"Vamp" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he takes the trombone] The trumpet in Zion! [Cusins rushes to the drum, which he takes up and puts on. Undershaft continues, aloud] I will do my best. I could vamp a bass ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... sleeve; His waistcoat to a cassock grew, And both assumed a sable hue; But, being old, continued just As threadbare, and as full of dust. His talk was now of tithes and dues: He smoked his pipe, and read the news; Knew how to preach old sermons next, Vamp'd in the preface and the text; At christenings well could act his part, And had the service all by heart; Wish'd women might have children fast, And thought whose sow had farrow'd last; Against dissenters would repine, And stood ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... overheard in the theatre. Incledon, the singer, who had been in early life a sailor before the mast, in the royal navy, was notorious for his frequent loss of memory upon the stage. In his time the word "vamp" seems to have prevailed as the synonym of gag. A contemporary critic writes of him: "He could never vamp, to use a theatrical technical which implies the substitution of your own words and ideas when the author's are forgotten. Vamping requires some tact, if not ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... pore man—about happy I don't know. He was a good-natured old man, for all his sins, and would sooner any day lay out money in new presents than pay it in old debts. But 'tis altered now. 'Tisn't the same place. Ah, in the old times I have seen the floor of the servants' hall over the vamp of your boot in solid beer that we had poured aside from the horns because we couldn't see straight enough to pour it in. See? No, we couldn't see a hole in a ladder! And now, even at Christmas or Whitsuntide, ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... carefully polished and fitted, as all the shoes were, upon their trees, they looked neat enough. What caught my eye was a slight splitting of the leather in that part of the upper known as the vamp, a splitting at the point where the two laced parts of the shoe rise from the upper. It is at this point that the strain comes when a tight shoe of this sort is forced upon the foot, and it is usually guarded with a strong stitching across the bottom of the opening. In both ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... our own argument that Sir Richard states. "Short separate poems on cognate subjects" can certainly co-exist for long anywhere, but they cannot automatically and they cannot by aid of an editor become a long epic. Nobody can stitch and vamp them into a poem like the ILIAD or Odyssey. To produce a poem like either of these a great poetic genius must arise, and fuse the ancient materials, as Hephaestus fused copper and tin, and then cast the mass into a mould of his own making. A small poet may reduce the ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... too well, and have worn out my patience With studying to study your new publications. There's Vamp, Scamp, and Mouthy, and Wordswords and Co.[610] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... even pajamas and bedtime stories. No one will object to Nancy's private affair being made public, and it would be impossible to interest the theatre public in a more ingenious plot. Nancy is one of those smart, sophisticated society women who wants to win back her husband from a baby vamp. Just how this is accomplished makes for an exceptionally pleasant evening. Laying aside her horn-rimmed spectacles, she pretends indifference and affects a mysterious interest in other men. Nancy baits her rival with a bogus diamond ring, makes love to her former husband's best friend, and ...
— The Ghost of Jerry Bundler • W. W. Jacobs and Charles Rock
... softened again for an instant. "C'mon with me," he said. "Mildred Macy in the Spawn of Infamy's at the Nonpareil. Milly is some vamp ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... SELBY or new vamp up The tarnish'd cloak she came in. I have seen her Demand such service from thee, as her maid, Twice told to do it, would blush angry-red, And pack her few clothes up. Poor fool! fond slave! And yet my dearest Kate!—This day at least (It is our wedding-day) we spend in freedom, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... too, has a memorable rhythm; and its majestic harmonies, far from presenting those novel or curious problems in polyphony of which Wagner still stands suspected by superstitious people, are just those three simple chords which festive students who vamp accompaniments to comic songs "by ear" soon find sufficient for nearly all the popular tunes in ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw |
