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More "Trumpery" Quotes from Famous Books



... and then he took it up and weighed it lightly in his hand. "I have never seen you wear it. I thought at first that you had got it on last night: but my eyes deceived me. My sight is not so good as it used to be. Really, Miss Heron, you make me ashamed of my trumpery gifts: pray take them away, and let me give you something prettier on your next birthday ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... God, that that princess might long prosper, and be employed in his service. The earl of Kent, observing that in her devotions she made frequent use of the crucifix, could not forbear reproving her for her attachment to that Popish trumpery, as he termed it; and he exhorted her to have Christ in her heart, not in her hand.[**] She replied, with presence of mind, that it was difficult to hold such an object in her hand without feeling her heart touched with ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume

... own sake, and the mere satisfaction of acquiring them, surely argues an intellect of a very low order; a mind disposed to be satisfied with mean and grovelling things; taking more pleasure in the trumpery casket than in the precious treasure which it contains, in the pursuit of words, than ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... better than that trumpery walk in the moonshine. Pope had not at this time joined the Tories, and both parties subscribed. He cleared over 5,000 pounds by the Iliad. Over the Odyssey he slackened, and employed two inferior ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell

... similar attire, he will be ravished with ecstasy. As if to show that it was the disproportion of the sizes which unfitted him to notice the lady, the larger he grows the bigger he wants his toys, till, when his wish reaches to life-sizes, good-by to the trumpery, and onward with realities.[1] ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... makes him open his eyes and contemplate you as scarcely sane to hint at such a thing. That "the Virgin," as he calls her, should come down from heaven and enter a church or a room, and hold a conversation with living men, women, or children in the nineteenth century, and give them a trumpery medal, or tell them to wear a piece of cloth round their neck, or cure them of some disease, he regards about as likely and rational as that the stories in the Arabian Nights and the Fairy Tales should ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton

... Lords Combermere and Amherst, and had discharged his office so much to the satisfaction of the governor and council in India, that they voted him five thousand sicca rupees, and a vote of thanks for his conduct. It was not to be endured, therefore, that he was to be taunted for appointing to this trumpery office a man who had previously filled the highest judicial functions in India. Lord Durham concluded by threatening that if this matter were proceeded in further by parliament he would not rest until he had obtained an inquiry ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... seeing that she has always shown herself a daughter to me—that she has all kinds of good qualities, and several accomplishments, knowing something of conchology, more of botany, drawing capitally in the Dutch style, and playing remarkably well on the guitar—not the trumpery German thing so-called—but the real ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow

... said the coachman, haughtily. "You are only going to some trumpery little village or other in the neighborhood, while we are going straight ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... are not slaves because Adam Wayne twenty years ago cheated us with a water-pipe. Notting Hill is Notting Hill; it is not the world. We in South Kensington, we also have memories—ay, and hopes. If they fought for these trumpery shops and a few lamp-posts, shall we not fight for the great High Street and the sacred Natural ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... laughed. "I never said it was, that I know. The job I'm in charge of is a bigger concern than your trumpery ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey

... a trumpery thing it is!' cried the stepmother; 'and now take your supper and go to bed, for it is ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang

... rags, rabbit and squirrel skins, at two cents each, in payment. His knowledge of "soft sawder and human natur" is as great as that of Sam Slick, his inimitable representative; and many a shoeless Irish girl is induced to change a dollar for some trumpery ornament, by his artful compliments to her personal attractions. He seems at home everywhere; talks politics, guesses your needs, cracks a joke, or condoles with you on your misfortunes with an elongated face. ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... perfect neatness. In fact, the two radical requirements of good taste in all such cases are an absence of obvious money-spending, and the evidence of constant care and attention. "Showiness" is common in every trumpery village in the land. What we should seek in our farm-villages is the most modest simplicity, shining with the polish of an affectionate care. Every spot should breathe of ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring

... further news of the assassin of Arthur Mountjoy. Under these encouraging circumstances the proposed consultation which might have produced such excellent results had been rejected; thanks to a contemptible fear of infection, excited by a story of a trumpery piece of flannel! ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins

... made light even of the "resurrection of Christ," and everywhere shows his superiority to the beggarly elements of history, dogma, and ritual, another declares that he was so enslaved by his Jewish prejudices and the trumpery he had picked up at the feet of Gamaliel, that he knew but little or next to nothing of the real mystery of the very Gospel he preached; that while he proclaims that it is "revealed, after having been hidden from ages generations," he himself manages to hide it afresh. This you will be told is a ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers

... Thinking this a trumpery remark he made no answer, but put out another domino—then as though something about her still intrigued his heavy curiosity: "You with ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold

... to Nahant. I want you to try your hand on a coast view. But what, what are you about? At that trumpery daguerreotype again? Let me see ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various

... crept across the field of view. The character of the shops became more and more difficult to define. Here a window displayed a heap of sailor's thimbles and pack-thread; there another set forth an array of trumpery glass vases or a basket of stale fruit, pretexts, perhaps, for the disguise of a "leaving shop," or unlicensed pawnbroker's establishment, out of which I expected to see Miss Pleasant Riderhood come forth, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various

... marks a stage. We are like the Indian who comes into town with all his money and buys everything he sees. There is no adequate realization of the large proportion of the labour and material of industry that is used in furnishing the world with its trumpery and trinkets, which are made only to be sold, and are bought merely to be owned—that perform no service in the world and are at last mere rubbish as at first they were mere waste. Humanity is advancing out of its trinket-making stage, and industry is coming down ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford

... going the circuit of the room, fell upon a trumpery filigree card-rack of paste-board, that hung dangling by a dirty blue ribbon, from a little brass knob just beneath the middle of the mantel-piece. In this rack, which had three or four compartments, were five or six visiting cards and a solitary letter. This last was much ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson

... have sold all my trumpery; not a counterfeit stone, not a riband, glass, pomander, brooch, ... to keep my pack from fasting." (Winter's Tale, ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley

... you please, Doctor," interrupted the Russian. "I have renounced the trumpery distinctions of your bourgeois civilization as far as ...
— The Great Drought • Sterner St. Paul Meek

... the bridge on all sides. At length I determined it could be done, and my heart beat nervously as the yawl neared the centre arch—not as to danger, but the dishonour of breaking a goodly spar at the end of a cruise, and in so trumpery a feat. It passed ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor

... enter into all the metaphysical trumpery of his Schools, nor wholly to confine my self to the language of the Pulpit; where we are told, that to think of GOD and of the Devil, we must endeavour first to form Ideas of those things which illustrate ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe

... Establishment; so that the rite meant and could mean nothing at all.... But I fear that your new position has brought you into contact with the Paedobaptists, that they have disturbed your old principles, and so induced you to believe in the validity of that trumpery ceremony!' ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy

... laughed cruelly, at the contrast between his pious words in Congress and his mad idea of forsaking everything to follow her around the world. Oh, the hypocrite! She had felt, as she sat listening to him, that his speech was a pack of lies, a mess of conventional trumpery and platitudes! The only one there who had spoken with any real sincerity, any real virtue, was that little old man, whom she had listened to with veneration because he had been one ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... house?" he said. "There are sixteen rooms ready for you. The people who moved out haven't left any trumpery. Nothing wanted but a little sweeping and ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... to Paris, that he might swallow them at a mouthful, and rise to the height of his genius in a battle greater than all the rest—a mother-battle, as 'twere. But there, there! the Parisians were afraid for their twopenny skins, and their trumpery shops; they opened the gates. Then the Ragusades began, and happiness ended. The Empress was fooled, and the white banner flaunted from the windows. The generals whom he had made his nearest friends abandoned ...
— Folk Tales Every Child Should Know • Various

... That no man who calls himself a Christian—no man who calls himself a man—shall ever disgrace himself by dealing at any show-shop or slop-shop. It is easy enough to know them. The ticketed garments, the impudent puffs; the trumpery decorations, proclaim them,—every one knows them at first sight, He who pretends not to do so, is simply either a fool or a liar. Let no man enter them—they are the temples of Moloch—their thresholds are rank with human blood. ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... Medicis. So the club called a Jew, named Salomon, who at that time was well known to all the vagabond of art and literature, and had continual transactions with them. Father Medicis traded in all sorts of trumpery. He sold complete sets of furniture from twelve francs up to five thousand; he bought everything, and knew how to dispose of it again, at a profit. Proudhon's bank of exchange was nothing in comparison with the system practiced by Medicis, who possessed the genius of ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger

... fantastic satisfaction in thinking that her millions were being used to build up the decayed fortunes of an English nobleman's family, as well as to 'restore' Roxmouth Castle, which is in a bad state of repair. And she would sacrifice my heart and soul and life to such trumpery ambitions ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... being established at Jerusalem, Jericho, Gadara, and Amathus. But its chief celebrity is connected with the tradition, that it was the residence of Joachim and Anna, the parents of the Virgin Mary. The house of St. Anne, observes Dr. Clarke, is the "commencement of that superstitious trumpery which for a long time has constituted the chief object of devotion and of pilgrimage in the Holy Land." No sooner was the spot discovered where the pious couple had lived than Constantine issued instructions to build upon it a magnificent church, the remains of which ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell

... fig for St. Denis of France! He's a trumpery fellow to brag on. A fig for St. George and his lance! Who splitted a heathenish dragon. The saints of the Welshman and Scot Are a pair of pitiful pipers, Both of whom may just travel to pot, Compared with the patron of swipers— St. Patrick ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore

... distressing yourself about it, you poor little kitten? I ought to have told you, but you were so pleased in thinking it was real I thought I would let it go, and I have not thought of it since. Why, dear, it was of no value at all, a mere trumpery little rhinestone that cost only ...
— Three Little Cousins • Amy E. Blanchard

... frequently and with no thought of payment. Very wealthy and a frequent traveller, Count Arthur's son had too many affairs on his head, and too many in it to cherish any desire of stuffing it further with old-fashioned trumpery. Kranitski soon observed this frame of mind in the young son of his former friend and protector, and he had long considered that house as lost and its master as a stranger. This did not sadden him at first over much, for he had a port, which ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)

... the head jailer, addressing his subordinate by a facetious prison nickname, "don't be all day starting that trumpery batch of yours. And harkye, friend, I have leave of absence, on business, at my Section this afternoon. So it will be your duty to read the list for the guillotine, and chalk the prisoners' doors before the cart comes to-morrow morning. 'Ware the bottle, Apollo, to-day; ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins

... Lord's sight, an't wool as good as bar, any time?" said Dinah. "I'd like to have Missis say which is worth the most,—a couple such as you, or one like me. Get out wid ye, ye trumpery,—I won't have ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... not think there is much courage or originality in giving utterance to truths that everybody knows, but which get overlaid by conventional trumpery. The only distinction which it is necessary to point out to feeble-minded folk is this: that, in asserting the breadth and depth of that significance which gives to fashion and fortune their tremendous power, we do not indorse the extravagances which often disgrace the one, nor the meanness which ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... get his daughter a husband, why does he not offer her to Wilmarth? If she is as pretty as you say, she ought not go begging for a mate, but when I marry for a fortune I want the money in hand, not locked up in a lot of useless trumpery." ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... time or other, namely,—Where do we find a precept in the Gospel requiring Ecclesiastical Synods? Convocations? Councils? Decrees? Creeds? Confessions? Oaths? Subscriptions? and whole cart-loads of other trumpery that we find religion encumbered with in these days?" [Footnote: Works of J. ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams

... muttered as he left the counting-house. "I was told that I was a gentleman for a little trumpery act in the street. That man tells you he is one by a single glance from his sad, stern eyes. He is another of the blue-bloods, Southerner to the backbone. How is it that he is in the old gentleman's employ, I wonder? I supposed father hated ex-Confederates as the Devil ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe

... FRANCIS,—I have just learned, with concern, that you are in prison upon two charges—one false, and another which is trumpery. I hasten to assure you that orders have been given which will satisfy your sense of justice, and, I hope, improve your opinion of myself. I believe that by this time you will have been assured that it was not I who betrayed your confidences to Semifonte—who, between you and ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett

... eaten by moth, perched in this wilderness of trumpery, presided over by an Angora cat, Madame Popinot's pet, restored to her no doubt with all the graces of life by some impecunious naturalist, who thus repaid a gift of charity with a perennial treasure. Some local artist whose ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac

... seen Master Faggus any the worse for liquor indeed? Her own opinion was, in truth, that he took a great deal too little, after all his hard work, and hard riding, and coming over the hills to be insulted! And if ever it lay in her power, and with no one to grudge him his trumpery glass, she would see that poor Tom had the nourishment which his cough ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore

... have been. Just playing at cooking and housework, reading aloud to her while she drew—yes, she told me that. And the flowers and all her little trumpery odds and ends about. Awfully amusing it ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit

... most cherished traditions and brought their idols beneath the iconoclastic hammer. In this general social and intellectual house-cleaning have we consigned virtue to the rubbish heap—or at best relegated it to the garret with the spinning-wheel, hand-loom and other out-of-date trumpery? Time was when a woman branded as a bawd hid her face for shame, or consorted only with her kind; now, if she can but become sufficiently notorious she goes upon the stage, and men take their wives and daughters to see her play "Camille" and kindred ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... imagine the Colonel in that role." Champney laughed. "What does he do with all his rhetorical trumpery at such times? I've never seen him under fire—in fact, he never ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller

... still Gilpin, who wrote so much on the beauties of country scenery at the close of the last century, has nothing better to say for Ferns than that they are noxious weeds, to be classed with "Thorns and Briers, and other ditch trumpery." The fact, no doubt, is that Ferns were considered something "uncanny and eerie;" our ancestors could not understand a plant which seemed to them to have neither flower nor seed, and so they boldly ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe

... Mr Gainsborough's birthday gift lay smashed to bits on the floor. For the second time their love bore hard on Mr Gainsborough's crockery. Startled they turned to look, and then they both broke into merry laughter. The trumpery thing had seemed a sign to them, and now the sign was broken. Their first kiss was ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope

... which he wrote were not sent;—and he took to his bed. It was during this condition of affairs that the cousin took upon himself to intimate to Mr. Forster that the managers of Mr. Kennedy's estate were by no means anxious of embarrassing their charge by so trumpery an additional matter as the income derived from Lady ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope

... customers amongst the nobility and gentry, persons who looked to quality and durability in their purchases, and were capable of estimating the solid advantages of dealing with a tradesman who despised the trumpery artifices ...
— Mr. Joseph Hanson, The Haberdasher • Mary Russell Mitford

... all simplicity he, told his story, how he had found the great bulk of Baron Duvillard's money going to the opposition newspapers as pretended payment for puffery and advertising, whilst on the other hand the Republican organs received but beggarly, trumpery amounts. He had been Minister of the Interior at the time, and had therefore had charge of the press; so what would have been said of him if he had not endeavoured to reestablish some equilibrium in this distribution of funds ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... new presence for whose existence he had been responsible. It had been one of the astonishing things about Clare that she had taken the child so quietly. He had seen her thrilled by musical comedy, by a dance at the Palace Music Hall, by the trumpery pathos of a tenth-rate novel—before this marvel she stood, it seemed ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole

... second candle in the sitting-room. "It is Eugenie's birthday, and we must have an illumination," he remarked. The Cruchots all brought handsome bouquets of flowers for Eugenie, but their gifts were eclipsed by a showy workbox fitted with trumpery gilded silver fittings, which Mme. des Grassins presented, and which filled Eugenie with delight. "Adolphe brought it from Paris," whispered Mme. des Grassins in the girl's ear. Old Grandet quite understood that both families were in pursuit of his daughter for the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various

... and a long, yet should have been a pleasant one, but for the lack of victual. The strangest land ever I did see, or think to see, is this. The poor men hereaway dwell in good houses, and lack meat: the rich dwell in yet fairer, and eat very trumpery. I saw not in all my life in England so much olive oil as in one week sithence I came into Spain. What I am for to live upon here I do marvel. Cheese they have, and onions by the cartload; but they eat not but little meat, and that all strings (a tender piece thereof have I not yet seen); ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt

... discovery. They fail so invariably, that the Unions do not risk a shilling by proffering them. In dramatic entertainments the tragedy is followed by a farce: and so it is with these sanguinary crimes in Hillsborough; they are always followed by a repudiation, and offers of a trumpery reward quite disproportionate to the offense, and the only result of the farce is to divert attention from the true line of inquiry as to who enacted the tragedy. The mind craves novelty, and perhaps these delegates will indulge that desire by informing us for once, what ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade

... maturity? And more—if it had not been for some profound movement of the national life,—some irresistible revolt of the common intelligence, the common conscience—does anyone suppose that the whims and violences of any trumpery king could have broken the links with Rome?—that such a life and death as More's could have fallen barren on English hearts? Never!—How shallow are all the official explanations—how deep down lies ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... "The trumpery room is plenty good enough for 'em," thought Corinda, retreating into the kitchen and cutting sundry flourishes in token of ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes

... morality is that of a highly respectable British cynic; his intelligence is largely one of trifles; he is wise over trivial and trumpery things. He delights in reminding us—with an air!—that everybody is a humbug; that we are all rank snobs; that to misuse your aspirates is to be ridiculous and incapable of real merit; that Miss Blank ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... their hats on are walking about the drawing-rooms, peering into the bedrooms, weighing and poising the poor old silver cocoa-nut tree, eyeing the plate and crystal, thumbing the damask of the curtains, and inspecting ottomans, mirrors, and a hundred articles of splendid trumpery. There is Rosey's boudoir which her father-in-law loved to ornament—there is Clive's studio with a hundred sketches—there is the Colonel's bare room at the top of the house, with his little iron bedstead and ship's drawers, and a camel trunk or two which have accompanied him on many ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... enjoyment of your favourite pleasures. At any rate, you need not have made yourself ridiculous. May I perish if I did not wish myself underground while you were talking nonsense to those sneaking rascals who wheedle you out of your money! S'death! I had a good mind to throw them and their trumpery out of the window when I saw you make ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier

... and Annatoo trying on coats and pantaloons, shirts and drawers, and admiring themselves in the little mirror panneled in the bulk-head. Then, were broken open boxes and bales; rolls of printed cotton were inspected, and vastly admired; insomuch, that the trumpery found in the captain's chests was disdainfully doffed: and donned were loose folds of calico, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville

... visitors are the merchants and traders from Soudan, Kanou, and Sukatou. I cannot help looking upon these people with profound pity. They bring their sable brethren, of the same flesh and blood, and barter them away for trumpery beads, coarse paper, and cloth, &c. They little think, that for such trifles, what miseries they inflict upon their helpless brethren! A Kanou merchant, in a friendly manner, recommended me not to go to Soudan, adding, "The Touaricks of Aheer ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... had been picked up in Annam, some have regarded it merely as a trading enterprise, and not really an embassy from the Roman Emperor; Chinese writers, on the other hand, suggest that the envoys sold the valuable jewels and bought a trumpery collection of ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles

... High Jinks had been seen going out for her afternoon with what Mabel described to Sabre as a trumpery, ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson

... thanks to Heaven, and was in a state of much pious pleasure, when a Scotch clergyman, named LEIGHTON, was pilloried, whipped, branded in the cheek, and had one of his ears cut off and one of his nostrils slit, for calling bishops trumpery and the inventions of men. He originated on a Sunday morning the prosecution of WILLIAM PRYNNE, a barrister who was of similar opinions, and who was fined a thousand pounds; who was pilloried; who had his ears cut off on two occasions—one ear at a time—and who was imprisoned for life. He highly ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens

... And the trumpery little ring with its turquoise heart was on Lily's finger, and there they continued to sit for nearly half an hour; not talking much, but wondrously happy; not a single vow of troth interchanged. No, not even a word that could be construed into "I love." And yet ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... felt a creep of indefinable horror. Not so my servant. "Why, they don't think to trap us, sir; I could break that trumpery door with a kick ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... superstition. 'She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the country of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, enchanted towers, giants, dragons, and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of Poesy; but had so strong an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp lookout in suspicious places; and though nobody can be more sceptical ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun

... her," said Norman. "Go on, Flora, we shall catch you up in no time;" and, as Flora went, he continued, "Never mind your aims and fames and trumpery English rhymes. Your verses will be much the best, Ethel; I only went on a little about Mount Vesuvius and the landscape, as Alan described it the other day, and Decius taking a last look, knowing he was to die. I made him beg his horse's pardon, and say how they will both be ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge

... fine as their milliners could make them. The first of these ladies had an emerald locket almost as big as a warming-pan, and Miss Robinson's pearls were a little fortune in themselves; but the chosen objects of that young idiot's attentions wore nothing but trumpery twopenny-halfpenny trinkets, and gowns which had been made at home for all Mr. Copperhead knew. Confound him! the father breathed hotly to himself. Thus it will be seen that unmixed pleasure is not to be had in this world, ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant

... is visited upon the son, and, only able to keep his purpose pure, he falls as fast as he struggles up, and still struggling falls again. Soft moments of peace with GOD and man may never come to him. He may feel himself viler than a thousand trumpery souls who could not have borne his trials for a day. Child, for you and for me is reserved no such cross and no such crown as theirs who falling still fight, and fighting fall, with their faces Zionwards, into the arms of the Everlasting ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing

... sulkiness, 'you won't be content without beggaring me of my trumpery twenty-five hundred as soon as ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... not be enough for a new bracelet too?" asked Arsinoe, coaxingly. "This one of mine is too narrow and trumpery." ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... the postman is dignified with the title of Ober-Brieftraeger. It is difficult to understand the type of mind which is flattered by such infantile honors. At any rate, it is a cheap system of rewards, and so long as men will work for such trumpery ends the state profits by playing upon their childish vanity. During the year 1912 more than 7,000 decorations were distributed, and some 1,500 of these were of the three classes of the Order of the Red Eagle. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the reign of the ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... families or generations have their fires, while they sleep next the walls, lying on the ground, underneath rabbit-skins and other less elegant robes, and amid a filthy cluster of baskets, dogs, and all the wretched trumpery dear to the aboriginal heart. There are three narrow holes for dens, one at either end and one at the elbow." This is Mr. Powers' fifth variety of the lodge. [Footnote: Powers' ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan

... anything to do with each other. What riled me was the way she talked of the shooting. People do when they take a little shooting. They pay some trumpery thirty or forty pounds a year, and then they seem to think that it's almost the same as though they owned the property themselves. I've known a man talk of his manor because he had the shooting of a wood and a small farm round it. They are ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope

... government. They tried to persuade the people that the tranquillity and welfare of the nation depended but on the re-establishment of an absolute monarch, of a feudal aristocracy, and of all the trumpery of superstition. Such was the tendency of the publications which issued from the ministerial press, owing their birth to writers who had either sold themselves to the government, or who had denationalized themselves by their ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon

... the winds, equally rudimentary, whatever may be sold or made in them; whether they display the finest gold lacquer ware, the most marvellous china jars, or old worn-out pots and pans, dried fish, and ragged frippery. All the salesmen are seated on the ground in the midst of their valuable or trumpery merchandise, their legs bared nearly ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti

... Miss Mapp with a magnanimous smile. "Do not think, dear, of troubling him with these little trumpery affairs. He will not take part in these little tittle-tattles. But if you could let dear Diva and quaint Irene and sweet Evie and the good Padre know that I ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson

... bank-notes, when he was lucky, and show his winnings to his wife, and chuckle and swear over them, and boast and rail, and tell her, if it was not for the cursed way his time was cut up with hospital, and field days, and such trumpery regimental duties, he could make a fortune while other men were thinking of it; and he very nearly believed it. And he was, doubtless, clear-headed, though wrong-headed, too, at times, and very energetic; but his genius was for pushing men out of their places ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... that I despise you and all your friends, and wish never to speak to any of you again. Come on, girls," she said, turning to the members of her party, who had listened in silent amazement to her attack upon Grace. "Let us go. Let them keep their trumpery hatchet." ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower

... the worthless trumpery!" cried Beresynth: "we shall live happily together without her, I warrant; our ways of thinking and feeling are so ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck

... I hope they will be firm, and they have nothing to fear; I am sure that the English nation will back them, for the insolence and ingratitude of the Irish, and the cowardice of their humbug chief, have caused universal disgust." Later he wrote, also to John Murray, with reference to that "trumpery fellow O'Connell . . . I wish I were acquainted with Sir Robert Peel. I could give him many a useful hint with respect to Ireland and the Irish. I know both tolerably well. Whenever there's a row I intend to go over with ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins

... and horse-racing, had never before gladdened the heart of "Merry Englonde," or England's monarchs. It seemed as if the whole realm were given up to idolatry and dissipation. The idol pleasure was worshipped with such ardour and devotion, that all ranks were striving to outdo each other in tinsel, trumpery, and deeds ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... shopping, and added three fine shirts to the purchases. Nathan sends you a cane. Blondet, who won three hundred francs, is sending you a gold chain; and the gold watch, the size of a forty-franc piece, is from La Torpille; some idiot gave the thing to her, and it will not go. 'Trumpery rubbish,' she says, 'like the man that owned it.' Bixiou, who came to find us up at the Rocher de Cancale, wished to enclose a bottle of Portugal water in the package. Said our first comic man, 'If this can make him happy, let him have it!' ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac

... silly!" Miss Smallwood rejoined impatiently, and all the girls grinned in agreement. But it was not Beth who was silly. Miss Smallwood had had nothing herself but the trumpery education provided everywhere at that time for girls by the part of humanity which laid undisputed claim to a superior sense of justice, and it had not carried her far enough to enable her to grasp any more comprehensive result of the battle of Hastings ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... years in filling six rooms with such trumpery as is just too good to be thrown away, and too bad to be kept. His life was as inoffensive as long. Instead of stealing the goods which other people use, he purchased what he could not use himself. He was not anxious what kind of property entered his house; if ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton

... Lohengrin? This cheap Italian music, sugar-coated in its sensuousness, the awful borrowings from Weber, Marschner, Beethoven, and Gluck—and the story! It is called "mystic." Why? Because it is not, I suppose. What puerile trumpery is that refusal of a man to reveal his name! And Elsa! Why not Lot's wife, whose curiosity turned her into ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker

... two miles from [the] Connecticut river. We went in the morning to gather ground nuts, to the river, and went back again that night. I went with a good load at my back (for they when they went, though but a little way, would carry all their trumpery with them). I told them the skin was off my back, but I had no other comforting answer from them than this: that it would be no matter if my ...
— Captivity and Restoration • Mrs. Mary Rowlandson

... that the Paradiso of Dante and the Second Part of Goethe's Faust are perhaps two of the best, the most infallible, touchstones for discovering whether we really possess what Tennyson calls the 'poetic heart'—not a trumpery aesthetic imitation ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill

... Q.M.G. as a guide, we sallied out immediately after breakfast to explore the land part of this Eastern Venice. Entering at the city gate, on the left bank of the river, near the Maharajah's palace, we walked past a row of trumpery pop-guns, on green and red carriages, and so through the most filthy and odoriferous bazaar I ever met with, till we reached the residence of Saifula Baba, the great shawl merchant of Sirinugger. ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight

... rubbish has the great man taken a painful tour; compassed land and sea; paid away in exchange a king's ransom; and claims now on their behalf, the very humblest homage of artists who are taxed with the basest envy if they refuse it, and who, meantime, cannot in sincerity look upon the trumpery with other feelings than such as the potter's wheel, if (like Ezekiel's wheels) it were instinct with spirit, would entertain for the vilest of its own creations;—culinary or 'post-culinary' mugs and jugs. We, the writers of this paper, are not artists, are not connected with artists. And ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... this trumpery out, and make Mrs. Keeling give me something sensible,' said Cecil, with a boy's rough-and-ready way of ...
— Holiday Tales • Florence Wilford

... great size and weight, and of small value, so that the equivalent for ten minae (about $140) required a great room for its stowage, and a yoke of oxen to draw it." The object of this, he tell us, was to prevent its being used for the purchase of "foreign trumpery." ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... on the chapel floor, and prayers in a right good tub of cold water." He nudged Gerard and winked his eye knowingly. "Nothing he hates and dreads like seeing us monks at our orisons up to our chins in cold water. For corpus domat aqua. So now go confess thy little trumpery sins, pardonable in youth and secularity, and leave me to mine, sweet to me as honey, and to be expiated ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... taking a look out of a particular window, and even opening a cupboard door, to give that same kind and sorrowful glance of recognition at the old often-resorted-to hiding-place of her own or her grandfather's treasures and trumpery. Those old corners seemed to touch Fleda more than all the rest; and she turned away from one of them with a face of such extreme sorrow, that Mr. Carleton very much regretted he had brought her into the house. For her sake, for his own, it was a curious show of character. ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell

... a better thing," said Rosamond; "an enchanted grove with a beneficent witch. We did it at St. Awdry's, with bon-bons and trumpery, in a little conservatory, hardly large enough to turn round in. If I may have the key of ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge

... "Aye—a trumpery missive, dealing with naught but summoning of the sheriff's posse and the like. There is more behind, could we but wait ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch

... young lady; you with your affections and hearts and trumpery,' returned Mr Boffin. 'It's of a piece with the rest of your behaviour. I heard of these doings of yours only last night, or you should have heard of 'em from me, sooner, take your oath of it. I heard of 'em from a lady with as good ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens

... light of subsequent events, so now Will had found himself, on the evening of his child's funeral, with fresh interests aroused and recent convictions shaken. An incipient negation of Deity, built upon the trumpery basis of his personal misfortunes, was almost shattered within the week that saw its first existence. A mystery developed in his path, and startling incidents awoke a new train of credulity akin to that already manifested over the ancient cross. The man's uneven mind was tossed from one extreme ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... oath, often desires two or three days' time to get ready these his swearing apparatus, called on such occasions sumpahan, of which some are looked upon as more sacred and of greater efficacy than others. They consist of an old rusty kris, a broken gun barrel, or any ancient trumpery, to which chance or caprice has annexed an idea of extraordinary virtue. These they generally dip in water, which the person who swears drinks off, after having pronounced the form of words before mentioned.* The pangeran of Sungei-lamo has by him certain copper bullets which had ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden

... Lowrie, General Negley's chief of staff, to join Negley and retire with him to Rossville. He also had much to say about saving many pieces of artillery; but it occurred to me that his presence on the field was of much more importance than a few pieces of trumpery artillery off the field. Why, at any rate, did he not notify me of the order which he had received from the division commander? The charge of Stanley's brigade had not occupied to exceed thirty minutes, and as soon as it was ended I had returned to find him gone. The Colonel, however, ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty

... Still Lucy did not return. A temptation came to Annie. Why not keep the pretty red silk frock? Lucy would not miss it at once; afterward she would think she had mislaid it. She would never suspect the truth. Annie breathed hard. If she had quickly put the showy bit of trumpery back into the box and banished the covetous wish, all would have been well; but instead, she stood deliberating and turning the little dress over and over in her hands. Meantime a hospitable thought had occurred to Lucy. She remembered that there was a new supply of apples in the ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley

... the fact, and mention only that it was so. How the poor people found the insufficiency of those things, and how many of them were afterwards carried away in the dead carts, and thrown into the common graves of every parish with these hellish charms and trumpery hanging about their necks, remains to be spoken ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe

... Sheitan. How that monstrous orange-tawny head grinned and wagged! How those flaps of ears were projected forwards, like unto those of a dog! How balefully those atrabilious eyes glistened! You laughed, and yet you shuddered. He spoke in mere doggerel and slang. He sang trumpery songs to negro melodies. He danced the Lancashire clog-hornpipe; he rattled out puns and conundrums; yet did he contrive to infuse into all this mummery and buffoonery, into this salmagundi of the incongruous and the outre, an unmistakably tragic element,—an ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various

... would be to see that splendid big fish safely out there on the bank. All his faculties seemed to be absorbed in the contemplation of that momentous struggle. The past and the future were alike cut off from him—he had forgotten all about the theatre and its trumpery applause—he had no thought but for the unseen creature underneath the water, that was dashing its head from side to side, and then boring down, and then sailing away over to the opposite shallows, exhausting every manoeuvre to regain its liberty. He ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black

... found the effects, the sure and only sure effects, of an English university education." He wrote a Latin ode on the death of George II., which was much praised. In later years he himself said of it, "It was a mediocre performance on a trumpery subject, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner

... birdie . . . ? There is no need for you to get married really like every one else. You're rich and free, you are your own mistress; but yet, my child, it doesn't seem the right thing for you to be an old maid. I'll find you, you know, some trumpery and simple-witted man. You'll marry him for appearances and then have your fling, bonny lass! You can hand him five thousand or ten maybe, and pack him off where he came from, and you will be mistress in your own house—you can love whom ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... never regarded it in that grave light. How was I to suppose that old Verner would disinherit you for that trumpery escapade? I never knew why he had disinherited you, until I came home and heard from yourself the story of the inclosed glove, which he left you as a legacy. It's since then that I have been wanting to make a clean ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood

... lighted with paraffine oil—the roof, the pillars, the sides. Suddenly some hangings near the figure of the Virgin took fire, and soon the whole church was in a blaze. Some of the priests ran off through a small side-door with their trumpery ornaments, leaving the poor women and children inside. On the heads of these the burning oil came pouring down. A few, but very few, were got out at the front door; but those trying to get out trampled down each other, ...
— Taking Tales - Instructive and Entertaining Reading • W.H.G. Kingston

... Mavis had stayed on at Brandenburg College, where the little her father had left sufficed to pay for her board and schooling. This sum lasted till she was sixteen, when, having passed one or two trumpery examinations, she was taken on the staff of the college. The last few months, Mavis's eyes had been opened to the straitened circumstances in which her employers lived; she had lately realised that she owed her bread and butter more to the kindness of the Miss Mees, ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte

... his boat, and that the sea-weed business was no better than a blind; for Barney had planned it all out that we were to go down to Galway and fetch the new ploughs home in the hooker, to save the cost of the land-carriage. 'Sure it's bad enough for the squire to be soiling his hands with trumpery made by them English thieves, that's no more conscience over bothering a gentleman for money nor if he was one of themselves,' said Barney; 'sorra a halfpenny shall the railway rogues rob him of.' ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... trumpery flashes play Among the miracles above thee, Be taught to feel thy Maker's sway, To labour, so that He shall love ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore

... forgive," he said earnestly. "Only I should like you to wear something of mine besides that little trumpery brooch. You are faithful to that and I love you for it. I thought perhaps you had lost the ring and ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay

... has quite forgotten him and his trumpery love. If she lives she will come back to him, but if she dies she will die triumphant and serene. Life and death, the child and the mother, are ever meeting as the one draws into harbour and the other sets sail. They exchange a bright "All's well" ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie

... a dirty stair, and from the passage two dirty doors let into two filthy rooms, which had strong bars at the windows, and yet withal an air of horrible finery that makes me uncomfortable to think of even yet. On the walls hung all sorts of trumpery pictures in tawdry frames (how different from those capital performances of my cousin Michael Angelo!); on the mantelpiece huge French clocks, vases, and candlesticks; on the sideboards, enormous trays of Birmingham plated ware: for Mr. Aminadab not ...
— The History of Samuel Titmarsh - and the Great Hoggarty Diamond • William Makepeace Thackeray

... French soil, to give them a respect for France, so he lets them come close up to Paris, so as to do for them at a single blow, and to rise to the highest height of genius in the biggest battle that ever was fought, a mother of battles! But the Parisians wanting to save their trumpery skins, and afraid for their twopenny shops, open their gates and there is a beginning of the ragusades, and an end of all joy and happiness; they make a fool of the Empress, and fly the white flag out at the windows. The Emperor's closest friends ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac

... hopes that he would not have remarked the absence of that. It belonged to the little desk which Amelia had given her in early days, and which she kept in a secret place. But Rawdon flung open boxes and wardrobes, throwing the multifarious trumpery of their contents here and there, and at last he found the desk. The woman was forced to open it. It contained papers, love-letters many years old—all sorts of small trinkets and woman's memoranda. And it contained a pocket-book ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... and unembarrassed, I awaited at the Tuileries The issue, for I trusted the Nation's Common Sense; And although the rowdy Faubourgs tried a few of their Tom-fooleries, My soldiers soon let light into each trumpery defence. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various

... wringing his fat hands more like a play-actor than a gentleman. For one question my mistress asked the doctor about the lady's chances of getting round, he asked a good fifty at least. I declare he quite tormented us all, and when he was quiet at last, out he went into the bit of back garden, picking trumpery little nosegays, and asking me to take them upstairs and make the sick-room look pretty with them. As if THAT did any good. I think he must have been, at times, a little soft in his head. But he was not a bad master—he had a monstrous civil tongue ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins

... she has just stolen out for a little," thought the giant, and he took a spoon, and went off to the cauldron to have a taste; but there was nothing in it but shoe-soles, and rags, and such trumpery as that, and all was boiled up together, so that he could not tell whether it was porridge or milk pottage. When he saw this, he understood what had happened, and fell into such a rage that he hardly knew what he was doing. Away he went after the Prince ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various

... in the 13th Light Dragoons, and subsequently in the 11th. He saw no service, and was an excellent soldier at mess and off duty. I am not qualified to speak with authority about his fulfilment of the trumpery trivialities which fill up garrison life, but here is ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey

... wort-refrigerators and various bent and contorted forms which evince the excellence of the material and of the methods. This is hardly enough, however, to justify the occupation of the position of vantage, and the trumpery collection of ropes, lines, nets, rods and hooks which is intended for a fishing exhibit only emphasizes the decision, acquiesced in by the public, which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various

... thickset, middle-sized man; papers relative to ships and business, a spyglass, a loaded iron pistol, some books of navigation, some charts, several great pieces of tobacco, and a few cigars; some little plaster images, that he had probably bought for his children, a cotton umbrella, and other trumpery of no great value. In one of the trunks we found about twenty pounds' worth of English and American gold and silver, and some notes of hand, due in America. Of all these things the clerk made an inventory; after which we took possession of the money and affixed the consular seal to the trunks, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... demonstrations in their native countries, which are not democracies. In fact, we suspect that the reason why English "flunkeys" hate American "flunkeyism," with its laced coachmen, etc., is because mere money, by aping the insignia of rank, its gewgaws and trumpery, shows too plainly how much of the rank itself depends upon the fabrics and demonstrations through which it sets itself forth. We can conceive that an English nobleman travelling in this country, who might chance in one of our cities to see a turn-out with its outriders, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various

... better thing," said Rosamond; "an enchanted grove with a beneficent witch. We did it at St. Awdry's, with bon-bons and trumpery, in a little conservatory, hardly large enough to turn round in. If I may have the key ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge

... air of mystery. He makes no allusion whatever to the business he had been hurriedly summoned to investigate, but "he admired the grounds, and remarked that he felt the sea air very brisk and refreshing." To the gardener's astonishment Cuff proved to be quite a mine of learning on the trumpery subject of rose gardens. As in the case of Bucket, the effective armor of Cuff is flattery. "You have got a head on your shoulders and you understand what I mean," is his typical style ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe

... eighteen; some showed from time to time a dangerous weakness of mind. Over-strung and enfeebled, they gave enormous sums to ignorant charlatans; and it was a common thing for some bath-attendant or other trumpery who turned healer or prophet, to make a rapid fortune by the practice of medicine or theology. The number of lunatics increased continually; suicides multiplied in the world of wealth, and many of them were accompanied by atrocious and extraordinary circumstances, which ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France

... laugh. You don't know that lady. She's masterful, and she's rich—'rich as Croesus,'—and don't know what to do with her money. When the old man was lookin' around an' chargin' me 'bout things, she broke in with: 'Oh, don't worry, father-in-law. The trumpery stuff isn't worth so much thought. I'm not a relic hunter, and let it go,' says she. Then he reminds her that he wanted it kept right for—Whew! I near let the secret out, didn't I? He told me he wrote you a letter. He gave it to you, didn't he? Well, if ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond

... resembling very small shot flattened upon an anvil. The hole was not deeper than 1 1/4 inch in the hard muscle of the rump, and the only effect of Berry's '577 hollow Express was to produce this trumpery wound, which had enraged the animal without creating any serious injury. It is necessary to explain that the bullet of this rifle was more than usually light and hollow; but the want of penetrating power of the hollow projectile, and ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... which has come over Japan in a single generation requires interpretation. Is the change real or superficial? Is the new social order "a borrowed trumpery garment, which will soon be rent by violent revolutions," according to the eminent student of racial psychology, Professor Le Bon, or is it of "a solid nature" according to the firm belief of Mr. Stanford Ransome, one of the latest ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... given an example of his familiar style, I must find room for two or three final quotations. The thing Parker hated most in the world was a Tender Conscience. He protests against the weakness which is content with passing penal laws, but does not see them carried out for fear of wounding these trumpery tender consciences. "Most men's minds or consciences are weak, silly and ignorant things, acted by fond and absurd principles and imposed upon by their vices and their passions." (7.) "However, ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell

... glideth into fine ears, he calleth falsehood and trumpery. Verily, he believeth only in Gods that make a ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche

... first performed December 14, 1797, at Drury Lane, ran sixty nights and "continued popular as an acting play," says the biographer, "up to a very recent period."[36] This is strong testimony to the contemporary appetite for nightmare, for the play is a trumpery affair. Sheridan, who had a poor opinion of it, advised the dramatist to keep the specter out of the last scene. "It had been said," explains Lewis in his preface, "that if Mr. Sheridan had not advised me to content myself with a single specter, I meant to have exhibited ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... baby, great, big, blue-eyed, ridiculous, unpractical thing! What do you suppose he did when he was in Chester last month, just after I'd left there? Walked all the way into town and back, twenty miles—he hadn't enough money for his car fare—to buy me a little trumpery pin I wanted, when they had the identical thing on sale at the little shop by the station! Wasn't that like him? And with all his artistic talent, I have to tell him what kind of a necktie to get. Imagine him, with his hair, in a scarlet one, when he looks so adorable ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various

... Families they once lived in. These, with a Croud of Midwives, Twelve-penny Lottery-Women, and other How d'ye do People, are for ever plaguing them with this new Fancy and Pattern, and recommending such and such Persons to their Custom for Teas, China, and Trumpery. And while a Story is telling of who's a going to be Married, who is brought to Bed, or who has Miscarried, down goes the Cup and Saucer, and the Tea all over her Ladyship's Petticoat; then do they curse their unlucky Hands, and beg ten thousand Pardons ...
— The Tricks of the Town: or, Ways and Means of getting Money • John Thomson

... garden; the pines of the snows, the familiar growths of the temperate zone, the palms of the tropics; and finally—which is California's own—the Big Trees. All day you may ride and never once will your eye rest upon a picture that is commonplace or trumpery. ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb

... Indian who comes into town with all his money and buys everything he sees. There is no adequate realization of the large proportion of the labour and material of industry that is used in furnishing the world with its trumpery and trinkets, which are made only to be sold, and are bought merely to be owned—that perform no service in the world and are at last mere rubbish as at first they were mere waste. Humanity is advancing out of its trinket-making stage, and industry is coming ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford

... pleases, and to publish his belief to the world whenever he thinks fit, especially if it serves to strengthen the party which is in the right? Would any indifferent foreigner, who should read the trumpery lately written by Asgil, Tindal, Toland, Coward, and forty more, imagine the Gospel to be our rule of faith, and to be confirmed by Parliaments? Does any man either believe, or say he believes, or desire to have it thought that he says he believes, one syllable of the matter? And is any man ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift

... there is no work to attack, we attack the inanimate stupidity of our surroundings. It is strange that the laborious task once achieved should so often become the thing abhorred. Scales fall from our eyes, perspective is restored, and we see what a trumpery affair held us enthralled. I have often thought with dismay of the effect on scores of reformers, whom I know, if the reform to which they have sworn allegiance should be accomplished. To many this would be a personal disaster of ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... connected with the tradition, that it was the residence of Joachim and Anna, the parents of the Virgin Mary. The house of St. Anne, observes Dr. Clarke, is the "commencement of that superstitious trumpery which for a long time has constituted the chief object of devotion and of pilgrimage in the Holy Land." No sooner was the spot discovered where the pious couple had lived than Constantine issued instructions to build upon it a magnificent church, the remains of which have ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell

... new-fangled musical eccentricities? Have we not all enjoyed the opera as it exists at present? And if so, why shall this Master Gluck step suddenly forward and announce to us that we know nothing of music, and that what we have hitherto admired as such was nothing more than trumpery? Why does he disdain the poetry of Metastasio, to adopt that of a man whom nobody knows? I will not lend my hand to mortify the old man who for thirty years has been our court-poet. I owe it to him, at least, not to appear at this representation, and that is reason enough ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... bottomless saucepans," continued Mrs. Kitson. "What a dish of nuts for my neighbours to crack! They always enjoy a hearty laugh at my expense, on Kitson's clearing-up days. But what does he care for my distress? In vain I hide up all this old trumpery in the darkest nooks in the cellar and pantry—nothing escapes his prying eyes; and then he has such a memory, that if he misses an old gallipot he raises a storm loud enough ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie

... daughter, and with good reason, seeing that she has always shown herself a daughter to me—that she has all kinds of good qualities, and several accomplishments, knowing something of conchology, more of botany, drawing capitally in the Dutch style, and playing remarkably well on the guitar—not the trumpery German thing so called—but the real Spanish guitar." His wife wrote letters for him, copied his manuscripts, and helped to correct his proofs. She remained at Oulton, or Yarmouth, while he went about; if he went to Wales or Ireland she sometimes ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas

... marvel that she did neglect those within. I made a comfortable supper of baked pumpkin and milk, and for lodgings I had a straw bed on the floor, in the dark loft, which was piled wellnigh full with corn- ears, pumpkins, and beans, besides a great deal of old household trumpery, wool, and flax, and the skins of animals. Although tired of my journey, it was some little time before I could get asleep; and it so fell out, that after the folks of the house were all abed, and still, it being, as I judge, nigh midnight, I chanced to touch ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... to her, were the only recognizable features of our southern shores. She would not admit indeed that there was any sea at all there; there was only churned chalk. Was it fair to say, even under the exasperation of continual goading, that the Isle of Wight was only a trumpery toy shop; that its "scenery" was fitly adorned with bazaars for the sale of sham jewelry; that its amusements were on a par with those of Rosherville gardens; that its rocks were made of mud and its ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various

... let us go to Nahant. I want you to try your hand on a coast view. But what, what are you about? At that trumpery daguerreotype again? Let me see the beauty,—that's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various

... make up so much of our lives, just so long as that happens you do not and you cannot see the truth. But when it happens to a person, as it does happen in times of great and deep and bitter experience; when it happens that all these trumpery little objects of life are swept away; then occasionally, with astonishment, the soul sees that. It is also the soul of the others around. Even if it does not become aware of an absolute identity, it perceives that there is a deep relationship ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... brute of a man you are! There," cried she, taking a string of pearls from her neck, and throwing it on the table; "lend me some of your trumpery out of your shop, for I am going immediately from hence to take the Misses Dundas to the opera; so give me the hundred on that, ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter

... interest of her own thriftless relatives. In his absence her brothers and sisters were at his table eating at his expense; food and coals bought with his earnings found their way to her mother's cottage; in short, he had "married the family," as they say. He knew it, too. In its trumpery way the affair was an open scandal, and the neighbours dearly wished to see him put a stop to it. Yet, though he would have had public opinion to support him in taking strong measures, his own good ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt

... come to despise thee," said he. "Thou would'st not have an honorable Prince! Thou could'st not prize the rose and the nightingale, but thou wast ready to kiss the swineherd for the sake of a trumpery plaything. Thou ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen

... the victory. The Carlton again began to pay the bills and pull the strings. Then in due time came the black night of defeat, when moon and stars disappeared, and Toryism was plunged into a deeper gulf than ever. The lesson is plain. Roll up your aristocratic trumpery, and give the party a leader. What it wants is a man strong enough to pull it out of the slough and set it on ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various

... kept a secret, the Colonel then being a comparatively penniless young lieutenant, and as such by no means a desirable son-in-law from the parental point of view. An elopement was contemplated so soon as the young lady should be of age; and it would be difficult to explain the occasion of the trumpery quarrel between the lovers, which ended in the lady taunting the gentleman with caring only about her money, and resulted in the rupture of the engagement. Doubtless it might have been renewed; but at this juncture the lieutenant was ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne

... a fool Honesty is! and Trust, his sworn brother, a very simple gentleman! I have sold all my trumpery; not a counterfeit stone, not a riband, glass, pomander, brooch, table-book, ballad, knife, tape, glove, shoe-tie, bracelet, horn-ring, to keep my pack from fasting;—they throng who should buy first, as if my trinkets had been hallowed, and brought a benediction ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare

... even tenor of his way, speaking little, as was his wont, and thinking much about the case before him, of a very trumpery character, unless you measured it by the game laws. But no one less liked to be disturbed by noises of any kind than Sir Henry when at work. Even the rustling of a newspaper would cause him to direct the reader to study in some other ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton

... was, "What lack you, sweet sir? Chafing-dishes, shaving-basins, bowls, goblets, salts? All good and sound—none of your trumpery rubbish!" ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt

... strange that a man of his powers should set store by such trumpery, and, too, that these notions had not impaired his ability as a seaman. I did not reply. He gave no heed, however, but drew from a case a number of odes and compositions, which he told me were ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... the pity. How should he show he is a gentleman but by hectoring a bit now and then, 'specially to such a rogue as thou, coming back when thy betters are lost. That is always the way, as I found when I lost my real silver crown, and kept my trumpery Parliament bit." ...
— The Pigeon Pie • Charlotte M. Yonge

... instance, when you send it down the railroad line, by the wire, is expressed thus: ... - .. .... .. . .. — . - Very good message, if Comet happens to be at the telegraph station when it comes! But what if Comet has gone by? Much good will your trumpery message do then! If, however, you have the wit to sound your long and short on an engine-whistle, thus:—Scre scre, scre; screeee; scre scre; scre scre scre scre; scre scre—scre, scre scre, screeeee ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... pity that the poor fellow gave himself the trouble to go down into damp, unwholesome graves, for the purpose of fetching up a few trumpery sheets of manuscript; and if the public has been rather tired with their contents, and is disposed to ask why Mrs. Sand's religious or irreligious notions are to be brought forward to people who are quite satisfied with their own, we can only say that this ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... asked them two ducats for the job, which they paid beforehand; so he fell to it and worked eight days, at the end of which he had made nothing of it, and said he could not bring his hand to paint such trumpery, and returned the money; yet, for all that, he married in the name of a good workman. The truth is, he has left his brushes and taken up the spade, and goes to the field like a gentleman. Pedro de Lobo's son has taken orders and shaved his crown, ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... in this, that Mr. Kipling in his greater moments cannot help but see that he, with every inspired singer, is by right the prophet of a law and order compared with which all the majestic law and order of the British Empire are but rags and trumpery:—" ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... be misunderstood. By 'religion', I don't mean 'priest-craft'. I don't mean that superstitious grimace; that rolling up of white eyes, and spreading of sanctified palms; with 'disfigured faces and long prayers,' and all the rest of that holy trumpery, which, so far from making people cheerful, tends but to throw them into the dumps. But I mean, by 'religion', that divine effort of the soul, which rises and embraces the great author of its being with filial ardor, and walks and converses ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems

... spit upon the glorious pavement of St. Peter's, and wherever else they like; they place paltry-looking wooden confessionals beneath its sublime arches, and ornament them with cheap little coloured prints of the Crucifixion; they hang tin hearts, and other tinsel and trumpery, at the gorgeous shrines of the saints, in chapels that are encrusted with gems, or marbles almost as precious; they put pasteboard statues of saints beneath the dome of the Pantheon;—in short, they let the sublime and the ridiculous come close together, and are not in the least troubled ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles

... careful buyer. Only worth-while things were selected, not a miscellaneous collection of trumpery junk. So the result to date was charming furniture and appointments, but ...
— Patty and Azalea • Carolyn Wells

... the sum of ten dollars in the rag-man's scales? More than once Helen had started at the rap at the door, half expecting an announcement that such and such a document had been found among that heap of trumpery, thought to have been worthless as yellow autumn leaves, which would install them as the possessors of such and such domain,—raps which usually brought nothing but a shoe-bill, or a demand for the price of the previous winter's coal. All these idle day-dreams Helen wisely kept to herself ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... who build upon the style of your neighbor's dress or equipage and trifle away God's precious moments in silly show and vain trumpery, go to the retreats at "Gladswood," follow Phillip Lawson in his daily rounds, and if you will not, like him, feel your heart expand and seek aspirations of a higher mould— a something which gives comfort each breath you draw, each word you utter and each thought you frame!—then, ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour

... anything of Arthur's spirit, may cause a difference between him and you, which you'll rue all your life—a difference that's a dev'lish deal more important, my good madam, than the little—little—trumpery cause which ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... of the former. Necessarian-like-speaking it is correct. Page 98 "Dead is the Douglas, cold thy warrior frame, illustrious Buchan" &c are of kindred excellence with Gray's "Cold is Cadwallo's tongue" &c. How famously the Maid baffles the Doctors, Seraphic and Irrefragable, "with all their trumpery!" 126 page, the procession, the appearances of the Maid, of the Bastard son of Orleans and of Tremouille, are full of fire and fancy, and exquisite melody of versification. The personifications from line 303 to 309 in the heat of the battle had better been omitted, they are not ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas

... cents each, in payment. His knowledge of "soft sawder and human natur" is as great as that of Sam Slick, his inimitable representative; and many a shoeless Irish girl is induced to change a dollar for some trumpery ornament, by his artful compliments to her personal attractions. He seems at home everywhere; talks politics, guesses your needs, cracks a joke, or condoles with you on your misfortunes with an elongated face. He always contrives to drop in at ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... a temple, on the other a flaming altar, with the words nil nisi vobis; on the pyramidical cover stood a Roman soldier leaning on his shield. This cup the bibulous monarch ever afterwards esteemed as one of his rarest and richest jewels. In 1623 James issued another of those absurd and trumpery sumptuary edicts, recommending the ancient way of wearing caps, and requesting the Templars to lay aside their unseemly boots and spurs, the badges of "roarers, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... be softened down or prevented? Assuredly, not by mortifying her, which is the course commonly pursued with such tempers; nor by preaching to her about her own defects; nor by overrunning her infancy with books about good boys and girls, and bad boys and girls, and all that trumpery; but (and this is the only important thing I have to say upon the subject) by putting her in the way of acquiring without measure or limit such knowledge as will lead her out of herself, such knowledge as is ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... see any one so ridiculous as Elizabeth Templeton; just fancy wearing her Paris gown at a trumpery little home affair like this! Talk of coquetry," in a disgusted voice, "do you suppose she did not know what she was doing when she pinned those La France roses in her dress! It is not as though she were ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... and Ave-Maria's, by which, God being neglected, they expected to obtain all Things, though none were particularly nam'd: Their tricenary, and anniversary Masses, nay, and all those for the Dead: The dying and being buried in a Franciscan's and Dominican's Garment or Cowl, and all the Trumpery belonging to it; and did, in a manner condemn all Sorts of Monastical Life and Order, as ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus

... could make them. The first of these ladies had an emerald locket almost as big as a warming-pan, and Miss Robinson's pearls were a little fortune in themselves; but the chosen objects of that young idiot's attentions wore nothing but trumpery twopenny-halfpenny trinkets, and gowns which had been made at home for all Mr. Copperhead knew. Confound him! the father breathed hotly to himself. Thus it will be seen that unmixed pleasure is not to be had in this world, even in the midst of envious friends and ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant

... upon reasoning the matter over, I came to the philosophic conclusion, that it would be no shame for a person of my means to wear a cheaper thing; so I think I shall take it, and if you ever see it and call it 'trumpery' so much the worse." ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... queries ?!? would positively, my worthy publisher, make your worship's fortune. For it should concern ghosts, dreams, omens, coincidences, good-and-bad luck, warnings, and true vaticinations: no childish collection, however, of unsupported trumpery, but authenticated cases staidly evidenced, and circumstantially detailed; no Mother Goose-cap's tales, no Dick the Ploughman's dreams, no stories from the 'Terrific Register,' nor fancies of hysterical females in Adult asylums; even Merlin witch-finders, and Taliesins should be ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... doubtless prepared for a catastrophe. They will expect to hear Mrs. Kinloch cry, "Lucy Ransom, you jade, what are you doing? Take your clothes and trumpery and leave this house!" You will suppose that her son Hugh will be shut up in the cellar on bread and water, or sent off to sea in disgrace. That is the traditional way with angry mistresses, I know; but Mrs. Kinloch was not one of the common sort. She did not know Talleyrand's maxim,—"Never ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various

... housekeeper, a woman of credit and respectability—a fellow-servant of this fine gentleman before you—such worn-out rags as these? Would you have thought it worthy of consideration, if such a servant had thought proper to appropriate to her own use a cart-load of this trumpery? If the poor woman did remove out of sight such trash as this, all I say is, that she seems to have had more respect for the credit and honour of that noble house than any of the people whose ridiculous pretensions to honesty have persecuted her and exhibited themselves here. Gentlemen and Ladies, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various

... and forward, getting opinions, and surveying the bridge on all sides. At length I determined it could be done, and my heart beat nervously as the yawl neared the centre arch—not as to danger, but the dishonour of breaking a goodly spar at the end of a cruise, and in so trumpery a feat. It ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor

... "Wait till she comes to have chickens," said Mrs. Scratchard; "then you will see. I have brought up ten broods myself—as likely and respectable chickens as ever were a blessing to society—and I think I ought to know a good hatcher and brooder when I see her; and I know THAT fine piece of trumpery, with her white feathers tipped with gray, never will come down to family life. SHE scratch for chickens! Bless me, she never did anything in all her days but run round and eat the worms which somebody else ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... leaves in the vases, cigarette ash on the table, no coals on the half-laid fire. In the merciless morning light Julia saw all the deficiencies; the way things were set best side foremost, though, to her, the worst side contrived still to show; the display there was everywhere, the trumpery silver ornaments, all tarnished for want of rubbing, and of no more intrinsic value and beauty than the tinfoil off champagne bottles; the cracked pieces of china—rummage sale relics, she called them—set forth in a glass-doored ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad

... been talking about the art of Mrs. Ross's protegee for nothing; and that art soon made short work of Keith Macleod's doubts. The fair stranger he had met at Prince's Gate vanished into mist. Here was the real woman; and all the trumpery business of the theatre, that he would otherwise have regarded with indifference or contempt, became a real and living thing, insomuch that he followed the fortunes of this spoiled child with a breathless interest ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black

... time I felt a creep of undefinable horror. Not so my servant. "Why, they don't think to trap us, sir; I could break the trumpery door with a kick ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various

... stupid it all is!" thought Vassilyev. "What is there in all this trumpery I see now that can tempt a normal man and excite him to commit the horrible sin of buying a human being for a rouble? I understand any sin for the sake of splendor, beauty, grace, passion, taste; but what is there here? What ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... one feel it an intolerable wrong to the world that she did not at once go upon the stage. Tableaux vivants were another of our occasional modes of amusement, in which scarlet shawls, old silken robes, ruffs, velvets, furs, and all kinds of miscellaneous trumpery converted our familiar companions into the people of a pictorial world. We had been thus engaged on the evening after the incident narrated in the last chapter. Several splendid works of art—either arranged after ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... little crash, and poor Mr Gainsborough's birthday gift lay smashed to bits on the floor. For the second time their love bore hard on Mr Gainsborough's crockery. Startled they turned to look, and then they both broke into merry laughter. The trumpery thing had seemed a sign to them, and now the sign was broken. Their first kiss was mirthful over ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope

... my eyes, in going the circuit of the room, fell upon a trumpery filigree card-rack of pasteboard that hung dangling by a dirty blue ribbon from a little brass knob just beneath the middle of the mantelpiece. In this rack, which had three or four compartments, were five or six soiled cards and a solitary letter. This last was much soiled and crumpled. It was ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various

... are the handy terms, admiring or disapproving, which criticism claps with random facility on to every imaginable school. This artist or group of artists goes in for the real—the upright, noble, trumpery, filthy real; that other artist or group of artists seeks after the ideal—the ideal which may mean sublimity or platitude. We summon every living artist to state whether he is a realist or an idealist; we classify all dead artists as realists or idealists; we treat the matter as if it were ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee

... has strength. Then the people conveniently flock in; ambassadors come from all corners of the earth to acknowledge Rienzi; Adriano warns him that mischief is breeding, and Rienzi calmly smiles; there is a most elaborate ballet, occupying many pages of the score and full of trumpery tunes; Orsini stabs Rienzi, and all the patricians are seized by the guards; Rienzi shows himself unhurt, being protected by a breastplate; the conspirators are condemned to die and are led away. Then Adriano and ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... "Trumpery! That's what it is to you. My shawl is worth five hundred dollars if it is worth a dollar. It is worth a great deal more than that, I believe; but I declare I get confused among the prices of things. That is one of the cares of riches, that ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner

... not in pride so much as in servility and mean admirations, and trumpery imitations of their neighbours. And I wonder De Tocqueville and De Beaumont, and THE TIMES' Commissioner, did not explain the Snobbishness of Ireland as contrasted with our own. Ours is that of Richard's Norman Knights,—haughty, brutal stupid, ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray

... with diligence and labor such things as are for no use is not seemly or honorable, but ridiculous. If Ulysses indeed had tied up with the knot which Circe taught him, not the gifts he had received from Alcinous,—tripods, caldrons, cloths, and gold,—but heaping up trash, stones, and such like trumpery, should have thought his employment about such things, and the possession and keeping of them, a happy and blessed work, would any one have imitated this foolish providence and empty care? Yet this is ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... she spoke—the beautiful oval of the face, the white brow, the general graciousness of line, so feminine, in truth!—so appealing. The darkness hid away all that shewed the "female franzy." Distress of mind—distress for his trumpery wound?—had shaken her, brought her back to youth and childishness? Again he felt a rush of sympathy—of ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Fancy anyone a paintin' them weeds and trumpery!" and with that cheerless remark the ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... social activities within its very sight and hearing; how they played golf and tennis upon reclaimed edges of its face, picnicked so blithely hard upon its frontiers, and danced at night while this stern, unfathomable Thing lay breathing just beyond the trumpery walls that kept it out. The challenge of their shallow admiration seemed presumptuous, almost provocative. Their pursuit of pleasure suggested insolent indifference. They ran fool-hardy hazards, he felt; for there was no worship in their vulgar hearts. With a mental shudder, sometimes he watched ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood

... indeed! I've been surprised the people who have everything will gather up their cards and trumpery boxes after a luncheon! And your thoughtfulness is lovely, Mona. We'll each give them our own ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells

... right way to look at the thing," said the larger-bodied Admiral; "and I only wish Twemlow could have heard you. I asked him to dine with us yesterday, as you know, because you would have done him so much good; but he sent some trumpery excuse, although his wife was asked to come with him. She stopped him, no doubt; to look big, I dare say; as if they could dine with a Lord ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... the heliograph winked and flickered on the hills, striving to tell the good news to a mountain forty miles away And in the evening there arrived, dusty, sweating, and sore, a misguided Correspondent who had gone out to assist at a trumpery village-burning, and who had read off the message from afar, ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling

... together in a most curious Piece of Network, the Parts of which were likewise imperceptible to the naked Eye. Another of these Antrums or Cavities was stuffed with invisible Billetdoux, Love-Letters, pricked Dances, and other Trumpery of the same Nature. In another we found a kind of Powder, which set the whole Company a Sneezing, and by the Scent discovered it self to be right Spanish. The several other Cells were stored with Commodities of the same kind, of which it ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... (to be exemplified and commented on more fully a little later) of vying with the Arabian Nights, substitutes for the genuine local colour and speech the fade jargon of French eighteenth-century "sensibility"—autels and flammes and all the rest of the trumpery. But it does worse still—it tries to be instructive, and informs us of the difference between male and female dives and peris, of the custom of suttee, and of the fact that there are many professional singers and dancers among Indian girls. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... chastity of their religion. In the meane season, Phelibus and his company, (by reason of the bruit which was dispersed throughout all the region there of their beastly wickednesse) put all their trumpery upon my backe, and departed away about midnight. When we had passed a great part of our journey, before the rising of the Sun, we came into a wild desart, where they conspired together to slay me. For after they had taken the goddesse from my backe and set her gingerly upon the ground, ...
— The Golden Asse • Lucius Apuleius

... she would not be friendly with him any more, I do call it snobbish, don't you, Mamma? just because she is going to be a Marquise. It isn't as if he was an English Marquis even, like Lord Valmond, that would be of some importance—but a trumpery French title, without any land or money, it is ridiculous. Of course, here no one has his own land really since the Revolution, I mean like "Tournelle," they only call the new house that; I believe the real "Tournelle" is down in Touraine somewhere and belongs to some one else now. This ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn

... last. It was widely rumored in the town that something had gone wrong at Major Milroy's with the new governess, and that Mr. Armadale was mixed up in it. I paid no heed to this, believing it to be one of the many trumpery pieces of scandal perpetually set going here, and as necessary as the air they breathe to the comfort of the inhabitants of this highly ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins

... rainspots which meet upon a window-pane in wet weather. We used to wander about the stony playground, from which every blade of grass was trampled, except in the remoter corners, and to walk with our arms about each other's shoulders, and to exchange almost daily such trumpery schoolboy treasures as we owned. I never had a child sweetheart, and I never knew anybody with whom I exchanged a caress, or bartered a word of real kindness, until I fell in with this fascinating young ragamuffin. I never spoke about him to a soul, but he filled my thoughts night ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray

... the Colonel in that role." Champney laughed. "What does he do with all his rhetorical trumpery at such times? I've never seen him under fire—in fact, he never had been when ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller

... fire-place, so large that an ox might have been roasted before it. The second and third stories originally contained but one chamber each, of ample dimensions, and furnished in the plainest manner. The attic was an unplastered room, which might have been used for lodgings or storing trumpery. The house stood about one hundred years after Josiah Franklin left it, and was finally destroyed by fire, on Saturday, Dec. 29, 1810. The spot on which it stood is now occupied by a granite warehouse bearing the inscription, "BIRTHPLACE OF ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer

... This, according to Plutarch, "was of great size and weight, and of small value, so that the equivalent for ten minae (about $140) required a great room for its stowage, and a yoke of oxen to draw it." The object of this, he tell us, was to prevent its being used for the purchase of "foreign trumpery." ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... holds—away from his sight—in that tremulous hand, is but patched up from the foil and cardboard bought at the stationer's shop. You might see it was nothing more, if you tried to see. Did a soul present think of such minute investigation? Not one. In the actor's hand that trumpery became at once the glorious thing by which Napoleon had planted the sentiment of knightly heroism in the men whom Danton would have launched upon earth ruthless and bestial, as galley-slaves that had burst ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... you she is infamous? Your innocency should be ignorant of such trumpery tittle-tattle. And one can be civil without ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... better than a blind; for Barney had planned it all out that we were to go down to Galway and fetch the new ploughs home in the hooker, to save the cost of the land-carriage. 'Sure it's bad enough for the squire to be soiling his hands with trumpery made by them English thieves, that's no more conscience over bothering a gentleman for money nor if he was one of themselves,' said Barney; 'sorra a halfpenny shall the railway rogues rob him of.' Ah, little stowaway, ye may guess my delight! ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... was a battle royal over the book and Christian evidences. He was very charming personally, though at times he looked stern and angry and white to a degree, so that I wondered sometimes how I had the courage to go on—the drawn brows were so formidable! There was one moment when he talked of "trumpery objections," in his most House of Commons manner. It was as I thought. The new lines of criticism are not familiar to him, and they really press him hard. He meets them out of Bishop Butler, and things analogous. But there is a sense, I think, that question and answer don't fit, and with it ever-increasing ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... I felt a creep of undefinable horror. Not so my servant. "Why, they don't think to trap us, sir; I could break that trumpery door with a kick ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various

... praises. I waited at the door; you were the key; Your ward is nicely turned, and yet no bolt it raises. Unlifted in the broadest day, Doth Nature's veil from prying eyes defend her, And what (he chooses not before thee to display, Not all thy screws and levers can force her to surrender. Old trumpery! not that I e'er used thee, but Because my father used thee, hang'st thou o'er me, Old scroll! thou hast been stained with smoke and smut Since, on this desk, the lamp first dimly gleamed before me. Better have squandered, ...
— Faust • Goethe

... won't be content without beggaring me of my trumpery twenty-five hundred as soon ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... know!" he cried, furiously. "There is something underneath all this trumpery. I am not a man to be trifled with in this fashion, I can tell ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey

... was like the love of money, and increased by indulgences, beyond the power of a manager to gratify: I proved by mathematical demonstration, that small theatres wanted nothing but good dialogue to support them: I entreated you to send your gorgeous trumpery to rag-fair, and to diminish your overgrown Drury, which no man could now think of entering unaccompanied by a telescope and an ear-trumpet. All the persuasions of a Tully, all the energy of a Waithman, were enlisted into my harangue; which finished by exhorting your worship ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold

... leddyship's pipe, and mony a mad measure has been danced sin' syne; for down cam masons and murgeon-makers, and preachers and player-folk, and Episcopalians and Methodists, and fools and fiddlers, and Papists and pie-bakers, and doctors and drugsters; by the shop-folk, that sell trash and trumpery at three prices—and so up got the bonny new Well, and down fell the honest auld town of Saint Ronan's, where blithe decent folk had been heartsome eneugh for mony a day before ony o' them were born, or ony sic vapouring fancies kittled in ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... the mass, and such trumpery as that, Popery, purgatory, pardons, were flat Against God's word and primitive constitution, Crept in through covetousness and superstition Of late years, through blindness, and men of no knowledge, Even such as ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne

... that was nothing to this. Anybody, even Emmy, curly-headed baby that she was, could turn poor Septimus into a slave. For a woman to impose her will upon Clem Sypher, Friend of Humanity, the Colossus of Curemongers, was no such trumpery achievement. ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke

... and your habit—write a department for the Saturday News after the fashion of the Noctes. Think it all over whilst you are away. What are you going to bring me for a present? Don't go to buying any foolish trumpery; you have no money to waste on follies. What I need is a "Noctes," and any other useful book you may get hold of in New York. ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... loyalty it is that sets up the loss of their trumpery treasure over and above the loss of their king, my brother Otho! If," she shrilled indignantly, "we are not unwise to listen to this at all. What is it you think? What ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale

... in the presence of his friends in the Museum of Marvels. He knew that the fictitious Rev. Andrew Rowbottom had been inquired for by the police as a man who might provide a clue, but the search for him had not been warmly followed up, it being assumed that he was some trumpery imposter. In any case, his importance was forgotten in a splendid dramatic idea entertained by the detectives, inculpating a clever and notorious criminal. The notorious criminal proved an alibi, and after being a nine days' wonder the great diamond robbery and murder case was supplanted ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson

... magnificence. In the throngs that lined the streets there were gaunt bodies and hungry faces everywhere. Here and there stood one, a man or a woman, as naked as a savage in Europe, and yet dull to shame. Even the trader, with trumpery gauds on his coat, aping the prevailing fashion for display, had a scared, uneasy look to his face, as though he had forgotten the mere name of safety, and hid a frantic heart with his tawdry outward ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne

... lawyer, Mr. Bruff, as my father's representative. No sensible person, in a similar position, could have viewed the matter in any other way. Nothing in this world, Betteredge, is probable unless it appeals to our own trumpery experience; and we only believe in a romance when we see ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins

... new troubles? The Spanish Charles Stuart invasion plot is indeed afoot, and that union abroad of the Protestant powers for which we crave is by no means accomplished. Therefore, says the Protector, you must be ready to fight on land as well as by sea. No time this for disunion, trumpery quarrels over points of form. Yet such debate ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... Hill as the man who had been carried into his bar after being knocked down. Nothing was more common than mistakes of identification. His glance wandered round the room, as though in search of some inspiration for his next question. His eye took mechanical note of the trumpery articles of rickety furniture; wandered over the cheap almanac prints which adorned the walls; but became riveted in the cheap overmantel which surmounted the fire-place. For, in the slip of mirror which formed the centre of that ornament, Inspector Chippenfield caught sight of the ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson

... he ever make a High Sheriff of himself, with chains dangling over the front of his waistcoat, or little pistols, seals, or trinketry appearing below his waistband, as much as to say, "if you only knew what a watch I have inside!" Nor does he sport trumpery rings upon raw-boned fingers; if he wears rings, you may depend upon it that they are of value, that they are sparingly distributed, and that his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various

... by stern resolves. I think I rather enjoyed the small sacrifices and the steady saving; and I know I very much enjoyed applying for and obtaining another small increase of salary, after completing a trumpery series of sketches of pleasure resorts near Sydney, the publication of which brought ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson

... we have in our mother-tongue several excellent works in verse and prose, and, heaven be praised! but little left of the trash and trumpery stuff of those duncical mumblers of ave-maries and the barbarous foregoing Gothic age, I have made bold to choose to chirrup and warble my plain ditty, or, as they say, to whistle like a goose among the swans, rather than ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... time's precious," said the coachman, haughtily. "You are only going to some trumpery little village or other in the neighborhood, while we are going ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... safety in anything else. Mr. Casaubon had prepared all this as beautifully as possible. He made himself disagreeable—or it pleased God to make him so—and then he dared her to contradict him. It's the way to make any trumpery tempting, to ticket it at a high price in ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... tongues for their own sake, and the mere satisfaction of acquiring them, surely argues an intellect of a very low order; a mind disposed to be satisfied with mean and grovelling things; taking more pleasure in the trumpery casket than in the precious treasure which it contains, in the pursuit of words, than in the acquisition ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... that the author of such a letter, instead of writin about pipple of tip-top qualaty, was describin Vinegar Yard? Would you beleave that the lady he was a-ritin to was a chased, modist lady of honor, and mother of a famly? O trumpery! O morris! as Homer says: this is a higeous pictur of manners, such as I weap to think of, as evry morl ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... will book at Fairfax Court House is the inventory of a gentleman's estate—household fabrics, mahogany and walnut furniture, family pictures, maps, prints, books, silverware, glassware, chinaware, and all manner of utensils, and drawers of "Trumpery!" More personal items imply a rich wardrobe and a man who doubtless cut a figure in society, for the list of apparel is long, containing, "1 scarlet cloth jacket with broad gold lace," "1 crimson velvet jacket with broad gold lace," "1 pair scarlet breaches with gold knee bands," ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore

... be readily turned into cash, and the money invested in immense tracts of wild land, and shingle palaces in the wilderness. Nay, his busy fancy already realized his hopes, and presented to him the blooming Katrina, with a whole family of children, mounted on the top of a wagon loaded with household trumpery, with pots and kettles dangling beneath; and he beheld himself bestriding a pacing mare, with a colt at her heels, setting out for Kentucky, Tennessee,—or the Lord ...
— The Legend of Sleepy Hollow • Washington Irving

... European seaside resort for a penny or two. But there it was a jewel beyond price, and no doubt was the first that had found its way into the kingdom. I put it on a table and left it there, wondering at the value which was set upon this trumpery article ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... questions may be answered some time or other, namely,—Where do we find a precept in the Gospel requiring Ecclesiastical Synods? Convocations? Councils? Decrees? Creeds? Confessions? Oaths? Subscriptions? and whole cart-loads of other trumpery that we find religion encumbered with in these days?" [Footnote: Works of J. ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams

... the greatest trumpery that ever was seen. If the prince had known what he is, he would have hung him rather than decorate him with ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann

... man—for that's what you look like. And I should like to know what the apron's for? There must be something in it not very respectable, I'm sure. Well, I only wish I was Queen for a day or two. I'd put an end to freemasonry, and all such trumpery, I know. ...
— Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures • Douglas Jerrold

... to spend, though. Pa said he'd lay it out for me; and he brought me home a cart from the Boulevard; but it didn't cost two napoleons. It was a trumpery cart, that went smash the first time Arthur ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... author of this libell was some vagabond huckster or pedler, and had gone particularly into many corners of Island to vtter his trumpery wares, which he also testifieth of himselfe in his worthy rimes, that he had trauailed thorow the greatest part of Island, whereupon when he had played the cousining mate with others (for often times deceit and lying are ioyned together, and he hath sufficiently proued himselfe ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt

... heathen gods, but Christianized through twelve centuries gone by. The world has nothing else like the Pantheon. So grand it is, that the pasteboard statues over the lofty cornice do not disturb the effect, any more than the tin crowns and hearts, the dusty artificial flowers, and all manner of trumpery gew-gaws, hanging at the saintly shrines. The rust and dinginess that have dimmed the precious marble on the walls; the pavement, with its great squares and rounds of porphyry and granite, cracked crosswise and in a hundred ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... Mr. Crisp, who, very much perplexed, said, in a boggling manner, that it was a novel-he supposed from the circulating library—only a trumpery novel." ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay

... able to keep his purpose pure, he falls as fast as he struggles up, and still struggling falls again. Soft moments of peace with GOD and man may never come to him. He may feel himself viler than a thousand trumpery souls who could not have borne his trials for a day. Child, for you and for me is reserved no such cross and no such crown as theirs who falling still fight, and fighting fall, with their faces Zionwards, into the arms of the Everlasting Father. 'As one whom ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing

... have been honest enough; you have never even pretended to think of me as anything else but a prostitute,—a trumpery bit of second-hand finery that plenty of other men have ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich

... you I am utterly shocked! You to say such a thing to my face, when we have been as good as engaged to each other all our lives! Who cares for the trumpery ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey

... former letter I pointed out how cleverly the Nationalists dissect the bill, how they point out that its proposals are insulting to Ireland, how they prove that its provisions are inconsistent and unworkable, how they propose to discount the trumpery restrictions and the gimcrack "safeguards" of the proposed measure, how in short, they tear the bill to rags, laugh its powers to scorn, and hold its authors in high derision. The Belfast men do not discuss the bill, do not examine it clause by ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... suppose they have anything to do with each other. What riled me was the way she talked of the shooting. People do when they take a little shooting. They pay some trumpery thirty or forty pounds a year, and then they seem to think that it's almost the same as though they owned the property themselves. I've known a man talk of his manor because he had the shooting of a wood ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope

... After thirty years' service the postman is dignified with the title of Ober-Brieftraeger. It is difficult to understand the type of mind which is flattered by such infantile honors. At any rate, it is a cheap system of rewards, and so long as men will work for such trumpery ends the state profits by playing upon their childish vanity. During the year 1912 more than 7,000 decorations were distributed, and some 1,500 of these were of the three classes of the Order of the Red Eagle. On the ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... no blear-eyed spinster mooning over the trumpery of a heyday that is gone, but a Miss Mischief offering her dainty fingers to you before the kiss of your grandfather's lips is yet dry on them. The damask petticoat, the powdered wig, and the coquettish little patch by her dimpled little mouth are off and into the garret, and ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post

... finally settled That new highway to make, which will join our town with the main road. But I am greatly afraid that the young generation won't act thus; Some on the one hand think only of pleasure and trumpery dresses, Others wont stir out of doors, and pass all their time by the fireside, And our Hermann, I fear, will always be one ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe

... he found a hint of that dead life. Gowns of velvet and of silk, such as princesses might wear, wonders of lace, yellowed with time, great cloaks of snowy fur, lustrous robes, jewels of worth,—a vast array of brilliant trumpery. Then there were books in many tongues, with rich old bindings and illuminated page, and in them written the dead woman's name,—a name of many parts, with titles of impress, and in the midst of all the name, ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie

... that failure, no English vessels have attempted to trade to the south of Borneo; but we discovered that the Macassar boats paid the coast an occasional visit, under Dutch colours, exchanging beads and other trumpery for rich cargoes of ivory and skins. We also discovered that commercial negotiations with this country would not be attended with any risk, provided that the vessels employed were well armed, and the arrangements ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat

... which show that personal appearance is not disregarded. The most hostile intentions have been averted, and imminent peril escaped, by the timely present of a few rows of bright-coloured beads, or a small piece of looking-glass; and the most trumpery European gewgaws have elicited more admiration, afforded greater pleasure, and effected more goodwill, than the most costly treasures could purchase among civilized nations. A love of finery seems to belong to human ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge

... incurious, to see some humble professors of gastronomy over smoking viands, fritters, and goffers or indented wafers baked on cast-iron stoves a la minute—it must be owned, unseasonable luxuries for a September day. The spectacles, or shows, in noise and absurdity, exceeded the English trumpery of that order; and to judge from the gaping crowds which they attracted, we are not the only credulous nation in the world. Among the games was a machine resembling an English round-a-bout, with wooden horses for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 330, September 6, 1828 • Various

... and most liberal of masters,' but he feels the drudgery of such work. Reading Bossuet (February 28, 1864), he observes that the works are so 'powerful and magnificent in their way' that they make me feel a sort of hatred for 'the trumpery that I pass my time in manufacturing.' It makes him 'sad to read great books, and it is almost equally sad not to read them.' He feels 'tied by the leg' and longs to write something worth writing; he believes that he might do more by a better economy of his time; but 'it is hopeless to try ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... will show you the end. If I cannot build empire I can do something else, I can throw this damnable little Kingdom down into the chaos it deserves!... I can abdicate to my cousin, Louis Delgado, who wants the throne I don't want!... I can stamp on this tinseled trumpery.... I can break jail!" He turned with an impassioned out-sweeping of his hands. Coming swiftly from behind the bench, he halted tensely before Benton and leaned defiantly forward. "Then I can free her—and by God I shall ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck

... At length I determined it could be done, and my heart beat nervously as the yawl neared the centre arch—not as to danger, but the dishonour of breaking a goodly spar at the end of a cruise, and in so trumpery a feat. It ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor

... unmeaning &c adj.; twaddle, quibble, scrabble. Adj. unmeaning; meaningless, senseless; nonsensical; void of sense &c 516. inexpressive, unexpressive; vacant; not significant &c 516; insignificant. trashy, washy, trumpery, trivial, fiddle-faddle, twaddling, quibbling. unmeant, not expressed; tacit &c (latent) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... the 13th Light Dragoons, and subsequently in the 11th. He saw no service, and was an excellent soldier at mess and off duty. I am not qualified to speak with authority about his fulfilment of the trumpery trivialities which fill up garrison life, but here is one ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey

... go, the worthless trumpery!" cried Beresynth: "we shall live happily together without her, I warrant; our ways of thinking and feeling are so ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck

... clad in a mourning dress,[37] on account of this old woman, I suppose, who was {lately} dead; without golden ornaments, dressed, besides, just like those who {only} dress for themselves, {and} patched up with no worthless woman's trumpery.[38] Her hair was loose, long, {and} thrown back negligently about her temples. (To CLINIA.) Do you hold ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence

... brave leader was here felt in a grave degree, we must also see that it was known far and wide that this very loss was now a great weakness to his followers. There is no surer sign of mischief in Africa than these trumpery charges of bewitching houses by placing things on them: some such over-strained accusation is generally set in the front rank when other difficulties are to come: drunkenness is pretty much the same thing in all parts of the world, and gathers ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone

... list of place-men and pensioners; and besides this, they have learned the manly doctrine of reverencing themselves, and consequently of respecting each other; and they laugh at those imaginary beings called Kings and Lords, and all the fraudulent trumpery of Court. ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... of small value, so that the equivalent for ten minae (about $140) required a great room for its stowage, and a yoke of oxen to draw it." The object of this, he tell us, was to prevent its being used for the purchase of "foreign trumpery." ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... have been only a continual fret and annoyance to you. And this—this change, I own, is infinitely harder to bear. It would be an outrage on common sense and on all that we hold seemly and—and sacred in life, even in some trumpery story. You do, you must see all ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare

... Ireland will not have it at any price"; and again, a moment later, "You come across and try to take them." Mr. Devlin was fully as fierce as these less prominent members of his party, and after many wrathful interruptions he turned aside the debate into a discussion about a trumpery report of one of the sub-committees of ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill

... traveller—for such is the term by which the number of his slaves are understood—was small, consisting of some six workers, and three or four little negro children asleep under the wagon. The workers were occupied at a little distance, in replacing boxes, beds, and some household trumpery, which had been taken out of the wagon, to enable them to effect its release from the slough in which it had cast one of its wheels, and broken its axle, and the restoration of which had made their supper so late in the night. ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms

... that was prepared for her, gave her no delight. She acquiesced in these things because her lord desired that they should be there, and she intended that her lord should be among the rich ones of the earth. But not for one moment did she feel even that trumpery joy which comes ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope

... food—no fancy fixings!" Eleanor had decreed. "These men burn up a tremendous lot of energy in work, and we've got to give them good food to replace it. So we don't want a lot of trumpery things, such ...
— The Camp Fire Girls on the March - Bessie King's Test of Friendship • Jane L. Stewart

... sleeping under bridges, eternally moved on by a ruthless London policeman (her only knowledge of extreme destitution being derived from the woeful tale of "Little Jo").—And to think that the beginning of it all had been the want of a trumpery tram-fare. How safe the other girls were! No wonder they could allow themselves to feel shocked and outraged; none of THEM knew what it was not to have threepence in your pocket. While she, Laura ... ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson

... roll of bank-notes, when he was lucky, and show his winnings to his wife, and chuckle and swear over them, and boast and rail, and tell her, if it was not for the cursed way his time was cut up with hospital, and field days, and such trumpery regimental duties, he could make a fortune while other men were thinking of it; and he very nearly believed it. And he was, doubtless, clear-headed, though wrong-headed, too, at times, and very energetic; but his genius was for pushing men ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... that the bishop had to be confiscated as soon as possible. Herbert, the seconder, had the same sentence, and was soon Poor in estate as well as name, and only got peace and possession back after injuries, losses, vexings, and many insults. But no man laid a finger even upon the most trumpery temporal of the Bishop of Lincoln. His anathema meant death. For nine months Richard hounded his minions on, but they dared not bite. Instead they beseeched the bishop's pity for their unhappy position, and he resolved to seek the king and talk ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson

... this time there had never been anything altogether unpardonable charged against him. But one fine morning the Hynds jewels were missing. Remember that the Hyndses had always been a wealthy and powerful family. The theft of those jewels was no trumpery affair. For generations they had been adding to that collection—sometimes a lustrous pearl, sometimes a flawless emerald; once it was a sapphire that had belonged to a French queen, once a pair of rubies that had hung in the ears of a duchess ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler

... great bulk of Baron Duvillard's money going to the opposition newspapers as pretended payment for puffery and advertising, whilst on the other hand the Republican organs received but beggarly, trumpery amounts. He had been Minister of the Interior at the time, and had therefore had charge of the press; so what would have been said of him if he had not endeavoured to reestablish some equilibrium in this distribution ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... thee," said he. "Thou would'st not have an honorable Prince! Thou could'st not prize the rose and the nightingale, but thou wast ready to kiss the swineherd for the sake of a trumpery plaything. Thou art ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen

... small relation you may see what kind of points these sort of people have upon their Compass. But to write the true nature and actions of such Rubbish, were to no other purpose then to foul a vast quantity of paper with a deal of trash and trumpery. For many are damnably liquorish tooth'd, everlasting Tattlesters, lazy Ey-servants, salt Bitches, continual Mumblers out of their Pockets, wicked Scolds, lavish Drones, secret Drinckers, stifnecked Dunces, Tyrants over Children, ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh

... were in your place I'd get myself up as a real genuine Pocahontas, and not go trailing around in any such trumpery as that," returned Alan, scornfully kicking at the end of the train, as it lay ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray

... volumes. Many a much-prized rarity have I obtained from Drake and Burnham and others of my townsmen, and from Denham in New York; and in my student years many a choice volume, sometimes even an Aldus or an Elzevir, have I found among the trumpery spread out on the parapets of the quays. But there is a difference between going out on the Fourth of July with a militia musket to shoot any catbird or "chipmunk" that turns up in a piece of woods within a few miles of our own cities, and shooting partridges in a nobleman's ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... like Benjamin Franklin, who gave his sister Jane a spinning wheel on her wedding day: she gave me that. And Jane's gone, though I did hear someone bought the wheel for a sort of keepsake. Oh, Elizabeth, I don't know what you will do with all this old trumpery!" ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas

... relative to ships and business, a spyglass, a loaded iron pistol, some books of navigation, some charts, several great pieces of tobacco, and a few cigars; some little plaster images, that he had probably bought for his children, a cotton umbrella, and other trumpery of no great value. In one of the trunks we found about twenty pounds' worth of English and American gold and silver, and some notes of hand, due in America. Of all these things the clerk made an inventory; after which we took possession of the money and affixed the consular seal ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... not his Honour called the jury's attention to the discrepancies in this witness's evidence; and when Dr. Mulhaus was acquitted, delivered a stinging reproof to the magistrates for wasting public time by sending such a trumpery case to a jury. But, on the other hand, Dr. Mulhaus' charge of assault with intent fell dead; so that neither party had ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley

... now, that the author of such a letter, instead of writin about pipple of tip-top qualaty, was describin Vinegar Yard? Would you beleave that the lady he was a-ritin to was a chased, modist lady of honor, and mother of a famly? O trumpery! O morris! as Homer says: this is a higeous pictur of manners, such as I weap to think of, as evry morl ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... vessel for, and what has He put into it? Why, many things this body is to be a vessel for, but at present God has put into it that curious thing, the soul. Cabinets, that are very rich and costly things of themselves, are not made nor designed to be vessels to be stuffed or filled with trumpery, and things of no value; no, these are prepared for rings and jewels, for pearls, for rubies, and things that are choice. And if so, what shall we then think of the soul for which is prepared, and that of God, the most rich and excellent vessel in the world? Surely it must be a thing of worth, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... Anybody, even Emmy, curly-headed baby that she was, could turn poor Septimus into a slave. For a woman to impose her will upon Clem Sypher, Friend of Humanity, the Colossus of Curemongers, was no such trumpery achievement. ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke

... quarrel which took place there, a poor young man was run into the bowels with a red-hot poker, of which injury he died. The mob vented their fury on the house, and the Magistrates, somewhat of the latest, shut up the exhibition. A quantity of glass and crystal trumpery, the remains of the splendid apparatus, was sold on the South Bridge for next to nothing. Graham's next {p.109} receipt was the earth-bath, with which he wrought some cures; but that also failing, he was, I ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart

... and simple uniform in which so many great victories had been won no longer sufficed. New embellishments medals, cords, trimmings, or what not were eternally being devised. As though such mere external trumpery could create anew the now waning ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein

... us go to Nahant. I want you to try your hand on a coast view. But what, what are you about? At that trumpery daguerreotype again? Let me see the beauty,—that's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various

... four days about it. [Here came the sonnet.] Barry, study that sonnet. It is curiously and perversely elaborate. 'Tis a choking subject, and therefore the reader is directed to the structure of it. See you? and was this a fourteener to be rejected by a trumpery annual? forsooth,'twould shock all mothers; and may all mothers, who would so be shocked, be damned! as if mothers were such sort of logicians as to infer the future hanging of their child from the theoretical hangibility ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb

... and careful buyer. Only worth-while things were selected, not a miscellaneous collection of trumpery junk. So the result to date was charming furniture and appointments, but ...
— Patty and Azalea • Carolyn Wells

... those. The few that imagine themselves kings or gods are happy, the rest are no happier than the sane. Of course, no man is entirely in his right mind at any time, but I have been referring to the extreme cases. I have taken from this man that trumpery thing which the race regards as a Mind; I have replaced his tin life with a silver-gilt fiction; you see the result—and you criticize! I said I would make him permanently happy, and I have done it. I have made him happy by ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... but little. To pay the bill would be enough for him. He, Mr Nearthewinde, was doing his business as he well knew how to do it; and it was not likely that he should submit to be lectured by such as Mr Moffat on a trumpery score ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope

... patronizing the rector's wife, and impressing her crotchet on the national school. But no—she is bitten with the tarantula of social success. She wants to "get on" in society. She must push as vigorously as any trumpery adventuress in May Fair. A good old name is dragged into the dirt inseparable from pushing. The family portraits look disdainfully from their frames, and the ancestral oaks hang their heads in shame. The company reflects the peculiar ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous

... Virgin Mary and her image, and the whole church was lighted with paraffine oil—the roof, the pillars, the sides. Suddenly some hangings near the figure of the Virgin took fire, and soon the whole church was in a blaze. Some of the priests ran off through a small side-door with their trumpery ornaments, leaving the poor women and children inside. On the heads of these the burning oil came pouring down. A few, but very few, were got out at the front door; but those trying to get out trampled down each other, and blocked up the door. The greater number were burned to death. I never tell ...
— Taking Tales - Instructive and Entertaining Reading • W.H.G. Kingston

... and small greedy eyes. He thought of the swell undertaking establishment, of the black gloves and long faces and soft tactful voices. That man and his father before him lived by pretending things they didn't feel, by swathing reality with all manner of crepe and trumpery. For those people, no one ever died, they passed away, they deceased. Still, there had to be undertakers. There was no more stain about that than about any other trade. And it was so as not to spoil his trade that the undertaker had enlisted, ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos

... his pious words in Congress and his mad idea of forsaking everything to follow her around the world. Oh, the hypocrite! She had felt, as she sat listening to him, that his speech was a pack of lies, a mess of conventional trumpery and platitudes! The only one there who had spoken with any real sincerity, any real virtue, was that little old man, whom she had listened to with veneration because he had been one ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... desires two or three days' time to get ready these his swearing apparatus, called on such occasions sumpahan, of which some are looked upon as more sacred and of greater efficacy than others. They consist of an old rusty kris, a broken gun barrel, or any ancient trumpery, to which chance or caprice has annexed an idea of extraordinary virtue. These they generally dip in water, which the person who swears drinks off, after having pronounced the form of words before mentioned.* The pangeran of Sungei-lamo has by him certain ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden

... plainish man himself), and there had been five or six beside him making a moderate share of money. He's lost all his great fortune, there's seventy thousand or so gone somewhere, the bank has smashed with thousands more of everybody's money, with nothing much to show but trumpery mortgages; there's no work and no money, and a howl goes up that there has been over-production. Not over-production of honesty, ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas

... forth their exertions, and now they have finally settled That new highway to make, which will join our town with the main road. But I am greatly afraid that the young generation won't act thus; Some on the one hand think only of pleasure and trumpery dresses, Others wont stir out of doors, and pass all their time by the fireside, And our Hermann, I fear, will always be one of ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe

... the honest wives of the men, but others drunken, swearing, loud-talking creatures—a disgrace to their sex. Quarrelling and fighting and the wildest uproar were taking place; and then there were a number of Jews with pinchbeck watches, and all sorts of trumpery wares, which they were eager to exchange for poor Jack's golden guineas. Some of them went away in the evening, but many more came back the next morning to drive their trade, and would have come as long as coin was to ...
— The Loss of the Royal George • W.H.G. Kingston

... think there is much courage or originality in giving utterance to truths that everybody knows, but which get overlaid by conventional trumpery. The only distinction which it is necessary to point out to feeble-minded folk is this: that, in asserting the breadth and depth of that significance which gives to fashion and fortune their tremendous power, we do not indorse the extravagances which often disgrace the one, nor the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various

... narrow streets, not exactly knowing where they were going. They agreed, however, that except the crowds of savage, dirty-looking Arabs, and still more hideous blacks, tumbledown houses, and bazaars full of trumpery goods, there was nothing to be seen in Zanzibar. Suddenly they found themselves in a square, which Desmond recognised as the slave-market. It was far more crowded than when Archie and he had been there before. As they looked round, they ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston

... "spiritual element," made light even of the "resurrection of Christ," and everywhere shows his superiority to the beggarly elements of history, dogma, and ritual, another declares that he was so enslaved by his Jewish prejudices and the trumpery he had picked up at the feet of Gamaliel, that he knew but little or next to nothing of the real mystery of the very Gospel he preached; that while he proclaims that it is "revealed, after having been hidden from ages generations," he himself manages to hide it afresh. This you ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers

... done, to take such trifles so much to heart?—to bother about a few miserable superannuated forms that are not of the slightest importance?—a few venerable, harmless prejudices?—a few foolish social customs and other trumpery affairs of ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson

... vibrations against its competitors. But what held Blinker in awful fascination was the mob, the multitude, the proletariat shrieking, struggling, hurrying, panting, hurling itself in incontinent frenzy, with unabashed abandon, into the ridiculous sham palaces of trumpery and tinsel pleasures, The vulgarity of it, its brutal overriding of all the tenets of repression and taste that were held by his caste, ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry

... in the dusky hall-way. She was so close to him that he could see every detail of her face and person, just as he could at night when he closed his eyes; so close that for an instant he felt her breath on his face. He ground his teeth, minded, that instant, to throw down the trumpery little wall of convention. It couldn't stand, he knew with an experienced certainty of his own power that it couldn't stand for an instant against him. The day he chose to put his shoulder to it, down it would go ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... all this trumpery out, and make Mrs. Keeling give me something sensible,' said Cecil, with a boy's rough-and-ready ...
— Holiday Tales • Florence Wilford

... first time I felt a creep of undefinable horror. Not so my servant. "Why, they don't think to trap us, sir; I could break that trumpery door with a kick ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... is that of a highly respectable British cynic; his intelligence is largely one of trifles; he is wise over trivial and trumpery things. He delights in reminding us—with an air!—that everybody is a humbug; that we are all rank snobs; that to misuse your aspirates is to be ridiculous and incapable of real merit; that Miss Blank has just slipped out to post a letter to Captain Jones; that ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... by, their unnatural villany, mocking and laughing at this the pure and cleane chastity of their religion. In the meane season, Phelibus and his company, (by reason of the bruit which was dispersed throughout all the region there of their beastly wickednesse) put all their trumpery upon my backe, and departed away about midnight. When we had passed a great part of our journey, before the rising of the Sun, we came into a wild desart, where they conspired together to slay me. For after they had taken the goddesse from my backe and set her gingerly ...
— The Golden Asse • Lucius Apuleius

... so. Dr. Ingle met him, in traveling dress, at the railway station, when he took a through ticket to Washington, and said that he was en route for New York, and meant to sail on the Scotia for Liverpool next Saturday. His trumpery was to be sent after ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth

... in going the circuit of the room, fell upon a trumpery filigree card-rack of paste-board, that hung dangling by a dirty blue ribbon, from a little brass knob just beneath the middle of the mantel-piece. In this rack, which had three or four compartments, were ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson

... faded flames, And you may take your oath he won't be still If once I mutter but a syllable Against the brazen bluster of his claims. These civil-service gentlemen, they say, Are very potent in the press to-day. A trumpery paragraph can lay me low, Once printed in that Samson-like Gazette That with the jaw of asses fells its foe, And runs away with tackle and with net, Especially towards the ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen

... enough to tell them that I was alone in the house, but my simplicity did not carry me so far as a compliance with their urgent request. After arguing with me for several minutes, and even endeavouring to bribe me with a trumpery jewel, the men withdrew, muttering. I watched them for a moment, and took note of the keen, earnest gaze they bent upon the house before leaving the garden. But the voice of the charmer in Tait was calling too loudly to allow me to dwell upon anything else, and I was quickly back again ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.

... also given way. They had, to be sure, become dingy, and that which had been originally a rich and goodly ruby had degenerated into a reddish brown. Mr. Harding, however, thought the old reddish-brown much preferable to the gaudy buff-coloured trumpery moreen which Mrs. Proudie had deemed good enough for her husband's own room in the provincial city ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope

... her arm. It was a sevenpenny-halfpenny trumpery thing that pretended to be silver; it had a glass heart of turquoise blue hanging from it, and it was the gift of the maid-of-all-work at the Fitzroy Street house. 'Here,' said Anthea, 'this is for you. That is ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit

... the younger, objected and wished her husband Marquis of Monthermer. This difference has been adjusted, by making Sir Edward Montagu Lord Beaulieu, and giving the title of the family to Lord Brudenel. With pardon of your Cu-blood, I hold, that Lord Cardigan makes a very trumpery figure by so meanly relinquishing all Brudenelhood. Adieu! let me know soon when you will keep your ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... of the public take a morbid delight in such works as Frankenstein, that "Poor, impossible monster abhorred," who would be disgusting if he were not so extremely ludicrous: and all this search after impossible mystery, such trumpery! growing into the popular taste, is fed with garbage; doing more harm than all the preachings and poundings of optimistic Reviews will be able to remedy in an ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various

... than that trumpery walk in the moonshine. Pope had not at this time joined the Tories, and both parties subscribed. He cleared over 5,000 pounds by the Iliad. Over the Odyssey he slackened, and employed two inferior wits to do half the books; but even after paying his journeymen he made nearly 4,000 pounds ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell

... like," replied Dickie; "the one has her chickens to reckon, and the other has his boys to whip. I would have given them the candle to hold long since, and shown this trumpery hamlet a fair pair of heels, but that Dominie promises I should go with him to bear share in the next pageant he is to set forth, and they say there are ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott

... but if she was telling him she would not be friendly with him any more, I do call it snobbish, don't you, Mamma? just because she is going to be a Marquise. It isn't as if he was an English Marquis even, like Lord Valmond, that would be of some importance—but a trumpery French title, without any land or money, it is ridiculous. Of course, here no one has his own land really since the Revolution, I mean like "Tournelle," they only call the new house that; I believe the real "Tournelle" is down in Touraine ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn

... true happiness in using its powers, and begins by being its own dupe before it is the dupe of others, keep it within the region of the heart's communion, keep it for woman and for God. Do not hawk its treasures in the bazaars of society or of politics, where trumpery will be offered in exchange for them. Believe the voice which commands you to be noble in all things when it also prays you not to expend your forces uselessly. Unhappily, men will rate you according to your usefulness, and ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac

... the one deserving of satire if anybody!' she said. 'I begin to feel I was a foolish girl to run away from a father for such a trumpery reason as a little scolding because ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy

... be sure. Perhaps it won't strike 'em as strange for you. But you must look up, and hold your own, and remember you're one of the Hamleys, who've been on the same land for hundreds of years, while they're but trumpery Whig folk who only came into the county ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... up the landscape. The banks of the river actually laughed when the sunshine fell upon them; and the river itself was alive and cheerful, and, by way of fun and amusement, it had swept away many wreaths of meadow-hay, and old, rotten branches of trees, and all such trumpery. These matters came floating downwards, whirling round and round in the eddies, or hastening onward in the main current; and many of them, before this time, have probably been carried into the Merrimack, and will be borne onward to the sea. The spots ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... being seems to condemn in the strongest terms the conduct of Wellesley; there never was such an ass, and if he has hatched all this trumpery and made Plunket his dupe, the latter will never get over it; such is the belief, and it really looks like it. Plunket must of course come to the meeting, and we shall then see what he chooses to disclose to the public; for a justification ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos

... "Do you know what, Annushka, my birdie . . . ? There is no need for you to get married really like every one else. You're rich and free, you are your own mistress; but yet, my child, it doesn't seem the right thing for you to be an old maid. I'll find you, you know, some trumpery and simple-witted man. You'll marry him for appearances and then have your fling, bonny lass! You can hand him five thousand or ten maybe, and pack him off where he came from, and you will be mistress in your own house—you can love whom you like and no one can say anything to you. And then ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... up so much of our lives, just so long as that happens you do not and you cannot see the truth. But when it happens to a person, as it does happen in times of great and deep and bitter experience; when it happens that all these trumpery little objects of life are swept away; then occasionally, with astonishment, the soul sees that. It is also the soul of the others around. Even if it does not become aware of an absolute identity, it perceives that there is a deep relationship and communion between itself and ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... Aristides, or Miltiades, and the illustrious of that day, he perceives it to be no grander than that of the neighbors. But now, ye men of Athens—as regards public measures—our government is content to furnish roads, fountains, whitewashing, and trumpery; not that I blame the authors of these works; far otherwise; I blame you, if you suppose that such measures are all you have to execute. As regards individual conduct—your men in office have (some of them) made their private houses, not only more ostentatious than the ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... bald at the age of eighteen; some showed from time to time a dangerous weakness of mind. Over-strung and enfeebled, they gave enormous sums to ignorant charlatans; and it was a common thing for some bath-attendant or other trumpery who turned healer or prophet, to make a rapid fortune by the practice of medicine or theology. The number of lunatics increased continually; suicides multiplied in the world of wealth, and many of them were accompanied by atrocious ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France

... we had all perished. As soon as it was known where Cortes was, two old ships were sent over to Truxillo with horses and colts, and one pipe of wine; all the rest of their cargoes consisting of shirts, caps, and useless trumpery of various kinds. Some of the Indian inhabitants of the Guanajas islands, which are about eight leagues from Truxillo, came at this time to Cortes, complaining that the Spaniards had been accustomed to carry away the natives and their ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr

... consequently possess it fully, is forgetting three fundamental facts: first, that it is quite inconceivable that anyone, having before him the splendid fields for investigation which true clairvoyance opens up, could ever have the slightest wish to pry into the trumpery little secrets of any individual man; secondly, that even if by some impossible chance our clairvoyant had such indecent curiosity about matters of petty gossip, there is, after all, such a thing as the honour of a gentleman, which, on that plane as on this, would of course prevent ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater

... for treason in Shaftesbury's plot. This noble person and I were brought acquainted, some years ago, by Lady Berkeley.(16) I love good creditable acquaintance: I love to be the worst of the company: I am not of those that say, "For want of company, welcome trumpery." I was this evening with Lady Kerry and Mrs. Pratt at Vauxhall, to hear the nightingales; but they are almost ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift

... case in the presence of his friends in the Museum of Marvels. He knew that the fictitious Rev. Andrew Rowbottom had been inquired for by the police as a man who might provide a clue, but the search for him had not been warmly followed up, it being assumed that he was some trumpery imposter. In any case, his importance was forgotten in a splendid dramatic idea entertained by the detectives, inculpating a clever and notorious criminal. The notorious criminal proved an alibi, and after being a nine days' wonder the great diamond ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson

... had ever seen Master Faggus any the worse for liquor indeed? Her own opinion was, in truth, that he took a great deal too little, after all his hard work, and hard riding, and coming over the hills to be insulted! And if ever it lay in her power, and with no one to grudge him his trumpery glass, she would see that poor Tom had the nourishment which his cough ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore

... husband was met walking up the High Street loaded with his guns and fishing-rods, and replied calmly to someone who inquired after his wife, 'that the poor woman was trying to save a parcel of crockery and some trumpery books'; the last being those which served her to conduct ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... the same conclusion, then modified it and returned to a creed in the light of subsequent events, so now Will had found himself, on the evening of his child's funeral, with fresh interests aroused and recent convictions shaken. An incipient negation of Deity, built upon the trumpery basis of his personal misfortunes, was almost shattered within the week that saw its first existence. A mystery developed in his path, and startling incidents awoke a new train of credulity akin to that already manifested over the ancient cross. The man's uneven mind was ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... that the ground has been turned over, and that the spot is hardly recognisable. The gardener comes up, and explains with much warmth that he had sown the seed of a precious Maltese melon in that particular spot long before Emilius had come with his trumpery beans, and that therefore it was his land; that nobody touches the garden of his neighbour, in order that his own may remain untouched; and that if Emilius wants a piece of garden, he must pay for it by surrendering to the owner half the produce.[283] Thus, says Rousseau, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... only glideth into fine ears, he calleth falsehood and trumpery. Verily, he believeth only in Gods that make a ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche

... gentleman but by hectoring a bit now and then, 'specially to such a rogue as thou, coming back when thy betters are lost. That is always the way, as I found when I lost my real silver crown, and kept my trumpery Parliament bit." ...
— The Pigeon Pie • Charlotte M. Yonge

... idea of a man coming to look after his trumpery cottage on the first day of his showing himself as lord of his own property! Perhaps he is demanding that you shall be delivered up to him. If he does I shall ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope

... tell you with what splendour we buried him. Of what avail are undertakers' feathers and heralds' trumpery? I went out and shot the fatal black horse that had killed him, at the door of the vault where we laid my boy. I was so wild, that I could have shot myself too. But for the crime, it would have been better that I should, perhaps; for what has my life been since that ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray

... to the changes dictated by our volition.' Unable to keep up the laudatory strain, even in joke, the reviewer (his style points to Christopher North) calls a literary friend to his assistance, who takes the opposite view, and declares that the book is 'a tawdry tissue of tedious trumpery; a tessellated texture of threadbare thievery; a trifling transcript of trite twaddle and trapessing tittle-tattle.... Like everything that falls from her pen, it is pert, shallow, and conceited, a farrago of ignorance, indecency, and blasphemy, a tag-rag and bob-tail style ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston

... shall—I will know!" he cried, furiously. "There is something underneath all this trumpery. I am not a man to be trifled with in this fashion, I can tell you, ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey

... Southampton. Personally, Clarendon preferred the latter; but he had put forward the name of the other at the solicitation of the Duke and his daughter without much consideration, and without knowing that any other claimant was in the field.] The matter was a trumpery one; but the irritation was fanned by those who were eager to break the alliance of the older statesmen. Southampton was a man who asked for few favours, and was all the more incensed when he was made to understand that his old friend had stood in his way, when for once he had stooped to make ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik

... Squire, "'tis the best think I know about Rickeybockey, that he don't attempts to humbug us by any such foreign trumpery. Thank heaven, the Hazeldeans of Hazeldean were never turf-hunters and title-mongers; and if I never ran after an English lord, I should certainly be devilishly ashamed of a brother-in-law whom I was forced to call markee or count! I should ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various

... classify. There are also, in Aldersgate Street, certain remains of what were once spacious and lordly family mansions, but which have in latter days been subdivided into several tenements. Here may often be found the family of a petty tradesman, with its trumpery furniture, burrowing among the relics of antiquated finery in great rambling time-stained apartments with fretted ceilings, gilded cornices, and enormous marble fireplaces. The lanes and courts also contain many smaller houses, not on so grand a scale, but, like ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving

... as might serve for a lady's album. Nota bene, John Lockhart, and Anne, and I are to raise a Society for the suppression of Albums. It is a most troublesome shape of mendicity. Sir, your autograph—a line of poetry—or a prose sentence!—Among all the sprawling sonnets, and blotted trumpery that dishonours these miscellanies, a man must have a good stomach that can swallow this ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... an infinite and just ruler to have mentioned the impropriety of murdering so many men, and degrading so many young girls to a life worse than that of the vilest quarter of any infamous dive, than to have occupied the time in trivial details about a trumpery jewel-box? Since God elected such a man as Moses to guide and govern his people, does it not seem natural that he would have given more thought to the moral worth and practices of his representative ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener

... the coachman, haughtily. "You are only going to some trumpery little village or other in the neighborhood, while we ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... eyes—the mythology of the Temple? In those days I saw Gods, as "old men covered with a mantle," walking upon the earth. Let the dreams of classic idolatry perish,—extinct be the fairies and fairy trumpery of legendary fabling,—in the heart of childhood, there will, for ever, spring up a well of innocent or wholesome superstition—the seeds of exaggeration will be busy there, and vital—from every-day forms educing the unknown ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... fancied that a trifling tax upon tea would destroy the trade of Boston and New York. They rose in arms against the principle represented by the imposition of the tax. We can all understand why there should have been a national rebellion against ship-money, and a national rebellion against a trumpery duty on tea, but English writers and English public men seem quite unable to explain the national outcry against Wood's patent, except on the theory that a clever writer, pouring forth captivating nonsense, bewitched the Irish ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... politics they may belong to, who tell you that they have an easy, simple, and unfailing remedy for such an evil. What sort of unscrupulous and reckless adventurers they are who tell you that tariff reform, that a trumpery ten per cent. tariff on foreign manufactures, and a tax on wheat would enable them to provide "work for all." I was very glad to see that Mr. Balfour frankly and honestly dissociated himself, the other ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill

... pedagogic moralizing, the oracular inconsequence. How absurdly obvious it all is now, and how inexplicable that the glamour of high place should ever have clothed such matter as his with the seeming of philosophy and statesmanship! 'Tis the very frippery and trumpery of the stage after the lights are out and the audience ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various

... find buried treasures, you won't get sudden luck, But things'll just go smoothly that used to get somehow stuck— The little things that matter, the trumpery things that please, You catch your santamingo and you're ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 14th, 1920 • Various

... harvest, it was no marvel that she did neglect those within. I made a comfortable supper of baked pumpkin and milk, and for lodgings I had a straw bed on the floor, in the dark loft, which was piled wellnigh full with corn- ears, pumpkins, and beans, besides a great deal of old household trumpery, wool, and flax, and the skins of animals. Although tired of my journey, it was some little time before I could get asleep; and it so fell out, that after the folks of the house were all abed, and still, it being, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... surprised the people who have everything will gather up their cards and trumpery boxes after a luncheon! And your thoughtfulness is lovely, Mona. We'll each give them our own place-card and ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells

... done, my bird. Thy shape invisible retain thou still: The trumpery in my house, go bring it hither For stale to catch ...
— The Tempest • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]

... the key; Your ward is nicely turned, and yet no bolt it raises. Unlifted in the broadest day, Doth Nature's veil from prying eyes defend her, And what (he chooses not before thee to display, Not all thy screws and levers can force her to surrender. Old trumpery! not that I e'er used thee, but Because my father used thee, hang'st thou o'er me, Old scroll! thou hast been stained with smoke and smut Since, on this desk, the lamp first dimly gleamed before me. Better have squandered, far, I now can clearly see, My little all, than melt beneath it, in this ...
— Faust • Goethe

... like the Pantheon. So grand it is, that the pasteboard statues over the lofty cornice do not disturb the effect, any more than the tin crowns and hearts, the dusty artificial flowers, and all manner of trumpery gew-gaws, hanging at the saintly shrines. The rust and dinginess that have dimmed the precious marble on the walls; the pavement, with its great squares and rounds of porphyry and granite, cracked crosswise and in a hundred directions, showing how roughly ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... just where you're wrong," piped old Luke Evans in his cracked voice. "That gas can't be analyzed, because it contains an unknown isotope, and, as for yourself, you're nothing but a daft old fool, with your tin-horn trumpery!" ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various

... friendly manner. To cry, "Hallo, Peggy!" on meeting; to discuss the doings of the neighbourhood in an easy-going fashion, as if no cloud hovered between them, and then to march past the very gates without coming in, refuse invitations on trumpery excuses, and attend a church at the opposite end of the parish—such behaviour as this was worse than inconsistent in Peggy's eyes, it ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey

... her success is, it will not make the nights pay on which she does not sing, when the theatre is absolutely empty. What they will do when she goes I cannot in the smallest degree conceive. We are just being sucked into the Maelstrom of bills, parcels, packages, books, pictures, valuables, trumpery, rummaging, heaping together, throwing apart, selecting, discarding, and stowing away that precedes an orderly departure after a two years' disorderly residence; in the midst of all which I have neither leisure nor leave to attend ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... and light, looks well on black; and upon reasoning the matter over, I came to the philosophic conclusion, that it would be no shame for a person of my means to wear a cheaper thing; so I think I shall take it, and if you ever see it and call it 'trumpery' ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... side, on the mat! That cost me seven dollars!" Then he would solemnly seat himself and begin to draw again. I saw him do this to all but the chiefest of the authorities of the paper. And all, even the dullest, seemed to be amused, quite fascinated by the utter trumpery folly of it. ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser

... knew well. "I—You must excuse me," she began; but Mr. Montfort, going to her, took her hand kindly: "My child, do not refuse me this little pleasure. You surely do not expect me to wear the chain myself? and Margaret has more trumpery than is good for her already. Besides, as I said, the thing was manifestly made for you, and for you alone. And, besides, again, Grace,"—he drew her nearer, and spoke low,—"besides, again, you are an explorer, too; if you had lived twenty-five years ago, we should have had great excursions ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards

... would have led him to take an interest in abstract questions, but he read all kinds of romances and poetry without any order and upon no system. He had no discriminating faculty, and mixed up together the most heterogeneous mass of trumpery novels, French translations, and the best English authors, provided only they were unworldly or sentimental. Neither did he know how far to take what he read and use it in his daily life. He often selected some fantastical motive which he had found set forth ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford

... vases, cigarette ash on the table, no coals on the half-laid fire. In the merciless morning light Julia saw all the deficiencies; the way things were set best side foremost, though, to her, the worst side contrived still to show; the display there was everywhere, the trumpery silver ornaments, all tarnished for want of rubbing, and of no more intrinsic value and beauty than the tinfoil off champagne bottles; the cracked pieces of china—rummage sale relics, she called them—set forth in a glass-doored cabinet, as if they were heirlooms. Mrs. Polkington had a romance ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad

... impression in society, as a three-hundred-guinea ring does now. Barwise was then considered the best watchmaker in London, and perhaps in the world. So I went to his shop, and chose two gold watches of good size and substance—none of your trumpery catchpenny things, the size of a gilt pill trodden upon—at the price of fifty guineas each. As I took the pair, the foreman let me have them for a hundred pounds, including also in that figure a handsome gold key for each, of exactly ...
— George Bowring - A Tale Of Cader Idris - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore

... or rhythm of his discourse. The dean was there and declared afterwards that he had not given him credit for such powers of utterance. "Any man can utter out of a full heart," Crawley had answered. "In this trumpery affair about myself, my heart is full! If we could only have our hearts full in other matters, our utterances thereanent would receive more attention." To all of which ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope

... unpunished, and increase by indulgence. But this is nothing. The Court of the municipal magistrate was a convenient common-ground and clearing-house for our manifold nationalities. It has now been, for all purpose of serious utility, abolished, and the result is distraction. There was a recent trumpery case, heard by Mr. Cooper amid shouts of mirth. It resolved itself (if I remember rightly) into three charges of assault with counter-charges, and three of abusive language with the same; and the parties ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... relate rather to take notice of the fact, and mention only that it was so. How the poor people found the insufficiency of those things, and how many of them were afterwards carried away in the dead carts, and thrown into the common graves of every parish with these hellish charms and trumpery hanging about their necks, remains to be spoken of as we ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe

... We are tired of thy trumpery state. Tired of thy mystery and falsity. We know thy plot—know thy cunning scheme to carry thy favorites away from here—to carry away the treasure that is ours, not thine! Think ye we men will let ye go, to set the dogs ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle

... a shilling by proffering them. In dramatic entertainments the tragedy is followed by a farce: and so it is with these sanguinary crimes in Hillsborough; they are always followed by a repudiation, and offers of a trumpery reward quite disproportionate to the offense, and the only result of the farce is to divert attention from the true line of inquiry as to who enacted the tragedy. The mind craves novelty, and perhaps these delegates will indulge that desire by informing ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade

... distance; but this I observed, that there was not a horse in his retinue, but that our carriers' pack-horses in England seem to me to look much better; but they were so covered with equipage, mantles, trappings, and such-like trumpery, that you cannot see whether they are fat or lean. In a word, we could scarce see any thing but ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe

... have quite enough weapons and instruments of carnage. I want a small figure,—something which will suit me as a paper-weight, for I cannot endure those trumpery bronzes which the stationers sell, and which may be found ...
— The Mummy's Foot • Theophile Gautier

... Began (as who would not begin That had, like him, so much within?) To let it out in books of all sorts, Folios, quartos, large and small sorts; Poems, so very deep and sensible That they were quite incomprehensible Prose, which had been at learning's Fair, And bought up all the trumpery there, The tattered rags of every vest, In which the Greeks and Romans drest, And o'er her figure swollen and antic Scattered them all with airs so frantic, That those, who saw what fits she had, Declared unhappy Prose was mad! Epics he wrote and scores of ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... Clare and his work—faded before this new presence for whose existence he had been responsible. It had been one of the astonishing things about Clare that she had taken the child so quietly. He had seen her thrilled by musical comedy, by a dance at the Palace Music Hall, by the trumpery pathos of a tenth-rate novel—before this marvel she stood, it seemed to him, without ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole

... I suppose, the largest collection in the country of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons, and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of poetry; but had so strong an effect on my imagination that to this hour in my nocturnal rambles I sometimes keep a sharp lookout in suspicious places; and though nobody can be more sceptical than I am in such matters, yet it often takes ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various

... she has all kinds of good qualities, and several accomplishments, knowing something of conchology, more of botany, drawing capitally in the Dutch style, and playing remarkably well on the guitar—not the trumpery German thing so called—but the real Spanish guitar." His wife wrote letters for him, copied his manuscripts, and helped to correct his proofs. She remained at Oulton, or Yarmouth, while he went about; if he went ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas

... true meaning of it. "Boy," said he to Robin, "I pray that you do not think upon Nottingham to-day. There will be a storm and much rain. The mud in the meadows of Nottingham will surely spoil the bravery of the Fair, and show us too plainly how trumpery and vain a matter ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick

... attack the inanimate stupidity of our surroundings. It is strange that the laborious task once achieved should so often become the thing abhorred. Scales fall from our eyes, perspective is restored, and we see what a trumpery affair held us enthralled. I have often thought with dismay of the effect on scores of reformers, whom I know, if the reform to which they have sworn allegiance should be accomplished. To many this would be a personal disaster of the gravest kind. For years they have poured their mental energy ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby









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