"Cumbrous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... after strict inquiries into his conduct and under the exercise of judicial discretion. The accounts of assignees were also strictly investigated, and the costs of solicitors and other agents were taxed by officers of the court. But the system was found to be cumbrous, to lead to delay and too often to the absorption of a large part of the estate in costs, over the incurring of which there was a very ineffective control. Hence arose a demand for larger powers on the part of creditors, and the introduction into the bankruptcy procedure ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... legislation, the Commons unanimously determined to treat the offences which the Committee had brought to light as high crimes against the State, and to employ against a few cunning mercers in Nicholas Lane and the Old Jewry all the gorgeous and cumbrous machinery which ought to be reserved for the delinquencies of great Ministers and Judges. It was resolved, without a division, that several Frenchmen and one Englishman who had been deeply concerned in the contraband ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and Hydriotaphia; or, Urn Burial, 1658, a discourse upon rites of burial and incremation, suggested by some Roman funeral urns, dug up in Norfolk. Browne's style, though too highly Latinized, is a good example of Commonwealth prose, that stately, cumbrous, brocaded prose, which had something of the flow and measure of verse, rather than the quicker, colloquial movement of modern writing. Browne stood aloof from the disputes of his time, and in his very subjects there is a calm and meditative remoteness from the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... New York to one eighth; in North Carolina to one tenth. It was partly for this reason that in devising a national coinage the more uniform dollar was adopted as the unit. At the same time the decimal system of division was adopted instead of the cumbrous English system, and the result was our present admirably simple currency, which we owe to Gouverneur Morris, aided as to some points by Thomas Jefferson. During the period of the Confederation, the chaotic ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... the theory of the secret closet and return to the genuine ground of attack—the unsightliness of so cumbrous a pile, with comments upon the great addition of room to be gained by its demolition, and the fine effect of the projected grand hall, and the convenience resulting from the collateral running in one direction and another ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... and size, in London! Evidently the house was still shut up. The people who owned it were now living the same cumbrous, magnificent life in the country which they would soon come up to live in the capital. Honors, parks, money, birth—all were theirs, as naturally as the sun rose. Julie envied and hated the big house and all it stood for; ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the side of the place against which he had been leaning, drew himself up, and applied his eyes to one of the cracks, just as a voice seemed to be calling out in the Malay tongue at three of the great cumbrous-looking beasts which were about a couple of ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... naturally enough to the faults of husbands. Now, although we are inclined to think that these are greatly exaggerated, and that married men are, on the whole, very good—excellent men and citizens, brave men, battling with the world and its difficulties, and carrying forward the cumbrous machine in its path of progress and civilization—although we think that, as a class, their merits are actually not fully appreciated, and that the bachelors (sly fellows!) get very much the best of it—still, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... spread his neckcloth, spotless, enveloping, cumbrous, reverence-compelling, a cravat worthy of a Moderator. And indeed the Doctor—our Doctor, parish minister of Eden Valley, had "passed the Chair" of the General Assembly. We were all proud of the fact, even top-lofty Cameronians ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... We must own ourselves under the law first, own our bodies, our earnings, our genius, and our consciences; then we will turn to the lesser matter of what shall be the garniture of the body. Was the old Roman less a man in his cumbrous toga, than Washington in his tights? Was Christ less a Christ in His vesture, woven without a seam, than He would have been in the suit of a ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... artist. Upon the walls hung a few pictures of female saints, bedecked with garlands of flowers, which showed them to be objects of devotion and respect in the eyes of the possessor. Among all this confusion, space was scarcely left, in the small chamber of the artist, for the pallet-bed and cumbrous press that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... Liverpool, and settle in that town. The sloop commanded by Newton was found defective in the stern port; and, as it would take some little time to repair her, Newton had obtained leave for a few days to accompany his father on his journey. The trunk picked up at sea, being too cumbrous, was deposited with the articles of least value, in the charge of Mr Dragwell; the remainder was taken away by Newton, until he could find a more secure place for their deposit. On their arrival at Liverpool, with little money ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... tortures, so that the Inquisitor who, for whatever reason, accompanied the victim into the torture chamber, was thereby rendered irregular, and could not exercise his office again, until he had obtained the necessary dispensation. The tribunals complained of this cumbrous mode of administration, and declared that it hindered them from properly interrogating the accused. Every effort was made to have the prohibition against clerics being present in the torture chamber ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... of an advanced KRIYA YOGI is influenced, not by effects of past actions, but solely by directions from the soul. The devotee thus avoids the slow, evolutionary monitors of egoistic actions, good and bad, of common life, cumbrous and snail-like to the ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... out of office, and one unfavourable to him came in. The Hon. Malcolm Cameron, a hostile member of the cabinet—although he afterwards became a personal friend of Dr. Ryerson—having concocted a singularly crude and cumbrous school bill, aimed to oust Dr. Ryerson from office, it was (as was afterwards explained) taken on trust, and, without examination or discussion, passed into a law. Dr. Ryerson at once called the attention of the Government ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... essays by Johnson in the Spectator vein, issued in 1750-52, but written in that "stiff and cumbrous style which," as Professor Saintsbury remarks, "has been rather unjustly identified with Johnson's manner ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... removed, the judicial and diplomatic charges being transferred on the accession of William IV.] The royal household was a gigantic nest of costly jobbery and purposeless profusion. It retained all "the cumbrous charge of a Gothic establishment," though all its usage and accommodation had "shrunk into the polished littleness of modern elegance." The outlay was enormous. The expenditure on the court tables only was a thing unfathomable. Waste was the rule in every ...
— Burke • John Morley
... Cherish the tulip, prune the vine, But freely let the woodbine twine, And leave untrimm'd the eglantine: Nay, my friend, nay,—since oft thy praise Hath given fresh vigour to my lays; Since oft thy judgment could refine My flatten'd thought or cumbrous line, Still kind, as is thy wont, attend, And in the ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... of March, Napoleon had been at Compiegne, denouncing the cumbrous machinery of etiquette which was retarding the happy moment when he should at last see his new wife and enfold her in his arms. He had had the castle repaired and richly furnished, that it might be worthy to receive a daughter of the Caesars. ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... the half-dozen negresses employed in the work moved with alacrity and precision. But what with beating carpets, scrubbing floors, and turning things topsy-turvy in general, the task was not accomplished with any considerable despatch. A man is a cumbrous article at house-cleaning time, as any housewife will aver, and Mr. Grundy, recognizing this fact, betook himself to the neighboring Little Beach River to fish, and let "the boss" tear up things to her heart's content. His request that I should accompany him was almost a warning, ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... That makes her loved at home, revered abroad: Princes and lords are but the breath of kings; "An honest man's the noblest work of God:"{24} And certes, in fair virtue's heavenly road, The cottage leaves the palace far behind; What is a lordling's pomp?—a cumbrous load, Disguising oft the wretch of human kind, Studied in arts of ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... Titianesque look in this particular. This innovation was a healthy one, and led to very noble results when followed up by succeeding artists: but in many of Giotto's compositions the figures become ludicrously cumbrous, from the exceeding simplicity of the terminal lines, and massiveness of unbroken form. The manner was copied in illuminated manuscripts with great disadvantage, as it was unfavourable to minute ornamentation. The French never adopted it in either branch of art, nor did any other ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... An inscription at Killeen Cormac, Co. Kildare, survives which seems to show that the Roman alphabet was known in Ireland in pagan times. Ogam is an alphabet suitable enough for chiselling upon stones, but too cumbrous for the purposes of literature. For this the Roman alphabet must have been used. The Ogam script consists of a number of short lines straight or slanting, and drawn either below, above, or through one long stem-line. This stem-line ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... troops, who are under the immediate command of the Commander-in-Chief, the Prince of Orange. The English volunteers being the next to the Prince's regiment of Guards, followed close upon the main body of the army, and behind them trailed the long, cumbrous baggage train. The rear-guard, together with some details of various kinds and nations, consisted of the Spanish division, which was commanded by Prince Vaudemont. As they came to higher ground Claverhouse began to see the lie of the country, ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... demonstrate to the Philippine people that one of its ends is to combat with a firm hand the inveterate vices of the Spanish administration, substituting for personal luxury and that pompous ostentation which have made it a mere matter of routine, cumbrous and slow in its movements, another administration more modest, simple and prompt in performing the public service: I ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... remain longest, though not perhaps finally, sacred from the grasp of a tyrannical government. But let there be a demand for capital to support a profitable commerce, and the mass is at once consigned to the furnace, and, ceasing to be a vain and cumbrous ornament of the banquet, becomes a potent and active agent for furthering the ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... carried down with them the essential morality they contained, which still exists, uncontaminated by the sloughs of superstition. And all that there is of justice, kindness and beauty embodied in our cumbrous forms will live perennially, when the forms themselves have been ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... and ready to perform any more pleasing duties they might be required; they were however so ugly, that not much self-denial was required in declining their offers. They were dressed in red, with abundance of cumbrous silver ornaments, and dirty leggings; one was ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... fire, I see Eight sorry carts, no less a train! 835 Unworthy successors of thee, Come straggling through the wind and rain: And oft, as they pass slowly on, Beneath my windows, [69] one by one, See, perched upon the naked height 840 The summit of a cumbrous freight, A single traveller—and there Another; then perhaps a pair— The lame, the sickly, and the old; Men, women, heartless with the cold; 845 And babes in wet and starveling plight; Which once, [70] be weather as it might, Had still a nest within a nest, Thy shelter—and their ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... giving a less imperfect impression of his powers as a critic than any other piece that could have been chosen The truth is that, great in talk and supreme in poetry, Coleridge was lost directly he sat down to express himself in prose His style is apt to be cumbrous, and his matter involved. We feel that the critic himself was greater than any criticism recorded either in his writings or his lectures The present extract may be defined as an attempt, and an attempt less inadequate than was common with ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... posts; and whilst the cumbrous screw was descending slowly into the water, the stokers had roused the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... by the farmer and the trader as fit only "for women in childbed," were now in general use. Carpets superseded the filthy flooring of rushes. The loftier houses of the wealthier merchants, their parapeted fronts and costly wainscoting, their cumbrous but elaborate beds, their carved staircases, their quaintly-figured gables, not only contrasted with the squalor which had till then characterized English towns, but marked the rise of a new middle class which was to play its part ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... again of what is called intellectual life, the life of thought. It is "of the Father," indeed. We picture to ourselves the pure joy of God in thought. Free from so many of our cumbrous processes, free from the limitations of slow-moving time, free from all imperfection, with an instantaneous thought as is His being, the intellect that is the center of all reason revolves in its unfathomed ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... elegance or simplicity is wanting in the intercourse of society, for all that is cumbrous in its proceedings, for any bad taste, and much for any coarseness that it tolerates, woman, as European manners are constituted, is exclusively responsible. The habits of daily intercourse represent her faults and virtues as naturally as a shadow is cast by the sun, or the image ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... recalls "Men and Women" rather than the "Fifines," the "Hohenstiel-Schwangaus," and the "Red Cotton Nightcap Countries" of a later and less happily-inspired period. "Ferishtah's Fancies and Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day" was the rather cumbrous title of a still later volume; and last of all appeared "Asolando," a work which displays all the old qualities, the old fire, and the old audacity, apparently untouched by advancing years, or even by imminent death. He died the same month that ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... state in which we are forced to present his observations, clearly shews the inherent vices of the Mogul government, through which it so rapidly fell into anarchy, and was torn in pieces by its own cumbrous and ill-managed strength. Perhaps the archives of the East India Company are still able to supply this deficiency in the history of its original establishment; and it were surely worthy of the more than princely grandeur of that great ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... While discarding the cumbrous ceremonial of the Roman Church, on the ground that it was not only overloaded with superfluous ornament, but too fatally disfigured by irrational, superstitious, or impious observances to be susceptible of correction or adaptation to the wants of their infant congregations, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... ear-rings must not be so weighty as to tear the lobes of the ears; nor should a bracelet prevent, by its size, the motions of the arm. "Barbaric pomp and gold" is a fine thing; but a medallion, as heavy and as cumbrous as a shield, appended to a lady's bosom, would be any thing but a luxury. So, in the other extreme, a watch should not be so small as to render the dial-plate illegible; nor should a shoe be so tight as ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... Avenel with many of the attributes of the undines, or water-sprites. German romance and lyrical poetry teem with allusions to sylphs, gnomes, undines, and salamanders; and the French have not been behind in substituting them, in works of fiction, for the more cumbrous mythology of Greece and Rome. The sylphs, more especially, have been the favourites of the bards, and have become so familiar to the popular mind as to be, in a manner, confounded with that other race of ideal beings, the fairies, who can boast of an antiquity much ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... that all the spears and javelins did not fall ineffectual, as when thrown on the same level, (as is generally the case,) but being steadied by their own weight they took effect; and the Gauls weighed down by the weapons, with which they had their bodies transfixed, or their shields rendered too cumbrous by those sticking in them. When they advanced almost up the steep at a run, becoming irresolute, they at first halted; then when the very delay shook the courage of the one party, and raised that of the enemy, being then pushed backwards they fell one upon the other, and produced a ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... Adventures of Roderick Random" (the cumbrous full titles of earlier fiction are for apparent reasons frequently curtailed in the present treatment), published when the author was twenty-seven, he avails himself of a residence of some years in Jamaica to depict life in that quarter of the world at a time when the local color had the charm ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... my feet ran down a crystall spring Which did the cumbrous pebbles hoarsly chide For standing in the way. Though murmuring The broken stream his course did rightly guide And strongly pressing forward with disdain The ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... (Plate 74, Figs. 2 and 3) are thick, heavy, cumbrous weapons, made out of the wood used for making wooden dishes. The outer surfaces are convex, and the inner ones concave, the natural convexity of the circular trunk of the tree from which they are made being retained. These shields are 4 1/2 to 5 feet long, and usually about 15 or ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... emotion,—fluid humanity. Out of this arise his forms, as Venus arose out of the sea, and as man is daily built up out of the liquids of the body. We cannot taste, much less assimilate, a solid until it becomes a liquid; and your great idea, your sermon or moral, lies upon your poem a dead, cumbrous mass unless there is adequate heat and solvent, emotional power. Herein I think Wordsworth's "Excursion" fails as a poem. It has too much solid matter. It is an over-freighted bark that does not ride the waves buoyantly and lifelike; far less so than ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... with tarnished tooling and faded gilding on the sun-scorched backs. What are they? old editions of classics, old volumes of controversial divinity, folios of the Fathers, topographical treatises, cumbrous philosophers, pamphlets from which, like dry ashes, the heat of the fire that warmed them once has fled. Take one down: it is an agreeable sight enough; there is a gentle scent of antiquity; the bumpy page crackles faintly; the ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... that are found at full length either in the text or footnotes are omitted here. Many more might have been added, but it is thought best to omit them because of their cumbrous titles, their scant interest to the average reader, and their inaccessibility, being found only in the largest libraries or among rare Americana. For similar reasons, works strictly theological in character are also not listed. Any sizable library ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... essentially modern, Dorothy decided, while she was dressing, to have all the furniture taken out into the back yard, where she could look it over at her leisure. She would make a bonfire of most of it, or, better yet, have it cut into wood for the fireplace. Thus Uncle Ebeneezer's cumbrous bequest might ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... began boat-building, preparatory to resuming their journey. The batteau was too cumbrous for use toward the head waters of the Missouri, and it was to be sent back to St. Louis. To take its place, canoes were fashioned from green cottonwood planks. Cottonwood lumber is full of whims and caprices,—bending, twisting, cracking like brown paper, ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... began. The Frari had taken their position on the right, under the elaborate hanging tomb of Fra Pacifico—a mass of sculpture, rococo, and gilding; the incense rising from the censer swinging below the coffin of the saint carried the eye insensibly upward to the grotesque canopy, where cumbrous marble clouds were compacted of dense masses of saints' and cherubs' heads with uncompromising ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... May. Far down the Beautiful River, Past the Ohio shore and past the mouth of the Wabash, Into the golden stream of the broad and swift Mississippi, Floated a cumbrous boat, that was rowed by Acadian boatmen. It was a band of exiles: a raft, as it were, from the shipwrecked Nation, scattered along the coast, now floating together, Bound by the bonds of a common belief and a common misfortune; Men and women and children, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... of drawing this cumbrous and unmanageable body into an ambuscade. He selected, accordingly, the narrowest and most dangerous part of the defile for the purpose, and stationed vast numbers of Norman soldiers, armed with javelins and arrows, upon the slopes of the hill on either side, concealing ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... immediate problem. He was groping for her hands. When he found them she was glad that she had her gloves on. They were chaperoned, too, as it were, by their heavy wraps. She was fairly lost in her furs and he in a burly overcoat, so that when in a kind of frenzy he thrust one cumbrous arm about her the insulation was complete. He might as well have been embracing the ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... by insisting on retaining certain duplicated formularies which the Committee had very properly dropped in order to find room for fresh material. But of the Book as first presented, it was possible to say that in no degree was it more cumbrous than that to which the people were already accustomed. Doubtless it would have been still more to the Committee's credit could they have brought in an enriched Book smaller by a third than the Book in use; but this ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... having a suit of armour well made." "What do you take that to be?" said Pistias. "I think," answered Socrates, "a suit of armour that is well made does not load the bearer so much as one ill made, even though it weigh as much. For ill-made arms, by pressing too much upon the shoulders, or hanging cumbrous on some other part, become almost insupportable, and greatly incommode the person that weareth them. But those arms which, as they ought, distribute an equal weight to all the parts of the body, that join upon ...
— The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates • Xenophon
... dramatic instinct, almost universal among young people, and which has almost no chance to exercise itself, except in the performance of the farces to which we are treated in "private theatricals." Can it not be put to a better use? It would be a cumbrous matter to represent or listen to the Aulularia, or the Miles Gloriosus, or the [Greek: Eirhene], in which Dr. Dee and his Scarabeus figured so successfully. The world is turned away from that[1]; but here is the magnificent wealth ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... to poetry. Women seem to me to possess just what our literature wants—a light touch, a delicate hand, a graceful mode of treatment, and an unstudied felicity of phrase. We want some one who will do for our prose what Madame de Sevigne did for the prose of France. George Eliot's style was far too cumbrous, and Charlotte Bronte's too exaggerated. However, one must not forget that amongst the women of England there have been some charming letter-writers, and certainly no book can be more delightful reading than Mrs. Ross's Three Generations of English Women, which ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... chin was embedded in a red comforter that rose to his ears. His trunk was first of all cased in a shirt of worsted stocking—net; over this he had a coarse linen shirt, then a thick cloth waistcoat; a shag jacket was the next layer, and over that was rigged the large cumbrous pea jacket, reaching to his knees. As for his lower spars, the rig was still more peculiar;—first of all, he had on a pair of most comfortable woollen stockings, what we call fleecy hosiery—and the beauties are peculiarly nice in this respect—then ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... dim I hear A thin voice pipingly revived of late, Which saith our India is a cumbrous weight, An idle decoration, bought too dear. The wiser world contemns not gorgeous gear; Just pride is no mean factor in a State; The sense of greatness keeps a nation great; And mighty they who mighty can appear. It may be that if hands of greed could steal From England's ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... produces more the impression of a great church. It has without so modest a measurability, represents so clean and compact a mass, that you are startled when you cross the threshold at the apparent space it encloses. An architect of genius, for all that he works with colossal blocks and cumbrous pillars, is certainly the most cunning of conjurors. The front of the Duomo is a small pyramidal screen, covered with delicate carvings and chasings, distributed over a series of short columns upholding narrow arches. It might be a sought imitation of goldsmith's ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... before the opening of the session, a "general proclamation" was read in the great hall of Westminster, that hall built by William Rufus, the woodwork of which was replaced by Richard II., and that has been lately cleared of its cumbrous additions.[684] This proclamation forbids each and all to come to the place where Parliament sits, "armed with hoquetons, armor, swords, and long knives or other sorts of weapons;" for such serious troubles have been the result of this wearing of arms that business has been impeded, and ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... broad-brimmed white beaver hat, such as may be seen in Sir Joshua Reynolds' paintings. She rode a sleek white pony, and was followed by a footman in rich livery, mounted on an over-fed hunter. At a little distance in the rear came an ancient cumbrous chariot, drawn by two very corpulent horses, driven by as corpulent a coachman, beside whom sat a page dressed in a fanciful green livery. Inside of the chariot was a starched prim personage, with a look somewhat between a lady's ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... the tenant of a large cumbrous carriage, which, drawn heavily on by four stout horses wended slowly on the King's Highway, not very far from the spot where the wooden gates that we have described raised their white faces by the side of ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... Stoneyhurst, he imbibed from refugee professors French idioms and a French standard of taste, while, strangely enough, O'Connell, to whom he was at first opposed, and of whom he became afterwards the first lieutenant, educated in France by British refugees, acquired the cumbrous English style of the Douay Bible and the Rheims Testament. The contrast between the two men was every way extreme; physically, mentally, and politically; but it is pleasant to know that their differences never degenerated ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... burial-ground with his men, and jumped upon the spot, which immediately gave out the soft notes as before. Africaner ordered an immediate exhumation, when the source of the mystery proved to be the pianoforte of the missionary's wife, which, being too cumbrous an article to take away, had been buried there, with the hope of being one day able to recover it. Never having seen such an instrument before, Africaner had it dissected for the sake of the brass wires; and ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... and left them to breed conviction. If they gave them entrance and cherished them, they would soon find how full of primary truth they were, and how well they would serve them, as they had served him. With all this heavy artillery, somewhat slow and cumbrous, on great questions, he had no want, when he was speaking off-hand, of quick, snell remark, often witty and full of spirit, and often too unexpected, like lightning—flashing, smiting, and gone. In Church ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... help one; and the cheap reproductions of the writings of the earlier centuries, erring, as they do, on the side of indulgence, place it in the power of individuals of modest means to have at their elbows a representative assemblage, not necessarily a cumbrous one, of the literature from Chaucer to the present day, so that they may form a comparative estimate of the intellectual activity and wealth of successive ages, while, at the same time, the Greek and Latin authors are procurable in a collective shape, if they desire to compare notes ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... space to reproduce, testify to the heroism, religious zeal, and literary industry of the women who helped to build up the early civilization of New England. Their writings, for some presumed on authorship, are quaint and cumbrous; but in those days, when few men published books, it required marked courage for women to appear in print at all. They imitated the style popular among men, and received much attention for their literary ability. Charles T. Congdon, as the result of his explorations through ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... these cumbrous gauds, These veils oppress me! What officious hand Has tied these knots, and gather'd o'er my brow These clustering coils? How all conspires to add To ...
— Phaedra • Jean Baptiste Racine
... wreaths were placed. Ney's had just received its tribute of a beautiful garland of blue cornflowers: and the other a Chaplet of Honeysuckle. By both graves were weeping willows. Mr. Sotheby's friend, the poet Delille,[125] sleeps beneath a cumbrous mass of marble, within which his wife immerses herself once a week, to manifest sorrow for one whose incessant tormentor I am told she was during his life. The inscriptions were for the most part commonplace. I copied out a few of ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... Though Superstition and her wolfish brood Bay his mild radiance, impotent and fell; Calm in his halls of brightness he shall dwell! 5 For lo! RELIGION at his strong behest Starts with mild anger from the Papal spell, And flings to Earth her tinsel-glittering vest, Her mitred State and cumbrous Pomp unholy; And JUSTICE wakes to bid th' Oppressor wail 10 Insulting aye the wrongs of patient Folly; And from her dark retreat by Wisdom won Meek NATURE slowly lifts her matron veil To smile with fondness on ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... not permit. A moment of satisfaction in a striking picture is accorded, and no more. For this London, this England, Europe, world, but especially this London, is rather a thing for hospital operations than for poetic rhapsody; in aspect, too, streaked scarlet and pock-pitted under the most cumbrous of jewelled tiaras; a Titanic work of long-tolerated pygmies; of whom the leaders, until sorely discomforted in body and doubtful in soul, will give gold and labour, will impose restrictions upon activity, to maintain a conservatism of diseases. Mind is absent, or ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... or tenth of July, in the afternoon; and the day being very sultry, the heat had oppressed me with langour, and I was all day as one laden with sleep. But no sooner had Mrs Aird told me this, than I felt the langour depart from me, as if a cumbrous cloak had been taken away, and I rose up a recruited and reanimated man. It was so much the end of my debility of body and sorrowing of mind, that she was loquacious with her surprise when she saw me, as it were, with a miraculous restoration, prepare myself to ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... of a few odd steps, diverging from the main staircase nearly opposite to Mrs Clennam's door. It could scarcely be said to be within call, the walls, doors, and panelling of the old place were so cumbrous; but it was within easy reach, in any undress, at any hour of the night, in any temperature. At the head of the bed and within a foot of Mrs Flintwinch's ear, was a bell, the line of which hung ready to Mrs Clennam's hand. Whenever this bell rang, up started Affery, and was ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... examine its beautiful structure; observe the intelligent play of the minute members which compose it: yet this little creature is but a development of the cumbrous clocks that preceded it; it is no deterioration from them. A day may come when clocks, which certainly at the present time are not diminishing in bulk, will be superseded owing to the universal use of watches, in which case they will become as extinct as ichthyosauri, while the watch, ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... coinage. All silver that comes to their net is considered good fish. The standard coin is the Spanish dollar, but one will find every variety of European and American money in circulation among them. The method of clipping and weighing the small change might be thought somewhat cumbrous in European markets, for the dollar is cut up into eight sikajy, (each about sixpence); the sikajy into nine eranambatra, and each eranambatra into ten vary-venty, each of which last is about the weight of a plump grain of rice. ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... be too thankful to the Arabs their inventors) have made it. It is difficult to imagine how any thing like a long sum in multiplication or division could have been done with the Roman numerals, so cumbrous were they. The number, for instance, which we represent by the figures 89 would require for its expression no less than nine figures, LXXXVIIII. The boy was helped by using the fingers, the left hand being used to signify numbers below a hundred, and the right numbers above it. Sometimes his ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... Loud snores the cumbrous Poustiakoff With better half as cumbersome; Gvozdine, Bouyanoff, Petoushkoff And Flianoff, somewhat indisposed, On chairs in the saloon reposed, Whilst on the floor Monsieur Triquet In jersey and in nightcap lay. In Olga's and Tattiana's rooms Lay all ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... object of attraction to all strangers, but more so from the novelty and singularity of its construction than from its beauty. Utility rather than elegance was consulted by the builder. This far-famed structure is ugly and cumbrous, and a passenger feels a very unpleasing sensation if he happens to stand upon it when a loaded waggon drives along it at low water, at which time there is a considerable descent from the side of the suburbs. An undulatory motion is then occasioned, which goes on gradually ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... legislative work on drainage should be to revise and consolidate the law. On some points the law is duplicate, and on one triplicate. It is generally demanded that the law shall be less cumbrous and more summary. This can be done to some extent when it shall be found that the courts favor drainage. So far they have had a very tender feeling for complaints. When drainage shall be acknowledged to be lawful, laudable, and ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... Indeed, we at the West, particularly, need a good, cheap, steam plow that can be made practicable for at least the better grade of farmers. The English plan of moldboards, that overcome all possible traction and necessitate the duplex stationary engines, with the cumbrous "artillery of attachments," may do for sluggish people but will never meet the wants of the ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... twelve-year-old boy; and she carried, first, a baby; second, three salmon, each of which weighed not less than twenty pounds; third, a wild goose, weighing six or eight pounds; finally, a huge bundle of some kind of greens. This cumbrous and heavy load the Indian had lashed together with strong thongs, and the squaw carried it on her back, suspended by a strap which ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... matters. But the peculiar position of those others—perpendicularly overhead at a vast distance—necessitates a troublesome code of verbal signals, unintelligible to common folk, for the expression of mutual desires. You cannot have any god of this kind without some such cumbrous contrivance to bridge over the gulf and make communication possible. It is called theology. It complicates life very considerably. Yes," he pursued, "the vertical-god system is not only vulgar; it is perplexing and expensive. Think of the wastage, of the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... wars. And because I knew Waldron's word is ever less than his deed, and, belike, that I grow weary of sieges (seven have I withstood within these latter years) I, at dead of night, by devious and secret ways, stole forth of Thrasfordham—dight in this armour new-fashioned (the which, mark me! is more cumbrous than fair link-mail) howbeit, I got me clear, and my lord Beltane, here stand I to aid and abet thee in all thy desperate affrays, henceforth. Aha! methinks shall be great doings within the ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... all sides when required, but were otherwise open to the weather, and much encumbered with lading; but all things being in readiness, on the 3rd of June we took to the water, and, a photograph of the scene having been taken, shoved off from the Landing. The boats were furnished with long, cumbrous sweeps, yet not a whit too heavy, since numbers of them snapped with the vigorous strokes of the rowers during the trip. A small sweep, passed through a ring at the stern, served as a rudder, by far the best steering gear for the "sturgeons," ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... completely replaced the wet cell in this country, and as a result, the general type of wall set as shown in Figs. 142 and 143, has gradually replaced the old wet-cell type, which was more cumbrous and unsightly. It is usual on wall sets to provide some sort of a shelf, as indicated in Fig. 142, for the convenience of the user in ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... engines stopped. The mass of water that swayed the junk like a cork lifted the great ship high by the stern. The propeller began to revolve in air—for the third officer had corrected his signal to "full speed ahead" again—and the cumbrous Chinese vessel struck the Sirdar a terrible blow in the counter, smashing off the screw close to the thrust-block and wrenching ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... upon a wooden frame supported by four pairs of wheels, which had been constructed for its reception. A barrel of water, placed on another frame upon wheels, was attached to it as a tender. After a great deal of labour, the cumbrous machine was got upon the road. At first it would not move an inch. Its maker, Tommy Waters, became impatient, and at length enraged, and taking hold of the lever of the safety valve, declared in his desperation, that "either ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... best traditions both of Roman and barbarian government, could not have obtained general recognition, as part of the natural order of things, unless it had grown up by degrees, unless it had been the outcome of older usages and institutions. A form of social organisation so cumbrous and so dangerous could hardly have survived for centuries unless it had solved difficulties of unusual urgency and magnitude. Let us then consider, in their historical order, the antecedents of feudalism and the reasons of state by ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... (1887) the Fort Scott management made careful selection of essential parts of the processes already used, omitted non-essential and cumbrous processes, availed themselves of all the experience of the past in this country, and secured a fresh infusion of experience from the beet sugar factories of Germany, and attained the success which finally places sorghum ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... insignificant in the sphere of the ideal and of the beautiful. In Art and Literature the influence of Germany has been purely superficial, although the beautiful Russian language has often been spoiled by the influence of a cumbrous German syntax. With the exception of Nietzsche, no German writer has left his mark on Russian literature. The literary influence of Great Britain has been much more extensive, and has grown enormously during the last generation. But it is the ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... abnormal, which is the main factor; it is the isolation in a homogeneous field, not the intrinsic value of the thing, which determines the marvelous phenomenon. Perhaps within countless thousands of chaotic perceptions the gem had existed, stored up amidst a multitude of useless and cumbrous objects, and had never succeeded in arresting attention; meanwhile inertia continued to allow new objects to penetrate continually within the distended and impotent walls. After a discovery, many will perceive that ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... past work and his future wife. Its orthography was impeccable, though its method was somewhat todious, for the Author had to run through the alphabet to provoke the sprite into tapping at any particular letter. But one soon grew reconciled to its cumbrous methods, as though holding converse with a foreigner; and its remarks made up in emphasis what they lacked in brevity, and were given with exemplary promptitude. Interrogated as to its own personality, it declared it was an unborn spirit, destined to be born ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... darkest periods of our republic to show the superiority of the English Constitution. If we have a Prime Minister who does not suit Parliament and the people, he argued, we remove him by a simple vote of the House of Commons. The United States can only get rid of its undesirable executive by a cumbrous and tedious process which can only be brought to bear during a period of revolutionary excitement; and even this failed because a legal case was not made against the President. The criticism was pregnant, but the remedy was not Cabinet responsibility. Whatever may be the ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... Queensland Premier, that the marking of preferences should be made compulsory. As explained in the course of the New Zealand debates, part of the alleged failure of the Queensland system was due to the unnecessarily cumbrous nature of the regulations. The Queensland Electoral Acts still retain the old method of voting—that of striking out from the ballot paper the names of such candidates as the elector does not intend ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... conditions would not obtain which have effected so singular an interference with the general laws of survival. Yet I admit that there may very well be places where an expert human climber may reach the summit, and yet a cumbrous and heavy animal be unable to descend. It is certain that there is a point where an ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... springless wagon over the rough roads seemingly very severe. But the inmates seem used to their discomforts, and sit placidly and contentedly on their uneasy seats, apparently proud of their turn-out and the effect they are producing. These cumbrous vehicles are much affected by the elder ladies of the sultan's court, who constitute the Faubourg-Saint-Germain portion of society. True old-school Turks these, who look down with scorn on the new fashions, both in costume and carriage, stolen or ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... villain to his lord. Villanage, in the reign of Henry VIII., had practically ceased. The name of it last appears upon the statute book in the early years of the reign of Richard II., when the disputes between villains and their liege lords on their relative rights had furnished matter for cumbrous lawsuits, and by general consent the relation had merged of itself into a more liberal form. Thus serfdom had merged or was rapidly merging into free servitude; but it did not so merge that labouring men, if they pleased, were allowed to live in ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... fast to Whitburn, but one summer's day a tall, gallant, fair-faced esquire, in full armour of the cumbrous plate fashion, rode up to the gate, and blew the family ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... be produced. There were meetings, and an engagement, which would finally secure the girl's affections from turning towards anyone else. But the deception could not be kept up forever. These pretended journeys to France were rather cumbrous. The thing to do was clearly to bring the business to an end in such a dramatic manner that it would leave a permanent impression upon the young lady's mind and prevent her from looking upon any other ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... spirit of his age, in so far as he did not, like young David, decline Saul's armor and enter into combat with Philistinism, wielding his sling and stone of native force alone. Yet that native force was so vigorous that, in spite of the panoply of prejudice he wore, in spite of the cumbrous armor lent him by authority, he moved at times with superb freedom. In those rare intervals of personal inspiration he dictated the love-tales of Erminia and Armida, the death-scene of Clorinda, the pastoral of Aminta and Silvia—episodes ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... common sense, can be preserved, I would rigidly adhere to it, if it were only for antiquity's sake; but, surely, it would be far more rational for judges to wear false beards, because formerly Bacon and Coke did not shave their chins, than it is for a magistrate to appear on the bench with a cumbrous, hot, and inconvenient cloud of powdered flax, or whatever may be the material on his poll, because our ancestors, a century or two since, were so silly as to violate nature in ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... spot, as a protection against pirates, which was repeatedly demolished, rebuilt, altered, and enlarged, till it was levelled to the ground in 1732, and a new palace erected, but was destroyed by fire in 1784. It was rebuilt, in its present cumbrous proportions, in 1828. The visitors entered the large court-yard, passed through the picture gallery, the "Hall of the Knights," the throne-room, looked into the riding-school,—which is a large, oblong room, with an earth floor, where the royal family may practise ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic |
