"Tinsel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... four lean horses, on which rode two old postilions dressed as devils, was raised a downright pyramid of men and women, sitting, standing, leaning, in every possible variety of odd, extravagant, and grotesque costume; altogether an indescribable mass of bright colors, flowers, ribbons, tinsel and spangles. Amid this heap of strange forms and dresses appeared wild or graceful countenances, ugly or handsome features—but all animated by the feverish excitement of a jovial frenzy—all turned with an expression ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... of pigmies. You call yourselves people's men! You haven't mastered the elementary truths of your religion. What's England, or France, or any other country in the world, by the side of humanity? Be off! I'll go my own way. Go yours, and take your little tinsel of jingoism with you. Whenever you want to fight me, ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... pulled, and smell the tallow-candles, and look at the pasteboard gold, and the tinsel jewels, and the painted old women, Theo? No. Do not look too close," says the sceptical young host, demurely drinking a glass of hock. "You were angry ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... are simple who prize The tongue that is smooth to deceive; Yet sure she had sense to despise, The tinsel that folly ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... that once played so prominent a part in these boisterous masquerades, but such life as it still enjoys at Padstow is somewhat a galvanised existence, just as children still occasionally dress in poor tinsel and gaiety in order to collect a few coppers. Such exhibitions are ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... few days till my granary is fuller of stock, which probably it would be by the end of next week; but, in truth, I had rather be a grateful, and consequently a punctual correspondent, than an ingenious one; as I value the honour of your lordship's friendship more than such tinsel bits of fame as can fall to my share, and of which I am particularly sick at present, as the Public Advertiser dressed me out t'other day with a heap of that dross which he had pillaged from some other strolling playwrights, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... is a story illustrative of this altered manner and matter of preaching. He had been preaching when very young, at Galashiels, and one wife said to her "neebor," "Jean, what think ye o' the lad?" "It's maist o't tinsel wark," said Jean, neither relishing nor appreciating his fine sentiments and figures. After my mother's death, he preached in the same place, and Jean, running to her friend, took the first word, "It's a' ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... No Drury Lane?—no tinsel flare?— No pirouetting Bogeydom?— Only a Club, and one who there Forgot in sleep his Fogeydom! Welcome my Transformation Scene; I'm dull once more, and every Old Bachelor like me, I ween, May muse at times ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 17, 1891 • Various
... from every bond, With all the tinsel-state of puppet-play! Lay off the crown, for it befits thee not, Even in jest; the mantle ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... laid in Persia. This play was brought upon the stage in a style of princely magnificence. The dresses were of rich material, profusely ornamented with gold and silver, the kind indulgence of the audience, for once, not being asked to attribute an extraordinary value to professional tinsel. The author is said to have laid out four hundred pounds for this occasion. Brennoralt, also a tragedy, was first published under the title of The Discontented Colonel, in 1639, as a satire on the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... but a night-gown in respect of yours: Cloth of gold, and cuts, and laced with silver, set with pearls down sleeves, side-sleeves, and skirts, round underborne with a blueish tinsel: but for a fine, quaint, graceful, and excellent fashion, ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Knight edition]
... a beautiful Greek girl, a veritable Helen, for the sake of whose beauty one might give up all things. Young, elegant, serpentine; clad in a single garment, a light cinnamon gown clasped at the waist; no stockings, her legs bare and brown; on her head a Persian scarf embroidered with red and gold tinsel; her face white, with a delicate pink flush over it; hair and eyes black as night, but also with a glitter of stars. Wherever she walked she was a picture, and whether she was working about the house, ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... plies the oar,—sometimes she drifts. But what greatness she has is genuine; there is no tinsel of any kind, no drapery carefully adjusted, no chosen gesture about her. May Heaven lead her, at last, to the full possession of her best self, in harmony with ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... hundred pairs of eyes, brimful with simple faith and simple trust, gazed in reverence on the naive wax figure behind the grating, within its throne of rough stone and whitewash. It was dressed in blue calico spangled with tinsel, and had a crown on its head made of gilt paper and a veil of coarse tarlatan. Two china pots containing artificial flowers were placed on either side of ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... with it. Everything pleased them; they applauded wildly, and uttered shouts of encouragement and delight to bulls and toreadors alike. The grand people were richly attired; beautiful ladies watched with excited eyes the bulls, wearing their colors in rosettes of satin and glittering tinsel; the thousands of waving, brilliantly hued fans fluttered like a swarm of butterflies; the music filled the air. Pe-" pita sat in a dream of joy, the color coming and going on her cheeks, her rapture glowing in her eyes. She was a Spanish girl, ...
— The Pretty Sister Of Jose - 1889 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... fellows. He shows that he looks at things, and not at the traditions of things. He is not led away by the cry of the mob, and the gleam of gold so pure and solid almost changes into indignation our regret that he has ever suffered himself to be deceived by the glare of tawdry tinsel. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... that some great dames, with thin lips, oblique noses, green complexions, and clay-coloured eyes, hate to be served by a damsel wearing that effulgent unbought crown of beauty which makes all other crowns seem such pitiful tinsel gewgaws to the sick soul. That was one disadvantage, but it was greatly overweighed by a general preference for beauty over ugliness. The flower-girl with beautiful eyes stands a better chance than her squinting sister of selling a penny bunch of violets to the next passer-by. If a girl ceased ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... bridal alter to the sacrifice of her future joy. Story oft told in the vicissitudes of betrayed innocence and in the fate of those who build their happiness in the castles of fancy: like the brilliancy of sunset her moment of pleasure faded; the novelty and tinsel of her gilded home lost their charm, and the virtue of her childhood was wrecked on golden rocks. She no longer went to daily Mass; her visits to the convent became less frequent, her dress lighter; her conversation, toned by the ideas of pride and self-love reflected from the society she ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... outwardly appeared (for in his black, close-fitting, modern civilian's dress, he formed a wonderful contrast with the gauze crape fringes, tinsel tassels, and crown), he very soon composed himself internally, and the scene became all the more strange. With the greatest gravity he placed himself in front of the tablet, which was supported by a couple of pages, and drew carefully an elaborate tomb, which indeed would ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... glorious pavement of St. Peter's, and wherever else they like; they place paltry-looking wooden confessionals beneath its sublime arches, and ornament them with cheap little colored prints of the crucifixion; they hang tin hearts and other tinsel and trumpery at the gorgeous shrines of the saints, in chapels that are incrusted with gems, or marbles almost as precious; they put pasteboard statues of saints beneath the dome of the Pantheon; in short, they ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... caps, a very superior-looking body of men. Then followed a very imposing well-kept line, composed of young men of the better class, well attired and respectable looking. These wore crape hat-bands, and green rosettes with harps in the centre. Several had broad green body scarfs, with gold tinsel shamrocks and harps intertwined. As this portion of the procession marched they attracted very considerable attention by their orderly, measured tread, and the almost soldierly precision with which they maintained the line. They numbered about four or ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... guard-house, a popular uprising, the fish-market, the galleys, the wine-shop, the poule au pot of Henri Quatre, are treasure-trove in her eyes. She seizes upon this canaille, washes it clean, and sews her tinsel and spangles over its villainies; purpureus assuitur pannus. Her object seems to be to deliver patents of nobility to all these roturiers of the drama; and each of these patents under the great ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... are discovered the airman drops a smoke ball directly over it or lets fall some strips of tinsel, which glitter in the sun as they slowly descend to the earth. The range to the target is apparently ascertained by those near the guns by a large telemeter, or other range finder, which is kept trained on the aeroplane, ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... master's cause in England. That halo of success which blinded a portion of the English press to the iniquities which were concealed beneath the Imperial purple has now disappeared. The publication of the papers discovered in the Tuileries has stripped despotism of its tinsel, and has revealed the vile and contemptible arts by which a gallant nation has been enslaved. The Government of Napoleon, as Mr. Gladstone said of that of Bomba, "was a negation of God upon earth." His councillors ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... song of the bomb-bird is heard. The searchlights stab and slash about the sky like tin swords in a stage duel; presently they pick up the bomb-bird—a glittering flake of tinsel—and the racket begins. Archibalds pop, machine guns chatter, rifles crack, and here and there some optimistic sportsman browns the Milky Way with a revolver. As Sir I. NEWTON'S law of gravity is still in force and all that goes up must come down again, it is advisable to wear a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... lights to men, Stand thou, and shout above the tumbled roar, Lest brave ships drive and break against the shore. What though thy sounding song be roughly set? Parnassus' self is rough! Give thou the thought, The golden ore, the gems that few forget; In time the tinsel jewel will be wrought. Stand thou alone, and fixed as destiny, An imaged god that lifts above all hate; Stand thou serene and satisfied with fate; Stand thou as stands the lightning-riven tree, That lords the cloven clouds of gray ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... to Newman? Did I offer him good advice? Alas, no! I thought not to say to him, Do thy duty in that station of life to which it has pleased God to call thee, regardless of this world's tinsel prizes. Look steadily forward to another and a better world for thy reward. This he did not. This world, and this alone, entirely occupied his attention. He only thought of the gratification of the moment. Blindly and obstinately ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... day Katchiba came to see us, bringing a present of flour. I gave him a tin plate, a wooden spoon, the last of the tea-cups, and a tinsel paper of mother-of-pearl shirt buttons, which took his fancy so immensely, that my wife was begged to suspend it from his neck like a medal. He was really a very good old fellow—by far the best I have seen in Africa. He ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... Conceit is the sexual characteristic.'' And we may add, "and the standard of sexuality.'' As soon as the child has the first ribbon woven into its hair, sexuality has been excited. It increases with the love of tinsel and glitter and dies when the aging female begins to neglect herself and to go about unwashed. Woman lies when she asserts that everything is dead in her heart, and sits before you neatly and decoratively dressed; she lies when she says that she still loves ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... he abounds with images of too florid a kind; affected turns; conceits and frivolous thoughts; which, far from being adapted to his Jerusalem, could hardly be supportable in his 'Aminta.' So that all this, opposed to the gravity, the sobriety, the majesty of Virgil, what is it but tinsel compared with gold?" ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... merry music of bugle, wheel, and whip, along which so many men and women had plodded in days gone by, in search of fame and fortune and happiness: some, to find these in a greater or less degree, with much of the tinsel rubbed off, others, to find none of them, but instead thereof, wreck and ruin in the mighty human whirlpool; and not a few to discover the fact that happiness does not depend either on fortune or fame, but on spiritual harmony with God in ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... rare moments of reflection in his gorgeous palace on the hills. Here they could at least be once more in the country they loved, albeit of a milder and less heroic type, and a little degraded by the overlapping tinsel and ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... mere reputation of it. Men do not affect a conduct that tends to their discredit. Let us, then, get the better of Monsieur Necker in his own way; let us do in reality what he does only in pretence; let us turn his French tinsel into English gold. Is, then, the mere opinion and appearance of frugality and good management of such use to France, and is the substance to be so mischievous to England? Is the very constitution of Nature so altered by a sea of twenty miles, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... even without the tinsel of court dress and the romance of French or Spanish setting, were acceptable to Eliza Haywood's public is shown by the two parts of "The Masqueraders: or, Fatal Curiosity" (1724-5), which in the most luscious language of passion narrate the philanderings ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... innocent, loving, and gentle mankind, to say nothing of tender, enthusiastic, love-blinded womankind, are to some extent deceived by the false ring of that which is not metal, and the falser glitter of a tinsel which ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... was mere tinsel show compared with the great pageant that has moved before those few men who have lived through the whole length of ...
— The New Minister's Great Opportunity - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... dreams. I say a child's heart, Chapman, and that phrase Crowns, not dis-crowns, his manhood. Well—he turned An honest penny, taking some small part In plays at the Red Bull. And, all the while, Beyond the paint and tinsel of the stage, Beyond the greasy cock-pit with its reek Of orange-peel and civet, as all of these Were but the clay churned by the glorious rush Of his white chariots and his burning steeds, Nay, as the clay were a shadow, his great dreams, Like bannered legions on some proud crusade, Empurpling ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... night weeping by the wayside. (Ah! how they have calumniated the love of Louis XV.'s time!) She was so unused to see the sunrise, that she hailed it with one of her finest songs. Her attitude, quite as much as her tinsel, drew the peasants about her; amazed at her gestures, her voice, her beauty, they took her for an angel, and dropped on their knees around her. If Voltaire had not existed we might have thought it a new miracle. I don't know if God gave her much credit ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... for sleep was not clear to the visitor; they seemed to be at work all day, and at midnight many of them had to start on their way to St. Petersburg with a cartload for the market. A church ornamented with tinsel is a feature of every Russian village; so also are the priests. The only two I saw were sitting on a fence, wearing garments that did not give evidence of having known water since they were made. One great drawback to the growth of manufactures ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... with its noisy phantasms, its poor paper-crown's tinsel-gilt, is gone; and divine everlasting Night, with her star-diadems, with her silences and her veracities, is come! What hast thou done, and how? Happiness, unhappiness; all that was but wages thou hadst; thou hast spent ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... her contempt of him; and declared, that, were there not another man in England, she would not have him. She was ready, on the contrary, she could assure them, to resign her pretensions under hand and seal, if Miss Clary were taken with his tinsel, and if every one else approved of his ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... around were hundreds of red, blue and white tapers, which were fastened upon the branches. Dolls, exactly like real men and women, were placed under the green leaves,—and the tree had never seen such things before,—and at the top was fastened a glittering star, made of gold tinsel. Oh, it was very beautiful. "This evening," they all exclaimed, ...
— Christmas Stories And Legends • Various
... half a dozen Jews or so were assembled pell-mell. They had just been given a hearty meal, but they did not look grateful. Almost naked, save for a white cloak of the meagrest dimensions, comically indecent, covered with tinsel and decorated with laurels, they stood shivering, awaiting the command to "Go!" to run the gauntlet of all this sinister crowd, overwelling with long-repressed venom, seething with taunts and lewdness. At last a mounted officer gave the word, and, amid a colossal shout of glee from the mob, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... my love, And thou art a tinsel thing, And I in my play Broke thee easily, And from the little fragments Arose my ...
— War is Kind • Stephen Crane
... the core is made from a double strand of strong lock stitch twine, over which is placed a linen braid. Then the tip conductor, which is of stranded copper tinsel, is braided on. This is then covered with two layers of tussah silk, laid in reverse wrappings, then there is a heavy cotton braid, and over the latter a linen braid. The sleeve conductor, which is also of copper tinsel, is then braided ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... contented with a little ore, and a great deal of dross. And so in publications of this kind, prejudicial as they are to taste and public feeling, and the public before deeply injurious to the real interests of literature, something may sometimes be found to compensate for the trash and tinsel and insolent flippancy, which are now become the staple commodities of such journals. This number contains Kant's idea of a Universal History on a Cosmo-Political plan; and that Kant is as profound a philosopher as his disciples have proclaimed ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... gaudy doll. It is not exactly the kind of doll an English child would care about, because its face is the face of an idiot and it is made of some sort of poor composition stuff; its clothes are tawdry material of tinsel and stiff muslin, and are pinned on by pins with coloured glass heads glittering in the sun. Maria thinks it lovely and shrieks if her young brother Sebastian lays a finger on it. She is on the point of leaving her own country, perhaps for ever, ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... people here are extravagantly fond of dress; a stranger would take Montreal to be a city inhabited by none but the rich and idle: they are all finely powdered, walk with their hats under their arms, and wear long coats, adorned with tinsel lace, and buttoned down to the extremity. Since I came here, I have not seen one man dressed like a tradesman. The ladies in general are handsome, extremely gay, and ...
— The Olden Time Series: Vol. 2: The Days of the Spinning-Wheel in New England • Various
... was Costa-mongered; finally even the late eminent Macfarren, the worst enemy music has ever had in this country, did not disdain to prepare "a performing edition," and to improve Mozart's improvements on Handel. One wonders whether Mozart, when he overlaid the "Messiah" with his gay tinsel-work, dreamed that some Costa, encouraged by Mozart's own example, and without brains enough to guess that he had nothing like Mozart's brains, would in like manner desecrate "Don Giovanni." Like "Don Giovanni," there the "Messiah" lies, almost unrecognisable under ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... splendid cavalcade through the city and distributed the most costly presents to the crowd. Engines were erected in all the squares which cast forth showers of confectionery among the people, while the artisans in chariots[185] adorned with tinsel and flying streamers exhibited the badges of their respective trades through the streets. Such brilliant displays of life and pageantry among the palaces and domes and gilded minarets of Lahore made the city altogether like a place ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Diable' was an immense success when first produced. The glitter and tinsel of the story suited Meyerbeer's showy style, and besides, even when the merely trivial and conventional had been put aside, there remains a fair proportion of the score which has claims to dramatic power. The ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... of them were in bed, we dressed the tree; it might better be said that Maude and Miss Allsop dressed it, while I gave a perfunctory aid. Both the women took such a joy in the process, vying with each other in getting effects, and as I watched them eagerly draping the tinsel and pinning on the glittering ornaments I wondered why it was that I was unable to find the same joy as they. Thus it had been every Christmas eve. I was always tired when I got home, and after dinner relaxation ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... so well off as the three former; though not altogether so unhappy neither, in her way. She could not indeed conquer her love of dress and tinsel, and so became the lady of Col. Wilson: and they are thus far easy in the marriage state, that, being seldom together, they have probably a multitude of misunderstandings; for the colonel loves gaming, in which he is ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... this plant with the god Vishnu, notwithstanding that tulsi bears the title of Krishna's bride, probably because of the latter being an incarnation of Vishnu. On these occasions pots of this plant are painted and adorned with tinsel. A magical circle is traced in the garden and the plant is put in the middle of it. A Brahman brings an idol of Vishnu and begins the marriage ceremony, standing before the plant. A married couple hold a shawl between the plant and the god, as if ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... animation. One need only see her to be satisfied of her low birth. At the first blush one would take her for a German actress. Her clothes looked as if bought at a doll shop; every thing was so old fashioned and so bedecked with silver and tinsel. She was decorated with a dozen orders, portraits of saints, and relics, which occasioned such a clatter that when she walked one would suppose that an ass with bells was approaching. The tzar, on the contrary, was tall and well made. His countenance ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... reader a description of the arms and equipments of every noted warrior, I will bestow a word upon the dress of this redoubtable commander. It comported with his character, being so crossed and slashed, and embroidered with lace and tinsel, that he seemed to have as much brass without as nature had stored away within. He was swathed too in a crimson sash, of the size and texture of a fishing-net; doubtless to keep his swelling heart from bursting through his ribs. His face glowed with furnace heat from between a huge pair ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... often casts made up in the humour of the moment, and never used at all, accumulate upon him so rapidly that he is glad to find some enthusiastic boatman to bestow them upon. It is needless to add, that a gift of this kind is usually very much appreciated by the recipient. Tinsel is a very useful adjunct to a fly, and should always be employed in those used in loch-fishing. If variety is wanted in colouring, the least tip of Berlin or pig's wool of the desired shade will be found very effective. Get your flies dressed on Limerick-bend ...
— Scotch Loch-Fishing • AKA Black Palmer, William Senior
... evergreen upon the chilling air; There's tinsel tawdriness revealed beneath the sunlight's glare; There's Want and Plenty, Greed and Pride—a hundred thousand souls, And, oh, the weary eyes of them, like dull and sullen coals. Who knows the town of Bethlehem, once gleamed beneath the star, Whose wondrous ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... speaks of the horrors, the gruesome impalings; deprecating them in a general way; not daring to come down to particulars, and rebuke Nero. Well; Nero commanded the legions, and was kittle cattle to rebuke. If sometimes you see tinsel and tawdriness about poor Seneca, look a little deeper, and you seem to see him writing it in agony and bloody sweat. . . . He was among the richest men in Rome, when riches were a deadly peril: he might even, had he been another man, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... marched through the city by the brilliancy of their rose-and-violet-faced uniforms, and by the display of their graceful and accurate military movements. Now they were to have an opportunity to show whether their warlike spirit was expressed chiefly in ruffles and tinsel trimmings, or whether they could win fame by ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... intimacy between them, in spite of the respect which each of them might well have had for the vast knowledge of the other. When the Decline and Fall was published, Burke read it as everybody else did; but he told Reynolds that he disliked the style, as very affected, mere frippery and tinsel. Sir Joshua himself was neither a man of letters nor a keen politician; but he was full of literary ideas and interests, and he was among Burke's warmest and most constant friends, following him with ...
— Burke • John Morley
... females who subsequently arrived, and the desultory and fitful labor performed. Passing from one hospital to another, and bestowing general sympathy, with small works, is not what wounded men want. It was very soon perceptible how the men in that hospital appreciated the solid worth of the one and the tinsel ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... thinning before her. She was glad, for suddenly she found herself very tired. What would Abbott think? Would he, henceforth, see nothing but the show-girl of tinsel and trainer's whip, for ever showing through the clear glass of her real self? At nine-thirty, what would Abbott say to her? and how should she reply? The thought of him obscured her vision of admiring faces. ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... Carlo. I inquired at the hotels; I inquired at the Casino—without success. I learnt one great lesson there, however, and that was the evil of gambling. In spite of tinsel and gilt, in spite of gay attire and loud laughter, in spite of high-sounding titles and ancient names, never did I see so much real misery as I saw in ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... solitary and alone, my Frederick, when we belong to one another—when nothing more can separate us, when we shall no more have to meet under the veil of secrecy, no more have to conceal the fair, divine reality under borrowed tinsel! You know, love, to-night ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... similar costume of pale gray and lavender, with a tall headdress of wire covered with white gauze and tinsel. ...
— The Belles of Canterbury - A Chaucer Tale Out of School • Anna Bird Stewart
... second day's campaign, when he set up as a dentist (in spectacles and a fine black beard), Fra Palamone chose me to be arrayed in a loose punchinello suit of red cotton, covered with the signs of the zodiac in tinsel; for, said he, "Mystery is half our battle won beforehand. Hermes Trismegistus himself had not been the philosopher he was if he had been understood, and to this day Aristotle is undervalued, not for saying what he ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... anomalous garment, slashed with various colors, like a harlequin's coat. Upon one shoulder was sewed the semblance of a door cut out of blue cloth; on the other, a crescent cut out of green. Upon the head was set a tinsel crown, amid tangles of disordered hair. Above was a huge brass key, suspended by a tow string from the ceiling. Table and floor were littered with manuscripts and papers; under the former ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... the colors of the chromatic scale. Their necks and arms, which were stained a saffron yellow, were hung with jewels or near-jewels. On their heads were towering, indescribable affairs of feathers, flowers and tinsel, faintly reminiscent of those fantastic headdresses affected by the lamented Gaby. The music was furnished by a gamelan, or orchestra, of half-a-hundred musicians playing on drums, gongs and reeds, ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... very fine robes, the women bearing coloured flags and lighted tapers, and the men playing on violins, flutes, and drums. All had garlands of flowers to hang on the altars; and for these lights and ornaments, and silk and tinsel robes, they save up all their money. They were playing a pretty air, but I doubt its being original. It was not melancholy and monotonous, like the generality of Indian music, but had something wild and ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... three words together, near equal to the Greek". No one has done more than Milton to justify this praise, or to make manifest what may be effected by this marriage of words. Many of his compound epithets, as 'golden-tressed', 'tinsel-slippered', 'coral-paven', 'flowry-kirtled', 'violet-embroidered', 'vermeil-tinctured', are themselves poems in miniature. Not unworthy to be set beside these are Sylvester's "opal-coloured morn", Drayton's "silver-sanded shore", and ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... dress, forsooth! The illustration is worthy of the doctrine taught. "An entire clause of a sentence" substantively possessed, is sufficiently like "the meaning of a lady's dress, &c." Cobbett despised andsoforths, for their lack of meaning; and I find none in this one, unless it be, "of tinsel and of fustian." This gloss therefore I wholly disapprove, judging the position more tenable, to deny, if we consequently must, that either a phrase or a participle, as such, can consistently govern the possessive case. For whatever word or term gives rise to the direct relation ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... him with wondering eyes. Such magnificence and wealth as was displayed in this palace was more than he had ever dreamed of, and he could scarcely believe that all the gorgeous glitter was real and not tinsel. ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... enough. A pale partridge or woodcock wing, short red hackle legs, a peacock-herl body, and a tail—on which too much artistic skill can hardly be expended—of yellow floss silk, and gold twist or tinsel. The orange-tailed governors 'of ye shops,' as the old drug-books would say, are all 'havers;' for the proper colour is a honey yellow. The mystery of this all-conquering tail seems to be, that it represents the yellow pollen, or 'bee bread' in the ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... peppermint which elude the thrusting index, and will be found again next December); the dining-room floor is thick with fallen needles; the gay little candles are burnt down to a small gutter of wax in the tin holders. The floor sparkles here and there with the fragments of tinsel balls or popcorn chains that were injudiciously hung within leap of puppy or grasp of urchin. And so you see him, the diligent parent, brooding with a tender mournfulness and sniffing the faint whiff of that fine Christmas tree odour—balsam and burning candles and fist-warmed peppermint—as ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... forth. ... Nor does this passage of tinsel stand alone. When the iron cools and Hubert says he can revive it, ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... Vandals produced. To centuries, to revolutions which at least laid waste with impartiality and grandeur, are conjoined the host of scholastic architects, licensed and sworn, degrading all they touch with the discernment and selection of bad taste, substituting the tinsel of Louis XV. for Gothic lace-work, for the greater glory of the Parthenon. This is the donkey's kick at the dying lion. It is the old oak, decaying at the crown, pierced, bitten and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... begin! But now I am younger, thanks to you; and I enjoy everything. I look on and laugh. But for the rest, I must be indifferent. It would be an insult to one's intellect to set any store on such tinsel as that of which the ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... to her breast a satin-striped box, in which beneath paper lace and tinsel was the most delicious candy; a whole box full all but a few bites, as Alene had said; while the latter leaned over the wall calling more good-byes, and Prince kept up a continuous barking that said so plainly, ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... Christmas, 1440, is from the records of Norwich:—"John Hadman, a wealthy citizen, made disport with his neighbours and friends, and was crowned King of Christmas. He rode in state through the city, dressed forth in silks and tinsel, and preceded by twelve persons habited as the twelve months of the year, their costumes varying to represent the different seasons of the year. Alter King Christmas followed Lent, clothed in white garments trimmed with herring ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 582, Saturday, December 22, 1832 • Various
... in Arabic means 'a star'. Steingass (Persian Dictionary) defines Kaukaba as 'a polished steel ball suspended to a long pole, and carried as an ensign before the king; a star of gold, silver, or tinsel, worn as ornament or sign of rank; a concourse of people; a royal ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... fruits to be painfully harvested by following her mother's tuition, and accept the easily gathered luscious golden fruit offered her by her father. Like all children and many adults, the glitter and the tinsel of the present enjoyment were too powerful and seductive to be resisted, or to be postponed ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... to value at its true worth the show and tinsel of London life. She never appeared again at Court but once, to pay her respects to the new Queen, who received her very cordially, seated on a throne by her husband. The small Queen of eight "hoped she was quite well, ...
— Mistress Margery • Emily Sarah Holt
... men and women in whose eyes he was always haloed by a crown of thousand-rouble pieces. To-day, how different his estate! He saw his world now with the eyes of the outsider. And what a thing it was!—This stolid dummy, from which both tinsel robe and leering mask had now been stripped for him, exposing the brutal, heartless machine that had taken such delight in crushing ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... could win her way into little Drina's heart. She did so, and there were no more difficulties. Drina learnt her letters like an angel; and she learnt other things as well. The Baroness de Spath taught her how to make little board boxes and decorate them with tinsel and painted flowers; her mother taught her religion. Sitting in the pew every Sunday morning, the child of six was seen listening in rapt attention to the clergyman's endless sermon, for she was to be examined upon it in the afternoon. The Duchess was determined that her daughter, from ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... if he wasn't trying to make everybody he met with eat it. Hardy, on the contrary, would test his new idea, and turn it over, and prove it as far as he could, and try to get hold of the whole of it, and ruthlessly strip off any tinsel or rose-pink sentiment with which it might happen ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... curtain to rise, Mary Carew, in best attire of worn black dress and cheap straw hat, was putting the Angel into the absent fairy's cast-off shell, which consisted of much white tarlatan as to skirts and much silver tinsel as to waist, with a pair of wonderful gauzy wings at sight of which the ...
— The Angel of the Tenement • George Madden Martin
... Knox. It was not difficult for him to set aside this weak scruple of loyalty. The lantern of his analysis did not always shine with a very serviceable light; but he had the virtue, at least, to carry it into many places of fictitious holiness, and was not abashed by the tinsel divinity that hedged kings and queens from his contemporaries. And so he could put the proposition in the form already mentioned: there was Christ's Gospel persecuted in the two kingdoms by one anomalous power; plainly, then, the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... arrogance lays it open to every blow and every sarcasm, and corrodes even an originally noble-minded spirit. It is throughout, moreover, the distinguishing characteristic of such natures as that of Scipio—strange mixtures of genuine gold and glittering tinsel—that they need the good fortune and the brilliance of youth in order to exercise their charm, and, when this charm begins to fade, it is the charmer himself that is most painfully ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... a beautiful and edifying adornment for the drawing-room in times of Victorian self-satisfied peace, but was a tinsel armour for the battle of life, and entirely futile as a sword ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... gold, incomparably soft and bright, shining like a sun in the centre of this dark, smoky room. The old tools were arranged in the same lines as they had been for centuries—the punches, the awls, the mallets, and the hammers; on the work-frame the little donkey waste-basket and the tinsel, the thimbles and the needles, moved up and down as usual, while in the different corners, where they ended by growing rusty, the diligent, the hand spinning-wheel, and the reel for winding, seemed to sleep in the peaceful quiet which ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... hamely fare we dine, Wear hoddin gray, and a' that; Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine, A man's a man for a' that! For a' that, and a' that, Their tinsel show, and a' that, The honest man, though, e'er sae poor Is king o' men for ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... any other time, in any other temper, she knew, she must have been swept off her feet by its exciting appeal to her innate love of luxury and sensation. But the sad truth was, it all seemed to her unillusioned vision an elaborate sham built up of tinsel, paste, and paint; and the warmth of her welcome at the hands, indeed in the very arms, of Lady Randolph West, and the success her youth and beauty scored for her—commanding in all envy, admiration, cupidity, or jealousy, ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... blending there—the old man's and the boy's—and, with the nimbus of the smoke-wreaths round the brows, the gilding of the firelight on cheek and chin, and the rapt and far-off gazings of the eyes of both, why, but for the silver tinsel of the beard of one and the dusky elf-locks of the other, the faces seem almost ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... wardrobe contained, and she was bright and cheery and exceedingly incompetent. It was her costume that shocked him. Not only was she attired in a low-necked, rose-coloured evening gown, liberally bespangled with tinsel, but she wore a vast top-heavy picture-hat whose crown of black was almost wholly obscured by a gorgeous white feather that once must have adorned the king of all ostriches. She was not at all his idea of a chambermaid. He started to back out of the door with an apology for having blundered into ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... four, and were continued till ten o'clock in the evening; during which time I was a silent witness to a coolness and candor of argument unusual in the conflicts of political opinion; to a logical reasoning, and chaste eloquence, disfigured by no gaudy tinsel of rhetoric or declamation, and truly worthy of being placed in parallel with the finest dialogues of antiquity, as handed to us by Xenophon, by Plato, and Cicero. The result was, that the King should have a suspensive veto on the laws, that ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the parade ground in more than Solomonic splendor of uniform. His inflated form bore upon it all the blue and tinsel prescribed by the Army Regulations for the raiment and insignia of a First Lietenant of Infantry, with such additions as had been suggested by his exuberant fancy. His blue broadcloth was the finest and shiniest. Buttons and bugles seemed masses of barbric ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... and insolence! To all but heaven-directed hands denied, The Muse may give thee, but the gods must guide: Reverent I touch thee, but with honest zeal, To rouse the watchmen of the public weal, To Virtue's work provoke the tardy Hall And goad the prelate slumb'ring in his stall. Ye tinsel insects! whom a court maintains, That counts your beauties only by your stains, Spin all your cobwebs o'er the eye of day, The Muse's wing shall brush you all away. All his grace preaches, all his lordship sings, All that makes saints of queens, and ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... reminded him of some spinsters in his country who 'spin their thread so fine that it is neither fit for weft nor woof.' To such men, recognising only the culture of schools, a genius like Burns was a puzzle, easier dismissed than solved. Burns saw them, in all their tinsel of academic tradition, through ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... the modern world, without tinsel and pasteboard; since I conceived him in fire and bore him in agony; since—even the cream of this tart is sour—since I carried him to and fro in my pocket, as a young kangaroo is carried in the pouch of ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... is too often confounded with mere reputation. When a youth, he had learnt how to value that bubble reputation, its fleeting character, but the love of which, in some men, is so injurious both to head and heart. Reputation, "the morrow's meal," the "breakfast only," the furnisher of the tinsel ornaments, or at most of some of the worldly agreeables, sown perhaps for future worldly enjoyment. 'He' laboured for riches of another kind, and stored them, in the hope of receiving ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... reply, that, so a valuable consideration was passed for the bill, the law looketh not to its exact amount. It is also asserted by our client that, beyond actual coin given for the bill, he did further release to John Heminge certain tinsel crowns, swords, and apparel appurtenant to the representation of royalty, which had before then—to wit, two weeks before—been pledged to him for the sum of 8 shillings, borrowed by the ...
— Shakespeare's Insomnia, And the Causes Thereof • Franklin H. Head
... his ear. Notwithstanding this, the fellow was a great dandy, spending many hours each day in greasing and arranging his long coarse hair, which he ornamented with plates of silver, bits of gaudy-colored cloth, bright feathers, and tinsel. Every hair was scrupulously plucked from his brows and eyelashes, and the lids of his eyes were painted a bright vermilion, giving to his face the expression of a demon rather than ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... Their wardrobe too is of the very simplest description. When they play a piece in which kings and queens appear, they borrow the gold bespangled dresses of the rich Servian women of the district to serve them as royal mantles. All they require besides is a little tinsel, some spangles and some pasteboard—and there you are! The manager, as I have said, is still but a child, but so ingenious is he that he can make moonshine out of a yellow gourd and produce thunder and lightning,—but that is a professional secret. It is true they have only six pieces in all, and ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... dead, but in their name Humanity is sold to shame, While (then as now!) the tinsel'd priest Sitteth with robbers at the feast, Blesses the laden, blood-stained board, Weaves garlands round the butcher's sword, And poureth freely (now as then) The sacramental blood ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... as his word. As soon as luncheon was over, he mounted his horse and rode away, humming a tune. Kate stood on the steps, with the pale November sunlight gilding the delicate rose-bloom cheeks, and making an aureole round the tinsel hair watching him out of sight. Eeny was clinging round her as usual, and Grace stopped to speak to her on ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... hardness which stands for manliness; for him must be multiplied days of mental reorganization to change the will of a weakling into saving masterfulness; nor will these suffice unless, in the white heat of a moral revelation, the false tinsel woven into the fabric of his character be consumed. For months he must deny himself the luxuries, even many of the comforts, his mother's wealth is eager to give. Yet these weeks and months of development may never be, for in a short time he ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... His patron's lucubrations have taken the turn of many other memoirs, and have ceased to address themselves virginibus puerisque. On the whole, he declares they are a very odd mixture—a medley of gold and tinsel, of bad taste and good sense. I can readily understand it. The old man bores me, puzzles me, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... and yet humble, which divines so well the hidden thoughts and secrets of the heart, and brings them all into the sacred bondage of love to God and man, how good and delightful a thing it is! Everything in it is smooth, even well put together, well thought out, but no display, no tinsel, no worldly ornaments of style. The moralist forgets himself and in us appeals only to the conscience. He becomes a confessor, a friend, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... himself by taking down their conversation by some shorthand process of his own; and afterwards, when he read it over to them to see what they could make of it, they all burst out laughing. And, in truth, the tinsel jargon which circulates among the upper ranks in every country yields mighty little gold to the crucible when washed in the ashes of literature or philosophy. In every rank of society (some few Parisian salons excepted) the curious ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... and deep, mysterious gulfs of a crumbling and devastated civilization. And then, impatient of their intoxicating and tantalizing search, suddenly grown desperate, they clutched and stored away everything, and returned home tattered, soiled, bedecked with gold and with tinsel, laden with an immense uncouth burden of jewels, and broken wealth, and refuse and ordure, with pseudo-antique philosophy, with half-mediaeval Dantesque and Petrarchesque poetry, with Renaissance science, with humanistic pedantry ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... Nereus' wrinkled look, And the Carpathian wizard's hook, [Footnote: Proteus] By scaly Triton's winding shell, And old soothsaying Glaucus' spell, By Leucothea's lovely hands, And her son who rules the strands. By Thetis' tinsel-slippered feet, And the songs ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... trust a man implicitly, and another thing entirely to try to tell him so. For silence is most golden in the specification of friendship, and when employed in the particularizing of intimate emotion the silver of speech is apt to turn to veriest tinsel. ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... defence of the point in question. The entire room became attentive. Then, as he paused, the strident voice of a noted and irascible man proclaimed, "That's not democracy and not Jefferson—that doctrine, Mr. Rand. Veil her as you please in gauze and tinsel, you've got conquest by the hand. You may not think it, but you're preaching—what's the word ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... hoarse, and rather unwell, in consequence of the great quantity of lemon and sugar-candy he had eaten to improve his voice; and two flutes and a violoncello had pleaded severe colds. What of that? the audience were all coming. Everybody knew his part: the dresses were covered with tinsel and spangles; the white plumes looked beautiful; Mr. Evans had practised falling until he was bruised from head to foot and quite perfect; Iago was sure that, in the stabbing-scene, he should make 'a decided ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... on a dishcloth, and she turned upon the visitor, surveying her carefully from her rather worn shoes to the newer dress and gaudily flowered hat with its tinsel ornaments and flowing pink ribbons. She knew full well that her neighbor had come for the sole purpose of showing her finery, and was secretly gloating over her misfortune in having to remain behind, and yet she allowed ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... and love high society. The glory of entering the splendid portals of the real English dukes and duchesses seems to be ours when Disraeli throws open the magic door and ushers the reader in. The decorations do not seem tawdry, nor the tinsel other than real. We move with pleasurable excitement with Lothair from palace to castle, and thence to battle-field and scenes of dark intrigue. The hint of the love affair with the Olympian Theodora appeals to our romance; the circumventing of the wily Cardinal ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... State-churchism in every age; when I observe the degenerating effect which it has ever had on the purity and simplicity of the Gospel of Christ, turning men's minds from its great truths, as a religion of the heart, to the mere outward tinsel, to the forms and ceremonies on which priestcraft flourishes; when I see that at all times it has been made the instrument of the rich and powerful in oppressing the poor and weak, I cannot but reject it utterly ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... determined to take matters into his own hands, and he proceeded to issue a number of sumptuary laws which were far from mild. Food was regulated, minstrels were not allowed to sit at the same table with ladies and gentlemen, most rigid rules were formulated against the abuse of gold, silver, and tinsel trimmings on the dresses of the women, and of the men as well, and the use of ermine and of all fine and Costly furs was carefully restricted. In Castile the same movement was taking place, and Alfonso ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... and leave me comparatively without resources. I detest this man so thoroughly that I cannot hate him. I abhor him. It is you who must save me from him; it is you who must also save me my principality. Oh, they envy me, these poor people, because I am a Princess, because I dwell in the tinsel glitter of the court. Could they but know how I envy their lives, their homes, their humble ambitions! Believe me, monsieur, as yet I love no man; but that is no reason why I should link my life to that of a man to whom virtue in a woman ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... excited their derision, and now afforded fresh matter for their ridicule. The customs of Germany, the simple habiliments in which the retainers of the greatest houses were arrayed in that country, were contrasted with the tinsel and glitter in which the prelate pranked himself. It was proposed, by way of showing contempt for Granvelle, that a livery should be forthwith invented, as different as possible from his in general effect, and that all the gentlemen present should indiscriminately adopt it for their own ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... man to lead the life of a recluse of seventy. Here we are in the height of the London season, and I am sure you haven't been into ten houses, when a hundred of the very best are open to you—" I loathe the term "best houses." The tinsel ineptitude of them! For entertainment I really would sooner attend a mothers' meeting or listen to the serious British Drama—Have I read so and so's novel? Am I going to Mrs. Chose's dance? Do I ride ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... play, rustic and philosophic virtue is prettily rewarded by the possession of a beautiful heiress, while certain mercenary fops withdraw in signal discomfiture; and that Fielding, at one and twenty, had already passed judgment on that glittering 'tinsel' tribe, is clear enough from his portrait of the "empty gaudy nameless thing," Lord Formal. Lord Formal appears on the stage with a complexion much agitated by a day of business spent with "three milleners, two perfumers, my bookseller's ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... men of the South, on their side, had made little altars between two trees, decked with white cloths and adorned with tinsel ornaments and little crosses and small carved images carefully brought, like household gods, from the far home, and treasured only next to their arms. The thin, dark faces of the men were fervent with southern faith, and their wild black eyes ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... obtrudes again—tricked out as a Nautch girl in veils of purple, saffron, gold-tinsel, and grass-green. She postures shamelessly before the delighted tourists with woven skeins of homeward-flying pelicans, fringes of wild duck, black spotted on crimson, and cheap jewellery of opal clouds. 'Notice Me!' She cries, like any other worthless woman. 'Admire the ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... instincts become marvellously acute to detect the false from the true. Madame de Frontignac longed for one strong, unguarded, real, earnest word from the man who had stolen from her her whole being. She was beginning to feel in some dim wise what an untold treasure she was daily giving for tinsel and dross. She leaned back in the carriage, with a restless, burning cheek, and wondered why she was born to be so miserable. The thought of Mary's saintly face and tender eyes rose before her as the moon rises on the eyes of some ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... than between the rich fertility of the last epoch and the barrenness of the present one. The age of Tiberius forms an interval of silence during which the dead are buried, and the new generation prepares itself to appear. Under Nero it will have started forth in all its panoply of tinsel armour; at present the seeds that will produce it are being sown by ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... dancers pirouetting in the midst of a public they can more surely enchant from the distance of the stage. The costumes, so many of them, came from humble costumers who let them from year to year without renewal of the tinsel or freshening of the ribbons. But those very things gave to this page of life its depth of interest, ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... crushed, wrinkled and dirty, which had at first bedecked a lady of quality, then descended to her Abigail, and dazzled the inmates of the servants' hall. A tawdry scarf of yellow silk, trimmed with tinsel and spangles, which had seen as hard service, and boasted as honourable a transmission, was next flung over one shoulder, and fell across her person in the manner of a shoulder-belt, or baldrick. Madge then stripped off the coarse ordinary shoes, ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... liberty to him to pass them as he pleased. He knew many men who were separated from their wives, and who seemed to be as happy as their neighbours. And then he remembered how ugly Alexandrina had been this evening, wearing a great tinsel coronet full of false stones, with a cold in her head which had reddened her nose. There had, too, fallen upon her in these her married days a certain fixed dreary dowdiness. She certainly was very plain! So he said to himself, and then he went to bed. I myself ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... dream. Women were riddles which only they themselves could solve for others. For this one woman he was perfectly ready to throw everything aside. A man lived but once; and he was a fool who would hold to tinsel in preference to such happiness as he thought he saw opening out before him. Nora saw, but she did not care. That in order to reach another she was practising infinite cruelty on this man (whose one fault lay in that he loved her) did not appeal to her pity. But her arrow flew wide of the target; ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... out of the old church through a side door leading into a small green enclosure, now gloomy in the shade of the old stone walls. At one end was a tangle of briar, and here were some old graves, each with a tinsel wreath or two on the iron cross. And presiding over these was the limp figure of a one-legged man on two crutches, who saluted us. We passed along to the end of the inclosure, where lay a chance beam of sunshine like a bar of dusty gold against ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... seen the executrix and son-in-law, whom that great genius deceased, my well-beloved cousin in folly, King Corny, chose for himself. As to that thing, half mud, half tinsel, half Irish, half French, Miss, or Mademoiselle, O'Faley, that jointed doll, is—all but the eyes, which move of themselves in a very extraordinary way—a mere puppet, pulled by wires in the hands of another. The master showman, fully as extraordinary in his own way ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... aisle leading from the door between them. Lap-robes were hung over the windows, and soon a gorgeous figure of Santa Claus was smiling down from the very tiptop of the tree. With her flushed face, eager eyes, and golden hair the busy marquise looked like its patron saint. Ropes of gold and silver tinsel were swiftly draped around and up and down; enmeshed in these were little red Santas, gayly colored paper horns filled with candy, colored balls, white and yellow birds, little colored candles with ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... Bertram, indeed, had come to assume a vastly different aspect from what it had displayed in times past. Heretofore it had been a plaything which like a juggler's tinsel ball might be tossed from hand to hand at will. Now it was no plaything—no glittering bauble. It was something big and serious and splendid—because Billy lived in it; something that demanded all his powers to do, and be—because ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... they caught each day a deeper note in the hoarse complaints of those same men—a note no less ominous than was that newer, hoarser one of the swollen river—nevertheless were duly thankful that the leaden sky had at least a tinsel lining. It might ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... dancer of his realm. Such dancing as it was! such exquisite footing! In the upper story of the grand gallery at Versailles, hang several pictures representing these court ballets; Cupids in coatees of pink lustring, with silver lace and tinsel wings, wearing full-bottomed wigs and the riband of the St Esprit; or Venuses in hoops and powder, whose minauderies might afford a lesson to the divinities of our own day for the benefit of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... up in my face, wagged his tail feebly, and whined. I stooped again to caress him, and, so doing, observed that he had, tied round his neck, and half-hidden in his rough brown hair, a ribbon of silver tinsel, uncommon both in material and design. I felt assured that the dog's owner must be a woman, and hastily removed the ribbon, expecting to find embroidered upon it some such name as "Amelie" or "Leontine." But my examination proved futile, the silver ribbon afforded me no clue to the antecedents ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... children were looking about and commenting upon the taste displayed in their arrangement, the folding doors communicating with another parlor were suddenly thrown open, disclosing the grand achievement of the afternoon—the beautiful Christmas tree—tall, wide-spreading, glittering with lights and tinsel ornaments, gorgeous with gay colors, and every branch ...
— Elsie's New Relations • Martha Finley
... outside the audience was applauding wildly, and she, lowering her lance, and surrounded by ushers with huge bouquets, would step forward to the footlights and make her bow of acknowledgment, under a deluge of tinsel and flowers. One medallion bore the portrait of the venerable don Pedro of Brazil, the artist-emperor, who paid tribute to the singer in a greeting written in diamonds. Gem-incrusted frames of gold spoke of enthusiasts ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Themistocles did not secure him from the seductions of avarice and pride, which led him to sacrifice both his honor and his country for the tinsel of Eastern pomp," yet, as THIRLWALL says, "No Greek had then rendered services such as those of Themistocles to the common country; and no Athenian, except Solon, had conferred equal benefits on Athens. He ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... crown and regalia, studded with priceless jewels, which belonged to Hungary, he took with him, with great parade. Hungary had been deprived of these treasures, which were the pride of the nation, for seventy years. But the Protestant nobles were not to be cajoled with such tinsel. They remained firm in their demands, and refused to accept him as their sovereign until the promised toleration was granted. Their claims were very distinct and intelligible, demanding full toleration ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... see it," actors will often candidly admit. Although we in front sometimes see and hear things we should not, some peculiarity of our position blinds and deafens us too much. Our eyes are beguiled into accepting age for youth, shabbiness for finery, tinsel for splendour. Garrick frankly owned that he had once appeared upon the stage so inebriated as to be scarcely able to articulate, but "his friends endeavoured to stifle or cover this trespass with loud applause," and the majority of the audience did not perceive that anything ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... "Yes, I am the King. I am the miserable, gilded figurehead out on the prow, which serves no end and no purpose. I am the ornamental symbol of a system which the world is discarding! I am a medieval lay figure upon which to hang these tinsel decorations, ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... all its display, all its tinsel, all its Jesuitism, all its bad taste, San Sebastian will become an important, dignified city within a very few years. When that time comes, the author who has been born there, will not prefer to hail from some hamlet buried in the mountains, rather than from ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... to attempt that euphuistic, antithetical, and delicately conceited vein, whose proper fountain was in Whitehall." However, on went Loyalty, very well pleased with himself, and next, amid much cheering, two great tinsel fish, a salmon and a trout, symbolical of the wealth of Torridge, waddled along, by means of two human legs and a staff apiece, which protruded from the fishes' stomachs. They drew (or seemed to draw, for half the 'prentices in the town were shoving it behind, and cheering on the panting ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... bosom of the deep, with its plains, and hills, and forests, and rocks, and streams, and strange, new races of men;—these are incidents in which the authentic history of the discovery of our Continent excels the specious wonders of romance, as much as gold excels tinsel, or the sun in the heavens outshines ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... of the ever-delightful Miss Frillie Farrington at the Incandescent the other evening and had the joy of seeing her put on that sweet ickle f'ock she wears for the Jazz supper scene in Oh My! All the materials used are three yards of embroidered chiffon, six yards of tinsel fringe and six dozen tinsel tassels; and anything so completely swish and so ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... carnage, war; The pomp and tinsel of unrighteous power; Bloated oppression in its awful hour,— I, ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... do not ask, when back on Blighty's shore My frozen frame in liberty shall rest, For pleasure to beguile the hours in store With long-drawn revel or with antique jest. I do not ask to probe the tedious pomp And tinsel splendour of the last Revue; The Fox-trot's mysteries, the giddy Romp, And all such folly I would fain eschew. But, propt on cushions of my long desire, Deep-buried in the vastest of armchairs, Let me recline what time the roaring fire Consumes itself ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... went down town together after supper. Even Poketown showed some special light and life at this season. Dusty store windows were rejuvenated; candles, and trees, and tinsel, and wreathes blossomed all along High Street. Janice was proud to know that the brightest windows, and the most tastefully dressed, were Hopewell Drugg's. And in the middle of the biggest window of Drugg's store was a beautiful wax doll, which she and Miss 'Rill ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... she had veneration for titles. She considered them a tinsel, and the devotee on his knee-caps to them a lump for a kick. Adding: 'Of course I stand for my class; and if we can't have a manlier people—and it 's not likely in a country treating my brother so badly—well, then, let things go on as they are.' But it was the pretension to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... have lost that instinctive loathing for it which they may have once experienced. Thinking to gain a life of ease, with means to gratify their love of show, they barter away their peace of mind for this world, all hope for the next, and only gain a little worthless tinsel, the scorn of their fellow-creatures, and a host ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg |
