"Prosy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... married, instead of to-day, as we had set on. So that's all right, and don't you worry. Your partner, John Ingalls, is as nice as he can be to me. Why did you not tell me how good looking he was? Maybe you never discovered it—you slow, prosy old Joe! When you wrote to me of that rich find you stumbled on, I was sorry you had picked up a partner; for you always did trust folks too much, and I was afraid you'd be cheated by the stranger you picked up. But I guess that I was wrong, Joe; for he ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... learnt very much at school. I got the lessons into my head as long as I had to patter them off by heart like a parrot,—but the teachers were all so dull and prosy, and never took any real pains to explain things to me,—indeed, now when I come to think of it, I don't believe they could explain!—they needed teaching themselves. Anyhow, as soon as I came away I forgot everything but reading and writing and sums—and began to learn ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... risk of being dull and prosy, I am going to tell a story that is not especially humorous or pathetic, but merely true. Every Christmas I try to tell a true story. I do not want the day to go by without some sort of recognition by which to distinguish it from ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... fugitive pieces is young, just on the threshold of life, and with the daring audacity of youth makes assertions and gives decisions which she may reverse as time mellows her opinions, and the realities of life force aside the theories of youth, and prosy facts obscure the memory of that happy time when ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... prosy dull society sinners, Who chatter and bleat and bore, Are sent to hear sermons From mystical Germans Who preach from ten to four, The amateur tenor, whose vocal villanies All desire to shirk, Shall, during off hours, Exhibit his powers To Madame ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... the only word I can think of that exactly describes him—dull and prosy. I don't say that he is not a good man. He may be. I don't say that he is not. I have never seen any sign of it, if he is. But I make it a rule never to say anything to take away ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... polyhedric Peter, or a Peter with many sides. He changes colours like a chameleon, and his coat like a snake. He is a Proteus of a Peter. He was at first sublime, pathetic, impressive, profound; then dull; then prosy and dull; and now dull—oh so very dull! it is ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... body. A good memory for faces, and facts connected with them—thus avoiding giving offence through not recognising or bowing to people, or saying to them what had best been left unsaid. The art of listening without impatience to prosy talkers, and smiling at the twice-told tale ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... (he writes) was singularly finished, and (if I may so express it) clean cut; never long-winded or prosy; enlivened by vivid illustrations. He was an excellent raconteur, and his stories had a stamp of their own which would have made them always and everywhere acceptable. His sense of humour and economy of words ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... univarse, it is ruled by one Superior Power; if all the angels had a voice in the government I guess—" Here I fell fast asleep; I had been nodding for some time, not in approbation of what he said, but in heaviness of slumber, for I had never before heard him so prosy since I first overtook him on the Colchester road. I hate politics as a subject of conversation; it is too wide a field for chit-chat, and too often ends in angry discussion. How long he continued this train of speculation I do not know, but, judging ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... of deluded, but well-meaning gentlemen, who obstinately adhere to the unfashionable notion, that, where great political powers are enjoyed, there are certain serious duties to the public closely connected therewith, a few prosy and pompous peers who believe that their constant presence is essential to the welfare and prosperity of the kingdom,—such, I think, is a correct classification of the ordinary attendance of noblemen at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... did not know what else to do, so as to show his intellectual appreciation of the parable; but in his heart, for all his gratitude, he thought Barney bill rather a prosy moralizer. It was one of the disabilities of advanced old age. Alas! what can bridge the gulf between fourteen ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... "you know I never can remember poetry, Mrs. Merryweather. I shall have to take to 'Mother Goose.' I know I am terribly prosy—well, prosaic, then, Margaret; what's the difference? But I can't think of ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... is no mean test of a translator's ability—this quick, tense scene, one of the finest in dramatic literature. Foersom did it with conspicuous success. Blom has reduced it to the following prosy stuff: ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... will let me have the hundred and thirty for—" And then Mr. Sowerby took his leave, having certainly made himself master of the occasion. If a man of fifty have his wits about him, and be not too prosy, he can generally make himself master of the occasion, when his companions are under thirty. Robarts did not stay at the Albany long after him, but took his leave, having received some assurances of Lord Lufton's regret for what had passed and many promises of his friendship for ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... less attention the minister pays to creeds, the less dogmatism he indulges in, the more popular he becomes with the people, the more eagerly they flock to hear him. The world does not care to listen to prosy lectures on foreordination and the terrors of Tartarus, because its reason rejects such cruel creeds; it takes little interest in the question whether Christ was dipped or sprinkled by the gentleman in the camel's-hair cutaway, because it cannot, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... exciting for a time at least, but not profitable, not conducive to work. At a dinner of the Washington Correspondents Club his response to the toast, "Women," was pronounced by Schuyler Colfax to be "the best after dinner speech ever made." Certainly it was a refreshing departure from the prosy or clumsy-witted efforts common to that period. He was coming altogether into his own.