulled all alienation of it by a general bull. His attitude undid all that Mary had done. In spite of the pompous reconciliation in which the Houses had knelt at the feet of Pole, England was still unreconciled to the Papacy, for the country and the Pope were at issue on a matter where concession was now impossible on either side. The Queen's own heart went with the Pope's demand. ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... even voice read the opposite page. It was a romantic narrative of some Eastern traveller of the thirties, pompous maybe, but fragrant with the emotion with which the East came to the generation that followed Byron and Chateaubriand. In a moment or ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... and welcome, you bless'd elyziums, where a new state of things expects us; where all the pompous and charming delights that detain us here a while, shall be changed into real and substantial fruitions, eternal springs, and pleasure intellectual, becoming the ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... not gain very much, however, by my inspection. Our visitor bore every mark of being an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow. He wore rather baggy gray shepherd's check trousers, a not over-clean black frock-coat, unbuttoned in the front, and a drab waistcoat with a heavy brassy Albert chain, and a square pierced bit of metal dangling ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... perfection, rather than to study nature, was his object in "Sir Charles Grandison," and therefore that novel was less powerful in the author's day, and is less interesting in ours than "Pamela" and "Clarissa." We no longer need the example of the pompous Sir Charles to dissuade us from indecent language and drunkenness in a lady's drawing-room, and we can only laugh at the studied propriety of his ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... and there are revolutions, especially in matters of art, which mankind accomplishes without any very clear idea how it is done, because everybody takes a hand in them. But this is not applicable to the romance of rustic manners: it has existed in all ages and under all forms, sometimes pompous, sometimes affected, sometimes artless. I have said, and I say again here: the dream of a country-life has always been the ideal of cities, aye, and of courts. I have done nothing new in following the incline that leads civilized ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... when the people realized what had happened, everybody roared. No one who glanced at the overturned music instrument and at the musicians, with their punch-dropping heads could restrain their laughter. Even the pompous bride found it so funny that she laughed ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... the well of Shaikh el Bakkar, and a sarcophagus with a long inscription in Greek, which I regretted not having discovered yesterday, so as to allow of copying it. From an eminence we took the last view of the pompous colonnades of Jerash. ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... less polished and more vigorously dramatic than in that intended for publication, or else more fervid and elevated in tone. In this latter respect, however, the best platform speaking of today differs from the models of the preceding generation, wherein a highly dignified, and sometimes pompous, style was thought the only fitting dress for a public deliverance. Great, noble and stirring as these older masters were in their lofty and impassioned eloquence, we are sometimes oppressed when we read their sounding periods ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... interrupted. Over the rail appeared a blue helmet, and an instant later a big and very pompous police officer leaped to the deck. He was followed by the wharf ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Pope, had a thousand times more sense and meaning than the majestic blank verse of Pitt; and yet the latter, like Milton, stalked with a conscious dignity of pre-eminence, and fascinated his audience with that respect which always attends the pompous but often hollow idea of the sublime." Burke, too, in one of his speeches on American affairs, utters a still warmer panegyric on his character and abilities, while lamenting his policy and its fruits: "I speak of Charles Townshend, officially the reproducer of this fatal ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... you've been cozened by a feigned zeal; But to make up for't, in the name of reason, Why should you plunge into a worse mistake, And find no difference in character Between a worthless scamp, and all good people? What! Just because a rascal boldly duped you With pompous show of false austerity, Must you needs have it everybody's like him, And no one's truly pious nowadays? Leave such conclusions to mere infidels; Distinguish virtue from its counterfeit, Don't give esteem too quickly, at a venture, ...
— Tartuffe • Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere
... brewer's patronage and pompous proposal that she should make a home in his house, and in return act as governess to his children. She had thrown in her lot with Hugh, and was soon making, as a typewriter who could be relied upon for faithful ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... threat that if the report was adopted without striking out the offensive sentence he would dissolve his connection with the Society. Having thus discharged his venom, and issued his commands, he took his hat and with a pompous air left the house and did not again show himself at ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Dagobert, denounced as a French spy, and his fair young companions accused of being adventuresses to help his designs, had so kindled at the insult, not less to him than to his old commander's daughters, that he had taught the pompous burgomaster of Mockern a lesson, which, however, resulted in the imprisonment of the three in ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... Timmin's History of the Robins, too, is a continuous delight; and from its pompous and high-sounding dialogue a skilful adapter may glean not only one story, but one story with two versions; for the infant of eighteen months can follow the narrative of the joys and troubles, errors and kindnesses of Robin, Dicky, Flopsy and Pecksy; while the child of five or ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... in the same position? You see your ancestors are not hastening to rejoice in the tale of your pompous burial. Where is the difference between us, ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... seized with such violent convulsions that he fell upon the floor, and her Grace raised him up with loud lamentations. He was carried in a dead faint to his chamber, and the court physician, Doctor Pomius, instantly summoned. Doctor Pomius was a pompous little man (for my father knew him well), dry and smart in his words, and with a face like a pair of nutcrackers, for his front teeth were gone, so that his lips seemed dried on his gums, like the skin of a mummy. He was withal too self-conceited ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... two days they rattled southward, making mysterious inexplicable stops in what were apparently arid wastes, and then rushing through large cities with a pompous air of hurry. The whimsicalities of this train foreshadowed for Anthony the ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the tribes of nature order runs, And rules around in systems and in suns: Still has the love of order found a place, With all that's low, degrading, mean, and base, With all that merits scorn, and all that meets disgrace - In the cold miser, of all change afraid; In pompous men in public seats obey'd; In humble placemen, heralds, solemn drones, Fanciers of flowers, and lads like Stephen Jones: Order to these is armour and defence, And love of method serves in lack of sense. For rustic youth could ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... remained chiefly at Rome, during his Gaulish campaigns, virtually dictator, certainly the strongest citizen. And Pompey had also his ambitious schemes. One was the conqueror of the East; the other of the West. One leaned to the aristocratic party, the other to the popular. Pompey was proud, pompous, and self-sufficient. Caesar was politic, patient, and intriguing. Both had an inordinate ambition, and both were unscrupulous. Pompey had more prestige, Caesar more genius. Pompey was a greater tactician, Caesar a greater ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... broken, how separate parts will be confused, and how many practical features and discriminations will be found compressed and conglobated into one gross and general idea." [530] "Brave words," comments Burton, "somewhat pompous and diffused, yet worthy to be written in letters of gold." [531] Very many of Burton's books, pamphlets and articles in the journals of the learned societies appeal solely to archaeologists, as, for example Etruscan Bologna, [532] an account of the Etrurian people, their sharp bottomed wells, ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... though now a memory only, because a certain baron of that house was traditionally reported to have caused the founder of the Hazlewood family hold his stirrup until he mounted into his saddle. In his general deportment he was pompous and important, affecting a species of florid elocution, which often became ridiculous from his misarranging the triads and quaternions with which he loaded ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... full of weeping, He faltered in his walk; Tom never shed a tear, But onward he did stalk, As pompous, black, and solemn, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... on a kind of throne, and to his feet Olivier de la Marche conducted the civic procession of penitents. Before this pompous gathering, after a statement of the city's sin and sorrow, the precious charter called the Grand Privilege of Ghent was solemnly read aloud, and then cut up into little pieces with a pen-knife. Next followed a recitation of the penalties imposed upon, and accepted by, the citizens ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... was a typical society business man, quietly but richly dressed. He was inclined to be pompous and affected a pair of rather distinguished looking ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... coat and a solemn made-up necktie, led the grand march with his mother. Clara had kept well out of that by sticking to the piano. She played the march with a pompous solemnity which greatly amused the prodigal son, who went over and ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... to say that I admire Miss Sherwood, and that I shall think it a crying shame if so beautiful and intelligent a girl is suffered to fall into the clutches of this stupid baronet who is laying siege to her—this pompous, empty-headed Sir ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... them from the Great Key of Solomon, and while I speak, the ruddy fumes take human forms. Out of the dark, fathomless Past—the Past of near four hundred years ago—comes a goodly company of simple, pompous folk all having a touch of childish savagery which shows itself in the fierceness of their love and ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... that henceforth he should dispense with the services of a prime minister, and that they would be responsible to him alone. The young king was then twenty-two years of age. He was very poorly educated, had hitherto developed no force of character, and appeared to all to be simply a frivolous, pompous, ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... grave. He lies at a corner of the churchyard, and his second son, Francis Wallace, beside him. There is no stone to mark the spot; {5} but a hundred guineas have been collected, to be expended on some sort of monument. 'There,' said the bookseller, pointing to a pompous monument, 'there lies Mr. Such-a-one'—I have forgotten his name,—'a remarkably clever man; he was an attorney, and hardly ever lost a cause he undertook. Burns made many a lampoon upon him, and there they rest, as you see.' We looked at the grave with melancholy and painful reflections, ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... him in old days to resent anything unbecoming done to his cause or those connected with it, he would not allow any homage to be paid to himself. He was by no means disposed to allow liberties to be taken or to put up with impertinence; for all that bordered on the unreal, for all that was pompous, conceited, affected, he had little patience; but almost beyond all these was his disgust at being made the object of foolish admiration. He protested with whimsical fierceness against being made a hero or a sage; he was what he was, he said, ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... scarcely taken my seat, when a distinguished-looking gentleman (Roscoe Conkling) came up and introduced himself, saying in a very pompous way: ...
— Building a State in Apache Land • Charles D. Poston
... his intellect and of his imagination he was immeasurably above the intel-lects of his neighbours and knew that he was immeasurably above them. Therefore, and in both moods, he commonly hated and despised them. "Fools, fools! Unread, pompous, petty!" ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... without either monument or tombstone. Thus after having lived under the mildest government, after having been guided by the mildest doctrine, they die just as peaceably as those who being educated in more pompous religions, pass through a variety of sacraments, subscribe to complicated creeds, and enjoy the benefits of a church establishment. These good people flatter themselves, with following the doctrines of Jesus Christ, in that simplicity with which ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... "James, according to the somewhat pompous rendering in our English version, says—'Wherefore my sentence is'—in the original—[Greek: dio elo krina]—a common formula by which the members of the Greek assemblies introduced the expression of their individual opinion, as appears from its repeated occurrence in Thucydides, ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... in an awful rage, Val," said Denham, when he came to me after a thorough search had seemed to prove that the prisoner had eluded the vigilance of the sentries. "He swears that some one must have been acting in collusion with the pompous blackguard, and that he means to have the whole of our Irish boys before him and cross-examine ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... out transformed into visual images. We have already cited examples from Victor Hugo (ch. I); Goethe, we know, had poor musical gifts. After having the young Mendelssohn render an overture from Bach, he exclaimed, "How pompous and grand that is! It seems to me like a procession of grand personages, in gala attire, descending the steps ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... in London was more tedious and engrossing than I had expected. Even a New York lawyer has much to learn of the law's delay in those pompous old offices amid the fog. Had I been working for myself, I should have thrown up the case in despair, but advices from our office said "Stick to ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... incantations dost thou trust, And pompous rites in domes august? See mouldering stones and metals' rust Belie the vaunt, That man can bless one pile of dust With ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... called "serious"? Can we call Synge, or St. John Hankin, or Shaw, or Barrie serious? Hardly! Yet they are all of this new movement in their very different ways, because they are sincere. The word "serious," in fact, has too narrow a significance and admits a deal of pompous stuff which is not sincere. While the word "sincere" certainly does not characterise all that is popularly included under the term "new drama," it as certainly does characterise (if taken in its true sense of fidelity ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... to their rulers have become trifle-monuments of no mean value in showing that popular idea of Russian policy. Foremost among these stand those two bronze masses of statuary in front of the Royal Palace at Berlin,—representing fiery horses restrained by strong men. Pompous inscriptions proclaim these presents from Nicholas; but the people, knowing the man and his measures, have fastened forever upon one of these curbed steeds the name of "Progress Checked," and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... treasures of his cemetery. In vain I persisted that I must not give him trouble, that I could discover the beauties for myself. "O monsieur!" he said reproachfully. Fearing he might return my pourboire, I followed him helplessly to inspect the pompous bead-covered tombs of the well-to-do, shocking him by stopping to muse at the rude mound of an anonymous corpse, remembered only by a little bunch of immortelles. One of the fashionable sepulchres stood open, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... A curious circumstance has been preserved in the life of the other immortal man in philosophy, Lord BACON. When young, he wrote a letter to Father Fulgentio concerning an Essay of his, to which he gave the title of "The Greatest Birth of Time," a title which he censures as too pompous. The Essay itself is lost, but it was the first outline of that great design which he afterwards pursued and finished in his "Instauration of the Sciences." LOCKE himself has informed us, that his great work on "The Human Understanding," ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... is anxious for the society of Laura. Laura wishes the escort of her brother, who has also been invited to Blue Cliffs. We must not oppose the will of the ladies," concluded John, bowing to his niece with pompous deference. ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... William's birth. The window is shown from which Duke Robert first beheld the tanner's daughter, and the room in which William first saw what, if it really be the spot, must certainly have been light of an artificial kind. A pompous inscription in the modern French style calls on us to reverence the spot where the "legislator of ancient England" "fut engendre et naquit." The odd notion of William being the legislator of England calls forth a passing smile, and another somewhat longer train of thought is suggested. William, ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... man of the world, as he surveyed the boy's demeanour, could hardly help a grin at his admirable pompous simplicity. Major Pendennis too had examined his ground; and finding that the widow was already half won over to the enemy, and having a shrewd notion that threats and tragic exhortations would have no effect upon the boy, who was ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the Raja Suddhodana; Indian pompous style; columns and beyond an outlook into a tropical palm-garden. Seats scattered through the room. On the left a compartment, open toward the audience, is separated from the main room ...
— The Buddha - A Drama in Five Acts and Four Interludes • Paul Carus
... judgment, would thereby have been proved victorious. This will justify us at times in talking over the heads of our readers and hearers, and in not sparing sonorous polysyllables, abstruse technicalities, or even the pompous parade of syllogistic arguments with all their unsightly joints sticking out for public admiration. Some hands may be too delicate for this coarse work; but there will always be those to whom it is easy and congenial; ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... Annie Steele caught them. Assenting Annie didn't throw any back, as Annie is merely as assenter, but neither of the honorable ladies who were coming to break my bread knew that Susie McDougal's ears were hearing ears. Susie says pompous-class people often act as if plainer-class ones weren't made of flesh ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... to you, Betty," began Gulian, with an air of importance, which set Betty's nerves on edge at once. If there was one thing more than another that annoyed her it was Gulian's pompous manner. "Will you come inside before going upstairs? I will not detain ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln
... His skepticism is learned and philosophical, and he ridicules those who reject without examination still more than those who believe with docile credulity. Jean Baptiste Rousseau (1670- 1741), the lyric poet of this age, displayed in his odes considerable energy, and a kind of pompous harmony, which no other had imparted to the language, yet he fails to excite the sympathy. In his writings we find that free commingling of licentious morals with a taste for religious sublimities which characterized the last years of Louis XIV. The Abbe Chaulieu ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... for her. As for Mueller, he was just fat, oily, pompous, conscious of his own importance as a witness; his fat fingers, covered with brass rings, gripped the two incriminating letters, which he had identified. They were his passports, as it were, to a delightful land of importance and notoriety. Sir Arthur Inglewood, ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... oath would relieve you, don't mind me," said Henry. His chin was squarer than usual, and his eyes were harder. "You can see what happened, can't you? Aunt Mirabelle railroaded him through—and the pompous old fool looks the part—and she let him promise money she expects to get in August. And I'll bet it hurt him just as much to promise it as it does me ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... awake, And spreads himself, and shall not sleep again; But through the idle mesh of power shall break Like billows o'er the Asian monarch's chain; Till men are filled with him, and feel how vain, Instead of the pure heart and innocent hands, Are all the proud and pompous modes to gain The smile of heaven;—till a new age expands Its white and holy wings ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... unturned to get a clue to the business, and so deliver him here in this world into the hands of an earthly judge. I must confess that I was considerably disconcerted when, at the conclusion of my violent and pompous harangue, the Councillor, without answering so much as a single word, calmly fixed his eyes upon me as though expecting me to go on again. And this I did indeed attempt to do, but it sounded so ill-founded and so stupid as well ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... forehead, making a sort of half bow previous to depositing it before us. Sometimes he undertook to praise its contents, always adding, that in Tibet none but very great men indeed partook of such sumptuous fare. Thus he tried to please both us and the Dewan, who conducted himself with pompous hospitality, showing off what he considered his elegant manners and graces. Our blood boiled within us at being so patronised by the squinting ruffian, whose insolence and ill-will had sorely aggravated the discomforts of ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... a pompous old buck who was bearing down on the old gray horse, and under the slouch hat with its flapping brim—one Mayhall Wells, by name. There were but few strands of gray in his thick blue-black hair, though his years were rounding half a century, and he sat the old nag ...
— Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... net: A house where whoso laughs this day shall weep * The next: then perish house of fume and fret! Endless its frays and forays, and its thralls * Are ne'er redeemed, while endless risks beset. How many gloried in its pomps and pride, * Till proud and pompous did all bounds forget, Then showing back of shield she made them swill[FN372] * Full draught, and claimed all her vengeance debt. For know her strokes fall swift and sure, altho' * Long bide she and forslow the course of Fate: So ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... gratified, sir," said the tall and thin Mr. Taylor, with a pompous tone, "in having so early an opportunity of making our ladies ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... Archbishop allowed the crystal coffin of St. Carlo Borromeo to be carried in solemn procession, upon the shoulders of Cardinals, from end to end of the city—on which occasion all Milan crowded into the streets, and clustered thick on either side of the pompous train of monks and incense-bearers, priests and acolytes. But soon there fell a deeper despair upon the inhabitants of the doomed city; for within two days after this solemn carrying of the saintly remains the death-rate had tripled and there was scarce a house in which ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... large possessions, pompous titles, honourable charges, and profitable commissions, could have made this proud man happy, there would have been ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... crony of Samuel Mace. This was pompous, red- faced Judge Roseberry. He had once been elected by mistake a justice of the peace, had never gotten a second term, but for some eight or ten years had traded on his past reputation. He managed to eke out a living by ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster
... then entered a house in one of the courts of Fleet street and Frank felt happy in having met with one likely to befriend him. For though the gentleman was rather pompous in his manners and somewhat awful in his aspect, yet there was a look of kindness about him and an expression of humanity and consideration in his countenance. When the intoxicated gentleman had been seated for a few minutes, his faculties partially returned ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various
... gentleman, with pompous and philanthropic whiskers, went stolidly by, the broad of his back sneering ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... stream that filled our pails with a silver trickle over a staircase of shelving rock, and up there Colin was already busy with his skilled French cookery, preparing our evening meal. The woods still made a pompous show of leaves, but I knew it to be a hollow sham, a mask of foliage soon to be stripped off by equinoctial fury, a precarious stage-setting, ready to be blown down at the first gusts from the north. A forlorn bird here and there made a thin ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... soldier; that is a quality which belongs to the place he occupies rather than to the man; and a change of circumstances reduces it to very discreet proportions. The Prime Minister out of office is seen, too often, to have been but a pompous rhetorician, and the General without an army is but the tame hero of a market town. The greatness of Charles Strickland was authentic. It may be that you do not like his art, but at all events you can hardly refuse it the ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... fever-fits of his illness, the wasted politician first begged piteously that they would not send him home unplaced, and then he would break out in the most extravagant and pompous boasts about his position, his Congressman and his influence. When he came to himself, he was silent, morose, and bitter. Only once did he melt. It was when he held Col. Mason's hand and bade him good-bye. Then the tears came ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... solemne, pompous Prigge is this Doctor! He cries "humph!" and "aye!" and bites his Nails and screws his Lips together, but I don't believe he understands soe much of Physick, after alle, as ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... Meanwhile Rosette assumed a pompous professional air, and appeared to be waiting for the entire party to be ceremoniously introduced to him. Nothing unwilling to humor the vanity of the eccentric little man, Servadac proceeded to go ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... universal vapor. As lightnings slink back into the charged bosom of the thunder cloud, as eager waves, spent, subside in the deep, as furious gusts die away in the great atmosphere, so the gleaming ranks of genius, the struggling masses of toil, the pompous hosts of war, fade and dissolve away into the peaceful bosom of the all engulfing SOUL. This simplest, earliest philosophy of mankind has had most extensive and permanent prevalence.3 For immemorial centuries it has possessed the mind ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the moon, then," snapped Mrs. Fosdick; "he was pompous enough, but I never could remember a single word he said. There, go on, Mis' Todd; I forget a great deal about that day you ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... she flushed. She did not hear the 'neglected and astonished colonel speak, and she sought diversion in saying to Fenellan: 'So many people of distinction are assembled here to-day! Tell me, who is that pompous gentleman, who holds his arms ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of Eleusis, a pompous worthy, who could hardly hold his head erect, thanks to an exceeding heavy myrtle wreath. After him, two by two, the snowy-robed, long-bearded priests of Demeter; behind these the noisy corps of musicians, ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... present when it was read. Suard, one of their writers, said to her, "Je crois, Madame, que vous etes un peu fache (sic) de ce que vous venez d'entendre." She replied, "Moi, Monsieur! point du tout! Je ne suis pas amie de M. Voltaire."' Walpole's Letters, vi. 394. Her own Letters are very pompous and very poor, and her wit would not seem to have flashed often; for Miss Burney wrote of her:—'She reasons well, and harangues well, but wit she has none.' Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, i. 335. Yet in this same Diary (i. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... Therefore never let any one, that designs to write Pastorals, corrupt himself with foreign manners; for if he hath once vitiated the healthful habit, as I may say, of Expression, which Bucolicks necessarily require, 'tis impossible he should be fit for that task. Yet let him not affect pompous or dazling Expressions, for such belong to Epicks, or Tragedians. Let his words sometimes tast of the Country, not that I mean, of which Volusius's Annals, upon which Catullus hath made that biting Epigram, are full; for though the Thought ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... bounds to all but officers. Various reasons for this step were suggested. What, however, is believed to have had a good deal to do with it is the fact that during dinner on one occasion a rather stout and pompous senior general, sitting at table with his wife and daughters, was very affectionately greeted, embraced, and kissed by an hilarious youth from the ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... lord, and was given to my mother's husband, a medical man, for his use till I came of age, when it was to be given to me. It was all the fortune that ever I inherited. That watch has regulated imperial interests in its time—the stately ceremonial, the courtly assignation, pompous travels, and lordly sleeps. Now ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... additional matter of like kind, was good fun to the scorners, and, whether any of the unskilful laughed at it, scarcely made even the judicious grieve, for they thought that those who had embarked in such pompous follies deserved the lash unconsciously administered to them in his blunders by an unhappy member ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... and darker, and, like the "cry of strong swimmers in their agony," her prayers had gone up to the Throne of Grace. Sometimes she was tempted to go to the minister of the church where she sat Sunday after Sunday, and beg him to explain the mysteries to her. But the pompous austerity of his manners repelled her whenever she thought of broaching the subject, and gradually she saw that she must work out her own problems. Thus, from week to week and month to month, she toiled on, with a slowly dying faith, constantly ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... fairies. Its course is twice interrupted by a peculiar, prolonged chord which seems to say, "Hush! you are listening to the activities of beings not of this every-day, humdrum world." The first theme has a second part in E major (beginning at measure 62) of a pompous, march-like nature, which may be thought to represent the dignity of Duke Theseus and his train. The Overture being in complete Sonata-form, there occurs at this point a short transition based on the rhythm of the first theme; followed ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... the week's work, and Robert Wade, Esq., the chief manager, stared in surprise as Clayton passed him without a word, in answer to his stately greeting. He watched the young man, who slowly descended by the stairway, forgetting the ready elevator service. "What's up with Clayton?" murmured the pompous official. "He ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... the sceptre sway'd; And though she were no queen of mighty power, Her memory will never be decay'd, Nor yet her works forgotten. In the Tower, In Windsor Castle, and in Hampton Court,— In that most pompous room called Paradise,— Whoever pleases thither to resort, May see some works of hers of wondrous price. Her greatness held it no disreputation To hold the needle in her royal hand, Which was a good example to our nation To banish idleness throughout the ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... in the drawing-room when he went down, and the old gentleman asked him after his progress in study, and what profession he intended to adopt, in a pompous and condescending way; but it was only a few sentences, for there were other gentlemen there, who came up and button-holed him seriously, and with whom he seemed to hold portentous conversation, politics, perhaps, or shares, or something of that kind. Then the ladies assembled, ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... Madame listened to pompous declamation in silent sorrow and indignation. She made another effort to interest the Abate in favor of Julia, but he preserved his stern inflexibility, and repeating that he would deliberate upon the matter, and acquaint her with the result, he arose with great solemnity, and quitted ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... Richard Tighe, so called because descended from a baker who supplied Cromwell's army with bread. Bettesworth is termed the player, from his pompous enunciation.] ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... the reason why! So he sat on the borough bench and fined himself for his own smoke, and then he installed gas ovens. The town laughed, of course, and spoke of him alternately as a rash fool, a hypocrite, and a mere pompous ass. In a few months smoke had practically ceased to ascend from the mayoral manufactory. The financial result to the mayor was such as to encourage the tenderness of consciences. But that is not the point. The point is that Mrs Garlick, re-entering her house one autumn ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... exhibitions became larger and larger and the competition engendered by them grew fiercer, it became increasingly difficult to attract attention by mere academic merit. So the painters began to search for sensationalism of subject, and the typical salon picture, no longer decorously pompous, began to deal in blood and horror and sensuality. It was Regnault who began this sensation hunt, but it has been carried much further since his day than he can have dreamed of, and the modern salon picture is not only tiresome ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... grey skin was flecked with dashes of white. And it was ever observed that, should the soldiers be passing from Portsmouth, or should the clank of trumpet or the rattle of drum break upon his ear, he would arch his old neck, throw out his grey-streaked tail, and raise his stiff knees in a pompous and pedantic canter. The country folk would stop to watch these antics of the old horse, and then the chances are that one of them would tell the rest how that charger had borne one of their own village lads to the wars, and how, when the rider had to ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... stick,[139] curved at its head into a spiral. Drusus knew perfectly well that the fowls had been kept without food all that day; but it would have seemed treason to all the traditions of his native land to cry out against this pompous farce. The hungry chickens pecked up the grain. The augur muttered formula after formula, and Lentulus took pains to repeat the meaningless jargon after him. Presently the augur ceased his chatter and nodded to the consul. Lentulus turned toward ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... order to get material for my lecture to munition-workers I was very anxious to see more of the war for myself than is possible at a soup-kitchen, and I asked at the British Mission if I might be given permission to go into the British lines. Major —— in giving me a flat refusal, was a little pompous and important I thought, and he said it was impossible to ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... know God, but whatever else He is, I feel sure that He is not a precise stickler-god, that He is not pompous about spiritual manners, a huge, literal-minded, Proper Person, who cannot make allowances for human nature, who cannot hear what humble, rough men like these, hewing their vast desires for Him out of darkness, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... was Messer Magistri—the pompous seneschal of Pesaro—who, after his own fashion, seemed to have a liking for me, and a certain pity. Here was my chance of discharging the true errand on ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini |
