"Fustian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a rather bent old man in rustic dress, and the skin of his face was wrinkled like that of an apple; corduroy trousers were caught up with a string below the knee, and he wore a sort of brown fustian jacket that was very much faded. His thin hand rested upon a stoutish stick. He wore no hat and carried none, and I noticed that his head, covered with silvery hair, was finely shaped and gave ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... their thick, straight dark hair and blue-grey eyes from the country to the town. They are forsaking the plough and the roadside school for the warehouse and the pestle and mortar. It is not openly reported of such that they would rather wear a black coat and starve than wear fustian and do well, to quote Thomas Hardy, but the stress of things drives them. The rural communities are dull; amusements are lacking; there seems nothing to live for outside work. Nature poets and wild-animal delineators are not among these set, earnest, ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... former position, at the ale-house which they had just quitted. The second personage whom we shall introduce was not of a corresponding height with the other: he was broad, square-chested, and short-dressed in knee-breeches, leggings, and laced boots—his coat being of a thick fustian, and cut short like a shooting-jacket: his profession was that of ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... boys peeled and climbed into their blankets. And there they all lay, wide-awake but silent, for an hour or two, some watching Circuit curiously, some enviously, others staring fixedly into the dying fire until from its dull-glowing embers there rose for some visions of bare-footed, nut-brown, fustian-clad maids, and for others the finer lines of silk and lace draped figures, now long since passed forever out of their lives. Those longest awake were privileged to witness Circuit's final offering at the shrine ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... if I abandon my right, which they have transmitted to me? My first enterprise; and to be given up lightly?'"—With more of the like sort; which Friedrich, in writing of it long after, seems rather ashamed of; and would fain consider to have been mock fustian, provoked by the real fustian of Sir Thomas Robinson, "who negotiated in a wordy high-droning way, as if he were speaking in Parliament," says Friedrich (a Friedrich not taken with that style of eloquence, and hoping he rather quizzed it than was serious with it, [OEuvres de Frederic, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... need of today was 11l., having several expenses to meet besides those of house-keeping, which amounted to 4l. for today. This sum the Lord gave me thus: last evening I received 1l. together with a pair of trousers and gaiters, and a remnant of fustian for the Orphans. But as I knew how much there would be needed today, I waited further upon the Lord this morning for help, and, in ONE MINUTE, after I had risen from my knees, I received a letter from Liverpool with 10l. for ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, Fourth Part • George Mueller
... a deal to her, you see; he had been the one man she trusted. She had gloried in his fustian rhetoric, his glib artlessness, his airy scorn of money; and now all this proved mere pinchbeck. On a sudden, too, there woke in some bycorner of her heart a queasy realisation of how near she had come to loving Kennaston. The ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... where, to my horrible embarrassment, I was made to strip stark naked, and was inspected by an elderly gentleman in a pince-nez, with half a dozen uninterested people looking on, amongst them two or three louts in fustian who were awaiting their turn. I was put into a variety of postures, all of which I felt to be ridiculous and humiliating; and when this ordeal was over there came the swearing-in and a visit to the depot canteen, where I received ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... appear before the Almighty at the sound of the trump of the Last Judgment, with the book of his Confessions in his hand, and there to issue a challenge to the whole human race, 'Let a single one assert to Thee if he dare: "I am better than that man."'" Rousseau would have been saved from this fustian virtue, Professor Babbitt thinks, if he had accepted either the classic or the religious view of life: for the classic view imposes on human nature the discipline of decorum, while the religious view imposes the discipline of humility. Human nature, he holds, requires the restrictions of the everlasting ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Here persons in fustian who claimed to be connected with the steamship line in a pseudo-official capacity sought to relieve me of a part of my baggage, but despite all such assurances of good faith I declined their proffered aid. For how many travellers—thus I inwardly reasoned—how many travellers in times ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... he has not, but he is sunk very low, drinks hard to drown his sorrow, and is ashamed to be seen. No wonder. You'd scarce know 'im, Phil, workin' like a coal-heaver, in a suit of dirty fustian, about the wharves—tryin' to keep out of sight. I've come across 'im once or twice, but pretended not to recognise 'im. Now, Phil," added little Pax, with deep earnestness in his face, as he laid his hand impressively on his friend's ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... much deceived if this be not abominable fustian, that is, thoughts and words ill-sorted, and without the least relation to each other; yet I dare not answer for an audience, that they would not clap it on the stage: so little value there is to be given to the common cry, that nothing but madness can please madmen, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... Doctor Fustian, quoth a? mass, Doctor Lopus[143] was never such a doctor: has given me a purgation, has purged me of forty dollars; I shall never see them more. But yet, like an ass as I was, I would not be ruled by him, ...
— The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... dog, and examining the prize, when I heard a crackling among the low bushes near me; and on looking up, perceived, about twenty paces distant, a short, thick-set man, whose fustian jacket and leathern gaiters at once pronounced him the gamekeeper; he stood leaning upon his gun, quietly awaiting, as it seemed, for any movement on my part, before he interfered. With one glance I detected how matters stood, ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... who has walked forth upon the industrial world, not from universities, but from hovels; not as clad in silks and decked with honours, but as clad in fustian and grimed with soot and ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... admired Home's "Douglas," and "The Regicide" was so often altered to meet objections, that we can scarcely criticise it. Of course it is absolutely unhistorical; of course it is empty of character, and replete with fustian, and ineffably tedious; but perhaps it is not much worse than other luckier tragedies of the age. Naturally a lover calls his wounded lady "the bleeding fair." ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... Fustian and taffeta were less costly, but frequently used in important work, as also were sarcenet and camora. Velvet and satin were of later date, not occurring until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Baudekin, a good silk and golden ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... certified; reared in a school of noble cadets, he has no noble or monarchical traditions.[1122]—Poor and tormented by ambition, a reader of Rousseau, patronized by Raynal, and tacking together sentences of philosophic fustian about equality, if he speaks the jargon of the day, it is without any belief in it. The phrases in vogue form a decent, academical drapery for his ideas, or serve him as a red cap for the club; he is not bewildered by democratic illusions, and entertains ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... talk of our Holy Scriptures as if they understood them perfectly. The impostor they follow has nothing but fustian and rodomontade in his impudent lying book from beginning to end. I know it, Filippo, from those who have contrasted it, page by page, paragraph by paragraph, and have given the ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... our trapper had stumbled thus suddenly might have been styled the wild man of any region—west, north, east, or south,—with perfect propriety. On his legs were a pair of dark grey fustian trousers, which had seen so much service that, from the knee downwards, they were torn into shreds. His feet were covered by a pair of moccasins. Instead of the usual hunting-shirt he wore one of the yellow deerskin coats of a Blackfoot chief, which was richly ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... is Here, our best haymaker (forgive me this, It is our country's style) in this warm shine I lie, and dream of your full Mermaid wine. Oh, we have water mix'd with claret lees, Brink apt to bring in drier heresies Than beer, good only for the sonnet's strain, With fustian metaphors to stuff the brain, So mix'd, that, given to the thirstiest one, 'Twill not prove alms, unless he have the stone. I think, with one draught man's invention fades: Two cups had quite spoil'd Homer's Iliades. 'Tis liquor that will find out Sutcliff's wit, Lie where he ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... fidelity. Report affirmed that he loved more than one pretty girl under the rose. Squire Nicholas was not particular as to the quality or make of his clothes, provided they wore well and protected him against the weather, and was generally to be seen in doublet and hose of stout fustian, which had seen some service, with a broad-leaved hat, originally green, but of late bleached to a much lighter colour; but he was clad on this particular occasion in ash-coloured habiliments fresh from ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... you have lost your senses. Bits of veritable Shakspearean gold, burnished star-bright, embossed in pewter! Diamonds set in dirt! Sentences illuminated with words of power, suddenly rising and sinking, through a flare of fustian! Here ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... fine cloth of Ypre and Curtike, fine cloth of all colours, fustian, linen cloth; for which ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... articles is countless: cloth, as fine as a spider's web, and coarse fustian, here finest batiste, and there, strong drill for overalls. Each finished article requires its own particular raw material, low qualities cannot produce fine goods, and it is also impossible to utilise high qualities for low grade goods. The very arbitrary law for economic ...
— Bremen Cotton Exchange - 1872/1922 • Andreas Wilhelm Cramer
... incurring the censure of a mere English critic. Nothing that belongs to Homer seems to have been more commonly mistaken than the just pitch of his style: some of his translators having swelled into fustian in a proud confidence of the sublime; others sunk into flatness, in a cold and timorous notion of simplicity. Methinks I see these different followers of Homer, some sweating and straining after him by ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... drab with a green collar, Mr. Wake's in blue, also a lad in scarlet and a flat hat, with a second horse for the huntsman. Drawing still nearer came the ruck—men in red, men in brown, men in livery, a farmer or two in fustian, all mingled together; and a few hundred yards before these, and close upon his lordship, were the elite of the field—five men in scarlet and one in black. Let us see who they are. By the powers, Mr. Sponge is first!—Sponge sailing away at his ease, ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... of an adventurer, he one day chanced to be at the ordinary, when the company was surprised by the entrance of such a figure as had never appeared before in that place. This was no other than a person habited in the exact uniform of an English jockey. His leathern cap, cut bob, fustian frock, flannel waistcoat, buff breeches, hunting-boots and whip, were sufficient of themselves to furnish out a phenomenon for the admiration of all Paris. But these peculiarities were rendered still more conspicuous ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... bearded, comely of personage, well spoken after his country of Scotland, courteous, lowly, lovely, glad to teach, desirous to learn, and was well travelled; having on him for his habit or clothing never but a mantle or frieze gown to the shoes, a black Millian [i.e. Milan] fustian doublet, and plain black hosen, coarse new canvas for his shirts, and white falling bands and cuffs at his hands,—all the which apparel he gave to the poor, some weekly, some monthly, some quarterly, as he liked, saving his French cap, which he kept the whole year of my being with him.... ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... slim, dark young man, whose quiet attire and modest manner would scarce proclaim him to be the most noted prince in Europe. A jupon of dark blue cloth, tagged with buckles and pendants of gold, seemed but a sombre and plain attire amidst the wealth of silk and ermine and gilt tissue of fustian with which he was surrounded. He sat with his two hands clasped round his knee, his head slightly bent, and an expression of impatience and of trouble upon his clear, well-chiselled features. Behind the thrones there stood two men in purple gowns, with ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... M. Doctor, your commodities are rare; a guard of Urinals in the morning; a plaguie fellow at midnight; a fustie Potticarie ever at hand with his fustian drugges, attending your ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... man, is 't not? To get the dirt and transpiration off one! 'S death! What a climate! 'Twixt the sun and osnaburg and fustian my skin feels as if I'd been triced up and ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... were to be seen in all parts of the house; in the boxes and stalls particularly, they were composed of persons of very decent appearance, who had many children with them. Among our dresses there were most kinds of shabby and greasy wear, and much fustian and corduroy that was neither sound nor fragrant. The caps of our young men were mostly of a limp character, and we who wore them, slouched, high-shouldered, into our places with our hands in our pockets, ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... sought expression in the excitement, of grotesque actions and brilliant costumes. The Morris dancers executed their curious movements, clad in "gilt leather and silver paper, and sometimes in coats of white spangled fustian,"[46] or in "greene, yellow, or some other light wanton collour," bedecked with "scarfs, ribbons and laces hanged all over with golde ringes, precious stones and other jewells," and "aboute either legge twentie ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... his cheek and lip was deeper, while his features, though larger than hers, were more finely regular, and his eyes had the same piercing blackness, the same all-examining keenness, as hers. The yellowish tones of his worn fustian suit and a red Tam-o'-Shanter cap completed the general effect of brilliancy and, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... from his seat by the grimy table, and Gigi followed his example with a sigh of disappointment. They were moderate men, and hardly ever drank more than their litre of their wine. Toto smelt of mortar and his fustian clothes and hairy arms were generally splashed with it. Gigi smelt of glue and sawdust, and there were plentiful marks of his calling on his shiny old cloth trousers and his coarse linen shirt. Toto's face was square, stony and impenetrable; ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... that we have no use for the distorted and mystical figure that they present as Christ, a conservative member of the Property Defence League, a thing neither man nor woman, but a third sex—not understood of us except as a rightful object of suspicion; we have no use for this rant, cant and fustian of his holiness and immaculate qualities. That presentation has always been repellent to us and always will be, no matter how much he may be proclaimed as the friend of the workingman.... Christ, the democrat, the agitator, the revolutionary, ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... revolution as morals. The pieces which were best calculated to form and refine the minds of the people, all abound with maxims of loyalty, with respect for religion, and the subordinations of civil society. These are all prohibited; and are replaced by fustian declamations, tending to promote anarchy and discord —by vulgar and immoral farces, and insidious and flattering panegyrics on the vices of low life. No drama can succeed that is not supported by the faction; and this support is to be procured only by vilifying the Throne, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... picturesque, equally romantic, equally passionate; but more than that, real, actual, modern, a thing in the very heart of the very life in which she moved. And here he sat, this Jadwin, quiet, in evening dress, listening good-naturedly to this beautiful music, for which he did not care, to this rant and fustian, watching quietly all this posing and attitudinising. How small and petty it must all ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... marked for ever with the trace of ripples, two old men were sitting with their backs to me. One, a rather stout and tall man in a neat dark-green coat and lined cap, was fishing; the other was thin and little; he wore a patched fustian coat and no cap; he held a little pot full of worms on his knees, and sometimes lifted his hand up to his grizzled little head, as though he wanted to protect it from the sun. I looked at him more attentively, and recognised in him Styopushka of Shumihino. I must ask the reader's leave ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... waterside, when Tartarin came home from hunting on Sunday evenings, with his cap on the muzzle of his gun, and his fustian shooting-jacket belted in tightly, the sturdy river-lightermen would respectfully bob, and blinking towards the huge biceps swelling out his arms, would mutter among one another ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... warm in fustian as a king in velvet, and a truth is as comfortable in homely language as in fine speech. As to the way of dishing up the meat, hungry men leave that to the cook, only let the meat be sweet ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... Select Collection of English Songs, was his vade mecum. He pored over them, driving his cart or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse, carefully noting the true, tender, or sublime from affectation or fustian. 'I am convinced,' he adds, 'I owe to this practice much of my critic craft, such as ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... to make a way of doing by swindling folks at fairs by the game of the garter. Indeed, it was stupid of me not to recognise their faces at first sight, having observed both of them loitering about our back bounds the afternoon before; and one of them, the tall one with the red head and fustian jacket, having been in my shop in the fore part of the night, about the gloaming like, asking me as a favour for a yard or two ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... no more than a stutter. He was an extremely little man, dressed in the Sunday garb of a civilian—fustian breeches, moleskin waistcoat, and a frock of blue broadcloth, very shiny at the seams. His hat had fallen off in the struggle, and his eyes, timorous as a hare's, seemed to plead for mercy while ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... a bit of Beaconsfieldian fustian," said Sidney laughing, yet astonished. "One would think you were anxious to assert yourself against the ancient peerage ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... troop for Sir Walter's on a sudden thought; and his fisherman's costume—a brown hat with flexible brim, surrounded with line upon line, and innumerable fly-hooks, jack-boots worthy of a Dutch smuggler, and a fustian surtout dabbled with the blood of salmon,—made a fine contrast with the smart jackets, white cord breeches, and well-polished jockey-boots of the less distinguished cavaliers about him. Dr. Wollaston was ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... given to ready-made clothes, and other furnishings, for seamen, by Maydman, in 1691. In Chaucer's time, sloppe meant a sort of breeches. In a MS. account of the wardrobe of Queen Elizabeth, is an order to John Fortescue for the delivery of some Naples fustian for "Sloppe for Jack Greene, ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... from Austin Paris of Philadelphia, Founder, on the 22do this Instant, A Negro Boy called Bedford or Ducko, aged about Sixteen or Seventeen Years; SPEAKS VERY GOOD ENGLISH wears a dark brown colored Coat and Jacket, a Pair of white Fustian Breeches, a grey mill'd Cap with a red Border, a Pair of new Yarn Stockings, with a Pair of brown worsted under them, or in his Pockets. Whoever brings him to his said Master, or informs him of him so that he may be secured, shall ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning amongst them was brought, that this was it which had dampt the glory of Italian wits, that nothing had been written there now these many years but flattery and fustian." Milton was introduced at the meetings of their academies; his presence is recorded on two occasions, of which the latest is the 16th September at the Svogliati. He paid his scot by reciting from memory some of his youthful Latin verses, hexameters, "molto erudite," says the minute-book ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... caution in it, as in that of one who mentally feels his way; and despite the fact that it was not a black coat nor a dark garment of any sort that he wore, there was something about him which suggested that he naturally belonged to the black-coated tribes of men. His clothes were of fustian, and his boots hobnailed, yet in his progress he showed not the mud-accustomed bearing of ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... hard-bound brains, eight lines a year; 180 He, who still wanting, tho' he lives on theft, Steals much, spends little, yet has nothing left: And He, who now to sense, now nonsense leaning, Means not, but blunders round about a meaning: And He, whose fustian's so sublimely bad, 185 It is not Poetry, but prose run mad: All these, my modest Satire bade translate, And own'd that nine such Poets made a Tate. How did they fume, and stamp, and roar, and chafe! And swear, not ADDISON himself was ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... the word, when a brawny Porter in a fustian jacket, with his knot slung across his shoulder, manifested dislike to the manner in which the Irish ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... contrast in the bowed master of the Mansion applying to his menials for a day's work at the rate of pay to able-bodied men:—which he is not, but the deception is not disingenuous. The contrast flashed with the rapid exchange of two prizefighters in a ring, very popularly. The fustian suit and string below the knee, on the one side, and the purple plush breeches and twinkling airy calves (fascinating his attention as he makes his humble request to his own, these domestic knights) to right and left of the doorway and in front, hit straight out of the canvas. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a quarter of an hour or so, a heavy-looking young man, in fustian clothes and last year's linen, came into the room, and was introduced as the communal schoolmaster. We shook hands with much impressment on the strength of the similarity of our professions, and the maire explained that the new arrival acted also as his secretary, for there was really so much ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... sash tilted a trifle towards the remote heavens. I bent my head, and entered by the open door. Near the threshold Nilushka was lying on a narrow chest against the wall. The folds of a dark-red pillow of fustian under the head set off to perfection the pale blue tint of his round, innocent face under its corona of golden curls; and though the eyes were closed, and the lips pressed tightly together, he still ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... People. They recite in a timid and indistinct tone the prescribed fustian. They are followed by CLAUDE, PAULINE, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various
... ordinary rate of speech In loftiness of sound was rich; A Babylonish dialect, Which learned pedants much affect. It was a parti-colour'd dress 95 Of patch'd and pie-bald languages; 'Twas English cut on Greek and Latin, Like fustian heretofore on satin; It had an odd promiscuous tone, As if h' had talk'd three parts in one; 100 Which made some think, when he did gabble, Th' had heard three labourers of Babel; Or CERBERUS himself pronounce A leash of languages at once. This he as volubly would ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... vast deal: the more he writes, the sooner will the Veal be done with. But if a man write very little, the bombast is not blown off; and it may remain till advanced years. It seems as if a certain quantity of fustian must be blown off before you reach the good material. I have heard a mercantile man of fifty read a paper he had written on a social subject. He had written very little save business letters all his life. And I assure you that his paper was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... among the womankind hoop-petticoats are not; but the men have doublets of fustian, under which lie multiple ruffs of cloth, pasted together with batter (mit Teig zusammengekleistert), which create protuberance enough. Thus do the two sexes vie with each other in the art of Decoration; and as usual ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... add, there is no touch of sentimentality. No man could be less the romantic, blubbering over the sorrows of his own Werthers. No novelist could have smaller likeness to the brummagem emotion-squeezers of the Kipling type, with their playhouse fustian and their naive ethical cocksureness. The thing that sets off Conrad from these facile fellows, and from the shallow pseudo-realists who so often coalesce with them and become indistinguishable ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... arrived at the port to which she was bound, and after she was moored and everything made trim, running gear coiled round the belaying pins, every bight being regular and equal, sails stowed in a cloth, and yards laid perfectly square, the sailors then proceeded to arrange themselves in spotless white fustian trousers and blue jerseys adorned in front with their names or initials worked in red or white worsted. The latter article of apparel was usually knit by their wives if they were married, or their intended wives if they were not, and in either case there ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... soon as he graduated, he was taken into his father's counting-house, to do small drudgery on a proportionate salary. For three years he earned his living as regularly as the obscure functionary in fustian who swept the office. Mr. Mallet was consistent, but the perfection of his consistency was known only on his death. He left but a third of his property to his son, and devoted the remainder to various public institutions ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... some purely formal business and a pompous final chorus? "Fidelio" exists by reason of that one tremendous scene: there is nothing else dramatic in it: however fine the music is, one cannot forget that the libretto is fustian and superfluous nonsense. Had Beethoven possessed the slightest genius for opera, had he possessed anything like Mozart's dramatic instinct (and of course his own determination to touch nothing but fitting subjects), he would have felt that no meaner story than the "Flying Dutchman" would ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... stationer complains they are seldom asked for in his shop. The poet who flourished in the scene is damned in the ruelle; nay, more, he is not esteemed a good poet by those who see and hear his extravagances with delight. They are a sort of stately fustian and lofty childishness. Nothing but nature can give a sincere pleasure; where that is not imitated, it is grotesque painting; the fine woman ends ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... eminent man towards those from whom he disagreed, he will not even allow that he had any 'patrons'[516] who have adorned the doctrine of Christ. 'His language is barbarous, unscriptural, and unintelligible.' 'It is most sublime nonsense, inimitable bombast, fustian not to be paralleled.' Bishop Warburton also refers to him in the most unqualified[517] terms of contempt. William Blake, most mystical of poets and painters, delighted, as might well be expected, in Behmen's writings.[518] A ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... the kennels. The same feeder in corduroy and fustian came out of the cooking-house when Vixen opened the five-barred gate. The same groom was lounging in front of the stables, where the horses were kept for the huntsman and his underlings. The whole place had the same slumberous out-of-season look she remembered so well of old in the ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... romantically conveyed. Reality is but the beginning, the raw material, of art; and it is by the artist's aid and countenance that we are used to make acquaintance with our fellows, be they generals in cocked hats or mechanics in fustian. Now Jefferies was not an artist, and so beside his stoats and hares, his pike, his rabbits, and his moles, his men and women are of little moment. You seem to have heard of them and to far better purpose from others; you have had their author's facts presented elsewhere, and that ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... formed the whole of my reading. The collection of songs was my vade mecum. I pored over them, driving my cart, or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse; carefully noting the true tender, or sublime, from affectation and fustian. I am convinced I owe to this practice much of my ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... said; but had he been born with a knowledge of Greek, he never, probably, would have been guilty of his chief literary faults. This is not certain, for some modern men of letters deeply read in Greek have all the qualities of fustian and effusiveness which Longinus most despised. Greek will not make a luxuriously Asiatic mind Hellenic, it is certain; but it may, at least, help to restrain effusive and rhetorical gabble. Our Asiatic rhetoricians ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... his master to put on an old fustian shooting jacket, which he took down from a peg in the passage; and Squeers, arming himself with his cane, led the way across a yard to a door in the rear of ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... to do. Your paterfamilias, in pre-telegraph days, used to hammer out a few solid opinions of his own on matters political and otherwise. He no longer employs his brain for that purpose. He need only open his morning paper and in it pours—the oracle of the press, that manufactory of synthetic fustian, whose main object consists in accustoming humanity to attach importance to the wrong things. It furnishes him with opinions ready made, overnight, by some Fleet Street hack at so much a column, after ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... would have seemed frightful in the condition she was in, for all the dress she had on was a scanty old petticoat, with a night jacket of plain fustian, and turned back at the top of her head a yellow cap, which let her hair fall in disorder on her shoulders; and yet dressed even thus she shone with a thousand attractions, and all her person ...
— The Impostures of Scapin • Moliere
... "Fustian" Clove's quotation may apply to references to the Pythagorean doctrine of the transmigration of souls in Shakespeare's earlier plays and other Elizabethan literature; and little can be based upon the "Et tu, Brute" quotation, as Ben Jonson ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... commonly both the ground and threeds in sunder, and after by crafty sleeking, they make the same fustians to appear to the common people fine, whole, and sound: and also they raise up the cotton of such fustians, and then take a light candle and set it in the fustian burning, which sindgeth and burneth away the cotton of the same fustian from the one end to the other down to the hard threeds, in stead of shering, and after that put them in colour, and so subtilly dress them that their false work cannot be espied without it be by workmen sherers ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... this exceeding fine; the treacle of coarse compliment sweetened it to her lips. Some would have laughed at such fustian. Mrs. Hanway-Harley was none of these; the compliment she laughed at must emanate from someone not a Count. None the less, she could see that something was at the back of it all. There was Storri's sigh as though a heart had broken. Had Storri made some soft advance, ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... came down the street westwards, walking not with an air of haste, but of one whose time was too valuable to be thrown away. He was rather shorter and younger than the first, and was very differently attired. He wore a fustian doublet, without either lace or embroidery; a pair of unstuffed cloth hose, dark worsted stockings, shoes with narrow toes and plain shoe-strings of black ribbon; a flat cap; cloth gloves, unadorned and unscented, and a cloak of black cloth, ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... pompously up and down and delivering commands to this and that and the other constable or jailer, and calling them Grand Chamberlain, and Prince This and Prince That, and Admiral of the Fleet, Field Marshal in Command, and all such fustian, and was as happy as a bird. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... had lent an ear was Dairyman Jinks, an old gnarled character who wore a white fustian coat and yellow leggings; the only man in the room who never dressed up in dark clothes for marketing. He now asked, 'Married abroad, was they? And how long will a wedding abroad stand ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... tunics, hussar jackets, infantry shell-jackets, cavalry stable-jackets, foresters' boots, dragoon jack-boots, stage piratical boots with wide tops to fit the thigh that drooped about the ankles,—trousers of every sort, from blue broadcloth, gold-striped, to the homely fustian,—and a rare show they made. They went fours right or fours left with a fine military jangle, and sometimes went fours right and fours left at the same time, with results disastrous to military order. Then it was good to see and hear the fat Dorn as he caracoled in a field-marshal's uniform, ...
— Schwartz: A History - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... you of the incident of the coat, the unfortunate coat which I sometimes think makes the rich folks visiting the hall look sidewise at me. It is strange! Am I not myself, whether clad in velvet or in fustian—in homespun fabric, or in cloth of gold? People say I am simple—wholly ignorant of the world; I ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... the wardrobe of both sexes, and cotton has taken their place. Shirts are made of bleached or coloured cotton goods; the dresses of the women are chiefly of cotton print goods, and woollen petticoats are rarely to be seen on the washline. The men wear chiefly trousers of fustian or other heavy cotton goods, and jackets or coats of the same. Fustian has become the proverbial costume of the working-men, who are called "fustian jackets," and call themselves so in contrast to the gentlemen who wear broadcloth, which latter ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... pretty ready with the tongue, and rarely came off second best when his opponents dragged him into a controversy, although his arguments were called by them, when he was not present, "mere fustian." ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur
... of the war, but that we catch little French ships like crawfish. They have taken one of ours with Governor Lyttelton(609) going to South Carolina. He is a very worthy young man, but so stiffened with Sir George's old fustian, that I am persuaded he is at this minute in the citadel of ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... with buttons on the cuffs, First Modern Pride your ear with fustian stuffs; 'Welcome, blest age, by holy seers foretold, By ancient bards proclaimed the age ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... corduroy or velveteen, was originally woven at Fustat on the Nile. The warp was stout linen, the woof of cotton so twilled and cut that it gave a low thick pile. Chaucer's knight in the fourteenth century wore fustian. In the fifteenth century Naples was famous ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... who would walk level with his fellows. He rushed to the labours of his toilette, performed severe ablutions, endued his best shirt—coarse, but sweet from the fresh breezes of Glashgar, a pair of trousers of buff-coloured fustian stamped over with a black pattern, an olive-green waistcoat, a blue tailcoat with lappets behind, and a pair of well-polished shoes, the soles of which in honour of Sunday were studded with small instead of large knobs of iron, set a tall beaver hat, which no brushing would make smooth, ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... we know much evil of him, and we could expose many of his tricks effectually. We also hate Dean Swift, and upon what we think substantial arguments. Some of our own contemporaries we hate particularly; Cobbett, for instance, and other bad fellows in fustian and corduroys. But for that very reason we will not write their lives. Or, if we should do so, only because they might happen to stand as individuals in a series, and after warning the reader of our own bias. For it is ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... composition, which she repeated verbatim three times before she would credit the evidence of her own senses. She began to fear in good earnest that love had produced a disorder in her lover's understanding; but after a thousand conjectures by which she attempted to account for this extraordinary fustian of style, she concluded that it was the effect of mere levity, calculated to ridicule the passion he had formerly professed. Irritated by this supposition, she resolved to balk his triumph with affected indifference, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... chest, through which appeared the rich furs and satins with which it was lined.... The ordinary material of the surcoat for the rich was cloth, either scarlet, blue, or reddish brown, or two or more of these colours mixed together; and for the poor, linsey-woolsey or fustian. The nobles, princes, or barons, when holding a court, wore surcoats of a colour to match their arms, which were embroidered upon them, but the lesser nobles who frequented the houses of the great spoke of themselves ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... kingdom for a soda and brandy. Bah! ye gods! What a smell of fish and fustian," signed Bertie, with a yawn of utter famine for want of something to drink and something to smoke, were it only a glass of brown sherry and a little papelito, while he glanced down at the snow-white and jet-black masterpieces of Rake's genius, ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... with what he calls fine cloaths, that is the frippery of the fashion. It is no wonder that the heart of a female, unimproved by reason, and untinctured with natural good sense, should flutter at the sight of such a gaudy thing, among the number of her admirers: this impression is enforced by fustian compliments, which her own vanity interprets in a literal sense, and still more confirmed by the assiduous attention of the gallant, who, indeed, has nothing else to mind. A Frenchman in consequence of his mingling with the females from his infancy, ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... put on an old fustian shooting-jacket, which he took down from a peg in the passage; and Squeers, arming himself with his cane, led the way across a yard, to a door in the ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... read of this conspiracy. The old stage-coachman was a farmer's friend. He wore top-boots, understood cattle, fed his horses upon corn, and had a lively personal interest in malt. The engine-driver's garb, and sympathies, and tastes belong to the factory. His fustian dress, besmeared with coal-dust and begrimed with soot; his oily hands, his dirty face, his knowledge of machinery; all point him out as one devoted to the manufacturing interest. Fire and smoke, and ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... And of his port as meek as is a maid. He never yet no villainy ne said In all his life, unto no manner wight. He was a very perfect gentle knight. But for to telle you of his array, His horse was good, but yet he was not gay. Of fustian he weared a gipon*, *short doublet Alle *besmotter'd with his habergeon,* *soiled by his coat of mail.* For he was late y-come from his voyage, And wente for to ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... tippling Englishman; he never went out till he was half-seas over. He wore black cloth gaiters up to his knees, and padded to make his legs look stouter; his trousers were lined with the thickest fustian; his waistcoat was buttoned up to his cheeks; a red scratch wig hid half his forehead, and he had added nearly three inches to his height; in short, the oldest frequenter of the Cafe David could not have recognized him. From his squarecut coat of black cloth with full skirts he might ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... dominate a multitude that never heard any sound short of thunder and never felt anything till it was hit with a club. The bulk of Forrest's great fortune was gained by him with Metamora, which is rant and fustian. He himself despised it and deeply despised and energetically cursed the public that forced him to act in it. Forrest's best powers, indeed, were never really appreciated by the average mind of his fervent admirers. He lived in a rough period and he had to use a hard method to subdue and ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... now arrived at the passage. The gin-shop was flaring through the fog. A man in a fustian jacket came out of it, and walked slowly down before us, with the clay of the brick-field clinging to him as high as the leather straps with which his trousers were confined, garter-wise, under the knee. The place was ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... theology. There were three battles of men. In black with red hats, horns branching above them and in the centre a great devil with a triple tiara, who danced holding up an enormous key. These stood on the right. On the left were priests in fustian, holding enormous flagons of Rhenish wine and dancing in a drunken measure with their arms round more drunken doxies dressed like German women. In the centre stood grave and reverend men wearing horsehair beards and the long gowns of English bishops and priests. Before these there ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... feelings which, as a strong man and a Puritan, he was wont to restrain. He had begun to write poetry in childhood, when his father had taught him the value of brevity or compression and "the difference between poetic enthusiasm and fustian." Therefore he wrote slowly, carefully, and allowed ample time for change of thought or diction. So his early "Thanatopsis" was hidden away for years till his father found and published it, and made Bryant famous in ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... a great number of remarkable statements to Vespasian against the Stoics, as, for instance, that they are full of empty boasting, and if one of them lets his beard grow long, elevates his eyebrows, wears his fustian cape thrown carelessly back and goes barefoot, he straightway postulates wisdom, bravery, righteousness as his own. He gives himself great airs, even though he may not understand (as the proverb says) either ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... of a word from a great heart! Such a word, uncouth and simple, but hot from a manly bosom, pierced silk and broadcloth as if they had been calico and fustian, and made a fashionable young lady and a bold school-boy take hands and cry together. But such sweet tears dry quickly; they dry ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... confabulation, chat, parley, causerie, parlance, confab; dialogue, interlocution; soliloquy, monologue; palaver, buncombe, blarney, blandishment, flattery, flummery; chaff, banter, raillery, persiflage, badinage, asteistn; chatter, babble, chit chat, gibberish, jargon, twaddle, fustian, moonshine, hanky-panky, jabbering, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... inoculating against kingocracy with a drop of its own virus. This hypodermic injection of Europeanism wandered happily into the veins of the city with the broad grin of a pleased child. It was not burdened with baggage, cares or ambitions. Its body was lithely built and clothed in a sort of foreign fustian; its face was brightly vacant, with a small, flat nose, and was mostly covered by a thick, ragged, curling beard like the coat of a spaniel. In the pocket of the imported Thing were a few coins—denarii—scudi—kopecks—pfennigs—pilasters—whatever ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... own party had so far forgotten him that he was scarcely mentioned for renomination,—though Tilden decrepit was incomparably stronger than Hancock "the superb." It was hard work enthusing over "Hancock and Hooray" after "Tilden and Reform;" the latter cry had substance, the former was just fustian. ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... number of the patients of course were paired with their fellow-prisoners, and at the top of the room the officials danced with some of the swells. Yes, there were swells here, ball-room coxcombs in fustian and felt. One in particular was pointed out to me as an University graduate of high family, and on my inquiring how such a man became an inmate of a pauper asylum the official said, "You see, sir, when the mind goes the income often goes too, and ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... Sept. last, a Molatto Fellow, about 27 Years of Age, named Crispas, 5 Feet 2 Inches high, short curl'd Hair, his Knees nearer together than common; had on a light colour'd Bear-skin Coat, plain brown Fustian Jacket, or brown all-Wool one, new Buckskin Breeches, blue Yarn Stockings, ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... hands at his said age of 24 years. Item. I give and bequeath to my said son Gregory of such household stuff as God hath lent me, three of my best featherbeds with their bolsters; and, the best pair of blankets of fustian, my best coverlet of tapestry, and my quilt of yellow Turkey satin; one pair of my best sheets, four pillows of down, with four pair of the best pillowberes, four of my best table-cloths, four of my best towels, two dozen of my finest napkins, and two ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... here be a letter for you." So saying, the woman pulled up her dirty apron, then her gown, and at last arrived at a queer fustian pocket, out of which she produced the missive, which had been jumbled in company with a bit of wax, a ball of blue worsted, some halfpence, a copper thimble, and a lump of Turkey rhubarb, from all of which companions it had ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... wholesome influence on classic French prose. It is simple, direct, manly, genuine. It is fresh and racy of the writer. It is flexible to every turn, it is sensitive to every rise or fall, of the thought. It is a steadfast rebuke to rant and fustian. It quietly laughs to scorn the folly of that style which writhes in an agony of expression, with neither thought nor feeling present to be expressed. Montaigne's "Essays" have been a great and a beneficent ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... that every woman-child born into this world were trained to be a lady, and every man-child a gentleman! But then I do not use those much-abused words by way of distinguishing people who wear fine clothes, and live in fine houses, and talk aristocratic slang, from those who go about in fustian, and live in back slums, and talk gutter slang. Some inborn plebeian blindness, in fact, prevents me from understanding what advantage the former have over the latter. I have never even been able to understand why pigeon-shooting at Hurlingham should be refined and polite, while ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... wool-birdseye, cotton filled with wool, linsey, M's and O's, cotton Indian dimity, cotton jump stripe, linen filled with tow, cotton striped with silk, Roman M., janes twilled, huccabac, broadcloth, counter-pain, birdseye diaper, Kirsey wool, barragon, fustian, bed-ticking, ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... scarcity of wit Did the new authors starve the hungry pit! Infected by the French, you must have rhyme, Which long to please the ladies' ears did chime. Soon after this came ranting fustian in, And none but plays upon the fret were seen, Such daring bombast stuff which fops would praise, Tore our best actors' lungs, cut short their days. Some in small time did this distemper kill; And had the savage authors gone on still, Fustian ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... tables, with stands for reading and writing, and around these were a number of men busily engaged in looking over some chosen author. Old men with grey hairs, young men with mustaches—some in cloth, others in fustian, indicating that men of different rank can meet here. Not a single word was spoken during my stay, all appearing to enjoy the silence that reigned throughout the great room. This is indeed a retreat from the world. No one inquires who ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... took up the bundle which he had brought and untied it. This bundle contained a little woollen gown, an apron, a fustian bodice, a kerchief, a petticoat, woollen stockings, shoes—a complete outfit for a girl of seven ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... very shabbily dressed—just an old flannel shirt and a pair of fustian trousers, while his head was covered by one of the regular, broad-brimmed, flop felt hats so common amongst Englishmen for protection from ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... any of the imitative flock. There are many other indications in the volume which show that Mr Tennyson is the model which Mr Patmore has set up for his imitation; but "Lilian," more particularly, is a complete counterpart in coarsest fustian of the silken splendours of Mr Tennyson's poem. It is "Locksley Hall" stripped of all its beauty, and debased by a thousand vulgarities, both of sentiment and style. The burden of both poems consists of bitter denunciations poured forth by disappointed and deserted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... fustian and blasphemy was accompanied in the delivery by every species of grimace and buffoonery, and a fierceness of dramatic action and posture far more ludicrously affecting than the classic attitudes of Gen. Tom Thumb, who was defying the lightning, as Ajax, dying like the Gladiator, and taking ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green |