—[This is the first of Mark Twain's after-dinner speeches to be preserved. The reader will find it complete, as reported next day, in Appendix G, at the end ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... stone-strewn centre and the ditch, I run into the latter, and am rewarded with my first Cis-atlantic header, but fortunately both myself and the bicycle come up uninjured. Unlike the Swabish peasantry, the natives east of Munich appear as prosy and unpicturesque in dress as ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... Lizzie Dangler's prosy platitudes, which some deemed wit—Horner, par exemple—sank into nothingness, and Baby Blake, one of the "gushing" order of girlhood, appeared as a stick, or, rather, a too pliant sapling—her inane "yes's" and lisping "no's" having an opportunity ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... motors, and expressed a doubt as to whether any of her friends would forsake the horse in favour of mechanical locomotion. That time, however, came about, and now the Duchess is claimed as a patroness of the car, which if prosy, compared with the delights of horsemanship, is, nevertheless, useful for accomplishing distances which horses are not expected ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... am afraid, doctor, our age is too prosy for that sort of thing. We have neither wit enough, nor poetry enough, to furnish the disputants. I can conceive a state of society in which such tensons would form a pleasant winter evening amusement: but that state ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... coming here was not a matter of choice: it was necessity. Come, I will make a confidant of you and relate my history. Don't be alarmed, I won't keep you up all night with prosy details. My life, as you may see, has not yet been a long one, and until this year it has been ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... herself out, first with reading and then with singing—very prosy and lengthy ballads of the old school, which were the ditties Mrs. Hill always chose—Agatha departed much more cheerful than she came. So great strength and comfort is there in having something to do, especially if that something happens ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... months of again writing to you. Will you have the charity to send me one more letter (as soon as this reaches you) directed to the C. of Good Hope. Your letters besides affording me the greatest delight always give me a fresh stimulus for exertion. Excuse this geological prosy letter, and farewell till you hear from me at Sydney, and see me ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... a great personal interest in New France even to the neglect at times of things which his courtiers deemed to be far more important. The governor and the intendant plied him with their requests, with their grievances, and too often with their prosy tales of petty squabbling. With every ship they sent to Versailles their memoires, often of intolerable length; and the patient monarch read them all. Marginal notes, made with his own hand, are still upon many of them, and the student who plods his ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... "preacher, preacher, preacher," or "teacher, teacher, teacher," uttered louder and louder, and repeated six or seven times, is also familiar to most ears; but its wild, ringing, rapturous burst of song in the air high above the tree-tops is not so well known. From a very prosy, tiresome, unmelodious singer, it is suddenly transformed for a brief moment into a lyric poet of great power. It is a great surprise. The bird undergoes a complete transformation. Ordinarily it is a very quiet, demure sort of bird. It walks about ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... yes, Wyndham is a good fellow; a little prosy sometimes, but means well. We endure the Dons, you know, if ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... with sentences solidly built, and no help from bastard rhythms. Moreover, there is a progression—I cannot call it a progress—in his work towards a more and more strictly prosaic level, until at last he sinks into the bathos of the prosy. Emerson mentions having once remarked to Thoreau: "Who would not like to write something which all can read, like 'Robinson Crusoe'? and who does not see with regret that his page is not solid with a right materialistic ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... owned by a storekeeper of Tahiti, prosy and disliked, who had fattened by ability to outwit the natives; but the glory had departed, and the place languished, ruins and jungle, the prey of guava and lantana. The neighborhood was known as Ati-Maono, "The Clan ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... poet dream at twenty-one of being the perfect lover? In his dreams he was the perfect lover, then. Yet actually what was he? What was she? What was their courtship, their marriage? You, prosy, contented, forty and forgetful, by your prosy hearth or shaking down the furnace fire, while the children are being put to bed, you dare to call "It might have been" the saddest words of tongue or pen? Those ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... of a very prosy conversation with Sir Joseph and Miss Mallowcoid, Mrs. Delarayne found opportunities enough to watch the younger people, and she was not a little relieved to see the cloud gradually lifting from Leonetta's brow. She knew that in the circumstances she had ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... give such perfect little dinner-parties as Aunt Marjorie. She had a knack of finding out each of her guests' particular weaknesses with regard to the dinner-table. She was no diplomatist, and her conversation was considered prosy; but with Mr. Merton to act the perfect host and to lead the conversation into the newest intellectual channels, with Hilda to look sweet and gracious and beautiful, and with Aunt Marjorie to provide the dinner, nothing could have ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... afraid I am too easy-going." He had never cared to talk about himself, and now he said, "Well, yes, I go along in my old prosy way. It is just like the old schooldays, with half the difficulties gone. Of course the children are not always good, but that makes it the more amusing; and one can see much more easily what they are thinking of and ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... "What you wish, so long as it is not conventional and hackneyed. But I know you will not be prosy, so go on, please." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... my old friend, I grow prosy, and you tire; Fill the glasses while I bend To prod up the failing fire. . . . You are restless:—I presume There's a dampness in the room.— Much of warmth our nature begs, With rheumatics in our ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... Instead of being all in white, she was married in the dress she happened to have on when she ran away,—just an old black walking skirt and plaid shirt-waist. No veil, no trail, and no orange-blossoms, and she had counted on having all three. It was so prosy and commonplace after the grand things she ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... idea! not a thought beyond the nursery! One wondered what she could have talked of before she had children. Good Mrs. Norris, such was she. Good Mr. Norris was, for all purposes of neighbourhood, worse still. He was gapy and fidgetty, and prosy and dosy, kept a tool chest and a medicine chest, weighed out manna and magnesia, constructed fishing-flies, and nets for fruit-trees, turned nutmeg-graters, lined his wife's work-box, and dressed his little daughter's doll; and had a tone of conversation ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 399, Supplementary Number • Various
... doctrine, but be so interesting as to command the attention of our audience. It is a question whether any man, who cannot make the people listen, should not be content to take his place in a pew. It is better to be able to heat or light the chapel well, than to wear out the patience of a congregation by prosy preaching, and it will be more to our eternal advantage to have been AN INDUSTRIOUS ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... since Hervey was an ill man to tackle; but probably Date, who was too dense to consider consequences, was unarmed. Neither did Don Pedro think it necessary to tell the officer that he and his two companions were prepared to shoot if necessary. Inspector Date, being a prosy Englishman, would not have understood such lawless doings in his ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... gas-lit, stuffy hall, A prosy speaker, such a duffer, A mob that loves to stamp and bawl, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... and Dryden, the most English of our poets, would not be so thoroughly English if he had not in him some fibre of la nation boutiquiere. Let us now see how he succeeds in attempting to infuse science (the most obstinately prosy material) with poetry. Speaking of "a more exact knowledge of the longitudes," as he explains in a note, ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... gong,' Mrs. Baxendale continued, 'and I shall have to go to the politicians. But I think I have given you a grain of comfort. Think of a prosy old woman inciting you to endure for the sake of the greatest prize you can aim at? Keep saying to yourself that Emily cannot do wrong; if she did say a word or two she didn't mean—well, well, we poor women! Go to bed early, and we'll ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... her; and when he called, intending to put the momentous question, Jane, who was sitting at her writing-table in the Overdene drawing-room, did not see any occasion to move from it. If the rector became too prosy, she could surreptitiously finish a few notes. He sank into a deep arm-chair close to the writing-table, crossed his somewhat bandy legs one over the other, made the tips of his fingers meet with ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... . to keep the clear reflection of her loveliness in his mind, ... and to live, so that he might deserve to follow and find her when his work on earth was done. Moreover, Heaven to him was no longer a vague, mythical realm, ill-defined by the prosy descriptions of church-preachers,—it was an actual WORLD to which HE was linked,—in which HE had possessions, of which HE was a native, and for the perpetuation and enlargement of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... his next to show them what fools they had been. I don't know how he has been kept on so long where he is, unless it be that he deals with news only. I believe he had to be withdrawn from the gallery of the House; he was very impatient over the prosy members and his remarks about them began to reach the Speaker's ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... for a while The arguments prosy and drear,— To lean at full-length in indefinite rest In the lap of the greenery here? Can't you kick over "the Bench," And "husk" yourself out of your gown To dangle your legs where the fishing is good— Can't you arrange to ...
— Riley Songs of Home • James Whitcomb Riley
... terribly prosy and serious and learned and philosophical. It is worse than being religious, at OUR ages. (The ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... to the watcher, he replied that treason had been their end, diabolical treason and priest-craft. He then, being rendered communicative by drink, delivered a long prosy narrative, the purport of which was as follows. These honest gentlemen who now dangled here so miserably were all stout men and true, and lived in the forest by their wits. Their independence and thriving state ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... there is timid promise of the spring or in the days of October when there are winds across the earth and gorgeous panic of fallen leaves—are you of that elect who, on such occasion or any occasion else, feel stirrings in you to be quit of whatever prosy work is yours, to throw down your book or ledger, or your measuring tape—if such device marks your service—and to go ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... prosy and practical enough and now have used my allotted time and space. It may not be wholly out of place to further tax your time and patience, and ask you to lift your eyes from taking a critical view of defective drains, muddy ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... 'That is as prosy as Mary, Ethel. At any rate, the woman told Leonard yours was the most irresistibly attractive countenance she ever saw, short of beauty; and that's not the best of it, for he ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... growled Reade, in a tone of disgust. "You're getting as prosy as that Congressman—-and that's the most insulting thing I can think of to say ...
— The High School Captain of the Team - Dick & Co. Leading the Athletic Vanguard • H. Irving Hancock
... visitors, had he not unfortunately nodded over certain verses which he had flattered Miss Caroline into producing, and fallen fast asleep during her sister's cavatina; and if his conversation, however easy and smooth, had not been felt to be upon the whole rather vapid and prosy. "Just exactly," said young Edward Dunbar, who, in the migration transit between Eton, which he had left at Easter, and Oxford, which he was to enter at Michaelmas, was plentifully imbued with the aristocratic prejudices common to each of those venerable seats of ...
— The London Visitor • Mary Russell Mitford
... at first so bothersome that Gard contemplated leaving the neighborhood. Even the Buchers, truest of prosy Germans, could grasp the ridiculousness of this situation, and it was the one item of noisy fun they could fall back upon when they ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... yard with a ghoul in it. I can't get the story from Mustapha, who is ashamed of such superstitions, but I'll find it out. We had a fantasia at Mustapha's for young Strutt and Co., and a very good dancing-girl. Some dear old prosy English people made me laugh so. The lady wondered how the women here could wear clothes 'so different from English females—poor things!' but they were not malveillants, only pitying and wonderstruck—nothing astonished ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... I cried, "what a horribly prosy, matter-of-fact affair life would be in any other view! I believe ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... are—that somebody has asked them out, or they have toothache and so wouldn't appreciate even the society of jolly seraphims. Christmas, except to the young, is essentially a festival of "let's pretend"—let's pretend that we love everybody, that everybody loves us, that Aunt Maria isn't a prosy old bore, that Uncle John isn't a profiteer; that everybody has his or her good points and that all their bad ones are not sticking out, as they usually appear to us to be, as painfully apparent as those on the back of a porcupine ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... dining, whom she had met the night before, and would see on the morrow—the young men faultlessly appointed, handsomely cravatted, with the neatest glossy boots and white gloves—the elders portly, brass-buttoned, noble-looking, polite, and prosy—the young ladies blonde, timid, and in pink—the mothers grand, beautiful, sumptuous, solemn, and in diamonds. They talked in English, not in bad French, as they do in the novels. They talked about each others' houses, and characters, and families—just as the Joneses do about the Smiths. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in every respect, such an inferior creature to the Indian—he was so vulgar, so ugly, so cringing, and so prosy—that he is quite unworthy of being reported, at any length, in these pages. The substance of what he had to tell me may be fairly ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... Well, I cannot kill such a father, So I tie his hands and I leave him there. Do I finish my little job? Well, rather; And I get home safe with some light to spare. Heigh-ho! by day it's just prosy duty, Doing the same old song and dance; But oh! with the night—joy, glory, beauty: Over ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... giving away my slaves to fellows who will use them no better than I, and becoming a slave myself; which, if you please, you shall not catch me doing in a hurry. No, my beloved, I must keep my foot on their necks for your sake as well as for my own. But you do not care about all this prosy stuff. I am consumed with remorse for having bored my darling. You want to know why I am living here like a hermit in a vulgar two-roomed hovel instead of tasting the delights of London society with my beautiful and ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... the longest number on the programme. I would dearly love the next number, also, but I must not make the evening too dull and prosy for you. Will you trust me to select your partner for ...
— Dick Prescott's Second Year at West Point - Finding the Glory of the Soldier's Life • H. Irving Hancock
... to a long, tedious hour. The room was hot and airless, the lawyer very prosy and unnecessarily fluent; but he seemed a straightforward, honest man, and gave them good counsel. Malcolm was soon put into possession of all the Strickland bequest, and after this it ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... she returned. "It's your duty. What a dear old chap he must be!—so thoroughly prosy and honest. I'm sure I should love him. I know just the sort of man he is. A downright Nonconformist minister of the midland counties, who was consecrated ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... It is, as yet, early in the afternoon, and the riotous beams, who are no respecter of persons, and who honor the righteous and the ungodly alike, are playing merrily in this sombre chamber, given so entirely up to science and its prosy ways, daring even now to dance lightly on the professor's head, which has begun to grow ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford
... from his narrative was the necessity of union among the magnates for the maintenance of the Catholic faith; the nobility and the Church being the two columns upon which the whole social fabric reposed. It is to be feared that the President became rather prosy upon the occasion. Perhaps his homily, like those of the fictitious Archbishop of Granada, began to smack of the apoplexy from which he had so recently escaped. Perhaps, the meeting being one of hilarity, the younger nobles became restive under the infliction of a very long and very ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... in the form of a hollow square, Tyson charged with magnificent contempt of danger. No doubt Tyson's method was extremely amusing and effective, and his sparkling periods proved the enemy's dullness up to the hilt; unfortunately, the prosy but responsible representations of Smedley had more weight ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... unfortunately, the plastering art died with the Montezumas, for the most vivid imagination failed to convert this rough coating into the "silver sheen" which so dazzled Cortes's little band. The reader will exclaim, "I can fancy no beauty from so prosy a description. Thatched roofs and ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... in horror to current prices. You have but to walk aside, however, into the Palazzo Pubblico really to feel yourself a thrifty old medievalist. The state affairs of the Republic were formerly transacted here, but it now gives shelter to modern law-courts and other prosy business. I was marched through a number of vaulted halls and chambers, which, in the intervals of the administrative sessions held in them, are peopled only by the great mouldering archaic frescoes—anything ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... much for your youth and beauty to enjoy outside. May be I'm responsible for many a sigh you've heaved lately, but it never struck me you see, my pretty darling, that our sentiments and sympathies run so widely apart, it is not very surprising if an old prosy bachelor should forget to ferret out the pleasures of youth, to bestow them on a fair young beautiful ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... think I have done enough duty for one day?" asks Molly. "Have I been prosy enough to allow of my leaving off now? Because I don't think I have got anything more to say about the coming harvest, and I wouldn't care to say it ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... of me, with a pious, prosy, perfect creature eternally haunting the house and exhorting me on the error of ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... single electric discharge, so to speak. Yet every word and all that partook of the nature of communication by intelligible sounds seemed to be colourless, cold, and dead. Then you try and try again, and stutter and stammer, whilst your friends' prosy questions strike like icy winds upon your heart's hot fire until they extinguish it. But if, like a bold painter, you had first sketched in a few audacious strokes the outline of the picture you had in your soul, you would then easily have been able to deepen and ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... estates, and residing chiefly in the neighbourhood, became, like his father before him, member for the county, and was one of the country gentlemen most looked up to in the House of Commons. A sensible and frequent, though uncommonly prosy speaker, singularly independent (for he had a clear fourteen thousand pounds a year, and did not desire office), and valuing himself on not being a party man, so that his vote on critical questions was often a matter of great doubt, and, therefore, of great moment, Sir ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... public career of our bluestocking. Fatal Friendship enjoyed a success which Catharine Trotter was not to taste again, and of all her plays it is the only one which has ever been reprinted. It is very long and extremely sentimental, and written in rather prosy blank verse. Contemporaries said that it placed Miss Trotter in the forefront of British drama, in company with Congreve and Granville "the polite," who had written a She-Gallants, which was everything that Miss Trotter did not wish her plays to be. Fatal ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... that, when two persons make concordant consecutive noises for ten minutes, the effect upon their relativities is one that without them might not have come about in ten weeks. We are not prepared to condemn the Philosopher, for once. He is prosy, as usual; but what he says refers to an indisputable truth. Nothing turns diversity into duality ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... think this smooth little fair-skinned Lillie is a cold-hearted monster, because her heart does not beat faster at these letters which she does not understand, and which strike her as unnecessarily prolix and prosy? Why should John insist on telling her his feelings and opinions on a vast variety of subjects that she does not care a button for? She doesn't know any thing about ritualism and anti-ritualism; and, what's more, she doesn't care. She hates to hear so much about religion. ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... condition I have described enables one to understand what is evidently the normal state of many thousands of hard-worked, ill-fed, and irregularly-sleeped labourers; the men who, sitting down thus weary at night, we expect to read some prosy book full of desperately good advice, of which one half the words are not needed for the sense and the other half are not ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... arrived at the conclusion that I was right, or thereabouts. This fact the eldest, most bald, and most stupid of the party, chosen by common consent, doubtless in virtue of these attributes, as spokesman, proceeded to communicate to me in a very prosy harangue, to which he appended a lecture—a sort of stock article, which he evidently kept constantly on hand, with blanks which could be filled up to suit any class of offenders. In this harangue he ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... content with looking pretty before marriage, and with good housekeeping after, they were uninteresting certainly, but they were respectable. Now they dabble in all things; are weakly aesthetic, weakly scientific, weakly controversial, and wholly prosy, and contemptible." Dabbling is pitiful, certainly, and weakness has few allies, but let us do justice even to the weak dabblers. AEsthetic, or scientific, or controversial training has but recently been made possible to women. Their previous ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... proposal was carried. The Club de la Delivrance is by far the most reputable public assembly in Paris. Those who take part in its proceedings are intensely respectable, and as intensely dull and prosy. The suppression of gas has been a heavy blow to the clubs. The Parisians like gas as much as lazzaroni like sunshine. The grandest bursts of patriotic eloquence find no response from an audience who listen to them beneath half-a-dozen ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... glimpse of his triumph. No other incentive would have taken him so close to that prosy bulletin board. He had vaulted over it but never read it. But now in the moment of supreme victory he limped forward, like an elated artist, to ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... and again that Tyndall was the greatest teacher he ever knew or heard of, inspiring the pupil to discover for himself, to do, to become, rather than imparting prosy facts of doubtful pith and moment. But Herbert Spencer, not being eligible to join a university club himself, was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... had a majority of thirty-seven, for Aberdeen and the Duke persisted in bringing on the question and dividing upon it. The former spoke nearly three hours, and far better than ever he had done before; the Duke was prosy. In the other House the Government had not a shadow of a case; their law officers, Home and Denman, displayed an ignorance and stupidity which were quite ludicrous, and nothing saved them from defeat but a good speech at the end from Palmerston, and ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... the exclamation of many who glance on my little page. To those who know nothing concerning them, a whole book about Indians will seem a very prosy affair, to whom I can answer nothing, for they will not proceed as far as my Preface to see what reasons I can render ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... entertainment most likely to please a young friend and attract him from places of idle amusement; and I knew that a well-timed evening-call at his bachelor home meant a dozen or two of oysters, a glass of old brown sherry, a fragrant cigar and an hour's chat which was often instructive and never prosy. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... that our schools do not give education; they give instruction. And it is so very easy to instruct, and so very easy to go on talking, and so very easy to whack Tommy when he does not listen. Our prosy lectures are wasted time. The children would be better employed ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... universal-suffrage republic—coolly tolerate, nay, they admire and vindicate, this atrocious system of personal restraint and espionage, are totally unfit for the enjoyment of civil liberty. In conclusion, we can hardly recommend the book before us, further than to say, that its gossip, though often prosy to the verge of twaddle, is also sometimes droll and amusing ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... ancients knew of and called nympholepsy—a beautiful name evocative and symbolic of its ideal aspect, "the breasts of the nymphs in the brake." And the disease is not extinct in these modern days, nor will it ever be so long as men shall yearn for the unattainable; and the prosy bachelors who trail their ill-fated lives from their chambers to their clubs know their malady, and they call ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... to wish to attack us. If we need an army at all, we should need one ten times the size, but we don't. Nature has seen to that. Yet tonight, when I was particularly anxious to get on with some important domestic legislation, we had to sit and listen to hours of prosy military talk, the possibilities of this and that. They don't realise, these brain-fogged ex-military men, that we are living in days of common sense. Before many years have passed, war will belong ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was a work of less pretentions, perhaps, and yet it had an immense sale. Eight years ago this book had reached a sale of 40,000,000, and yet it had the same grave defect. It was disconnected, cold, prosy and dull. I read it for years, and at last became a close student of Mr. Webster's style, yet I never found but one thing in this book, for which there seems to have been such a perfect stampede, that was even ordinarily ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... said Hugh; "these are the last strawberries of the season, and I have no inclination to discuss anything at present but their sweetness. But I will venture to assert that at six o'clock this evening I shall have imbibed more knowledge in that very hammock then any of you in your prosy chairs." ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... hearts of his audience. No, I have always felt that to be beyond my powers, and I have only tried to mould my action, gestures, and intonation after the pattern set by him. Now, as it happened, that owing to his constitution and temperament his speech was always slow and deliberate, not to say prosy, and my own quite the opposite, I became so strangely changed that my dear people at Belley (where the above incident occurred) almost failed to recognise me. They thought a changeling had been foisted upon them in the place of their own Bishop, whose vehement ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... is now necessary to my existence. I cannot live without it. This is why we have no more of this kind of enjoyment. To-night I relish it because I'm in the humor; but as a general thing it is unbearable—too tame and prosy." ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... even be pretended. Imagine the mother of twins trying to flirt with a man even as nice as you are! It would be as bad as an elephant trying to be kittenish and about as absurd as one of your dinosauria getting up and trying to do a two-step. And I'm getting old and prosy, Peter, and if I pretend to be skittish now and then it's only to mask the fact that I'm on the shelf, that I've eaten my pie and that before long I'll be dyeing my hair every other Sunday, the same as ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... are not going to be proper at this time of day! That would be a joke! Darling, indulgent, good old Mimsey!—you don't mean to turn into a prim, prosy, cross Mrs. Grundy! I won't believe it! And you mustn't be severe on poor Lennie—he's such a docile, good boy, and ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... shows the beginning of American fiction, dominated by English writers, like Samuel Richardson. The early novels, like Mrs. Morton's The Power of Sympathy, were usually prosy, didactic, and as dull as the Sunday school books of three quarters of a century ago. The victory of the English school of romanticists influenced Charles Brockden Brown, the first professional American author, to throw off ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... and Vanbrugh, who patronized Cibber, employed him to act the character. He was an exception to the rule that a good playwriter is not a good performer. In Cibber, we especially mark the Spanish element, which then tinged the drama, and although somewhat prosy and sententious, he is fertile and entertaining in his love intrigues. Of real humour, he seems to have no gift—some of his best attempts referring to such common failures as sometimes occur at hotels. We have in "She ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... into the hands of Nicholas Stone, the sculptor, who made a reproduction of it in white marble, with the little urn concealing the feet. This was placed in St. Paul's Cathedral, of which King was chief residentiary, and may still be seen in the present Cathedral King's elegy is very prosy in starting, but improves as it goes along, and is most ingenious throughout. These are the words in which he refers to the appearance of the dying ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... prosy, preachy professor!" she exclaimed affectionately, "I have been thinking of it. I've half a mind to try, really. Wouldn't Grace Noir just die?...O ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... volubly. This being the stern and prosy record of applied science, it becomes us not to report the chatterings of these two till they reached the base of the vast brick chimney, towering nearly eighty feet into the air above them. Its long shadow lay like a ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... something deliciously refreshing in a sailor's yarn. I have listened to hundreds in the course of my consular career, and have yet to find one that is dull or prosy. They all bear the imprint of truth, perhaps a trifle overdrawn, but nevertheless sparkling with the salt of the sea and redolent of the romance of strange people and distant lands. In listening, one becomes almost dizzy at the rapidity with which the scene and personnel change. The icebergs ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... listening first to the Prefect's political and society talk, then to stories of the General's campaigns. Under the influence of the despised wine of Anjou, Monsieur de Mauves, whose temper needed no sweetening, became a little sleepy, prosy, and long-winded. General Ratoneau on his side was mightily cheered, and showed quite a new animation: long before the meal ended, he was talking more than the other three put together. It was he who had been the hero ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... My curiosity was unsatisfied; but, perhaps, I went to bed that night with a fuller gush of happiness at my heart than if I had heard this prosy fellow's account of the matter. It is a frequent subject of meditation with me, whether or not I am constituted as other men are. Are others played upon in this way by some slight occurrence—by meeting with a face seen before only in a dream, by a peculiar smile, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... mountains, along beautiful beaches and graceful tongues of velvety meadows—all 'neath the shadows of towering, snow-clad peaks, is a delight worth days of travel to experience. It enraptures the artist and enthuses even ordinarily prosy folks. There is no single feature wanting to make of such places as Tacoma, Seattle, and Port Townsend, the most delightful and agreeable watering places in the world. Surrounded by magnificent and ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... said Ida, "that a great many beautiful and heroic events are very prosy and painful to the actors therein, and they never dream the world will give them the ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... treat of subjects in the most popular manner, avoiding, as far as is consistent with the dignity of the object in view, very elaborate and prosy disquisitions. I shall endeavor to get a circular out next week. Meantime accept my thanks for the interest you take in the subject, and be assured that if I succeed in starting the journal, I shall, at all times, be grateful for ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... these reflections, with manifest risk of being thought somewhat prosy by my more lively readers, in order to guard my countrymen, English, Scotch, and Irish, against a kind of presumption which is exceedingly common among them when they come to Canada—of fancying that they are as capable of forming correct opinions on local matters as the Canadians themselves. ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... appearance than his years warranted. He was bald and clean-shaved but for scraps of side-whiskers that gave him a resemblance to the traditional stage-lawyer of amateur theatricals, a likeness increased by his heavy and prosy manner. It was hard to believe that he had ever been a young subaltern, though such had once been the case, for the Indian Political Department is recruited chiefly from officers of the Indian Army. But he was never the gay and light-hearted ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... far greater than that of her first novel, arises entirely out of the situations. There is no gradual unfolding of character and motive. The high-handed marquis, the jealous marchioness, the imprisoned wife, the vapid hero, the two virtuous sisters, the leader of the banditti, the respectable, prosy governess, are a set of dolls fitted ingeniously into the framework of the plot. They have more substance than the tenuous shadows that glide through the pages of Mrs. Radcliffe's first story, but they move only as she ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... favorable Answer) your unknown Adorer." The custom of inserting letters in the course of the story was, as has already been indicated, a heritage from the times of Gomberville, La Calprenede, and the Scuderys when miscellaneous material of all sorts from poetry to prosy conversations was habitually used to diversify the narrative. Mrs. Haywood, however, employed the letter not to ornament but to intensify. Her billets-doux like the lyrics in a play represent moments of supreme emotion. In seeking vividness she too often ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... instead of being sought, was shunned,—when princes possessing the most beautiful lands among the Rhine hills should, with great trouble and expense, have transported their seats to some flat, uninviting locality,—when, for instance, the dull, flat, prosy, wearisome gardens of Schwetzingen should have been deemed more beautiful than the immediate environs of Heidelberg. Yet such were the sentiments that prevailed in Switzerland until a comparatively late date. It is only since the days of Scheuchzer that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... while the heads of the two boys are very like those which we shall find later in a drawing in the Berlin Gallery. From the pronounced way in which his father's hand rests on little Hans' head, while the left points him out,—and even his elder brother "Prosy" shows by his attitude the special notice to be taken of Hans,—it is clear that if this is a portrait-group either it was painted when the boys were actually older, or the younger had already given some astonishing proof of that precocity which his early ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... Such a crowd as there was at our railway depot! So many bonny, happy little children never went on the same morning to the busy old town before. It was something new for great elephants to be seen walking through the prosy business streets. Once before, twenty-seven years ago, when Sir John Musgrave was Lord Mayor, not only elephants, but camels, deer, negroes, beehives, a ship in full sail, and Britannia seated on a car ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... caribou. That night we camped, and I heard stories, from two poor, humble men, that made my head just whirl, for they were really Odysseys, or sagas, or any of the big tales one ever heard of. It would seem, Aunt Jennie, dear, as if the world is not at all the prosy thing some people take it to be. I suppose that the great knights and warriors are altogether out of it now, but I find that it is running over with men one usually never hears of, who accomplish tremendous things without the slightest accompaniment ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... I say, filled me with sorrow. I hate military belongings, and am disgusted at seeing the great affairs of a nation put out of their regular course. Congress to me is respectable. Parliamentary debates—be they ever so prosy, as with us, or even so rowdy, as sometimes they have been with our cousins across the water—engage my sympathies. I bow inwardly before a Speaker's chair, and look upon the elected representatives of any nation as the choice men of ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... pilgrim, perhaps; and then he tried to guess at the longevity of cedars, and thought of asking Margaret, the botanist of the family. Then he yawned, moved the horse a little about, opined that Mr. Rivers must be very prosy, or have some abstruse complaint, considered the sky, and augured rain, buttoned another button of his rough coat, and thought of Miss Cleveland's dinner. Then he thought there was a very sharp wind, and drove about till he found a sheltered place on the lee side of ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... filled me with too much diffidence and respect to admit of any freedom of approach. One listened to him, as he held forth of an evening when surrounded by his family, with reverential silence. He had a strong Scotch accent; and, if a wee bit prosy at times, it was sententious and polished prose that he talked; he talked invariably like a book. His family were devoted to him; and I felt that no one who knew him could help ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... again, "I wonder is HE pinned somewhere? I feel like giving him a lift; he is so prosy it isn't likely anyone else will feel ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... of the eighteenth century that many were sorry his novels were no longer. The novelty of productions of this type also added to their interest. His many faults are largely those of his age. He wearies his readers with his didactic aims. He is narrow and prosy. He poses as a great moralist, but he teaches the ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... 'Fisherman and the Diver,' which he translated for us, and his Prize Poem, which didn't get the prize; and, indeed, I thought it very pompous and prosy," ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a jewel in my fingers And went to sleep. The day was warm, and winds were prosy; ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... way down the road, who had been presented by some sporting people, not with a silver vase, as our governor had been, but with a silver currycomb, in testimony of their admiration for his skill; but I confess that the poetry of rubbing down had become, as all other poetry becomes, rather prosy by frequent repetition, and with respect to the chance of deriving glory from the employment, I entertained in the event of my determining to stay, very slight hope of ever attaining skill in the ostler art sufficient to ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... cover. One derives from the exercise a sense of the evolution of Shakespeare criticism which cannot be otherwise obtained; one begins to understand that Pope had his merits as an editor, as indeed a man of genius could hardly fail to have, to appreciate the prosy and pedestrian pains of Theobald, to admire the amazing erudition of Steevens. One sees the phases of the curious process by which Shakespeare was elevated at the beginning of the nineteenth century to a sphere ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... letters come to me across the thousands of miles of land and sea, carried by sooty train and boat, buried in a dross of mail in prosy canvas sacks: I open them with the delight one feels when he brushes aside the mat of damp and frosty withered leaves to find ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson |
