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Tinsel   /tˈɪnsəl/   Listen
Tinsel

verb
(past & past part. tinseled or tinselled; pres. part. tinseling or tinselling)
1.
Impart a cheap brightness to.
2.
Adorn with tinsel.
3.
Interweave with tinsel.



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"Tinsel" Quotes from Famous Books



... prince with the stately volume which the University of Oxford issued from the Clarendon Press: "Epicedia Oxoniensia in obitum celsissimi et desideratissimi Frederici Principis Walliae." Here an {277} obsequious vice-chancellor displayed all the splendors of a tinsel Latinity in the affectation of offering a despairing king and father such consolations for his loss as the Oxonian Muses might offer. Here Lord Viscount Stormont, in desperate imitation of Milton, did ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... flat and, oh yes, indeed, our casual income. I remember, too, that when it was finally bought I put it on my shoulder with a proud feeling, and we drifted farther, picking up the trimmings—the tinsel and gay ornaments, the small gifts for the one very small person who had so recently come to live with us, discussing each purchase with due deliberation, going home at last with rather more than we could afford, I fear, for I recall further that we did not have enough left next morning to ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine

... desired to be the lord of your lord. You wished to reign through me. Poor Fredersdorf, do you think it such happiness to be a king? Do you not know that this royal crown, which seems so bright to you, is only a crown of thorns, which is concealed with a little tinsel and a few spangles? Poor Fredersdorf, you are ambitious; I will gratify you in this as far as possible, but you must conquer the desire to control my will, and influence my resolutions. A king is only answerable to God," proceeded the king, "and ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... now seen what meaningless tinsel the unrestricted right to trade in furs was. To get the furs access to the land was necessary; and the land was monopolized. In the South, where tobacco and corn were the important staples, the worker was likewise denied the ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus

... impudent young Cockney, who had the most miraculous faculty of telling lies—not only palpable lies, but lies absolutely impossible: yet they were so sublimely told often, and he contrived to lug into them such a quantity of gorgeous tinsel ornament, as, in his happier efforts, decidedly to carry the day against his opponent. The London hand had seen life too, of which, with respect to what is called the world, his competitor was as ignorant as a child. He had his sentimental vein, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various

... the ranks thinning before her. She was glad, for suddenly she found herself very tired. What would Abbott think? Would he, henceforth, see nothing but the show-girl of tinsel and trainer's whip, for ever showing through the clear glass of her real self? At nine-thirty, what would Abbott say to her? and how should she reply? The thought of him obscured her vision of admiring faces. Her manner lost ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis

... earth-shaking Neptune's mace, And Tethys grave majestick pace, 870 By hoary Nereus wrincled look, And the Carpathian wisards hook, By scaly Tritons winding shell, And old sooth-saying Glaucus spell, By Leucothea's lovely hands, And her son that rules the strands, By Thetis tinsel-slipper'd feet, And the Songs of Sirens sweet, By dead Parthenope's dear tomb, And fair Ligea's golden comb, 880 Wherwith she sits on diamond rocks Sleeking her soft alluring locks, By all the Nymphs that nightly dance Upon thy streams with wily glance, Rise, rise, and heave thy rosie head ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton

... like madness freed from every bond, With all the tinsel-state of puppet-play! Lay off the crown, for it befits thee not, Even in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... still and thought of my dream, and the rain beat against the windows, and a draughty wind fluttered the tinselly decorations of last night. The floor was strewed with fragments of garments torn in the crush—paper and silken flowers, here a rosette, there a buckle, a satin bow, a tinsel spangle. Benches and tables were piled about the room, which was half dark; only to westward, through one window, was visible a paler gleam, which might by comparison ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill

... I should still like to know of some of these popular good-doers. We must make considerable allowance for human frailty. Perhaps I shall be able to pick out a real jewel, where you have believed them to be only coloured glass and tinsel." ...
— Working in the Shade - Lowly Sowing brings Glorious Reaping • Theodore P Wilson

... to matters outside of the law, though a little to a volunteer militia company of which I was a member; for a time a lieutenant, then in 1860 brigade-major on a militia brigadier's staff. We staff officers wore good clothes, much tinsel, gaudy crimson scarfs, golden epaulets, bright swords with glistening scabbards, rose horses in a gallop on parade occasions and muster days, yet knew nothing really military—certainly but little useful in war. We knew a little of company drill and of the handling ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer

... Napoleon, making little answer, asked for a pair of scissors, clipped one of the gold tassels from a window-curtain, put it in his pocket, and walked on. Some days afterward he produced it at the right moment, to the horror of the upholstery functionary: it was not gold but tinsel! In Saint Helena, it is notable how he still, to his last days, insists on the practical, the real. 'Why talk and complain? Above all, why quarrel with one another? There is no resultat in it; it comes to nothing that we can do. Say nothing if one can do nothing!' He ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various

... shunning sight Of man, and shrinking from the light, One dull, dim taper through the cell Glimmering, to make more horrible The face of darkness, she prepares, Working unseen, all kinds of snares, With curious, but destructive art: Here, through the eye to catch the heart, 30 Gay stars their tinsel beams afford, Neat artifice to trap a lord; There, fit for all whom Folly bred, Wave plumes of feathers for the head; Garters the hag contrives to make, Which, as it seems, a babe might break, But which ambitious madmen feel More firm and sure than chains ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill

... stooped over the pillow to be kissed; and out of a pocket in the hooded coat came forth the Christmas Angel. In the face it bore a strong family likeness to the drayman, but its feet were hidden in folds of snowy muslin, and on its head glittered a tinsel star. ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... doubted their sincerity. Love, wife, children, home, all have been sacrificed to pride of wealth, of power, and things—just mere things, that cannot touch the hand in times of sorrow, nor rejoice in times of joy. But I do not complain; I made my god a thing of gilt and tinsel, and he repaid me for my worship. And now I go ...
— Drusilla with a Million • Elizabeth Cooper

... caught, so that few fell to the floor. Wrapped in tinsel, they shone like stars as they caught the light, and the boys and girls vied with each other, laughing as they tried to see which would be lucky, and ...
— Princess Polly's Gay Winter • Amy Brooks

... hamely fare we dine, Wear hoddin grey, and a' that; Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine, A man's a man for a' that. For a' that, and a' that, Their tinsel show, and a' that; The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor, Is king o' men ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various

... "Salle" was large and showy; and when I had attended it in former debates, it exhibited the taste and skill which the French, more than any other people on earth, exhibit in temporary things. Nothing could exceed the elegance with which the Parisian decorators had fitted up this silk and tinsel abode, which was to be superseded, within a few months, by the solid majesty of marble. But, on this memorable and melancholy night, the ornaments bore, to me, the look of those sad frivolities ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various

... Nelly that her foster-father should wear, on that occasion, the splendidly-embroidered uniform which the board of general officers had adopted as the costume of the commander-in-chief of the armies of the United States, but he could not be persuaded to wear a suit bedizened with tinsel. He preferred the plain old continental blue and buff, and the modest, black-ribbon cockade. Magnificent white plumes, which General Pinckney had presented to him, he gave to the bride; and to the Reverend Thomas Davis, rector ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing

... angry," said Aunt Anne. She said it as though she meant it. Amazing how human this strange aloof creature had become. As though some coloured saint bright with painted wood and tinsel before whom one stood in reverence slipped down suddenly and with fingers of flesh and blood struck one's face. Her cheeks were flushed, her beautiful hands were no longer thin but were ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole

... him for the modern world, without tinsel and pasteboard; since I conceived him in fire and bore him in agony; since—even the cream of this tart is sour—since I carried him to and fro in my pocket, as a young kangaroo is carried in the pouch ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill

... the shadows were falling. In the west the sun was slipping down behind the hills, leaving the strong day with a rosy and radiant glamour, that faded away in eloquent tones to the grey, tinsel softness of the zenith. Out in the yard a sumach bush was aflame. Rich tiger-lilies thrust in at the sill, and lazy flies and king bees boomed in and out of the window. Something out of the sunset, out of the glorious freshness and primal majesty of the new land, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... influenced by such motives, and possessing a frank and caustic tongue, was not likely to attain any very large share of popular favour or to be esteemed a companionable sort of person. The fabric of social life is interwoven with a multitude of delicate evasions, of small hypocrisies, of matters of tinsel sentiment; social intercourse would be impossible, if it were not so. There is no sort of social existence possible for a person who is ingenuous enough to say always what he thinks, and, on the whole, one may be thankful that there is not. One naturally ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... not the last to be attracted by glitter and tinsel, and to live for earthly things which perish in the using. The candidate who cares much for honour and nothing for learning, the professional man who will sacrifice reputation to win a fortune, and all who wrong others in order to better themselves, ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.

... at this when I observed that a strange procession was passing by the cobbler's door. First there was a man who was burdened with a great tinsel box hung with velvet, in which were six plush chairs. After him came another who was smothered with rugs and pictures. A third carried upon his back his wife, a great fat creature, who glittered with jewels. Behind him he dragged a dozen trunks, from which ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks

... the greensward dart the lizards; But it was no serpent singing, Nor a sacred lizard calling, It was but the mountain-berry Calling to the lonely maiden: "Come, O virgin, come and pluck me, Come and take me to thy bosom, Take me, tinsel-breasted virgin, Take me, maiden, copper-belted, Ere the slimy snail devours me, Ere the black-worm feeds upon me. Hundreds pass my way unmindful, Thousands come within my hearing, Berry-maidens swarm about me, Children come in countless numbers, None of these has come to gather, ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.

... anomalous garment, slashed with various colors, like a harlequin's coat. Upon one shoulder was sewed the semblance of a door cut out of blue cloth; on the other, a crescent cut out of green. Upon the head was set a tinsel crown, amid tangles of disordered hair. Above was a huge brass key, suspended by a tow string from the ceiling. Table and floor were littered with manuscripts and papers; under the former I ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... adding oxide of tin to glass, thus imparting a slight milkiness to it. The imitation is then shaped from this glass by molding, and the back of the cabochon is given an irregular surface, which may be set over tinsel to give the effect ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade

... before the shows of wild beasts, which, by the bye, are frequently found much more worthy of admiration than the real beasts themselves; listening to the jokes of the merry-andrews from the platforms in front of the temporary theatres, or admiring the splendid tinsel dresses of the performers who thronged the stages in the intervals of the entertainments; and in this manner, occasionally gazing and occasionally listening, I passed through the town till I came in front of a large edifice looking full upon the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... you weigh 'gainst love That's true? Tell me with what you'd turn the scale? Yea, make the index waver? Wealth? A feather! Rank? Tinsel against bullion in the balance! The love of kindred? That to set 'gainst love! Friendship comes nearest to't; but put it in, Friendship will kick the beam!—weigh nothing 'gainst it! Weigh love against the ...
— The Hunchback • James Sheridan Knowles

... humour of the moment, and never used at all, accumulate upon him so rapidly that he is glad to find some enthusiastic boatman to bestow them upon. It is needless to add, that a gift of this kind is usually very much appreciated by the recipient. Tinsel is a very useful adjunct to a fly, and should always be employed in those used in loch-fishing. If variety is wanted in colouring, the least tip of Berlin or pig's wool of the desired shade will be found very effective. ...
— Scotch Loch-Fishing • AKA Black Palmer, William Senior

... straightening objects here or there which did very well as they were. Flora knocked, and was sent away. On the mantel was discovered a square lavender box, bearing a blazoned name well known in another city. Fresh flowers from Canning, these were; and Carlisle, removing the purple tinsel from the bound stems, carefully disposed the blossoms in a bowl of water. Once in her goings and comings, she encountered her reflection in the mirror, and then she quickly averted her eyes. One glance of recognition between herself and that poor frightened little thing, and down would come ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... choice and beseeching, what would she think of in her journeying, what would she look for when the herds passed her? Surely for the gaze which had found her, and which she would know again. Life would be no better than candle-light tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been, to issues of longing and constancy. It was true that Dorothea wanted to know the Farebrothers better, and especially to talk to the new rector, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... with any the least weakness either of hand or design, is only to set the weakness in a more glaring light, dressing it up, not in the gorgeous array and real jewellery of the court, but in the foil and tinsel glitter, and mock regality of a low theatrical pageantry. And this would be the case even if we had in use his luscious vehicle; but with an inferior one, too often with a bad one, the case of weakness is aggravated, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various

... decorations, the wreaths, the gauze, the tinsel, and paper angels, suspended by invisible wires over the counters, and all glittering and shining and twinkling with light, a strong whiff of evergreen fragrance came to her, and the aroma of fir-balsam, and it was to her the very breath of all the mysterious joy and hitherto untasted festivity ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... by her personal suite. Of the royal vehicle in question Cayet gives a minute description, which we transcribe as affording an accurate idea of the taste displayed in that age in the decoration of coaches: "It was," he says, "covered with brown velvet and trimmed with silver tinsel on the outside; and within it was lined with carnation-coloured velvet, embroidered with gold and silver. The curtains were of carnation damask, and it was drawn by four gray horses." [110] These royal conveyances were, however, far less convenient ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe

... night for Belinda when Blanche went away; and her husband, with rather a blush and a sigh, said "he had been deceived in her; he had thought her endowed with many precious gifts, he feared they were mere tinsel; he thought she had been a right-thinking person, he feared she had merely made religion an amusement—she certainly had quite lost her temper to the schoolmistress, and beat Polly Rucker's knuckles cruelly." Belinda flew to his arms, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... the Duc d'Elboeuf, MM. de Puylaurens, du Coudrai-Montpensier, and de Goulas were tried and executed in effigy; the figures by which they were represented being clothed in costly dresses, richly decorated with lace, and glittering with tinsel ornaments.[193] ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe

... passion, culminating at last, when the storm burst, in complete mutual understanding, and a joint determination that carried all before it—when, I say, Aunt Rennie, defeated, prepared to take her leave, she said a word to me which I often thought of afterwards. "She is choosing blindfold, tinsel for gold." I thought of it, not on account of the expression, but of Aunt Rennie herself. There was something in the pallor of her face, and in her tone, that made me ask myself whether there could be anything in this ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall

... must there be, to hold the fabric together and make possible the daring spins of you, my lords Lovelace, and you, Launcelots and Tristrams, and Miss Vivien here; who weave your paradoxical cross-purposes of tinsel evil in ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson

... republic, which his family had really changed from a democracy to a ploutarchy, he had the good taste to scorn the vulgar pomp of kings,—"the horses led, and grooms besmeared with gold,"—all the theatrical paraphernalia and plebeian tinsel "which dazzle the crowd and set them all agape"; but his expenditures were those of an intellectual and accomplished oligarch. He was worthy, in many respects, to be the chief of those haughty merchants and manufacturers, who wielded more power, through the length of their purses ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various

... tawny sovereign had insulted the French, but it was difficult for them to define the nature of the offence. However, they claimed the right to mount guard, if only to the end of getting a better foot-hold. Poor, hapless sovereign! she thought more of her tinsel than the French did of her rights: thus the small difficulty. Frenchmen are clever fellows in a small way, have very pliable ideas, which they can change with wondrous celerity; they aim to do good, ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton

... more distasteful fruits to be painfully harvested by following her mother's tuition, and accept the easily gathered luscious golden fruit offered her by her father. Like all children and many adults, the glitter and the tinsel of the present enjoyment were too powerful and seductive to be resisted, or to be postponed for ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.

... sleeve-board, and sticking him to the road with wax—Clown dissolving partnership by walking off, in a new wrap-rascal, with the cash-box, that no one may rob them. The best things must come to an end!—and so does the Pantomime—with a gorgeous display of red fire, tinsel and gold, real water and the electric light—all chopped off in the middle by the descending curtain. The box-fronts have been enveloped in their night-gowns; the Columbine is clattering, in pattens, to her lodgings; the Harlequin has been bolted out, unable to vault through the fan-light; ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner

... pay, social position, or any glitter and tinsel of man's glory; in fact, we can promise little more than rations, plenty of hard work, and probably no little of worldly scorn; but if on the whole you believe you can in no other way help your Lord so well and bless ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... great dames, with thin lips, oblique noses, green complexions, and clay-coloured eyes, hate to be served by a damsel wearing that effulgent unbought crown of beauty which makes all other crowns seem such pitiful tinsel gewgaws to the sick soul. That was one disadvantage, but it was greatly overweighed by a general preference for beauty over ugliness. The flower-girl with beautiful eyes stands a better chance than her squinting sister ...
— Fan • Henry Harford

... players would begone, Out of this theatre of tinsel days And lights and tawdry glamour, out to face Even the blank of night, the icy stars, The vast abysses. What the gallery-gods Could give, they well have given; but deities Inscrutabler than they annul all gifts With one gift more—the restless mind that peers Past fame, friends, learning, ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke

... upper end of the room, an antiquated Abigail, dressed in her lady's cast-clothes; whom he (I suppose) mistook for some countess just arrived at the Bath. The ball was opened by a Scotch lord, with a mulatto heiress from St Christopher's; and the gay colonel Tinsel danced all the evening with the daughter of an eminent tinman from the borough of Southwark. Yesterday morning, at the Pump-room, I saw a broken-winded Wapping landlady squeeze through a circle of peers, to salute her brandy-merchant, who stood by the window, ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett

... finally even the late eminent Macfarren, the worst enemy music has ever had in this country, did not disdain to prepare "a performing edition," and to improve Mozart's improvements on Handel. One wonders whether Mozart, when he overlaid the "Messiah" with his gay tinsel-work, dreamed that some Costa, encouraged by Mozart's own example, and without brains enough to guess that he had nothing like Mozart's brains, would in like manner desecrate "Don Giovanni." Like "Don Giovanni," ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman

... science of Homoeopathy, to which you are asked to trust your lives and the lives of those dearest to you. A mingled mass of perverse ingenuity, of tinsel erudition, of imbecile credulity, and of artful misrepresentation, too often mingled in practice, if we may trust the authority of its founder, with heartless and shameless imposition. Because it is suffered so often to appeal unanswered to the public, because it has its ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... his way was impossible. A man carried away by abnormal appetites, and wickedness, and the devil, may of course commit murder, or forge bills, or become a fraudulent director of a bankrupt company. And so may a man be untrue to his troth,—and leave true love in pursuit of tinsel, and beauty, and false words, and a large income. But why should one tell the story of creatures so base? One does not willingly grovel in gutters, or breathe fetid atmospheres, or live upon garbage. If we are to deal with heroes and heroines, let us, at any rate, have ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope

... sir, And with powder'd caps and wigs, sir, And with ruffles to be shown, Cambric ruffles not their own; And with Holland shirts so white, Shirts becoming to the sight, Shirts bewrought with different letters, As belonging to their betters. With their pretty tinsel'd boxes, Gotten from their dainty doxies, And with rings so very trim, Lately taken out of lim—[1] And with very little pence, And as very little sense; With some law, but little justice, Having stolen from ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... worship—the gaudy toyshop above the grand altar, the tiny side chapels, with their pictures of the dying Saviour, and the confessional box, now thick with dust, and echoless of sob of penitent or counsel of confessor. It was evidently a poorly endowed chapel, the tinsel adornments being of the cheapest and the candles of the thinnest. But in some past generation a good Catholic had bestowed upon it an altarcloth of richest silk, daintily embroidered. The colours had faded out of the flowers, and the golden hue of the cloth had been grievously ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy

... Neptune's mace, And Tethys' grave majestic pace; By hoary Nereus' wrinkled look, And the Carpathian wizard's hook; By scaly Triton's winding shell, And old soothsaying Glaucus' spell; By Leucothea's lovely hands, And her son that rules the strands; By Thetis' tinsel-slippered feet, And the songs of Sirens sweet; By dead Parthenope's dear tomb, And fair Ligea's golden comb, Wherewith she sits on diamond rocks Sleeking her soft alluring locks; By all the Nymphs that nightly dance Upon thy streams with wily glance; Rise, ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton

... suspended, looking as though they had grown there, and little blue and white tapers were placed among the leaves. Dolls that looked for all the world like men—the Tree had never beheld such before—were seen among the foliage, and at the very top a large star of gold tinsel was fixed. It was really ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various

... brimful with simple faith and simple trust, gazed in reverence on the naive wax figure behind the grating, within its throne of rough stone and whitewash. It was dressed in blue calico spangled with tinsel, and had a crown on its head made of gilt paper and a veil of coarse tarlatan. Two china pots containing artificial flowers were placed on either side ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... evening of life for the venerable grandparents at home. For their sake she had conquered her dread of the lion in the pageant. Indeed she had found other lions in her path that she feared more—the glitter and gauds of her tinsel world, the enervating love of ease, the influence of sordid surroundings and ignoble ideals. But not one could withstand the simple goodness of the unsophisticated girl. They retreated before the power of her fireside traditions ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... by the proffer of a stolen regard? And what have we to do with homes, or hearts, or firesides? Have we not the playhouse, its paste diamonds, its paste feelings, and the loud applause of fops and sots—hearts?—beneath loads of tinsel and paint? Nonsense! The love that can go with souls to heaven—such love for us? Nonsense! These men applaud us, cajole us, swear to us, flatter us; and yet, forsooth, we would have ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade

... at the bit of tinsel in his own hand, and at the smaller, but exquisitely-shaped "article" that my grandmother held up to look at, suspended by its bit of ribbon, and was quite as much puzzled as he had evidently been a little while before, in his distinctions between the rich and the poor. Tom was not able to distinguish ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper

... of the family determine the needs of citizens. Its conversation, its reading, its customs, set the standard of social needs. Where the father laughs at the smartness of the artful dodge in politics, where the mother sighs after the tinsel and toys that she knows others have bought with corrupt cash, where the conversation at the meal-table steadily, though often unconsciously, lifts up and lauds those who are out after the "real thing," ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope

... pretentiousness of the Casino itself—Durkin could never quite decide whether it reminded him of a hurriedly finished exposition building or of a child's birthday cake duly iced and bedecked—the tinsel glory, the hackneyed magnificence, of its legitimatized and ever-orderly gaming dens, the eternal claws of greed beneath the voluptuous velvet of indolence—it all combined to fill his soul with a sense ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer

... god Vishnu, notwithstanding that tulsi bears the title of Krishna's bride, probably because of the latter being an incarnation of Vishnu. On these occasions pots of this plant are painted and adorned with tinsel. A magical circle is traced in the garden and the plant is put in the middle of it. A Brahman brings an idol of Vishnu and begins the marriage ceremony, standing before the plant. A married couple ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky

... into several small churches to see the sepulchres. Not like our Tuscan ones; wretched things, mainly tinsel and shabby frippery. ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee

... floor in a corner, and many of the guests also were seated on the floor. Miss Ingate, intoxicated by the rapture of existence, and Miss Thompkins were carefully examining the frescoes on the walls. A young woman covered from head to foot with gold tinsel was throwing chocolates into Musa's mouth, or as near to it ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett

... on these occasions his room is richly ornamented, and a statue of the ten-armed goddess Durga placed in it. This statue is formed of clay or wood, painted with the most glaring colours, and loaded with gold and silver tinsel, flowers, ribbons, and often with even real jewellery. Hundreds of lights and lamps, placed between vases and garlands of flowers, glitter in the room, the court-yard, and outside the house. A number of different animals are ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer

... richer dressed than your friends, but I will venture to say that I saw none neater or more elegant: which praise I ascribe to the taste of Mrs. Temple and my mantuamaker; for, after having declared that I would not have any foil or tinsel about me, they fixed upon ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... rankling in his brain, Hal Surtaine sat and pondered in his private study at home. His musings arraigned before him for judgment and contrast the two women who had so stormily wrought upon his new life. Esme Elliot had played with his love, had exploited it, made of it a tinsel ornament for vanity, sought, through it, to corrupt him from the hard-won honor of his calling. She had given him her lips for a lure; she had played, soul and body, the petty cheat with a high and ennobling ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... submits, the advantages will be that, after exposing himself to all the humiliation and performing all the barbarities required of him, he may, if he escapes being killed, get a decoration of red or gold tinsel to stick on his clown's dress; he may, if he is very lucky, be put in command of hundreds of thousands of others as brutalized as himself; be called a field-marshal, and ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy

... practice. We are inclined to think that the morning is more favourable to dramatic excellence than the evening. The daylight accords with the truth and sobriety of nature, and it is the season of cool judgment: the gilded, the painted, the tawdry, the meretricious—spangles and tinsel, and tarnished and glittering trumpery—demand the glare of candle-light and the shades of night. It is certain, that the best pieces were written for the day; and it is probable, that the best actors were those who performed whilst the sun was above the horizon. ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various

... in the field are cutting off French heads. And it will be best for me to go back to Kunzendorf. I have nothing to do here; no one cares for an old fellow like me. I have hoped on from day to day, but all my hopes are gone now. Amelia, take off your tinsel, and pack up our traps. The best thing we can do will be to start this very evening and return to our miserable, ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach

... glorious and lofty as they are, proudly as they stand over their trembling subjects! Even to them comes the dark hour in which all the borrowed and artistically-combined tinsel of their lives falls from them; a dark hour, in which they tremble and repent, and pray to God for what they seldom granted to their fellow-men—mercy! Mercy for those false tales which they have imposed upon ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach

... The Pope shook upon his throne; the shuttle of diplomatic intrigue stood still; diplomatists who had lived so long in lies that the whole life of man seemed but a stage pageant, a thing of show and tinsel, stood aghast at the revelation of English sincerity, and a shudder of great awe ran through Europe. The fury of party leaves little room for generous emotion, and no pity was felt for these men by the English Protestants. The Protestants knew well that if these same sufferers could have had their ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude

... fruit, nor blossom bore. Sid's sceptre, full of juice, did shoot In golden boughs, and golden fruit; And he, the dragon never sleeping, Guarded each fair Hesperian Pippin. No hobby-horse, with gorgeous top, The dearest in Charles Mather's[7] shop, Or glittering tinsel of May Fair, Could with this rod of Sid compare.[8] Dear Sid, then why wert thou so mad To break thy rod like naughty lad?[9] You should have kiss'd it in your distress, And then return'd it to your mistress; Or made it a Newmarket ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... pages of hurdy-gurdy tune and unmeaning music intervene. Recall "Ah, fors' e lui che l'anima," with its passionate second section, "A quell' amor," and that most moving song of resignation, "Dite all' giovine." These things outweigh a thousand times the glittering tinsel of the opera and give "Traviata" a merited place, not only beside the later creations of the composer, but among those latter-day works which we call lyric dramas to distinguish them from those which we still call operas, with commiserating ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... they had fallen from the lips of the other. "Yes, I am the King. I am the miserable, gilded figurehead out on the prow, which serves no end and no purpose. I am the ornamental symbol of a system which the world is discarding! I am a medieval lay figure upon which to hang these tinsel decorations, these ribbons!" ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck

... a similar costume of pale gray and lavender, with a tall headdress of wire covered with white gauze and tinsel. ...
— The Belles of Canterbury - A Chaucer Tale Out of School • Anna Bird Stewart

... all to blame. The gospel it hears is too seldom of the inviting kind, adapted to its wants, addressed to its affections and reason. Men have been fed on the letter, while needing the spirit and truth which the letter conceals. Preachers have spun too much gossamer and tinsel; and woven too little solid bang-up and beaver for wear and comfort. The people have been served with too many custards and candies of entertainment, while hungering hotly for ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee

... of a good infantry soldier can be perfectly well gone through by whoever wears it. The shoulders, if they require external ornament, should have something that is really useful at the same time; not merely tinsel or cotton lace; and, therefore, it should be the adaptation of a thick woollen pad, ornamented with metal or coloured lace, calculated to take off the pressure of the musket and of the knapsack-straps from the bones of the neck and arm. Whoever has carried ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various

... a story illustrative of this altered manner and matter of preaching. He had been preaching when very young, at Galashiels, and one wife said to her "neebor," "Jean, what think ye o' the lad?" "It's maist o't tinsel wark," said Jean, neither relishing nor appreciating his fine sentiments and figures. After my mother's death, he preached in the same place, and Jean, running to her friend, took the first ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... smiling too; 'but it does not turn to tinsel. Would it if I saw more of it?' and he looked at ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge

... fare we dine, Wear hodden gray, an' a' that? Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine— A man's a man for a' that. For a' that, an' a' that, Their tinsel show, an' a 'that: The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor, Is king o' men ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... the neighbors found acceptable strung with a few strands of dingy popcorn and pasteboard ornaments. No, the Robson tree was always an opulent work of art, freighted with bursting cornucopias and heavy glass balls and yards of quivering tinsel. The money for all this dazzling beauty usually came a fortnight or so before the eventful day in the shape of a ten-dollar bill tucked away in the folds of Gertrude Sinclair's annual letter to Mrs. Robson. As Claire had grown older she had grown also impatient of the memory of her mother squandering ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie

... continued till ten o'clock in the evening; during which time I was a silent witness to a coolness and candor of argument unusual in the conflicts of political opinion; to a logical reasoning, and chaste eloquence, disfigured by no gaudy tinsel of rhetoric or declamation, and truly worthy of being placed in parallel with the finest dialogues of antiquity, as handed to us by Xenophon, by Plato, and Cicero. The result was, that the King should have a suspensive veto on the laws, that the legislature should be composed of a single ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... the Count of Crevecoeur, "and very like one that wears a lady's favour in his hat, and thinks he must carry things with a high tone, to honour the precious remnant of silk and tinsel. Well, sir, I trust it will be no abatement of your dignity, if you answer me, how long you have been about the person of the Lady Isabelle ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott

... Berrington, who, having entered during the contest, had stood unobserved until this moment; "and their gold and tinsel would prove but dross and bubble, if struck by the Ithuriel touch of Merit when ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter

... respective kinds. His thoughts are dressed up in this shabby finery with so much profusion and so little discrimination, that they remind us of a company of wretched strolling players, who have huddled on suits of ragged and faded tinsel, taken from a common wardrobe, and fitting neither their persons nor their parts; and who then exhibit themselves to the laughing and pitying spectators, in a state of strutting, ranting, painted, gilded beggary. "Oh, rare Daniels!" "Political economist, go and do thou likewise!" ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... I have some gold and silver money, besides a lot of beads, trinkets, and gaudy tinsel things, such as earthly savages have been willing ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass

... church imitating the theatre in its paper glories and plaster painted like marble. The real, living religious spirit insists on bringing, as in St Mark's, a gift of precious material, of delicate antique ornament, with every shipload. The crown of the Madonna is not, like the tragedy queen's, of tinsel, the sacrament is not given in an empty chalice. The priest, even where he makes no effort to be holy as a man, is at least sacred as a priest; whereas there is something uncomfortable in the sense that the actor ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... walked thru a dingy street Hurried, harassed, Thinking of all my problems that never are solved. Suddenly out of the mist, a flaring gas-jet Shone from a huddled shop. I saw thru the bleary window A mass of playthings: False-faces hung on strings, Valentines, paper and tinsel, Tops of scarlet and green, Candy, marbles, jacks— A confusion of color Pathetically gaudy and cheap. All of my boyhood Rushed back. Once more these things were treasures Wildly desired. With covetous eyes I looked ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale

... corridor was a little door leading to the apartment where the census-takers were. This was the chamber of the mistress of the whole of No. 30; she rented the entire apartment from Ivan Feodovitch, and let it out again to lodgers and as night-quarters. In her tiny room, under the tinsel images, sat the student census- taker with his charts; and, in his quality of investigator, he had just thoroughly interrogated a peasant wearing a shirt and a vest. This latter was a friend of the landlady, and had been ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi

... guardsmen of Butaritari. The court ladies were busy making mats; the guardsmen yawned and sprawled. Half a dozen rifles lay on a rock and a cutlass was leaned against a pillar: the armoury of these drowsy musketeers. At the far end, a little closed house of wood displayed some tinsel curtains, and proved upon examination to be a privy on the European model. In front of this, upon some mats, lolled Teburcimoa, the king; behind him, on the panels of the house, two crossed rifles represented fasces. He wore pyjamas which sorrowfully misbecame his bulk; his nose was hooked ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... her contempt of him; and declared, that, were there not another man in England, she would not have him. She was ready, on the contrary, she could assure them, to resign her pretensions under hand and seal, if Miss Clary were taken with his tinsel, and if every one else approved of ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... skeptic's sneer, the bigot's hate, the din Of clashing texts, the webs of creed men spin Round simple truth, the children grown who build With gilded cards their new Jerusalem, Busy, with sacerdotal tailorings And tinsel gauds, bedizening holy things, I turn, with glad and grateful heart, from them To the sweet story of the Florentine Immortal in her blameless maidenhood, Beautiful as God's angels and as good; Feeling that life, even now, may be divine With love no wrong can ever change to hate, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... dreamer of a frozen dream, Whirling bit of tinsel on the troubled spray, 'Tis not your hair's dead roses (your sunless, scentless roses) 'Tis not your sham sad poses That tell your hollow day— The glass is at my lips, but the wine is far away, The music's in my throat, but my soul no ...
— The Broadway Anthology • Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton

... accepted an invitation for you, Colonel." He was in one of his gently sparkling moods. "Get into your armor asinorum, for we fare forth to make contest with tinsel and gauze. In other words, we mingle with the proletariat. We go to see Margaret Anglin and Henry Miller in that superb and realistic Western libel, ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming

... glanced hastily out of the corner of my eye at Kennedy. Involuntarily his hand which held the telltale sequin had sought his waistcoat pocket, as though to hide it. Then I saw him check the action and deliberately examine the piece of tinsel between his ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve

... entering and calling the virgins with a flute; these appeared from a green-room, to the number of thirty or forty, of all ages and sizes. Each had her hair dressed in a topknot, and her head covered with a veil; a scarlet petticoat loaded with tinsel concealed her naked feet, and over this was a short red kirtle, and an enormous white shawl was swathed round the body from the armpits to the waist. A broad belt passed over the right shoulder ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... queer garden. There were rows and rows of Christmas trees, all glittering with balls and cobwebby tinsel, and instead of flower beds there were beds of every kind of toy in the world. Margaret at once ran over ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various

... apologetically, "is so odd, but he's an excellent sterling character; and that, you know, Mr. Linden, tells more in the bosom of a family than all the shining qualities which captivate the imagination. I am sure, Mr. Linden, that the moralist is right in admonishing us to prefer the gold to the tinsel. I have now been married some years, and every year seems happier than the last; but then, Mr. Linden, it is such a pleasure to contemplate the growing graces of the sweet pledge of our mutual love.—Adolphus, ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... dazzling, silvery glitter of the mirror-work and stuccoed halls of the Teheran palaces, the home of the wealthy Timuree Chieftain is distinguished by a striking and lavish display of colored glass, gilt, and tinsel. ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly brought the performers with all their tinsel and color directly into the room of ...
— A Bottle of Old Wine • Richard O. Lewis

... One child could make the yard outside the castle of green blotting-paper. Another child could furnish a mirror for the lake, another two toy green trees, one two wax swans, one a box of tin soldiers, another a jack-in-the-box, while the girls might dress a paper doll for a tinsel maid. The teacher, instructed by the class, might make a castle of heavy gray cardboard, fastening it together with heavy brass paper-fasteners and cutting out the door, windows, and tower. It is natural for children to ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready

... they had had some supper, although it was after eleven o'clock, Owen fixed the tree in a large flower-pot that had served a similar purpose before, and Nora brought out from the place where it had been stored away since last Christmas a cardboard box containing a lot of glittering tinsel ornaments—globes of silvered or gilded or painted glass, birds, butterflies and stars. Some of these things had done duty three Christmases ago and although they were in some instances slightly tarnished most of them were as good as new. In addition to these and the toys they had bought that evening ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... shadow. It is a real thing," said Mrs. Mayflower. "It does not project itself in advance of us; but exists in the actual and the now, if it exists at all. We cannot catch it by pursuit; that is only a cheating counterfeit, in guilt and tinsel, which dazzles our eyes in the ever receding future. No; happiness is a state of life; and it comes only to those who do each day's work peaceful self-forgetfulness, and a calm trust in the Giver of all good for the blessing that lies stored for each one prepared ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur

... determined to take matters into his own hands, and he proceeded to issue a number of sumptuary laws which were far from mild. Food was regulated, minstrels were not allowed to sit at the same table with ladies and gentlemen, most rigid rules were formulated against the abuse of gold, silver, and tinsel trimmings on the dresses of the women, and of the men as well, and the use of ermine and of all fine and Costly furs was carefully restricted. In Castile the same movement was taking place, and Alfonso X., who followed Fernando, issued similar laws, wherein women ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger

... By my troth's but a night-gowne in respect of yours, cloth a gold and cuts, and lac'd with siluer, set with pearles, downe sleeues, side sleeues, and skirts, round vnderborn with a blewish tinsel, but for a fine queint gracefull and excellent fashion, yours is ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... despair and anger his modest merits took heroic proportions in her eyes. She forgot her past dislike; she thought only of this, the simple good man, contrasted with the showy and fickle-hearted—true metal against glittering tinsel. His very weaknesses seemed homely and venial. He was of her own world, akin to the things which deep down in her soul she knew she must love to the last. It is to the credit of the man's insight that he saw the mood and took pains ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan

... dissect With long and tedious havock fabled knights In battles feign'd; the better fortitude Of patience and heroick martyrdom Unsung; or to describe races and games, Or tilting furniture, imblazon'd shields, Impresses quaint, caparisons and steeds, Bases and tinsel trappings, gorgeous knights At joust and tournament; then marshall'd feast Serv'd up in hall with sewers and seneshals; The skill of artifice or office mean, Not that which justly gives heroick name To person, or ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton

... she received with empressement. She was dressed to her heart's delight, with a profusion of mock pearl and tinsel; her hair in a shower of long curls in front, with any quantity of bows and braids behind, and a wreath!—that required all Mrs. Castleton's self-possession to look at without laughing. Her entrance excited no little sensation—for she was a striking-looking girl, being tall, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various

... been very hot for several days, but that morning the east wind came in, and crisped the air till it seemed to rustle like tinsel, and the sky was as sincerely and solidly blue as if it had been chromoed. They felt that they were really looking up into the roof of the world, when they glanced at it; but when an old gentleman hastily kissed a young woman, and commended her to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... pressed, each will be glad to get rid of the pressure, by sacrificing the most dependent. The church should have stood on its own defence. The Gallican hierarchy was, beyond all question, the most powerful in Europe. Rome and her cardinals were tinsel and toys to the solid strength of the great provincial clergy of France. They had numbers, wealth, and station. Those things could give influence among a population of Hottentots. Let other hierarchies take example. They threw them all away, at the first move of a bloody handkerchief on the top ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... criticism here. But on all sides in the social conversation of the young people of this day, it seems to be agreed to give good, plain, strong English the go-by and to indulge in the embroidery of adjectives. Tawdry adjectives such as 'beautiful', 'lovely,' 'horrid', 'awful', and the like worn tinsel. I suppose I might venture the assertion without fear of contradiction, that this is the stock in trade in most young girls in qualifying their conversation. The use of that tinsel gives a wholly unreal tone to what is being said and is ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley

... secret and the value of non-violence as they have never done before. He who runs may see that this a religious, purifying movement. We are leaving off drink, we are trying to rid India of the curse of untouchability. We are trying to throw off foreign tinsel splendour and by reverting to the spinning wheel reviving the ancient and the poetic simplicity of life. We hope thereby to sterilize the existing harmful institution. I ask Your Royal Highness as an Englishman ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi

... once universal. The special survival here is of the Hobby Horse, that once played so prominent a part in these boisterous masquerades, but such life as it still enjoys at Padstow is somewhat a galvanised existence, just as children still occasionally dress in poor tinsel and gaiety in order to collect a few coppers. Such exhibitions are melancholy ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon

... not be hard, methinks, sir, to decide between a coronet and a player's tinsel crown," observed his princely rival, with a sneer, as he too arose and assumed ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.

... earth ever passed to his tomb through such a storm of human tears. The pageants of Alexander, Caesar, and Wellington were tinsel to this. Nor did the spirit of Napoleon, the Corsican Lieutenant of Artillery who once presided over a congress of kings whom he had conquered, look down on its like even ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon

... morning we arrayed ourselves in our new habiliments; mine were silk stockings, shoes, and white kerseymere kneed breeches, a blue silk waistcoat loaded with tinsel, and a short jacket to correspond of blue velvet, a sash round my waist, a hat and a plume of feathers. Timothy declared I looked very handsome, and as the glass said the same as plain as it could speak, I believed him. Timothy's dress was a pair of wide Turkish trousers and red jacket, with ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat

... due to the lavish use of diamonds, rubies, emeralds and other precious stones, mainly introduced for their effect in color, few of them being of great value as gems. Stones with flaws, and others which are mere chips or scales, are laid on like tinsel. Two cases are filled with gaudy trappings and caparisons—horse and camel saddles with velvet and leather work, gold embroidery and cut-cloth work (applique); an elephant howdah of silver; chowries of yak tails with handles of sandal-wood, chased gold or carved ivory; gold-embroidered ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various

... no mercy in the girl, no more for him than for herself. The big head lay upon her breast; she caressed the gross hair of it ever so lightly. "These are tinsel oaths," she crooned, as if rapt with incurious content; "these are the old empty protestations of all you strutting poets. A word gets you what you desire! Then why do you not speak that word? Why do you not speak many words, and become again as eloquent ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell

... him again. By the following morning the transformation was complete, and the coffin moving unsheltered up the course of the river, as though to take possession of the stream, was much more striking than all the tinsel and canopies imaginable. The whole voyage up to Courbevoie, the point of arrival, was a mere classic reproduction of the usual official journey—flags, authorities girt with tricolour sashes, clergy pronouncing blessings, shaking with terror all the time, ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville

... that the old gentleman and lady in the front seat absolutely swear you to be the living image of their 'long lost Amy'? And how, if the farthest journey you ever will take again is the monotonous hand-journey from your pillow to your medicine bottle, then how, for instance, with map or tinsel or attar of roses, can you go to work to solve even just for your own satisfaction the romantic, shimmering ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... have seen the executrix and son-in-law, whom that great genius deceased, my well-beloved cousin in folly, King Corny, chose for himself. As to that thing, half mud, half tinsel, half Irish, half French, Miss, or Mademoiselle, O'Faley, that jointed doll, is—all but the eyes, which move of themselves in a very extraordinary way—a mere puppet, pulled by wires in the hands of another. The master showman, fully as extraordinary ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth

... other evening and had the joy of seeing her put on that sweet ickle f'ock she wears for the Jazz supper scene in Oh My! All the materials used are three yards of embroidered chiffon, six yards of tinsel fringe and six dozen tinsel tassels; and anything so completely swish and so ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various

... "It's only tinsel, Mrs. Bread," said Newman. "If you stay there a while it will all peel off of itself." And he ...
— The American • Henry James

... future kingdom of hers as though wishing to convince herself of its worthiness. And, though it was sham, tinsel, lies, and comedy she tried to see above ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont

... might be called a street of cafes at Perpignan, not far from the Castillet. They are great, splendid establishments, with wide, overhung, awninged terraces, and potted plants and electric lights and gold and tinsel, and mixed drinks and ices and sorbets, and all the epicurean cold things which one may find in the best establishment in Paris. These cafes are side by side and opposite each other, and are as typical of the life ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield

... behold, it remains, or the want of it remains;—for endless Times and Eternities, remains; and that is now the sole question with us forevermore! Brief brawling Day, with its noisy phantasms, its poor paper-crowns tinsel-gilt, is gone; and divine everlasting Night, with her star-diadems, with her silences and her veracities, is come! What hast thou done, and how? Happiness, unhappiness: all that was but the wages ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... possessed of miraculous powers; and that part of it visible, is not destitute of merit as a painting; but some of her grateful devotees, having decorated her with a real blue silk gown, spangled with tinsel stars, and two or three crowns, one above another, of gilt foil, the effect is the oddest imaginable. As I was sitting upon a marble step, philosophizing to myself, and wondering at what seemed to me such senseless bad taste, such pitiable and ridiculous ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson

... right for a young man to lead the life of a recluse of seventy. Here we are in the height of the London season, and I am sure you haven't been into ten houses, when a hundred of the very best are open to you—" I loathe the term "best houses." The tinsel ineptitude of them! For entertainment I really would sooner attend a mothers' meeting or listen to the serious British Drama—Have I read so and so's novel? Am I going to Mrs. Chose's dance? Do I ride in the Park? Do I know ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... is a funeral without a legacy; an assembly is a mob, and a ball a compound of glare, tinsel, noise, and dust. However amusing in their freshness, after a few repetitions, they are only rendered endurable by the prospect of some collateral gain, or the gratification of personal vanity. To exhibit the beauty of a young wife, or the diamonds ...
— The Mirror, 1828.07.05, Issue No. 321 - The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction • Various

... vermin the avenging thumb—'Any thing but that,' squeaks he, 'an you love me. Liken me to Lucifer, or Caius Gracchus; charge me with ambition, and glorious vices; let me be the evil genius of the commonwealth, the tinsel villain of the political melodrama; but don't threaten me with the fool's cap, or write me down with Dogberry; above all, don't quote me in cold blood, that the foolish people may see, after the fever heat has ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various

... love color. I love the drowsy blue of the fringed gentian, And the yellow of the goldenrod, And the rich russet of the leaves That turn at autumn-time.... I love rainbows, And prisms, And the tinsel ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster

... aware. What thoughts coursed through the mind of the Beaubien as she sat studying the girl through the tempered light, we may not know. What she saw in Carmen that attracted her, she herself might not have told. Had she, too, this ultra-mondaine, this creature of gold and tinsel, felt the spell of the girl's great innocence and purity of thought, her righteousness? Or did she see in her something that she herself might once have been—something that all her gold, and all the wealth of Ormus or of Ind could ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... for gold and silver; men have dreamed at night of fame; In the heat of youth they've struggled for achievement's honored name; But the selfish crowns are tinsel, and their shining jewels paste, And the wine of pomp and glory soon grows bitter to the taste. For there's never any laughter, howsoever far you roam, Like the laughter of the loved ones in the ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest

... Singer, how does he, good Lord, Compete with such a money-making Horde Of tinsel rhymesters that infest the Shops? They say he makes enough to pay ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne • Gelett Burgess

... all its display, all its tinsel, all its Jesuitism, all its bad taste, San Sebastian will become an important, dignified city within a very few years. When that time comes, the author who has been born there, will not prefer to hail from some hamlet buried in the mountains, rather than ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja

... candidly admit. Although we in front sometimes see and hear things we should not, some peculiarity of our position blinds and deafens us too much. Our eyes are beguiled into accepting age for youth, shabbiness for finery, tinsel for splendour. Garrick frankly owned that he had once appeared upon the stage so inebriated as to be scarcely able to articulate, but "his friends endeavoured to stifle or cover this trespass with loud applause," and the majority ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook

... truth, Agnes could scarcely understand how a boy could so dislike circus life as to really want to run away from even Twomley & Sorber's Herculean Circus and Menagerie. There was a glitter and tinsel to the circus that ever appealed to ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill

... left at the stage-door, and to boxes of chocolates handed over the footlights. Night after night, in dance or make-believe of life, she spends herself to exhaustion for the pleasure of the multitude; night after night, in a tinsel-world of limelight and grease-paint, ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke

... of silver-lustrous Chinese silks and waves of tinsel, which an oblique sunbeam shot through with luminous beads, while portraits of every era, in frames more or less tarnished, smiled through their ...
— The Mummy's Foot • Theophile Gautier

... walnuts hung down, as if they grew there, and more than a hundred little candles, red, white, and blue, were fastened to the different boughs. Dolls that looked exactly like real people—the tree had never seen such before—swung among the foliage, and high on the summit of the Tree was fixed a tinsel star. It was ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... contents. We know now, however, that we have nothing to do but to let them alone; that by degrees the blood will be absorbed and the tumour will disappear, and as it does so we may trace the gradual transformation of the membrane which covered it into bone, as we feel it crackling like tinsel under the finger. Two, three, or four weeks may be needed for the entire removal of one of these blood-swellings. The doctor will at once recognise its character, and you will then have nothing ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.



Words linked to "Tinsel" :   interweave, yarn, ornamentation, decorate, beautify, contribute, grace, adorn, lend, impart, embellish, add, weave, bring, decoration, ornament, bestow, thread



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