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More "Ostentation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had been forgotten; and in the mean time, her anticipations were fixed on the great 12th. She was aware of what the entertainment would consist, but was in honour bound to conceal her knowledge from Virginia and Louisa, who on their side affected great excitement and curiosity, and made every ostentation of guessing and peeping. Gifts were smuggled into the house from every quarter—some to take their chance, some directed with mottoes droll or affectionate. Clara prepared a few trifles, in which she showed that school ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Bucolicks should require such Brevity, and be so essentially sparing in Expression, I see no other reason but this: It loves Simplicity so much that it must be averse to that Pomp and Ostentation which Epick Poetry must show, for that must be copious and flowing, in every part smooth, and equal to it self: But Pastoral must dissemble, and hide even that which it would {42} show, like Damon's ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... truly make a judgment, that the principal point of greatness in any state, is to have a race of military men. Neither is money the sinews of war (as it is trivially said), where the sinews of men's arms, in base and effeminate people, are failing. For Solon said well to Croesus (when in ostentation he showed him his gold), Sir, if any other come, that hath better iron, than you, he will be master of all this gold. Therefore let any prince or state think solely of his forces, except his militia of natives be of good and valiant soldiers. And let princes, ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... gaping citizens, anxious to see the new admiral, who has already taken on the dignities of his station, is costumed in velvet, wears a sword at his side, and is accompanied by a retinue of hired retainers. Vespucci, on the contrary, shows no ostentation in his garb, for he is but a man of business, and, entirely unconscious of any discrepancy in their apparel, conducts his guest to the ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... and I must needs think the savages of America live much more happy than the poorer sort of these, because as they have nothing, so they desire nothing; whereas these are proud and insolent and in the main are in many parts mere beggars and drudges. Their ostentation is inexpressible; and, if they can, they love to keep multitudes of servants or slaves, which is to the last degree ridiculous, as well as their contempt of all the ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... intention to come up to town shortly, and give a series of balls and receptions, when she would be much pleased to receive his friends; and by this means Lady Chutny's advent among the big bugs at Madras, was quietly heralded without the slightest effort or ostentation ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... depart. The Delaware got the canoe ready for his friend, as soon as apprised of his intention, while Hist busied herself in making the few arrangements that were thought necessary to his comfort. All this was done without ostentation, but in a way that left Deerslayer fully acquainted with, and equally disposed to appreciate, the motive. When all was ready, both returned to the side of Judith and Hetty, neither of whom had moved from the spot ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... best felicities; because he thinks that he may have them all if he have that which he then chiefly wishes to obtain. This is, then, what they chiefly wish to obtain, wealth, and dignity, and authority, and this world's glory, and ostentation, and worldly lust. Of all this they are desirous because they think that, through these things, they may obtain: that there be not to them a deficiency of anything wished; neither of dignity, nor of power, nor of renown, nor of bliss. They wish for all this, and they do well that ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... prohibition of lending at interest in continental Europe promoted luxury and discouraged economy; the rich, who were not engaged in business, finding no easy way of employing their incomes productively, spent them largely in ostentation and riotous living. One evil effect is felt in all parts of the world to this hour. The Jews, so acute in intellect and strong in will, were virtually drawn or driven out of all other industries or professions by the theory that ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... thyself on thy religious works, Give to the poor, but talk not of thy gifts: By pride religious merit melts away, The merit of thy alms, by ostentation. ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... at the German coast, was not large, and the whole of his slaves, of both sexes and of all ages, did not exceed thirty-two. His friends and brother conspirators, who were among the first gentlemen in the land, did not live with more ostentation. All the sequestrated property being sold, it was found that, after having distributed among the widows and other creditors what they were entitled to, and after paying the costs of the trial and inventories, the royal treasury had little or nothing to ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... for the calm resourceful confidence of those who can, if need be, "walk alone," as regards dependence upon even an apostolic friend beside them. Live then as those who carry about with them the very life and power of God in Christ. And what will that life be? A life of spiritual ostentation? Nay, the beautiful and ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... Granvelle. Solicited by the King, at their parting interview, to express his candid opinion as to the causes of the dissatisfaction in the provinces, Montigny very frankly and most imprudently gave vent to his private animosity towards the Cardinal. He spoke of his licentiousness, greediness, ostentation, despotism, and assured the monarch that nearly all the inhabitants of the Netherlands entertained the same opinion concerning him. He then dilated upon the general horror inspired by the inquisition and the great ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... dollars in his fraudulent hold-up arrangement with various mail subsidy lines. He was known to be mercenary and unscrupulous. Yet he was selected by Secretary of War Stanton to act as the agent for the Government. At this time Vanderbilt was posing as a glorious patriot. With much ostentation he had loaned to the Government for naval purposes one of his ships—a ship that he could not put to use himself and which, in fact, had been built with stolen public funds. By this gift he had cheaply attained the reputation of being ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... of American life is for simplicity and absence of ostentation. We have no parade of office: our public men wear no robes, no stars, garters, collars, etc.; and it would, therefore, be in good taste in our women to cultivate simple styles of dress. Now I object to the present fashions, as adopted from France, that they are flashy and theatrical. ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... statues, and cabinet of curiosities, while dinner was preparing; but rather for the ostentation of his magnificence and taste, than to do me pleasure. I even observed an increasing coldness in his behaviour; and his eye was too often cast upon me with a fierceness that shewed resentment; and not ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine joined in a rapturous cheer, each man and woman, to show that he or she was not disappointed. The bearer spoke with Mr. Burrham, in answer to his questions, and, with a good deal of ostentation, he opened a check-book, filled a check and passed it to her, she signing a receipt as she took it, and transferring to him her ticket. So far, in dumb show, all was well. What was more to my purpose, it was rapid, for we should have been done in five minutes more, but that some devil tempted ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... material or moral. We do not wish to reduce useful expenditure, but to get money for what we need by increasing production and by more careful spending. It will be a time for all classes to refrain from expenditure on luxuries or ostentation, or in fulfilling those imagined claims which convention imposes. In different ways almost all classes are fettered by these conventional obligations. How much of the expenditure of a person with ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... him round here on Sunday afternoons, and have tea with him in the kitchen;" for my Euphemia has a motherly conception of her duty towards her maid-servants. And presently the amethystine ring was being worn about the house, even with ostentation, and Jane developed a new way of bringing in the joint so that this gage was evident. The elder Miss Maitland was aggrieved by it, and told my wife that servants ought not to wear rings. But my wife looked it up ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... two ends to every stick. It was the Stapletons and others of their sort, rather than any soft-handed Musgraves, who converted a wilderness, a little by a little, into the America of to-day. The task was tediously achieved, and without ostentation; and always the ship had its resplendent figure-head, as always it had its hidden, nay! grimy, engines, which propelled the ship. And, however direfully America may differ from Utopia, to have assisted in the making of America is no mean distinction. We Musgraves and our peers, I sometimes ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... of apartments through which he passed, were filled with attendants or visitors of various descriptions, disposed, perhaps, with some ostentation, in order to impress the envoy of Montrose with an idea of the superior power and magnificence belonging to the rival house of Argyle. One ante-room was filled with lacqueys, arrayed in brown and yellow, the colours of the family, who, ranged in double file, gazed ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... personal freedom, but the conventional and sophisticated man fears lest agreement should, after all, spell weakness, while indifferentism—specially in outward observances—argues strength. A certain shyness, moreover, withheld Iglesias, a not unadmirable dread of being guilty of ostentation. It was so little his custom to obtrude himself, his opinions, and his needs upon the attention of others, that he was scrupulous and diffident in the selection of time and place. The affair, however, decided itself, as ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... the "Cricket on the Hearth," and the "Wreck of the Grosvenor," as I had never imagined a divine could read? The Bishop again. Who might be seen in the mid-day hours when the cabin passengers were asleep, quietly and without ostentation reading or talking to the steerage, ay, and Mrs. Saskabosquia too with her baby on her arm, going about amongst those poor tired folk, many of them with their own babies, not too well fed and not too well washed ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... one of the most kindly and delicate of humourists, and we can perceive the gentleness which made him one of the most charming of companions in a small society. His sense of the ludicrous saved him from the disagreeable ostentation of powers which were never applied to express bitterness of feeling or to edge angry satire. The reserve of his sensitive nature made access difficult, but he was so transparently modest and unassuming that his shyness was not, as is too often the case, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... could have admitted the Prussian maxim of keeping in line with the bishops, it would have accomplished nothing. The English bishops were divided; but the Irish bishops, who are the natural foes of the Fenian plot, were by an immense majority on the ultramontane side. There was almost an ostentation of care on the part of the Government to avoid the appearance of wishing to influence the bishops or the Court of Rome. When at length England publicly concurred in the remonstrances of France, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... instead of loading themselves down on life's journey with so many bags and parcels and boxes of superfluous luggage and bric-a-brac that they are forced to sit down by the roadside and gasp for breath, instead of wearing themselves out in the dusty ways of ostentation and vain show or embittering their hearts because they can not succeed in getting into the weary race of wealth and fashion,—suppose instead of all this, they should turn to quiet ways, lowly pleasures, pure and simple joys, "plain ...
— Joy & Power • Henry van Dyke
... country's altar. Oh, it would not be thus but for the true manhood which our government infuses into loyal citizens. It would not be so, but for the Christianity it protects without dictation, and acknowledges without ostentation. ...
— Government and Rebellion • E. E. Adams
... achievement! Yet this he would never know, seeing her, as he ever must, framed in a vast fortune from which she could not extricate herself. She thought if she might choose, she would remain quietly with her father for ever, doing good, as he, by stealth and without ostentation, feeding her heart on a memory that would never die; but here the spirit of self-sacrifice intervened, and gave her no hope of rest but in fulfilment of what she ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... my face with an air of great kindness, and expressed his concern at seeing me look so ill, with his accustomed sensibility.... We had a long and serious conversation about his present situation, and the approaching termination of all his earthly prospects. He spoke of his death without any of the ostentation of philosophy, but with firmness as well as feeling, as an event likely to happen very soon, and which gave him concern chiefly from leaving his four children so young and unprotected, and his wife ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... the apprehension she excited, and, with mischievous ostentation, produced from her pocket a weapon of war in the shape of a blue ribbon, and began weaving it into her chestnut fuzz, too naturally wavy and long to require frizettes. Coey, who was rather pretty in the white kitten style, had sparse pale hair, ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... Napoleon said of Turenne, "He is the only general whom experience ever made more daring." He had been fighting for forty years, and his fame was still increasing, without effort or ostentation on his part. "M. de Turenne, from his youth up, possessed all good qualities," wrote Cardinal de Retz, who knew him well, "and the great he acquired full early. He lacked none but those that he did not think about. He possessed ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... sports or contentions of two gulls, as they wheeled and hovered about each other, with hoarse screams, one moment flapping on the foam of the wave, and then soaring aloft, till their white bosoms melted into the upper sunshine. In the calm of the summer sunset, I drag my aged limbs, with a little ostentation of activity, because I am so old, up to the rocky brow of the hill. There I see the white sails of many a vessel, outward bound or homeward from afar, and the black trail of a vapor behind the eastern steamboat; there, too, is the sun, going down, ...
— The Village Uncle (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... almost self-taught man. He united, in a singular degree, the sailor, the soldier, and the legislator. Like his brother, the admiral, his mind and manners rose immediately to the level of his situation, showing no arrogance nor ostentation, and exercising the sway of sudden and extraordinary power with the sobriety and moderation of one who had been born to rule. He has been accused of severity in his government, but no instance appears of a cruel or wanton abuse of authority. If he was stern towards ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... "the insolence of wealth" appears far more frequently in the houses of the rich than in the manners of the rich. The reason is plain enough. Personal ostentation is, in the very nature of it, ridiculous; but the ostentation which exhibits magnificent pictures, priceless china, and splendid furniture, can purchase good taste to guide it, and can assert itself without ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... consume Rockstone altogether. It was a very fine house, and the gardens were reported to be beautifully kept up, but the owner was almost always in Italy, and had so seldom been at Rockstone that it was understood that all this was the ostentation of a man who did not know what to do ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the courtezan, and paid her homage by endeavouring to imitate her dress and her manners. Cardsharpers and stockjobbers, disreputable adventurers and public functionaries were intimate friends. No one, able to insult modest industry by lavish ostentation, was asked how he had acquired his wealth. Honour and honesty were prejudices of the past. What has been the consequence? It is a comment upon despotism, which I hope will not be lost upon those who extol the advantages of personal government, and who would sacrifice the ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... be plain and decent (for I don't think the ostentation of buildings necessary or suitable to works of charity), and be built somewhere out of town for ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... that related to her husband's business and interests, as well as in his recreative enjoyments. The household affairs were under her skilful guidance. She conducted them with economy, and yet with generous liberality, free from the least taint of ostentation or extravagance. The home fireside was a scene of cheerfulness. And most of our family have been blest with this sunny gift. Indeed, a merrier family circle I have never seen. There were twelve persons round the table to be provided ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... for himself, and, if possible, trick the British so that they would lose all benefit of the breeze. The clouds that were coming up to windward seemed to threaten a squall, and driving sheets of rain were rapidly advancing toward the ship. With great ostentation, the "Constitution" was made ready for a severe gale. The enemy could see the nimble sailors taking in sail, and furling all the lighter canvas. Then the driving rain swept over the ship, and she was shut out of sight. Immediately all ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... from ostentation as the Otaheiteans, and whose manners are so simple and natural, the strictness with which the punctilios of rank are observed is surprising. I know not if any action, however meritorious, can elevate ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... starched ruff is by a man who wrote to abuse it. An individual named Stubbes published an Anatomy of Abuses. Having become extremely rare, a small impression of it was lately reprinted, as a curious picture of the times. Stubbes dealt trenchantly with everything that savoured of pride and ostentation in dress; and he was peculiarly severe on Mrs Turner's invention, which made the ruff stand against bad weather. He describes the ruffs as having been made 'of cambric Holland lawn; or else of some other the finest cloth that can ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... certain personal enlargement. It adds to the romance of himself in his own eyes, as well as in the eyes of others. It procures the flattering ears of journalists, and a place on front pages, and, if one inclines toward ostentation, even the ownership of a ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... ruin. And under idleness I include, not mere inaction only, but all that circle of trifling occupations in which too many saunter away their youth; perpetually engaged in frivolous society or public amusements, in the labours of dress or the ostentation of their persons. Is this the foundation which you lay for future usefulness and esteem? By such accomplishments do you hope to recommend yourselves to the thinking part of the world, and to answer the expectations ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... ridiculous, in this strange confusion of two different states of being. These passions of masters, when they pass into the souls of menials, assume the natural dimensions of the place they occupy—they are contracted and lowered. What was pride in the former becomes puerile vanity and paltry ostentation in the latter. The servants of a great man are commonly most punctilious as to the marks of respect due to him, and they attach more importance to his slightest privileges than he does himself. In France a few of these old servants of the aristocracy are still to be met with here and ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... the ground that he was at the head of a regularly constituted army and could only receive communications under his proper title of general. Those who knew General Washington, as I afterwards had the means of doing, were aware that this was not owing to pride or ostentation, but from the importance in the critical position in which he was placed of keeping up his character and of asserting the legality of the cause in which he was engaged. Whatever might have been then said of that ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... precisely the case with the Bourbons, who are rather reproached with avarice. Henri IV. was said to be avaricious. He gave to his mistresses, because he could refuse them nothing; but he played with the eagerness of a man whose whole fortune depends on the game. Louis XIV. gave through ostentation. It is most astonishing," added he, "to reflect on what might have happened. The King might actually have been assassinated in his chamber, without anybody knowing anything of the matter and without a possibility of discovering the murderer." For more than ...
— The Secret Memoirs of Louis XV./XVI, Complete • Madame du Hausset, an "Unknown English Girl" and the Princess Lamballe
... formed, as if moulded by herself. Roland had simple manners, austere morals, tried opinions; enthusiastically attached to liberty, he was capable of disinterestedly devoting to her cause his whole life, or of perishing for her, without ostentation and without regret. A man worthy of being born in a republic, but out of place in a revolution, and ill adapted for the agitation and struggle of parties; his talents were not superior, his temper somewhat uncompliant; ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... a man of understanding, the answer he had had from Solomon; whereupon quoth the other, 'He could have given thee no truer nor better counsel. Thou knowest thou lovest no one, and the honours and services thou renderest others, thou dost not for love that thou bearest them, but for pomp and ostentation. Love, then, as Solomon bade thee, and thou shalt be loved.' On this wise, then, was the froward wife corrected and the young ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... very refined and fastidious taste. He lived for the pleasures of art and literature, and the society where these are valued. For this, and not without some secret love of display, he lived in Paris; not extravagant in his pleasures, nor silly in his ostentation, but leading, like a gentleman, as worthy and rational a life as a man can lead who lives only to himself, with no further thought than to enjoy the passing hours. Mr. Rossitur enjoyed them elegantly, and, for a man of the world, moderately; bestowing, however, few of those precious ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... minarets and all sorts of gingerbread effects to compel the eye of the passer-by. But when he became enormously rich, so rich that his name was one of the synonyms for wealth, so rich that people said "rich as Roebuck" where they used to say "rich as Croesus," he cut away every kind of ostentation, and avoided attention more eagerly than he had once sought it. He took advantage of his having to remove to New York, where his vast interests centered; he bought a small and commonplace and, for a rich man, ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... some names and some scraps of ancient authors by heart, which they improperly and impertinently retail in all companies, in hopes of passing for scholars. If, therefore, you would avoid the accusation of pedantry on one hand, or the suspicion of ignorance on the other, abstain from learned ostentation. Speak the language of the company that you are in; speak it purely, and unlarded with any other. Never seem wiser, nor more learned, than the people you are with. Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... quickly. "Or if indeed we do call them difficulties, let us say at once that they are very minor ones. Only the thing must be done neatly and without ostentation, for the sake of ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that Adele's notorious extravagance got her into hot water shortly after she divorced Standish and had only her private means to support her insane passion for clothes and ostentation in general. She went to money-lenders—usurers, in fact. And, of course, that only made it worse. Then Walter, who has never been overscrupulous, conceived the brilliant notion of squaring everything up for a new start by swindling the burglary-insurance people. Adele has always ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... of good should be of his own choosing. He knew very well the temperaments of his chosen constituency, and he adapted himself to their impressionable peculiarities. To this end he dispensed heavily padded gratuities with much ostentation on selected occasions, but gathered his tolls in merciless silence. He did this without fear, for he knew that the blare of the multitude would drown the cries ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... a festival of ostentation; and by the laws of the game each accepts and fans the vanity of the other. It is from that reason that we venture to lay ourselves so open, that we dare to be so warmly eloquent, and that we swell in each other's ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... consistent one, because in his egotism he never forgot himself, not even among his mistresses. As grand monarque, the arbiter of all fortunes, the central sun of all glory, was he always figuring before the eyes of men. He never relaxed his habits of ceremony and ostentation, nor his vigilance as an administrator, nor his iron will, nor his thirst for power; so that he ruled as he wished until he died, in spite of the reverses of his sad old age, and without losing the respect of his ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... Ballard's Collection. Bodleian. With plain downright simplicity and free from all ostentation Peter carried this valuable ruby to the king in his waistcoat pocket, and presented it wrapped up in a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 575 - 10 Nov 1832 • Various
... of Dhamersala is applied, in the mountains as in the plains of India, to a house provided for the accommodation of travellers, whether it be one of the beautiful caravanserais built to gratify the piety, ostentation, or benevolence of a rajah, or such a miserable shieling of rough stone and plank as that of Tuquoroma, in which we took up our quarters, at 13,000 feet elevation. A cheerful fire soon blazed on the earthen floor, filling the room with the pungent ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... the clashing of cymbals, and the flowing of champagne. This cordial friendly people had welcomed them kindly, and must have their courtesy returned in fitting style. Mrs. Smith suggested a simpler entertainment, fearing contrast, and any appearance of ostentation, but the general gauged his neighbors better. They were at once too well bred, and too self-satisfied for any idea of comparison to occur to them. They would eat his fruit-cake, or make him welcome to their ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... were literally true, the youthful population of Cuba must have been sensibly diminished by Rita's departure. There were black-browed youths, too, some gazing tenderly, some scowling fiercely, all wearing the Cuban ribbon with all possible ostentation. One of these youths was manifestly Carlos Montfort, Rita's brother, for they were like enough to have been twins; another had been pointed out to Margaret, in a whisper charged with dramatic meaning, ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... language of freedom and sincerity, without disguise. I am aware, however, those who differ from me in political sentiments may, perhaps, remark, I am stepping out of the proper line of my duty; and they may possibly ascribe to arrogance or ostentation, what I know alone is the result of the purest intention. But the rectitude of my own heart, which disdains such unworthy motives; the part I have hitherto acted in life; the determination I have formed of not taking ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... quarrel with Marius was kindled anew by fresh matter supplied by the ostentation of King Bocchus, who, with the view of flattering the Roman people and pleasing Sulla, dedicated in the Capitol some figures bearing trophies, and by the side of them placed a gilded figure of Jugurtha being surrendered by himself to Sulla. Marius was highly incensed and attempted to ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... to him, I can tell you! 'That's all ostentation,' I said. 'Why can't Regina and I begin life modestly? What do we want with a carriage to drive out in, and champagne on the table, and a footman to answer the door? We want to love each other and be happy. There are thousands of as good gentlemen as I am, in England, with wives and families, ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... would have been in colour without Giorgione we cannot say; but Giorgione could not affect his draughtsmanship. As it is, the word Titianesque means everything that is rich and glorious in paint. The Venetians, with their ostentation, love of pageantry, and intense pride in their city and themselves, could not have had a painter more to their taste. Had Giorgione lived he would have disappointed them by his preoccupation with romantic ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... interfere in elections for the House of Commons. We certainly know that a Minister of the Crown should not attempt to purchase parliamentary support. We happen to know also the almost more than public manner,—are we not justified in saying the ostentation?—with which at the last election the Duke repudiated all that influence with the borough which his predecessors, and we believe he himself, had so long exercised. He came forward telling us that he, at least, meant to have clean hands;—that he would not do as his forefathers ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... frontiers—German, Austrian, Italian and French. Lenin's Legation had opened up modestly and without ostentation as becomes a world's reformer, a distributing office on each one of the four. Somehow I could never work myself up to be really alarmed at jolly ANNA BALABANOFF, but I fancy she has done as much harm since as most people achieve ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... party it held them only for a day, and the other side rose up. Now he rested upon the Lutherans, whom he hated, and, standing on that terrace, he had watched gloomily the great State barges of the Ambassadors from the Empire and from France come with majestic ostentation downstream abreast, to moor side by side against ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... butcher in a poor neighbourhood, and his eyes had a look of sleepy cunning. He carried his fat paunch with ostentation on his short legs, and during the time his gang infested the station spoke to no one but his nephew. You could see these two roaming about all day long with their heads close together ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... resound with His praise! May the eye which seeth in secret witness here the sincere and unaffected piety which withdraws from the engagements of the world to silence and privacy, that it may be exercised with less interruption and less ostentation. ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh
... Ostentation is snobbish. Too great profusion is snobbish. Tuft-hunting is snobbish. But I own there are people more snobbish than all those whose defects are above mentioned: viz., those individuals who can, and don't give dinners at all. The man without hospitality shall never sit SUB IISDEM TRABIBUS with ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... long past its infancy, and she had leisure to enjoy herself, in increasing the happiness of her offspring. She had improved her mind by reading; and her historical lore, in particular, was always ready to be produced for the common advantage. There was no ostentation in this; but everything was produced just as if each had a right to its use. Then it was, I felt the immense importance of having a companion, in an intellectual sense, in a wife. Lucy had always been intelligent; but I never fully understood ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... agree together. For what is more absurd, than that a ragged old Fellow, that has not a Coat to his Back, but what is so ragged that he may be ashamed to put it on, should every now and then change his Rags, as though he design'd to shew his Beggary by Way of Ostentation: And those Affectators of Variety seem equally ridiculous, who, when they have spoken barbarously once, repeat the same Thing much more barbarously; and then over and over again much more unlearnedly. This is not to ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... might well be uneasy; but neither Whig nor Tory had so much to fear as the Trimmer, who might not improbably find himself the common mark at which both parties would take aim. For these reasons Halifax determined to avoid all ostentation of power and influence, to disarm envy by a studied show of moderation, and to attach to himself by civilities and benefits persons whose gratitude might be useful in the event of a counterrevolution. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... matter. An old woman in a blonde wig, a dirty hand covered with jewels, ostentation without dignity, rhetoric without cogency, all offend by an inner contradiction. To like such things we should have to surrender our better intuitions and suffer a kind of dishonour. Yet the elements offensively combined may be excellent in isolation, so that an untrained or torpid ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... man with great ostentation; and tiptoeing over to the door he partly drew it to, putting his head outside to whisper, "He is too weak; it ain't best fur him to ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... sitting in the middle of the floor, handling his calumet with some ostentation. The Hurons were but the remnant of a race, for Iroquois butchery had reduced them in numbers and in spirit, but even in their exile they preserved a splendor of carriage that made the Ottawas, who camped beside them here, seem but a poor and shuffling people. This man was a comely specimen, ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... difficult to give to the most ancient of the pyramids less than four thousand years of antiquity; but one must consider that these efforts of the ostentation of the kings could only have been commenced long after the establishment of the towns. But to build towns in a land inundated every year, let us always remark that it was first necessary to raise the land of the towns on piles in this land of mud, and to render ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... From this place there was little danger in their proceeding singly, and it was agreed, in consequence of the low state of their finances, that they should separate, in order to try what each might be able to accomplish single-handed and without ostentation, till new supplies should ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... (fallacy of vision) 443. pageant, spectacle; peep-show, raree-show, gallanty-show; ombres chinoises [Sp.]; magic lantern, phantasmagoria, dissolving views; biograph^, cinematograph, moving pictures; panorama, diorama, cosmorama^, georama^; coup de theatre, jeu de theatre [Fr.]; pageantry &c (ostentation) 882; insignia &c (indication) 550. aspect, angle, phase, phasis^, seeming; shape &c (form) 240; guise, look, complexion, color, image, mien, air, cast, carriage, port, demeanor; presence, expression, first blush, face of the thing; point of view, light. lineament ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... these free fisherfolk of the islands; they have only haughty stares for the servile set of gondoliers in lacings of gold and scarlet—who are not nobles nor fishers, nor people of the soil—and they pass them silently, with much ostentation of taking all the gondoliers of Murano into the friendliness of their jests and curses, as the barges touch and clash with some swiftly gliding gondolier of their own rank, who wears no ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... himself driven into exile, the majesty of his appearance, and the magnanimity of his character, attracted the respect of strangers wherever he went. He had the air of a sovereign prince rather than of an exile, and commanded more regard than monarchs in the height of their ostentation. ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... suspectible, the widow must be got handsomely aforehand; and no doubt but she is. The elegance of her house and furniture, and her readiness to discharge all demands upon her, which she does with ostentation enough, and which makes her neighbours, I suppose, like her the better, demonstrate this. She will propose to do handsome things by her two nieces. Sally is near marriage—with an eminent woollen-draper in the Strand, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... to be seen of Men; and for that Reason, probably, it is, that there are so few secret Corbans offered up to Heaven, and not to the World; and if this be so, 'tis plain, that People give more for the Ostentation of having given, than the good they hope to get done by it, and therefore you must have met ...
— A Dialogue Between Dean Swift and Tho. Prior, Esq. • Anonymous
... have been Tiberius in Rome, Richelieu under Louis XIII., or Fouche, had the ambition seized him to go to the Convention; but, instead of all that, Rigou had the common sense to remain a Lucullus without ostentation, in other words, a parsimonious voluptuary. To occupy his mind he indulged a hatred manufactured out of the whole cloth. He harassed the Comte de Montcornet. He worked the peasants like puppets by hidden wires, the handling of which amused him as ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... whether by dissuading his friends from a vain ostentation he did not exhort them to the pursuit of virtue. He frequently said that there was no readier way to glory than to render oneself excellent, and not to affect to appear so. To prove this he alleged the ...
— The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates • Xenophon
... between the unfortunate! The poor man will seek in vain for true compassion at the rich man's doors; what he receives is a sacrifice to ostentation and not true benevolence; and the man in sorrow should not look for pity from one to whom sorrow is unknown, if there be such ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... prose composition were almost neglected in this reign. Even rhetoric sank to a low level; the splendid displays of men like Latro, Arellius, and Ovid gave place to the flimsy ostentation of REMMIUS PALAEMON. This dissolute man, who combined the professions of grammarian and rhetorician, possessed an extraordinary aptitude for fluent harangue, but soon confined his attention to grammatical studies, in which he rose to the position of an authority. Suetonius says he was born a ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... intervened. The Anglo-Saxon naturally loves a kind of feudal dignity; he likes a great house, a crowd of servants and dependants, the impression of power and influence which it all gives; and the delights of ostentation, of having handsome things which one does not use and indeed hardly ever sees, of knowing that others are eating and drinking at one's expense, which is a thing far removed from hospitality, are dear to the temperament of our ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... esteem the prior greatly, but his companion very little. They think that the religious who lives better and has the greater number of servants, is a great chief. They believe the contrary of him who does not live with so much ostentation. It happened that a religious was going to visit the chapels of that district where he lived. He, with the spirit that he brought from Castilla, intended to commence with the greatest poverty, so that he took neither bed nor refreshment. An Indian, who was going along as cook, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIII, 1629-30 • Various
... written deeply in the modest stones which mark the green graves of their faithful dead during a period of fully two hundred years. The vainglory of a graven stone to exalt the virtues of imperfect men and women was to them a forbidden thing; the ostentation even of a name carved on a slab was at variance with doctrine; the cravings of a poor humanity to be remembered after death had to be satisfied with bare initials, and initials are all that were ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... the pedant of the lobby, both smell equally of the shop, yet the odour from the Russian binding of good old authentic- looking folios and quartos is less annoying than the steams from the tavern or bagnio. Nay, though the pedantry of the scholar should betray a little ostentation, yet a well-conditioned mind would more easily, methinks, tolerate the fox brush of learned vanity, than the sans culotterie of a contemptuous ignorance, that assumes a merit from mutilation in the self-consoling sneer at the pompous ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... drunk with ostentation from the tin dipper he went to the outside door and flung it open. "Don't you people know how hot and smelly it is in here?" he said, ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... ideas they do or should stand for, those disputes would not end of themselves, and immediately vanish. I leave it then to be considered, what the learning of disputation is, and how well they are employed for the advantage of themselves or others, whose business is only the vain ostentation of sounds; i. e. those who spend their lives in disputes and controversies. When I shall see any of those combatants strip all his terms of ambiguity and obscurity, (which every one may do in the words he uses himself,) I shall think him a champion for knowledge, ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... were loudly heard around, And feeling bosoms shuddered at the sound; Though, we, on these occasions, truly know, The plaint is always greater than the woe. Some ostentation ever is with grief Those who weep ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... a pair of pattens, a toasting-fork, a kettle, a pap-boat, a spoon for the administration of medicine to the refractory, and lastly, Mrs Gamp's umbrella, which as something of great price and rarity, was displayed with particular ostentation, completed the decorations of the chimney-piece and adjacent wall. Towards these objects Mrs Gamp raised her eyes in satisfaction when she had arranged the tea-board, and had concluded her arrangements for the reception of Betsey Prig, even unto the setting forth of two pounds ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... sparkle as we all reached, laughing and joking, to gather them; and Mr. Gabriel—we got into the way of calling him so,—he liked it best—hurried to get them out of sight as if he'd committed some act of ostentation. And then, to make amends, he threw off what constraint he had worn in this new atmosphere of ours, and was so gay, so full of questions and quips and conceits, all spoken in his strange way, his voice was so sweet, and he laughed so much and so like ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... mind to induce her to despise these requirements of etiquette, and to treat them with open contempt. Maria Theresa, in the spirit of independence which ever characterizes a strong mind, ordinarily lived like any other lady, attending energetically to her duties without any ostentation. She would ride through the streets of Vienna unaccompanied by any retinue; and the other members of the royal family, on all ordinary occasions, dispensed with the pomp and splendors of royalty. Maria Antoinette's education and natural disposition led her to adhere to the customs ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... persons, whom they supposed to be their enemies, they killed. At Canterbury they pillaged the palace of the archbishop. The Archbishop of Canterbury, then as now, drew an immense revenue from the state, and lived in great splendor, and they justly conceived that the luxury and ostentation in which he indulged was in some degree the cause of the oppressive ...
— Richard II - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... before this speech would have astonished me beyond measure, but now I was not surprised, for I had acquired some knowledge of Spanish manners. I might admire the Senor de la Cerda's prodigality, but I could not help deploring such ostentation on the part of a Prince of the Church about to participate ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the prince, he was not restrained by any scruple of morality or delicacy from manifesting his jealousy and pique. [Footnote: See portrait, Chap. XXV.] Moreover, this disgraceful feeling was fostered by other considerations than those of mere sensuality or ostentation. Her father, the tributary ruler of Chiengmai, had on several occasions confronted his aggressive authority with a haughty and intrepid spirit; and once, when Maha Mongkut required that he should send his eldest son to Bangkok as a hostage for the ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... greatly to the folly, or, I should say, the real vice of using it, is, that the parties themselves, nine times out of ten, do not drink it by choice; do not like it; do not relish it; but use it from mere ostentation, being ashamed to be seen even by their own servants, not to drink wine. At the very moment I am writing this, there are thousands of families in and near London, who daily have wine upon their tables, and who drink it too, merely because their own servants should ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... by the handful, and spent it with a lavish ostentation. Paul continued his habit of riding about in cabs and dining in hotels. It was a bad commercial training, but he was not at the time of life to think of that. The days and nights were full. There were both labour and enjoyment ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... think, if times mend, that a good deal more will be raised. There never was a meeting in Methodism like the one at City Road. It was an All-day meeting. The first hour was spent in devotional exercises, and then the contributions flowed in without pressure, ostentation, or shame. We are beginning the Circuit Meetings next week. Our Brixton one is fixed for Monday evening, but the cream of our subscriptions was announced at City Road. Dr. ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... the increase is for real comfort and advance in decent living, and so far it is to be commended. Such part of the increase as is for ostentation, for show and sham, is to be frowned upon, for this high cost of shelter is to-day the greatest menace to the social welfare of the community. When the average young man finds it impossible to support a family, when the ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... It gives their follies also room to rise; For praise too dearly loved, or warmly sought, Enfeebles all internal strength of thought, 270 And the weak soul, within itself unblest, Leans for all pleasure on another's breast. Hence ostentation here, with tawdry art, Pants for the vulgar praise which fools impart; Here vanity assumes her pert grimace, 275 And trims her robes of frieze[32] with copper lace; Here beggar pride defrauds her daily cheer, To boast one splendid banquet once a year; The mind still turns where shifting ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... the pressure of matronly and maidenly feet, by which the homespun garments of the time were made. While the less well- to-do and laboring classes were content with clothing spun and knitted at their own firesides, the wealthier people arrayed themselves with far more ostentation than they do at this day. Silks and satins came hither by ship-loads from France to supply the luxury of costume which was then in vogue. The difference between the costumes of that day and of this was especially marked in the attire of gentlemen. Now there ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... have sometimes adopted his restoration of a comma, without inserting the panegyrick in which he celebrated himself for his achievement. The exuberant excrescence of his diction I have often lopped, his triumphant exultations over Pope and Howe I have sometimes suppressed, and his contemptible ostentation I have frequently concealed; but I have in some places shown him, as he would have shown himself, for the reader's diversion, that the inflated emptiness of some notes may justify or excuse the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... consent to such folly. It is not that I care for the money, but I disapprove of the ostentation. You can do as ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... daresay I put in because it sounded well; but I was properly paid for my ostentation ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... provinces or sacrificing his private fortune. The latter was at this time by no means ample; but, with the good sense and taste which mark his character, he preserved in his domestic arrangements the dignity of a literary and public man, without any of the ostentation of magnificence which often distinguished ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... that little triumph of hers. It had stopped against a blank wall just when the car stopped under the ports cochere of the Dearborn Avenue house. John's arm which had been around her was withdrawn and he looked with just a touch of ostentation at his watch. She knew before he spoke that when he did, his tone would ring flat. The old spell was broken. He was once more under the dominion of the newer, ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... is a species of dishonesty. They live within their means, and lay by something for a rainy day. They provide for the things of their own household,—yet they are not wanting in hospitality and benevolence on fitting occasions. And what they do, is done without ostentation. ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... misfortunes of others; to be humble, but without meanness; to be proud, but without arrogance; to abjure every sentiment of hatred and revenge; to show himself magnanimous and liberal, without ostentation and without profusion; to be the enemy of vice; to pay homage to wisdom and virtue; to respect innocence; to be constant and patient in adversity, and modest in prosperity; to avoid every irregularity that stains ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... bewigged, cocked-hatted coachman, and the two gorgeous flunkies hanging on behind. Sir Gorgeous Midas has beaten the dukes in mere gorgeousness, flunkies and all—burlesqued the vulgar side of them, and unconsciously shamed it out of existence; made swagger and ostentation unpopular by his own evil example—actually improved the manners of the great by sheer mimicry of their defects. He has married his sons and his daughters to them and spoiled the noble curve of those lovely noses that Leech drew ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... be large sums given for these is within common knowledge. 1 d., 2 d., nay even 4 d., is not too great a price, if a man will have of the finest leaf, reckless of expense. In this sort of smoking, however, I find more of vainglory and ostentation than solid satisfaction; and its votaries would seem to display less a calm, healthy affection for tobacco than (as Sir T. Browne hath it) a "passionate prodigality.'' And, besides grievous wasting of the pocket, atmospheric changes, ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... that which will go without force. Amulet ornaments may be either a whim which does not take, or fashion may seize upon something of this kind and make it a tribe mark. Then it becomes group money, because it is universally desired. The articles admit of accumulation, and ostentation is a new joy; they also admit of change and variety. They are available for gifts to the medicine man (to satisfy ghosts, get rain, or thwart disease). They may be used to buy a wife, or to buy a step ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... those men who speak upon a level pitch, in a gentle and winsome monotony. His voice was never broken by impulse, never shaken by feeling. He was courteous without ostentation, treating everybody kindly without exactly seeming to intend it. He let fall pleasant remarks incidentally or accidentally, so that one was always fortuitously overhearing his good opinion of one's self. He did not have any conscious ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... man get away under his very nose and convey Government secrets to a foreign Power. It was but natural that these three dismal failures should find their way to the newspapers and that, in the hysterical condition of modern journalism, they should be flung out to the world at large with all the ostentation of leaded type and panicky scare heads, and that learned editors should discourse knowingly of "the limitations of mentality" and "the well-authenticated cases of the sudden warping of abnormal intelligences resulting in the startling termination of amazing careers," or snivel dismally ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... friend, as I would rather prove myself a gentleman, by being learned and humble, valiant and inoffensive, virtuous and communicable, than by any fond ostentation of riches, or, wanting those virtues myself, boast that these were in my ancestors; and yet I grant, that where a noble and ancient descent and such merit meet in any man, it is a double dignification of that person; so if this antiquity of ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... tell you of the famous men she has known for years, and how she has found the most celebrated of them simple in their tastes, and free from ostentation—"in fact it is always so, is it not, with les hommes celebres? C'est toujours comme ca, monsieur, toujours!" and mentions one who has grown gray in the service of art and can count his decorations from ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... voted in that district, spent a month every year with the Gerards, read a Republican morning newspaper, and judiciously enlarged the family reservation in Greenwood—whither he retired, in due time, without other ostentation than half a column in the Evening Post, which paper he had, in ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... What a dismal hash poor Mary, the cook, made of the French dish which she WOULD try out of Francatelli! How angry Mrs. Pope was at not going down to dinner before Mrs. Bishop! How Trimalchio sneered at your absurd attempt to give a feast; and Harpagon cried out at your extravagance and ostentation! How Lady Almack bullied the other ladies in the drawing-room (when no gentlemen were present): never asked you back to dinner again: left her card by her footman: and took not the slightest notice of your wife and daughters at Lady Hustleby's assembly! On ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hand however it is certain, that much of the ostentation and a multitude of the luxuries which subsist in European and Asiatic society are just topics of regret, and that, if ever those improvements in civilisation take place which philosophy has essayed to delineate, there would be a great abridgment of the manual labour that we now see ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... collar of which a close look revealed two much-battered and faded stars, indicating his rank of major-general. He wore a black "slouch" hat, the brim well down over his face, and rode along with a single orderly, without the least ostentation. The men of the other regiments knew him and broke out into a cheer, at which he promptly doffed his hat and swung it at the boys. His hat off, we recognized the handsome author of the "Burnside" whiskers. He was not only very ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... the pheasant proper placed upon his carriage and the buttons of his coachman, and both crest and motto on his writing-paper. The arms he hugged to himself, partly because, not having paid for them, he thought it would look ostentatious to put them on his carriage, and he hated ostentation, and partly because he, like any practical man all over the country, had a secret dislike and contempt for things he could not understand he found it hard, as anyone might, to swallow 'three dexter buckles on ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... have combined with much of the steady determination to aggrandise and elevate his race which was characteristic of the Douglases, and their indifference to commonplace laws and other people's rights, an impulsiveness of character, and temptation towards ostentation and display, which led him at once to submission and to defiance at unexpected moments, and gave an element of uncertainty to his career. Soon after his succession it would seem to have occurred to him, after some specially unseemly ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... the mouth, or injected into the veins, it is not without reluctance that I offend the sensibility of the tender mind with images like these. If such cruelties were not practised it were to be desired that they should not be conceived; but, since they are published every day with ostentation, let me be allowed once to mention them, since I mention them with abhorrence. Mead has invidiously remarked of Woodward that he gathered shells and stones, and would pass for a philosopher. With pretentions much ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... where seeming Pity moves the mind, From self's mean source the liberal current flows; While Ostentation, insolently kind, Wounds while he soothes, insults ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... be afraid. Look on me as a friend," urged the judge, who towered above him in the dim candle-light. "Here's comfort without ostentation. Don't tell me you prefer the tavern, with its corrupt associations!" Hannibal was silent, and the judge, after a brief moment of irresolution, threw open the door. Then he bent toward the small ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... The main reason why gems and the precious metals were formerly used as ornaments seems to have been the great convertible value belonging to them, which made them symbols of wealth and importance, and consequently a favorite means of social ostentation. The fact that they have entirely lost this quality would account, I think, largely for their disuse as ornaments, even if ostentation itself had not been deprived of its motive by the ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... which are mere collateral functions of convenience, need only a small one. Wherefore, then, and to what end, are the vast systems of building, the palaces and towers of Oxford? These are either altogether superfluous, mere badges of ostentation and luxurious wealth, or they point to some fifth function not so much as contemplated by other universities, and, at present, absolutely and chimerically beyond their means of attainment. Formerly we used to hear attacks upon the Oxford discipline as fitted ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... to the Directoire, when, following the Revolution, the voice of the populace decried all ostentation and everything savouring of the superfluous. The Great Napoleon in his first period affected simplicity and there were no longer bronze mounts, in rosettes, garlands and bow-knots, elaborate inlaying, nor painted furniture with ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... were well provided; yes, sir, if we had had an hundred miles to travel, we had sufficient to bear our expenses in a noble manner." (At which words he produced the half-guinea which was found in the basket.) "I do not show you this out of ostentation of riches, but to convince you I speak truth. Your seating me at your table was an honour which I did not ambitiously affect. When I was here, I endeavoured to behave towards you with the utmost respect; if I have failed, it was not with design; nor ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... them, and to hold converse with him through their idols or anitos; and he appeared to them in various forms. The method of making the sacrifices hinged on the different purposes for which they were intended. If it were for a feast of ostentation and vanity that was being made to some chief, they called it "the feast of the great god." The method of celebrating it was near the house of the chief, in a leafy bower which they erected especially for that purpose, hung round about with hangings in their fashion, namely, the Moorish, which ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... the interior had a heightened emphasis by reason of the elemental turmoils without. True, the rain beat in a deafening fusillade upon the roof, and the ostentation of the one glass window, a source of special pride to its owner, was at a temporary disadvantage in admitting the fierce and ghastly electric glare, so recurrent as to seem unintermittent. But the more genial illumination of hickory flames, ...
— Wolf's Head - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... unable to conceive that the natural man can have any other motive for being just and upright than that it is useless to be otherwise, or that a character for honesty is profitable; according to his experience, between the feelings of ostentation and selfish alarm and the feeling of love to Christ, there lie no sensibilities which can lead a man to relieve want. Granting, as we should prefer to think, that it is Dr. Cumming's exposition of his sentiments which is deficient rather ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... little ability as there is energy, and the plain cook with her savagery, or the fourth-rate confectioner with his rancid pastry, have it all their own way, according to the election of economy or ostentation. ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... impossible to regard them with any feeling but that of warm regard and esteem. S—- was, in truth, a noble-hearted fellow. Whatever he did seemed so much a matter of habit, that the idea of selfish design or ostentation was utterly excluded from the mind. I could relate several instances of the disinterested benevolence of this kind-hearted tavern-keeper. I shall just mention one, which came under my own observation while ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... slammed, and locked from within with a great noise of rattling keys. The sound of the keys made Anna feel faint; Axel was on the other side of that ostentation of brute force. She leaned against the wall shivering. The children tittered; she was a very fine lady, they thought, ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... is covered with a deep black; above which, arches are drawn one over another as high as the short ribs. They are often a quarter of an inch broad, and the edges are not straight lines, but indented. These arches are their pride, and are shewn both by men and women with a mixture of ostentation and pleasure; whether as an ornament, or a proof of their fortitude and resolution in bearing pain, we could not determine. The face in general is left unmarked; for we saw but one instance to the contrary. Some old men had the greatest part of their bodies covered with ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... small canvas bag which no one had taken notice of up to that moment, and took from it a large quantity of broken biscuit, a lump of salt beef, several cocoa-nuts, a horn of gunpowder, and a bag of shot and ball—all of which he spread out in front of the fire with much ostentation. The satisfaction caused by this was very great, and even Muggins, in the fulness of his heart, declared that after all there were worse things than being lost in ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... high-backed chair, he arranged his garments fussily about him, rolled up his long embroidered sleeves to the elbow, and spread his writing implements all over the desk in front of him with much mock-solemn ostentation. Then, rubbing his lean hands together, he gave a stealthy glance of covert derision round at Sah-luma and Theos,—a glance which Theos saw and in his heart resented, but which Sah- luma, absorbed in his own ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... by Empson, Julian deviated from the principal door, to one which opened, with less ostentation, in an angle of the courtyard. On a modest tap from the flute-player, admittance was afforded him and his companions by a footman, who conducted them through a variety of stone passages, to a very handsome summer parlour, where a lady, or something resembling one, dressed ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... in hacks, or private carriages; but not many. Milton people were, for the most part, plain folk, and frowned upon any ostentation. ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... shoulders, because he knows if it weren't for him and men like him upon whom the prosperity of this nation depends, we'd have famine and anarchy on our hands in no time. And look what he's done for the city, without ostentation, mind you! He never blows his own horn-never makes a speech. And for the Church! But I needn't tell you. When this settlement house and chapel are finished, they'll be coming out here from New York to get points. By the way, I meant to have written you. Have ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... England, was born in the year 1662, at Middleton in Buckinghamshire, a parish of which his father was rector. Francis was educated at Westminster School, and carried thence to Christchurch a stock of learning which, though really scanty, he through life exhibited with such judicious ostentation that superficial observers believed his attainments to be immense. At Oxford, his parts, his taste, and his bold, contemptuous, and imperious spirit, soon made him conspicuous. Here he published at twenty, his first work, a translation of the noble poem of Absalom and ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... him with a certain tenderness during the last half-hour. She liked these simple, downright men, and fancied that the absence of ostentation which usually characterized them was essentially English, though she had certainly met a few in that country who came under quite a different category. They were continually posing; men who could not afford to be natural lest they should give themselves away. Though she liked him, Gregory ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... their best shoes toeing out precisely under the smooth sweep of her gray silk skirt. Miss Martha Rose dressed always in gray, a fashion which the village people grudgingly admired. It was undoubtedly becoming and distinguished, but savored ever so slightly of ostentation, as did her custom of always dressing little Lucy in blue. There were different shades and fabrics, but blue it always was. It was the best color for the child, as it revealed the fact that her big, dark eyes were blue. Shaded as they were by heavy, curly lashes, they ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Vittoria smiled a little on me and a great deal on Messer Guido; and as for Dante, she glanced at him slightly and gave him little heed, for his habit was modest and his looks were not of a kind at once to tickle the fancy of such as she. Yet Dante looked at her curiously, though without ostentation, as one whose way it is instinctively to observe all men and all women with an exceeding keenness and ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... mortification, to which the Crusaders, according to the opinion expressed by him of Gilsland, ought to subject themselves. A space of ground, large enough to accommodate perhaps thirty tents, according to the Crusaders' rules of castrametation, was partly vacant—because, in ostentation, the knight had demanded ground to the extent of his original retinue—partly occupied by a few miserable huts, hastily constructed of boughs, and covered with palm-leaves. These habitations seemed entirely deserted, and several of them ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... of a good light and free air, he fitted up for a study and furnished with books, chosen with so little regard to editions or their external appearances as showed they were intended for use, and that he disdained the ostentation of learning." ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... ourselves into a state of superiority, and immediately began to envy, hate, and declare war against us. The neighbouring little squires, too, were uneasy to see a poor renter become their equal in a matter in which they placed so much dignity; and, not doubting but it arose in me from the same ostentation, they began to hate me likewise, and to turn my equipage into ridicule, asserting that my horses, which were as well matched as any in the kingdom, were of different colours and sizes, with much more of that kind of wit, the only ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... of so essential importance. Indeed, among things appertaining to human life, it is friendship alone that has the unanimous voice of all men as to its capacity of service. By many even virtue is scorned, and is said to be a mere matter of display and ostentation. Many despise wealth, and contented with little take pleasure in slender diet and inexpensive living. Though some are inflamed with desire for office, many there are who hold it in so low esteem that they can imagine nothing more inane or worthless. ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... exuberance of money displayed itself in gaiety of appearance, and wantonness of expence, and introduced me to the acquaintance of those whom the same superfluity of fortune had betrayed to the same licence and ostentation: young heirs who pleased themselves with a remark very frequently in their mouths, that though they were sent by their fathers to the university, they were not under the necessity of ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... indulge in rhetoric and to dwell upon the magnificence of some of the more luxurious houses of the wealthy Romans; to describe their ostentation of rich marbles in pillar, wall, or floor—the white marbles of Carrara, Paros, and Hymettus; the Phrygian marble or "pavonazzetto" its streakings of crimson or violet; the orange-golden glow of the Numidian stone of "giallo ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... directions, and there are few directions, if any, in which good taste and good morals more commend the happy medium than in tips. Excess in them, however, is not always prompted by good nature and generosity and reciprocation of spontaneous kindness, but often by desire for comfort, and even by ostentation. But all such promptings require regulation for the same reason that, it is now becoming generally recognized, the promptings of even ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... Chandos, had built himself an Italian palace at Canons, near Edgware, in which he must have outdone even the magnificent Lord Burlington in sumptuousness and ostentation. Like a German princeling, he kept his choir and his band of musicians, though there seems to be no evidence that he was himself genuinely musical. The chapel of the house, a florid Italian baroque building with frescoes in the appropriate style by Italian ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... going into the dark and I was not afraid—with ostentation. I still regard that, though now with scarcely so much gravity as heretofore, as a very magnificent period in my life. For nearly four months I was dying with immense dignity. Plutarch might have recorded it. I wrote—in touchingly unsteady pencil—to all my intimate ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... sometimes live—be it only for an hour, and though we must lay all else aside—to make others smile. The sacrifice is only in appearance; no one finds more pleasure for himself than he who knows how, without ostentation, to give himself that he may procure for those around him a moment of ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... written anything, and felt only the charm which a nature of such capacity for supreme enjoyment causes every one around it to enjoy. His talk was unaffected and natural, never bookish in the smallest degree. He was quite up to the average of well read men, but as there was no ostentation of it in his writing, so neither was there in his conversation. This was so attractive because so keenly observant, and lighted up with so many touches of humorous fancy; but, with every possible thing to give relish to it, there were not many ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... supplyes and encouragement, as Ben. Johnson and[1] many others of that tyme, whose fortunes requyred, and whose spiritts made them superiour to ordinary obligations; which yett they were contented to receave from him, because his bountyes were so generously distributed, and so much without vanity and ostentation, that except from those few persons from whome he sometimes receaved the characters of fitt objectes for his benefitts, or whome he intrusted for the more secrett derivinge it to them, he did all he could that the persons themselves who receaved ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... an insight and a foresight which the ancients would have called divination, he saw, in the midst of darkness and obscurity, the logic of events, and forecast the result. From the first, in his own quaint, original way, without ostentation or offense to his associates, he was pilot and commander of his administration. He was one of the few great rulers whose wisdom increased with his power, and whose spirit grew gentler and tenderer as his ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... shops as soon as she had paid L1, 19s. to Denry. It was a marvellous scheme. The rumour of it spread; before dinner Denry had visits from other aspirants to membership, and he had posted a cheque to Bostocks', but more from ostentation than necessity; for no member could possibly go into Bostocks' with his coupons until at least ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... interested in its being and its well-being. But besides this, by virtue of His perfect humanity, He was attracted by those peculiar traits which are seen in the earlier years of human life. He loved the artlessness and gentleness, the sense of dependence, the implicit trust, the absence of ostentation and ambition, the unconscious modesty, in one word, the child-likeness of ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... to the gate to hear the several claims of those who endeavored to pass. The first among other pretensions, set forth that he had been very liberal to an hospital; but Minos answered, "Ostentation," and repulsed him. The second exhibited that he had constantly frequented his church, been a rigid observer of fast-days: he likewise represented the great animosity he had shown to vice in others, which never escaped his severest censure; and as to his own behavior, he had never been ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... to give to the most ancient of the pyramids less than four thousand years of antiquity; but one must consider that these efforts of the ostentation of the kings could only have been commenced long after the establishment of the towns. But to build towns in a land inundated every year, let us always remark that it was first necessary to raise the land of the towns on piles in this land ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... prejudicial to the matter. It takes from the general power, not only to please, but to instruct. The monotony of style produces an apparent monotony of ideas. What is really striking and valuable, is lost in the vain ostentation and circumlocution of the expression; for when we find the same pains and pomp of diction bestowed upon the most trifling as upon the most important parts of a sentence or discourse, we grow tired of distinguishing between pretension ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... antiquity, wealth and hereditary refinement, the observer would see, what now is never beheld, foolish parvenus frenzied in the pursuit of an elegance which, in its nature, is inaccessible to them. We should see lavish and unmeaning displays. We should see a gaudy ostentation,—serving only as a magnificent frame to the vanity of the subject. We should see the grave and thoughtful, the witty and accomplished, the men and women whose genius fitted them for society, withdrawing from ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... without thought of ostentation, for her parents' riches had come when she herself was so young that she had no remembrance of the little house in the manufacturing town, but looked as a matter of course upon the luxuries with which she was surrounded. It never occurred to her mind ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... people to make use of intellectual and moral resources which they have not yet got. It is as vain to preach to the majority of the well-to-do the duty of abstinence from wastefulness, rivalry, and ostentation as it is vain to preach to the majority of the badly-off abstinence from alcohol; without such pleasures their life would ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... gorgeous spectacle of him. Now when Solon came before him, and seemed not at all surprised, nor gave Croesus those compliments he expected, but showed himself to all discerning eyes to be a man that despised the gaudiness and petty ostentation of it, he commanded them to open all his treasure houses, and carry him to see his sumptuous furniture and luxuries, though Solon did not wish it; he could judge of him well enough by the first sight of him; and, when he returned from viewing ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... Orthodocia, and immediately looked out of the window again. I edged my chair toward the other window. Then the cloven foot appeared in the shape of a note-book. He produced it with gentle ostentation, as one would a trump card. The simile is complete when I add that he took ...
— Humour of the North • Lawrence J. Burpee
... was justly imputed to him. For the war with Holland, he was, with less justice, held accountable. His hot temper, his arrogant deportment, the indelicate eagerness with which he grasped at riches, the ostentation with which he squandered them, his picture gallery, filled with masterpieces of Vandyke which had once been the property of ruined Cavaliers, his palace, which reared its long and stately front right opposite to the humbler residence of our Kings, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... reasonable beings! The Ten Commandments would be unnecessary: no reasoning being sins, no reasoning creature makes mistakes. There would be no rich men, for what reasonable man cares for luxury and ostentation? There would be no poor: that I should eat enough for two while my brother in the next street, as good a man as I, starves, is not reasonable. There would be no difference of opinion on any two points: there is only one reason. You, dear Reader, would find, that ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... century, the marked division of costume into waist and skirt begins, the waist line more and more pinched in, the skirt more and more full, the sleeves and neck more elaborately trimmed, the head-dresses multiplied in size, elaborateness and variety. Textiles developed with wealth and ostentation. ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... the odour from the Russian binding of good old authentic- looking folios and quartos is less annoying than the steams from the tavern or bagnio. Nay, though the pedantry of the scholar should betray a little ostentation, yet a well-conditioned mind would more easily, methinks, tolerate the fox brush of learned vanity, than the sans culotterie of a contemptuous ignorance, that assumes a merit from mutilation in the self-consoling sneer at the pompous ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... eyes, and dignity towered on her forehead. Almamoulin approached and trembled. She saw his confusion and disdained him: "How," says she, "dares the wretch hope my obedience, who thus shrinks at my glance? Retire, and enjoy thy riches in sordid ostentation; thou wast born to be wealthy, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... plain clothes and without attendants, tied his horse to the fence, and walked unannounced into the Senate chamber. This careful avoidance of display marked his whole official career, running sometimes, indeed, into an ostentation of simplicity whose good taste might be questioned. But of Jefferson's entire sincerity there can be no doubt. Inconsistent as he sometimes was—as every man is—his purposes and policies all tended steadily toward the betterment of humanity; and the great mass of the people who to this day revere ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... treat them with open contempt. Maria Theresa, in the spirit of independence which ever characterizes a strong mind, ordinarily lived like any other lady, attending energetically to her duties without any ostentation. She would ride through the streets of Vienna unaccompanied by any retinue; and the other members of the royal family, on all ordinary occasions, dispensed with the pomp and splendors of royalty. Maria Antoinette's education and natural disposition led her to adhere to the customs of the court ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... literary question comes out oddly in the article upon 'The Relation of Novels to Life,' contributed to the 'Cambridge Essays.' He has no fear of modern aesthetes before his eyes. His opinion is that life is too serious a business for tomfoolery and far too tragic for needless ostentation of sentiment. A novel should be a serious attempt by a grave observer to draw a faithful portrait of the actual facts of life. A novelist, therefore, who uses the imaginary facts, like Sterne and Dickens, as mere pegs ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... neighbors, his wife, his children, his servants, his masters, and thereby gain incomparably greater merit than he can find by fulfilling vows to do works chosen by himself and not commanded by God. The foolish opinion of the common people and the ostentation of the Bulls[29] have brought it to pass that these vows of pilgrimages, fastings, prayers, and other works of the kind far outweigh in importance the works of God's Law, although we never have sufficient strength to do these ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... with deep astonishment, To famous Westminster how there resort Living in brasse or stony monument, The Princes and the worthies of all sort; Do I not see re-formed nobilitie, Without contempt, or pride, or ostentation, And look upon offenseless majestie, Naked of pomp or earthly domination? And how a play-game of a painted stone Contents the quiet, now, and silent sprites, Whom all the world, which late they stood upon, Could not content, nor quench their appetites. Life is a frost of cold felicities; And ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... and convey Government secrets to a foreign Power. It was but natural that these three dismal failures should find their way to the newspapers and that, in the hysterical condition of modern journalism, they should be flung out to the world at large with all the ostentation of leaded type and panicky scare heads, and that learned editors should discourse knowingly of "the limitations of mentality" and "the well-authenticated cases of the sudden warping of abnormal intelligences resulting in the startling termination ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... friend and class fellow, Whiteside, gave him a dinner to which I attended him, where was the late Dr. Lloyd, the Provost of the College, a learned man, whose works on "Optics" are well known. It was pleasant to note how Forster, like his prototype, the redoubtable Doctor, here "talked for ostentation." "I knew, sir," he might say, "that I was expected to talk, to talk suitably to my position as a distinguished visitor." And so he did. It was an excellent lesson in conversation to note how he took ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... in his Sentiments, is an unnecessary Ostentation of Learning, which likewise occurs very frequently. It is certain that both Homer and Virgil were Masters of all the Learning of their Times, but it shews it self in their Works after an indirect and concealed manner. Milton seems ambitious of letting us ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... the commanders' names of every squadron, with all others, their magazines of provision, were put in print, as an army and navy irresistible and disdaining prevention; with all which their great and terrible ostentation, they did not in all their sailing round about England so much as sink or take one ship, barque, pinnace, or cock-boat of ours, or even burn so much as one sheep-cote ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... she felt that she was being noticed, when the windows of her soul were suddenly shut, and she turned to some subject of common interest, as if ashamed to be discovered praying, for she permitted herself no ostentation of devotion, but reserved it for her nights and solitary moments. Of her own salvation she had only a faltering hope, harassed always by a fear that she had at some time in her life committed the unpardonable sin, as to the nature of which she knew nothing, and which was, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... Neither did they affect aristocracy. Their manner of living was as comfortable as their modest means would allow. It was a common habit for the people of this class to indulge in luxury far beyond their resources and no small amount of this love of ostentation was attributed to the daughters of the families. In this respect Marjorie offended not in the least. Whether assisting her father in the shop during the busy hours, or presiding at the Coffee House, or helping her mother with the affairs of the household, she was equally at home. Neither the ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... others. It was not that she had anything to conceal, but undeniably, Chatty felt herself on a lower level of being, subdued by Minnie's presence. There is often in young married persons a pride in their new happiness, an ostentation of superiority in their twofold existence, which is apt to produce this effect upon the spectators. Minnie and her husband stood between the two ladies, neither of whom possessed husbands, as the ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... villain Yeager had knocked out. The others crowded around him in excitement, all expostulating at once. They were dressed wonderfully and amazingly as cowpunchers, but they were painted frauds in spite of the careful ostentation of their costumes. Steve's shiny leathers and dusty hat missed the picturesque, but he looked indigenous and they did not. He was at his restful ease, this slender, brown man, negligent, careless, eyes twinkling but alert. ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... But, hark, again—"Ostentation, parental pride and a host of moral" (immoral?) "qualities must be recognized as among the springs of industry; political economy should not ignore these, but, to discuss them, it must abandon its pretensions to the precision of ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... let my counsell sway you in this case, Your daughter heere the Princesse (left for dead) Let her awhile be secretly kept in, And publish it, that she is dead indeed: Maintaine a mourning ostentation, And on your Families old monument, Hang mournfull Epitaphes, and do all rites, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Anglican divines of our day who have enriched the whole Church of Christ by their scholarly contributions to sacred literature; and we would ascribe all the praise of Methodist achievement to the almighty Author of good, whom the spirit of ostentation and vain glorifying must displease, while it would ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... would inform Lady Collingwood and the family that it was meant to move in the House for a monument for Lord Collingwood in St Paul's, next to Nelson's. Of course the Body, which has arrived in the Thames, will be deposited in that Church, and the funeral must be splendid without ostentation—at the expense of the executors, or rather of the family." It was not, however, till May 8th that Mrs Stanhope was enabled to furnish her son with full details of the manner in which the intended ceremony ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... friend by himself, "he only acts thus from pride and ostentation. What am I at his house, but a living witness of his generosity and devotion? He seems to live for me—it's Tremorel here and Tremorel there! He triumphs over my misfortunes, and makes his conduct a glory and ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... without missile weapons of any sort, but furnished instead with an immense shield, a long ill-tempered sword, a dagger and a lance, all ornamented with gold, for they were not unskilful in working in metals. Everything was made subservient to ostentation—even wounds, which were often enlarged for the purpose of boasting a broader scar. Usually they fought on foot, but certain tribes on horseback, in which case every free man was followed by two attendants, likewise mounted. War-chariots were ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... cleanness is to be referred to works commanded by God, and not to human traditions, such as the ablutions were at that time, and the daily sprinkling of water, the vesture of monks, the distinctions of food, and similar acts of ostentation are now. But the adversaries distort the meaning by sophistically transferring the universal particle to only one part: "All things will be clean to those having given alms." [As if any one would infer: Andrew is present; therefore all the apostles are present. Wherefore ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... Port Elizabethans was a thing to be remembered with great pleasure. No sooner had we landed than invitations poured in on us. This was not merely complimentary it was the outcome of genuine kindness and a desire to be helpful. There was no ostentation, but just the natural expression of a simple desire to welcome and assist the stranger newly arrived within the gates. Hospitality was one of the cardinal South African virtues in those days. It has been truly said that even a quarter ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... to wonder at. He remembered for months, years even, her most trivial fancies, her unexpressed dislikes. He knew her tastes, as if by instinct; he prepared little surprises for her, and placed them in her way without ostentation, and quite as matters of course. He never permitted her to be embarrassed; the little annoying situations of the day's life he had smoothed away long before they had ensnared her. He never was off his guard, ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... receives by the gift of a Christmas or New Year's volume to the wife or daughter of his entertainer. The presentation of Etrennes is now carried to a ruinous and ludicrous height among our French neighbours; but it should be remembered that, without either ostentation or folly, a gift ought to be worth offering. It is better to give nothing than too little. On the other hand, mere costliness does not constitute the soul of a present; on the contrary, it has the commercial and unflattering effect of repayment for ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... the relationships he formed, the modest demeanor of the citizen was always evident; for he was aware that a constant exhibition of pomp brings more envy upon its possessor than greater realities borne without ostentation. Thus in selecting consorts for his sons, he did not seek the alliance of princes, but for Giovanni chose Corneglia degli Allesandri, and for Piero, Lucrezia de' Tornabuoni. He gave his granddaughters, the children of Piero, Bianca to Guglielmo ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... 'stony-hearted,' and whom I, eating no opium, and speaking as I find, shall ever consider the most kindly and maternal of all streets—the street of the middle classes—busy without uproar, wealthy without ostentation. Ah, the pretty ancles that trip along thy pavement! Ah, the odd country cousin-bonnets that peer into thy windows, which are lined with cheap yellow shawls, price L1. 4s. marked in the corner! Ah, the brisk young lawyers flocking from their quarters at the back of Holborn! Ah, the quiet old ladies, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... anything and could get it, he had it; and if a friend had a longing for ices, strawberry mess, oyster- patties, or any other school luxury, he would treat him, running up a score if he had not the cash in his pocket to pay with. And if there was generosity in this impulse, I fear that there was ostentation too. It added to his popularity, and popularity had become as the air he breathed. For the only real test of generosity is self-denial. If you go without something you really want in order to oblige someone else, ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... name and motherly tenderness. When we had seen all, she stood a moment before us, and as one of the coarse woolen lappets of her cape had hidden it, she drew out a heavy crucifix of gold, and placed it in sight, with a heavenly little ostentation, over her heart. Sweet and beautiful vanity! An angel could have done it without harm, but she blushed repentance, and glided away with ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... more trying to the Christianity or the philosophy which teaches the vanity of riches than a few hours' domestication in a family where wealth is employed, not for purposes of ostentation, but for the perfecting of home comfort and the gratification of refined intellectual tastes; and as Mr. Stanton leaned back, slippered and gowned, in one of the easiest of chairs, and began to look ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... I know," said Master John. "What d'ye think—if he did'nt 'pitch into' our 'dunghill' the other day, and laid him dead at a blow. I owe him one!—Come along." I followed in his footsteps, and soon beheld Chanticleer crowing with all the ostentation of a victor at the hens he had so ruthlessly widowed. A clothes-horse, with a ragged blanket, screened us from his view; and Master'John, putting the muzzle of his gun through a hole in this novel ambuscade, discharged ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... and manners, and the advantages of a pleasing person. It is said he possessed a pretty taste for the fine arts, and had himself attained some proficiency in poetry, music, and painting. His knowledge appeared without ostentation, and embellished by a diffidence that rarely accompanies so many talents and accomplishments, which left you to suppose more than appeared. His sentiments were elevated and inspired esteem, they had a softness ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... yourself as the servant of all, but without ostentation, or their having any knowledge ...
— Gold Dust - A Collection of Golden Counsels for the Sanctification of Daily Life • E. L. E. B.
... through which he passed, were filled with attendants or visitors of various descriptions, disposed, perhaps, with some ostentation, in order to impress the envoy of Montrose with an idea of the superior power and magnificence belonging to the rival house of Argyle. One ante-room was filled with lacqueys, arrayed in brown and ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... type of man who hates ostentation. I doubt if he has ever spent a thousand a year on himself all his life—do you think it is wise to ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... quality of execution is simplicity. The more unpretending, quiet, and retiring the means, the more impressive their effect. Any ostentation, brilliancy, or pretension of touch,—any exhibition of power or quickness, merely as such, above all, any attempt to render lines attractive at the expense of ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... even that should be shown without ostentation." Beatrice laughed. "And you are decidedly ostentatious at the present moment. It would interest mamma and me very much to know the ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... had from Solomon; whereupon quoth the other, 'He could have given thee no truer nor better counsel. Thou knowest thou lovest no one, and the honours and services thou renderest others, thou dost not for love that thou bearest them, but for pomp and ostentation. Love, then, as Solomon bade thee, and thou shalt be loved.' On this wise, then, was the froward wife corrected and the ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... Christopher Columbus and his brother Bartolomeo were absent, engaged in superintending the erection of a fort in the province of Xaragua; Don Diego was commanding in their absence. Bovadilla landed and went to hear mass, displaying during the ceremony a very significant ostentation; then, having summoned Don Diego before him, he ordered him to resign his office into his hands. The admiral, warned by a messenger of what was occurring, arrived in great haste. He examined the letters patent brought by Bovadilla, and having read them, he declared ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... the two forces that were at this time working in society, the one opposing the entrance of the Grecian influence, and the other encouraging the refinement in manners and modes of living that came with it, even encouraging ostentation and the lavish use of money for pleasures. When Scipio was making his arrangements to go to Africa, he was governor of Sicily, and lived in luxury. Cato, then but thirty years old, had been sent to Sicily to ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... of ancient authors by heart, which they improperly and impertinently retail in all companies, in hopes of passing for scholars. If, therefore, you would avoid the accusation of pedantry on one hand, or the suspicion of ignorance on the other, abstain from learned ostentation. Speak the language of the company that you are in; speak it purely, and unlarded with any other. Never seem wiser, nor more learned, than the people you are with. Wear your learning, like your watch, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... of pompous ostentation and riotous overloading of ornament, the Baroque, now took the place of the classical beauty of the Renaissance and art degraded became the slave of wealth, until the great Cardinal Albani erected his villa to serve ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... was a big lump in Joyce's throat, and Cynthia herself coughed and flourished a handkerchief about her face with suspicious ostentation. Suddenly she burst out: ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... the discoverer, while you reap all the credit, have all the fun!" dolefully lamented Waldo, when the catch was displayed with an ostentation which may have covered just a tiny bit of malice. "I'll put a tin ear on ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... travellers reached Tagelel. From this place there was little danger in their proceeding singly, and it was agreed, in consequence of the low state of their finances, that they should separate, in order to try what each might be able to accomplish single-handed and without ostentation, till new supplies ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... full of people who can't imagine why they don't prosper like their neighbors, when the real obstacle is not in the banks nor tariffs, in bad public policy nor hard times, but in their own extravagance and heedless ostentation. The young mechanic or clerk marries and takes a house, which he proceeds to furnish twice as expensively as he can afford; and then his wife, instead of taking hold to help him earn a livelihood by doing her own work, must ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... fastidious taste. He lived for the pleasures of art and literature, and the society where these are valued. For this, and not without some secret love of display, he lived in Paris; not extravagant in his pleasures, nor silly in his ostentation, but leading, like a gentleman, as worthy and rational a life as a man can lead who lives only to himself, with no further thought than to enjoy the passing hours. Mr. Rossitur enjoyed them elegantly, and, for a man of the world, moderately; ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... But what I alluded to about the fruit was this: Le Grice was in the habit of eating apples in school-time, for which he had been often rebuked. One day, having particularly pleased the master, the latter, who was eating apples himself, and who would now and then with great ostentation present a boy with some half-penny token of his mansuetude, called out to his favorite of the moment: "Le Grice, here is an apple for you." Le Grice, who felt his dignity hurt as a Grecian, but was more pleased at having this opportunity ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... the art is to strike the imagination. The painter is, therefore, to make no ostentation of the means by which this is done; the spectator is only to feel the result in his bosom. An inferior artist is unwilling that any part of his industry should be lost upon the spectator. He takes as much pains to discover, as the greater artist does to conceal, the ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... raptures over them. You mustn't imagine all those people are selfish and callous merely because they preserve a decent reticence. To tell you the truth, that constant profession of noble feelings you would like to see would have something of ostentation ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... of the interior had a heightened emphasis by reason of the elemental turmoils without. True, the rain beat in a deafening fusillade upon the roof, and the ostentation of the one glass window, a source of special pride to its owner, was at a temporary disadvantage in admitting the fierce and ghastly electric glare, so recurrent as to seem unintermittent. But the more genial illumination of hickory ...
— Wolf's Head - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... will to serve. Abbe Chesnais, who does not attach primary importance to the vocation, has understood this well. At the end of his notes he reminds us that Guynemer was a believer who accomplished his religious exercises regularly, without ostentation and without weakness. "How many times he has stopped me at night," he writes, "as I passed near his bed! He wanted a quiet conscience, without reproach. His usual frivolity left him at the door of the chapel. He believed in the presence ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... he uses it in a spirit of wise benevolence, and his public and private benefactions, while large, are made without ostentation or affectation. Affable, approachable, companionable, devoted and faithful in his personal friendships, it is little wonder that some of them now and then impulsively speak of him as "the best ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 4, January, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... high-minded, and fond husbands and fathers are echoing such questions with a sigh of agony! Poor Follett! 'twas for such reasons that he lived with an honourable economy, eschewing that extravagance and ostentation which too often, to men in his dazzling position, prove irresistible; it was for such reasons that he rose up early, and went to bed late, and ate the bread of carefulness. Had he been alone in the world—had he had none to provide for but himself, and yet had manifested ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... mind, in several letters during her imprisonment which I have read, much the contrary. The French editor makes this observation: "Who could believe that these writings are of the same epoch? The first denotes asperity and ostentation; the second indicates simplicity, softness, and nobleness. The one is that of Elizabeth, queen of England; the other that of her cousin, Mary Stuart. The difference of these two handwritings answers most evidently ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... to be so crucial, came in cheerfully enough. There was, to be sure, a trifle less ostentation in the public celebrations, but the usual amount of champagne brought in the most vital year in the history of the nation. The customary number of men, warmed by that champagne, made reckless love to the women who happened to be near them and forgot it by morning. And the women themselves ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... army and the loyal gentry of the province, most of whom were collected within the beleaguered town, had been invited to a masqued ball, for it was the policy for Sir William Howe to hide the distress and danger of the period and the desperate aspect of the siege under an ostentation of festivity. The spectacle of this evening, if the oldest members of the provincial court circle might be believed, was the most gay and gorgeous affair that had occurred in the annals of the government. The brilliantly-lighted apartments were ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... all, they did less mischief than Lucifer had expected from them, the cause was their entire bewilderment by what had passed, and their utter inability to penetrate the policy of Gerbert, who henceforth devoted himself even with ostentation to good works. They could never quite satisfy themselves whether they were speaking to the Pope or to the Devil, and when under the latter impression habitually emitted propositions which Gerbert justly stigmatised as ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... continued quickly. "Or if indeed we do call them difficulties, let us say at once that they are very minor ones. Only the thing must be done neatly and without ostentation, for the sake ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... force, there were two hundred horse, seemingly very well armed and mounted, and, as we conceived, properly trained and regimented, being furnished with trumpets, drums, and standards. These troops paraded about the hill with great ostentation, sounding their military music and practising every art to intimidate us (as our numbers on shore were by this time not unknown to them), in hopes that we might be induced by our fears to abandon the place before the pillage was completed. But we were ...
— Anson's Voyage Round the World - The Text Reduced • Richard Walter
... this be so: His meanes of death, his obscure buriall; No Trophee, Sword, nor Hatchment o're his bones, No Noble rite, nor formall ostentation, Cry to be heard, as 'twere from Heauen to Earth, That I must call ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... extravagant gifts of silver plate presented to Isabeau of Bavaria. The family of Mustel in fact had "fait mettre en criees et subhastations le manoir de la ville." And in times of such distress the citizens may well have objected to any useless ostentation on ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... enmities which Francis had brought back from the East. After his usual fashion, he mistook his malevolence for virtue, nursed it, as preachers tell us that we ought to nurse our good dispositions, and paraded it, on all occasions, with Pharisaical ostentation. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... waste labour breed luxury create unhappiness by propagating factitious wants too often engender vice and are injurious for the most part to real civilization. The most malignant feelings which enter into the present struggle have been generated especially in England by the ostentation of idle wealth in contrast with surrounding poverty. No really high nature covets such a position as that of a luxurious and useless millionaire. Communism as a movement is a mistake but there is a communism which is deeply seated ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... harsh thing to say—instead of finding something nice and appropriate. On board, where she never saw him in evening clothes, Renouard's resemblance to a duke's son was not so apparent to her. Nothing but his—ah—bohemianism remained. She rose with a sort of ostentation. ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... Those essays, written by him, which we have read, exhibit a sagacious and careful treatment of the subjects under consideration. He shared in a very great degree the taste of his times for outward show and splendor; but in him it took a direction which led to something far higher than mere ostentation. The works of sculpture and architecture produced under his reign are monuments of a pure and severe taste; the capital of Prussia has seen none more beautiful. He complacently indulged in the contemplation of the greatness founded by his ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... the guardians of Cecilia. He is a man of wealth and great ostentation, with a haughty humility and condescending pride, especially in his intercourse with his social inferiors.—Miss Burney, Cecilia (1782). DEME'TIA, South Wales; ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... that respectable residence for a large mansion in Hamilton Place; and his sober dinners were succeeded by splendid banquets. Naturally, he had no taste for such things; his mind was too nervous, and his temper too hard, to take pleasure in luxury or ostentation. But now, as ever he acted upon a system. Living in a country governed by the mightiest and wealthiest aristocracy in the world, which, from the first class almost to the lowest, ostentation pervades,—the very ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book III • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... into such long invectives and loaded the young widow with such bitter reproaches, that Zadig was far from being pleased with this ostentation ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... Although this was the great Jubilee year, the festivals of the carnival began none the less for that, and were conducted in a manner even more extravagant and licentious than usual; and the conqueror after the first day prepared a new display of ostentation, which he concealed under the veil of a masquerade. As he was pleased to identify himself with the glory, genius, and fortune of the great man whose name he bore, he resolved on a representation of the triumph ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... pleasure will have no taste for sedition, and he who is in debt is no longer free. Your majesty must bestow gifts and places at court; the Magyars will grow ambitious—they will become hangers-on of princes, and—dissipation, ostentation, and extravagance will ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... offer sets before thee to deliver. 380 These if from servitude thou shalt restore To thir inheritance, then, nor till then, Thou on the Throne of David in full glory, From Egypt to Euphrates and beyond Shalt raign, and Rome or Caesar not need fear. To whom our Saviour answer'd thus unmov'd. Much ostentation vain of fleshly arm, And fragile arms, much instrument of war Long in preparing, soon to nothing brought, Before mine eyes thou hast set; and in my ear 390 Vented much policy, and projects deep Of enemies, of aids, battels and leagues, Plausible to the world, to me worth naught. Means ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... strong Northern character, his eyes are light grey, and his complexion sandy; he is a large man of perfectly unassuming manners and of most amiable deportment. Daily receiving homage from all the potentates of Europe, he is still without the least appearance of ostentation. He readily assented to a request to sit for his portrait which I hope soon ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... had been admitted to a fashionable club, he had moved into bachelor apartments suitable to his improving fortunes and social position. He had also committed himself to the keeping of an English man-servant—he did not like to call him his valet, lest the appearance of ostentation and Anglomania should prejudice him with his business associates. But somehow the new dignity of his own surroundings seemed to lend something bordering on probability to the conjecture that this ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... service, and its lofty arch resound with His praise! May the eye which seeth in secret witness here the sincere and unaffected piety which withdraws from the engagements of the world to silence and privacy, that it may be exercised with less interruption and less ostentation. ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh
... pictures by a given artist adds to their "gentility," and there is no price which his work may not immediately reach, and for years maintain; and in buying at that price, you are not getting value for your money, but merely disputing for victory in a contest of ostentation. And it is hardly possible to spend your money in a worse or more wasteful way; for though you may not be doing it for ostentation yourself, you are, by your pertinacity, nourishing the ostentation of others; you meet them in their game ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine joined in a rapturous cheer, each man and woman, to show that he or she was not disappointed. The bearer spoke with Mr. Burrham, in answer to his questions, and, with a good deal of ostentation, he opened a check-book, filled a check and passed it to her, she signing a receipt as she took it, and transferring to him her ticket. So far, in dumb show, all was well. What was more to my purpose, it was rapid, ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... reasonably despise the understanding of one who conducts himself in such a manner as naturally produces such lamentable consequences, and continues in the same destructive paths to the end of a long life, ostentatiously boasting of morals and philosophy in print, and with equal ostentation bragging of the scenes of low debauchery in public conversation, though deplorably weak both in mind and body, and his virtue and his vigour in a state of non-existence. His confederacy with Swift and Pope puts me in ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... shortcomings may be best taken by seeing how a man exercising such enormous power, power repeated day by day, and almost at every hour of the day, might have prepared the way for disarmament and peace, might have modified the character of modern civilization, might have made ostentation look like a crime, might have brought capital and labour into a sensible partnership, and might have given to the moral ideals of the noblest sons of men if not an intellectual impulse ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
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