"Frippery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... trick in the request divines, Turns it all ways, then civilly declines. "What! Says me nay?" "'Tis even so, sir. Why? Can't say. Dislikes you, or, more likely, shy." Next morning Philip searches Mena out, And finds him vending to a rabble rout Old crazy lumber, frippery of the worst, And with all courtesy salutes him first. Mena pleads occupation, ties of trade, His service else he would by dawn have paid, At Philip's house,—was grieved to think, that how He should have failed to notice him till now. ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... clowns, harlequins, pantaloons, dancing ladies, walking dandies, kings with their crowns, and queens in their rabbit-skins, and the rest, are poor pinch-bellied devils, caricaturing humanity for some twelve or fourteen shillings a-week, finding their own paint and frippery. Now, whenever you wish to form a correct idea of the two great classes of fashionable life, call to your remembrance the gentlemen who, like the late lamented Mr Richardson, are proprietors of shows, and the berouged, bedraggled ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... liberty to take 200 pieces of brass cannon, lest part might be intercepted. M. Coudray has the character of the first engineer in the kingdom, and his manners and disposition will, I am confident, be highly pleasing to you, as he is a plain, modest, active, sensible man, perfectly averse to frippery and parade. My friends here rejoice at the acquisition, and considering the character of the man, and at whose hands I in effect received him, I must congratulate you on it. Several young gentlemen of fortune, whose families are nearly connected ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... about his breeding—by Stormcloud out of Frippery—but he never ran to his breeding before. The way he ran for Jimmy Miles you'd have thought he was by a steam roller out of a wheelbarrow. What in Sam Hill have you been doing to him—sprinkling powders on ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... and the descriptive poetry of Bryant shows how carefully he has observed the rules which Scott has laid down. He never has a conventional image, and never resorts to the second-hand frippery of a poetical commonplace-book to tag his verses with. Every season of our American year has been delineated by him, and the drawing and coloring of his pictures are always correct. Our American springs, for instance, are not at all the ideal or poetical ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... dark streets where Wisdom herself hath stretched forth her hands and no man regarded,—thirty minutes to raise the dead in,—let us but once understand and feel this, and we shall look with changed eyes upon that frippery of gay furniture about the place from which the message of judgment must be delivered, which either breathes upon the dry bones that they may live, or, if ineffectual, remains recorded in condemnation, perhaps against the utterer and listener alike, but assuredly against ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... affection, to be sure. But among the revolutions in France must be reckoned a considerable revolution in their ideas of politeness. In England we are said to learn manners at second-hand from your side of the water, and that we dress our behavior in the frippery of France. If so, we are still in the old cut, and have not so far conformed to the new Parisian mode of good breeding as to think it quite in the most refined strain of delicate compliment (whether in condolence or congratulation) ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... their clothes to be made, and have done with the subject; women make their own clothes, necessary or ornamental, and are continually talking about them; and their thoughts follow their hands. It is not indeed the making of necessaries that weakens the mind; but the frippery of dress. For when a woman in the lower rank of life makes her husband's and children's clothes, she does her duty, this is part of her business; but when women work only to dress better than they could otherwise afford, ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... maids and metaphors conspire to vex! In studious deshabille behold her sit, A letter'd gossip and a housewife wit: At once invoking, though for different views, Her gods, her cook, her milliner, and muse. Round her strew'd room a frippery chaos lies, A chequer'd wreck of notable and wise. Bills, books, caps, couplets, combs, a varied mass, Oppress the toilet and obscure the glass; Unfinished here an epigram is laid, And there a mantua-maker's bill unpaid. There new-born plays foretaste the town's applause, There dormant patterns ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... of this quarrelling in my presence or out of it. I lost Quelus and Maugiron that way, and loss enough, and I will have none of it, I say! M. de Bruhl,' he added, standing erect, and looking for the moment, with all his paint and frippery, a king, 'M. de Bruhl, repeat ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... pillars of marble and the walls are frescoed. The high altar is a remarkable composition, with pillars of porphyry mingled with a confusion of images, candlesticks, and tinsel. The stalls for the priests are handsomely carved in mahogany. It was annoying to see Gothic grandeur and modern frippery so mingled as was observable in this church. When mass is being performed women attend in goodly numbers, but one rarely sees any of the male population present, unless they be, like the author, strangers come hither from curiosity to see the interior of this ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... are not less subdued. In 1824 there was a noisy dapper dandyism abroad. Vulgar, as we should now think, but yet genial—a matter of white greatcoats and loud voices—strangely different from the stately frippery that is rife at present. These men are out of their element in the quadrangle. Even the small remains of boisterous humour, which still clings to any collection of young men, jars painfully on their morbid sensibilities; and they beat ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... shako; Without a pair of shirts between us, Morn, noon, and night to smell tobacco; To live my days in Gallic hovels, Untouched by water since the flood; To wade through streets, where famine grovels In hunger, frippery, and mud. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 290 - Volume X. No. 290. Saturday, December 29, 1827. • Various
... aback. He jumped up, found the bonnet underneath him sure enough, and tossed it on to the table. "Gew-gaws!" said he, settling himself again and puffing. "Gew-gaws and frippery! That man'll do good in this country; he's ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... that in this work it was not alone the well-born and the wealthy who made sacrifices, and gave grand gifts. Not from the sacrifice of gauds and frippery did the humble charities of these hired nurses come, but from the yielding up of a thousand needed comforts for themselves, and the forgetfulness of their own wants, in supplying the mightier wants of the suffering. It is impossible to mention them ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... hold of the ring to run his boatline through it, it fitted round his finger so tightly that he had to tug at it. He tugged, and out of the mountain side with a rush came a large drawer. It was brimful of silk neckerchiefs and women's frippery. ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... the "ruffianly style of dress" or the slouchy appearance of a half-unbottoned vest, and suspenderless pantaloons. That sort of affectation is, if possible, even more disgusting than the painfully elaborate frippery of the dandy or dude. Keep your clothes well brushed and keep them cleaned. Slight spots can be removed with a little sponge and ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... when one goes to him, he shows to little advantage in large companies, and that is why he did not please everybody at St. Petersburg. You will easily see the reason why this incomparable man in such companies, where people talk of fashion, of clothes, of frippery, and all other sorts of triviality, neither gives pleasure to others nor finds pleasure himself." And the friendly Swede rises to the height of generalisation in the quaint maxim, Where an empty head shines, there a thoroughly cultivated man ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... and dowagers again! The money—root of all evil. What comes here? [A Page enters.] A long-winged grasshopper, all gold, green, and gauze? How these young pea-chicks must needs ape the grown peacock's frippery! Prithee, now, how many such butterflies as you suck here together on ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... romantic in nothing but the title-page. Instead of "a holy-water sprinkle dipped in dew," he has given us a fashionable watering-place—and we see what he has made of it. He must not come down from his fastnesses in traditional barbarism and native rusticity: the level, the littleness, the frippery of modern civilization will undo him as ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... We delve in the mine for paltry gems, explore old ocean's deep for pearls; we toil and strive for gold until the hands are worn and the heart is cold; we attire ourselves in Tyrean purples and silks of Ind and strut forth in our gilded frippery on the narrow bridge of time, between the two eternities; we despoil the thin purse of the poor to erect brazen altars and priceless fanes, when the whole earth's a sacred shrine, the universe a temple through which rings the voice of God and rolls the ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... both the mother and daughter—to the daughter instinctively, at sight of her youth and beauty; to the mother reflectively, on account of her matronly dress and dignified deportment, in too striking contrast to her own frippery appearance— increased every day, and every hour, when she saw the attentions, the adoration, that Sir Ulick paid to Miss Annaly, and the deference and respect he showed to Lady Annaly, all for qualities and accomplishments in which Lady O'Shane ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... Gothic architecture and naked of all the ornaments which belong to the florid Gothic of a later age. The massy pillars were left unviolated by the petty hand of household neatness: they stood severe in monumental granite, unwhitewashed, unstuccoed, without tricks or frippery. All the gingerbread work of plinths to the base, or fretted cornices to the capitals, had been banished by the austerity of the presiding taste. And it struck Bertram also, as a picturesque circumstance in the whole effect and at the same time a circumstance of rude grandeur which ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... Miss Roberts was that "A lady on ship-board, spruced up for the Park or the Opera, would only be an object of ridicule to her experienced companions. Frippery which would be discarded in England is often useful in India. Members of my sex," she adds, "who have to study economy, can always secure bargains by acquiring at small cost items of fashion which, while outmoded in London, will ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... These brokers, like rapacious bats, hover around the emigrant and before his purse is opened for the fourth time, the trick is done. And with what ceremony, you shall see. From the steamer the emigrant is led to a dealer in frippery, where he is required to doff his baggy trousers and crimson cap, and put on a suit of linsey-woolsey and a hat of hispid felt: end of First Act; open the purse. From the dealer of frippery, spick and span from top to toe, he is taken to the hostelry, where he is detained a fortnight, sometimes ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... in any of the 15 forthcoming combinations of show and emptiness, yclept Annuals. Let me whisper in your ear that wholesome sacramental bread is not more nutritious than papistical wafer stuff, than these (to head and heart) exceed the visual frippery of Mitford's Salamander God, baking himself up to the work of creation in a solar oven, not yet by the terms of the context itself existing. Blake's ravings made genteel. So there's verses for thy verses; ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... put up with you," said her father, kissing her. "And meantime, what's this talk about piling up your hair on top of your head. Is it really absolutely necessary to do so, if you wear this frippery confection of dry-goods?" ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... the stars you told me long ago Laid that old work upon you, added this, That, having chain'd your prisoner so long, You loose his body now to slay his wits, Dragging him—how I know not—whither scarce I understand—dressing him up in all This frippery, with your dumb familiars Disvizor'd, and their lips unlock'd to lie, Calling him Prince and King, and, madman-like, Setting a crown of ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... grandeur about its possessor? You will call this romantic; but consider I was born in the land of talisman and spell, and my childhood lulled by tales which you can only enjoy through the gauzy frippery of a French translation. O, Matilda, I wish you could have seen the dusky visages of my Indian attendants, bending in earnest devotion round the magic narrative, that flowed, half poetry, half prose, from the lips of the tale-teller! ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... in the room a good deal of second-hand frippery in the way of silk and lace, rather faded velvet, even, eight-button gloves that had been cleaned several times, and perfumes abstracted from madame's dressing-table, but the faces were happy, thoughts given wholly to gaiety, and I was able to make a little corner ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... our agents, and in some degree discredit the country. I am not one of your sensitives on the subject of parade and appearance, nor a member of the embroidery school; still I would substitute for the irrational frippery of the European customs, a liberal hospitality, and a real elegance, that should speak well for the hearts and tastes of the nation. The salary of the minister at Paris, I know it, by the experience of a housekeeper, ought to be increased by at least one ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... answered the landlord, "was more like to pick it up in a frippery warehouse, while the broker was looking another way; and, for the hawk's eye you talk of, his was always after my stray spoons. He was tapster's boy here in this blessed house for a quarter of a year; and between misreckonings, miscarriages, ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... enchantments are laid on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hung it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune, and talked of "the dear cottage where so many joyful hours had flown." Well, this thatching of hovels is the custom of the country. Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... young fops, the senior Ensign and his frippery and his marked attention to Lois, and his mincing but unfeigned devotion to her, had irritated me to the ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... I entered, I saw that the room had been changed. There was too much middle-class frippery: white curtains at the windows, numerous pictures on the walls, a lamp pendent from the ceiling, underneath it in the center of the room a round table and chairs, knickknacks in a china cupboard, a ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... the most sullen and exasperated; that of Ciudad Rodrigo the swiftest and most brilliant. A great siege tests the fighting quality of any army as nothing else can test it. In the night watches in the trenches, in the dogged toil of the batteries, and the crowded perils of the breach, all the frippery and much of the real discipline of an army dissolves. The soldiers fall back upon what may be called the primitive fighting qualities—the hardihood of the individual soldier, the daring with which the officers ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... countenance, bathed in tears, and purple with shame; "is it not shameful of me to be dressed in all this frippery, and throwing away so much money in follies, while you are thus miserably clad, and in need of everything—perhaps dying of want, for I have never seen your poor face look ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... moment longer shall Folly condescend to stay near one who has the effrontery to own that she does not want to be introduced to Lady Fashion!" and, snatching up her cockatoo, Parade, Miss Folly rushed out of the cottage as fast as her mass of frippery would let her. ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... Bach's son, Phillip Emanuel Bach, realized this, and gave years to the proper exposition of embellishments. However, the student should realize that the study of embellishments is only a part of the great whole and he should not be misled into accepting every little shake or other little frippery, and then magnifying it into a matter of more vital ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... succession resigned their breath. It is not unusual to see one of these apartments now transformed into a modern drawing-room, where a thoughtful mind can scarcely forbear comparing the past and present,—the spindled frippery of modern furniture, the frail but elegant apparatus of a tea-table, the general decorum, the equal absence of everything to afflict or to transport, with what has been heard, or seen, or felt, within the same walls,—- the logs of oak, the clumsy utensils, and, above all, the tumultuous ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... scheme, a definite meaning and purpose, a sustained and adequate command of poetical presentation, and passages and phrases of the most exquisite beauty. Although it begins as a pastoral, the mere traditional and conventional frippery of that form is by no means so prominent in it as in the later (and, I think, less consummate) companion and sequel Thyrsis. With hardly an exception, the poet throughout escapes in his phraseology the two main dangers which so constantly beset him—too great stiffness and too great ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... creatures of Nature, pagans untamed, lawless and unabashed. For all they are robed in crimson and saffron, and are with such fine pearls necklaced, these dames do exhale from their exuberant bodies the essence of a quite primitive and simple era; but for the ease of their deportment in their frippery, they might be Maenads in masquerade. They have nothing of the coyness that civilisation fosters in women, are as fearless and unsophisticated as men. A 'wooing' were wasted on them, for they have no sense of antagonism, ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... turned out his gas and locked one of his own doors in his face. If it was a secret society, well and good, no matter how desperate its plan. But why did they laugh and joke and play tricks? He was not in the humour. For the time his soul abhorred what seemed to him frippery. He sought intuitively to find relief in action and he began impatiently to look ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... mummer as I am within the walls, and thou knowest that well enough, dame," replied the apprentice. "I can touch the players themselves, at the Ball and at the Fortune, for presenting any thing except a gentleman. Take but this d—d skin of frippery off me, which I think the devil stuck me into, and you shall put me into nothing else that I will not become as if ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... Then came the bride, hanging on her brother, then two bridesmaids,—friends of Dorothy's, living in the town; and, lastly, Priscilla with her mother, for nothing would induce Priscilla to take the part of a bridesmaid. "You might as well ask an owl to sing to you," she said. "And then all the frippery would be thrown away upon me." But she stood close to Dorothy, and when the ceremony had been performed, was the first, after Brooke, to ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... leads; a fondness for the parade, the gayety, not to say the licentiousness, of a station calculated to gratify such a disposition; and a prepossession for Major Sanford, infused into your giddy mind by the frippery, flattery, and artifice of that worthless and abandoned man. Hence you preferred a connection with him, if it could be accomplished; but a doubt whether it could, together with the advice of your friends, who have kindly espoused my cause, has restrained you from the avowal of your ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... economic production by reason of the illusive value of private enterprise, is directed not towards the satisfaction of such universal and primary necessities as food, shelter, clothing, leisure and reasonable comfort, but towards the creation of unnecessary luxury and artificial frippery, towards the piling up, by means of advertisement, monopoly, exploitation and every kind of chicanery of unproductive accumulation ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... as neat as you please," interrupted I, "and I shall love you the better for it; but all this is not neatness, but frippery. These rufflings and pinkings and patchings will only make us hated by all the wives of our neighbors. No, my children," continued I, more gravely, "those gowns must be altered into something of a plainer cut, for ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... to hear English men and women talk of their dear country. There is nothing like Old England, say they; yet paramount as their love of country appears to be, their love of French frippery is a stronger passion! They will lament the times, the stagnation of trade, the scarcity of money, the ruin of manufacturers, but they will wear Parisian productions. It is a comfort, however, to know that they ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 386, August 22, 1829 • Various
... dress goods and the airy nothings that enhance a girl's beauty. The husband understood their meaning too well, and he muttered something like an oath. At last he said, in a hard tone, "Well, after buying all this frippery, how much money ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... great ones of the earth is so intimately known to us as the magnificent histrion, whose tinselled grandeur and pompous egoism have been laid bare by the Duke of St. Simon, prince of memoirists. Never has the frippery of a court been shrivelled by such fierce and consuming light, glaring like a fiery sun on its meretricious splendours. And what a court it is! What a gilded crowd of princes and paramours, harlots and bastards, struts, fumes and intrigues through these Memoirs! ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... Luvena Juris is so old, so old, so old!—the folly and frippery of modern life cannot dwell in it a moment; it is as that enchanted throne which turned into stone like itself whosoever dared to seat himself ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... that spot for so many centuries.—The people were accordingly as angry, I believe, as Frenchmen can be, when the folly was first committed: the court, however, had wit enough to convert the place into a sort of Vauxhall, with tents, fountains, shops, full of frippery, brilliant at once and worthless, to attract them; with coffeehouses surrounding it on every side; and now they are all again merry and happy, synonymous terms at Paris, though often disunited in London; and ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... fair one, seated in front of a dressing-table blazing with wax lights, was unfastening her frippery ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... succeeded so completely in changing the aspect of the building, that it looked, within, more like a vast pagan toyshop than a Christian church. Here and there, it is true, a pillar or an altar rose unencumbered as of old, appearing as much at variance with the frippery that surrounded it as a text of Scripture quoted in a sermon of the time. But as regarded the general aspect of the basilica, the decent glories of its earlier days seemed irrevocably ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... say nothing about old Sarah's Memoirs; for, with some spirit they are nothing but remnants of old women's frippery. Good night! I recommend my poor Mr. Mann to you, and am yours, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... ornate articles of girls' clothing (daisy-hat with blue ribbons, pink sash, lace jabot, etc.) which will, one by one, be hung on the bull when he isn't looking. In order to accomplish this, one of the bandilleros will engage the animal in conversation while another sneaks up behind him with the frippery. When he is quite trimmed, the bandilleros will withdraw to behind a ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... of the court frequently donated old ribbons, feathers, or flowers, from discarded millinery or other finery, and all these were utilized by the frippery ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... wonderful art of preaching sermons which the wheelwright and the blacksmith can understand; not because he talks condescending twaddle, but because he can call a spade a spade, and knows how to disencumber ideas of their wordy frippery. Look at him more attentively, and you will see that his face is a very interesting one —that there is a great deal of humour and feeling playing in his grey eyes, and about the corners of his roughly-cut mouth: a man, you observe, who has most likely sprung from ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... strain? "'Twas such as England loved to hear, "Ere thou and all thy frippery train, "Corrupted both her ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... better in way of money, and Master Hall, like an ass as he was, took up wi' him. There's no end to men's doltishness [foolishness]. I'm homely, [plain-spoken] you'll say, and that's true; I love so to be. I never did care for dressing my words with all manner o' frippery, as if they were going to Court. 'Tis a deal the best to speak plain, and then ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... We passed by the Concert of Musard, then held in the Rue St. Honore; and round this, in the wet, a number of coaches were collected. The ball was just up, and a crowd of people in hideous masquerade, drunk, tired, dirty, dressed in horrible old frippery, and daubed with filthy rouge, were trooping out of the place: tipsy women and men, shrieking, jabbering, gesticulating, as French will do; parties swaggering, staggering forwards, arm in arm, reeling to and fro across the street, and yelling ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... his idol-beetle-fly: Next in an arch, akin to this, His idol-canker seated is: Then in a round is placed by these His golden god, Cantharides. So that, where'er ye look, ye see, No capital, no cornice free, Or frieze, from this fine frippery. Now this the fairies would have known, Theirs is a mixed religion: And some have heard the elves it call Part pagan, part papistical. If unto me all tongues were granted, I could not speak the saints here painted. Saint Tit, Saint Nit, ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... squires was certainly very costly. Public entertainments, frippery, and splendour made frightful inroads; and when the domestic table was spread, the invisible shapes of tailors, bootmakers, milliners, mercers, and hairdressers sat down and helped to consume poor ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... is too late. Defend yourselves against this disintegrating invasion—not by force, be it understood, not by inhospitality or ill-humour—but by disdaining this Occidental rubbish, this last year's frippery by which you are inundated. Try to preserve not only your traditions and your admirable Arab language, but also the grace and mystery that used to characterise your town, the refined luxury of your dwelling-houses. It is not a question now of a poet's ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... Roundhead; and, to be sure, how she did stamp! Then presently down tumbled Mistress Maud from the steeple, where, I guess, she had been making observations, and Lady Frances rated the waiting-maid soundly, which I didn't grudge her—the frippery, insolent baggage! It isn't a month since she called me a chip of the jib-boom and an ugly fellow!—Ugly fellow, indeed;" repeated Springall, twitching up his trowsers—"I wonder what ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... afterwards conformed, and managed to come out of all political troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family estate. Young women of such birth, living in a quiet country-house, and attending a village church hardly larger than a parlor, naturally regarded frippery as the ambition of a huckster's daughter. Then there was well-bred economy, which in those days made show in dress the first item to be deducted from, when any margin was required for expenses more distinctive of rank. Such reasons would have been enough to account for ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... an eye to the great job I had mentioned to them— they had secretly set their hearts on supplying the right essence for my pictorial vindication of our fine novelist. They knew that for this undertaking I should want no costume—effects, none of the frippery of past ages—that it was a case in which everything would be contemporary and satirical and presumably genteel. If I could work them into it their future would be assured, for the labour would of course be long and the ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... ready are we to do what is not commanded and to leave undone what is commanded. We see that the world is full of shameful works of unchastity, indecent words, tales and ditties, temptation to which is daily increased through gluttony and drunkenness, idleness and frippery. Yet we go our way as if we were Christians; when we have been to church, have said our little prayer, have observed the fasts and feasts, then we think our whole duty ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther
... shelter me till the Empress should deign to arrive, there my complaisance ended. Again the matter of clothes was harped upon. The three gorgeously caparisoned chamberlains, who had inducted me to the shelter, laid before me changes of raiment bedecked with every imaginable kind of frippery, and would have me transform myself into a popinjay in ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... twilight of July and a glorious moon lent us their misty light. Gusts of mingled perfumes soothed the soul; the Countess was clinking in her hand the five gold pieces given to her by a supposititious dealer in fashionable frippery, another of Octave's accomplices found for him by ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... fit mode to address you, a figure descended the stairs, which, at first sight, I mistook for an Alguazil, in a plethora, but upon nearer approach found to be your worshipful self, posting to the opera, clad in a great-coat of the newest cut, all fringe and frippery, the offspring of a German tailor. You and your cloak were so enveloped in frogs and self-conceit, that I could compare you to nothing but king Pharaoh, inoculated with a plague greater than any in Egypt, an Italian singer. After desiring me in a surly ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... preparations. I made a show of consulting her about many things, but she invariably gave me to understand that her experience and superior knowledge in such matters were not to be gainsaid. I was willing to leave to her all the fuss and frippery of preparing clothes for her daughter. It always seemed to me that she had clothes enough, and clothes that were good enough for married life. I couldn't understand why a young woman, on becoming a wife, should need a lot of new and elaborate dresses, such as she had never worn ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... Here she nibbled her thread with white teeth, and held up what she had been sewing to view the effect of a bow of riband, with her head very much on one side. And I inwardly wondered that she should spend so much care upon such frippery—all senseless bows and laces. ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... have come together again, almost from the jaws of death, we sat in the sunny noon, and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. The trees above us looked proud and cheerful, laying aside the mere frippery of leaves with a good grace and contented arms, and a surety of having quite enough next spring. Much of the fruity wealth of autumn still was clustering in our sight, heavily fetching the arched ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... seriously. "In every human heart, Cary, there is a place where the man or the woman dwells inside all the frippery and mannerism; the real creature itself, stripped of all disguises. Dig down to that place if ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... full of his "ragged veterans." This I saw, years after Charles Lamb's death, in the possession of his sister, Mary. "All our furniture has faded," he writes, "under the auctioneer's hammer; going for nothing, like the tarnished frippery of the prodigal." Four years afterwards (in 1833) Lamb moves to his last home, in Church Street, Edmonton, where he is somewhat nearer to his ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... Vice-Chancellor, "where she sat for three days together, to receive adoration, and hear herself for four hours at a time called Minerva." In this assembly, adds the wit, in his peculiar style, "she appeared in all the tawdry poverty and frippery imaginable, and in a scoured damask robe," and wonders that "she did not wash out a few words of Latin," as she used to fricassee French and Italian; or, that "she did not torture some learned simile," as when she said, that "it was as difficult to get into an Italian coach, as it was for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... frippery news to tell you; no politics; for the rudiments of a war, that is not to be a war, are not worth detailing. In short, we have acted with spirit, have got ready thirty ships of the line, and conclude that the French will not care to examine whether they are well manned or not. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... into the house, and Sir Peregrine and I were driven by them from room to room, until at length we were driven out of the house altogether; the building being, almost from basement to roof- tree, crowded with silks, muslins, ribbons, flowers, and every other imaginable species of frippery affected by ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... my cloth. Am I not half naked? Is this the cloth I should respect—this gaudy frippery, which your citizens have made a target for filth ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... us at every turn. The whole of the lower section of the middle classes is penetrated through and through with the worship of pinchbeck, and for one family that holds itself in the honor and simplicity of truth, ten thousand lie, to the world and to themselves, in frippery ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... here the revolutionary side of Hegel's philosophy was again taken up, and at the same time freed from the idealistic frippery which had in Hegel's hands interfered with its necessary conclusions. The great fundamental thought, namely, that the world is not to be considered as a complexity of ready-made things, but as a complexity made up of processes ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... finances, and all her industry to the building up of a vast array of wonderful church edifices, and starving half her citizens to accomplish it. She is to-day one vast museum of magnificence and misery. All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathedrals. And for every beggar in America, Italy can show a hundred—and rags and vermin to match. It is the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... flavour to Mr. Michob Ader. It had not been myrrh or balm or hyssop that I had smelled. The emanation was the odour of bad whiskey—and, worse still, of low comedy—the sort that small humorists manufacture by clothing the grave and reverend things of legend and history in the vulgar, topical frippery that passes for a certain kind of wit. Michob Ader as an impostor, claiming nineteen hundred years, and playing his part with the decency of respectable lunacy, I could endure; but as a tedious wag, cheapening his egregious story with song-book ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... importation of Indian saltpetre to be necessary. But the importation of silks and of Bengals, as shawls were then called, was pronounced to be a curse to the country. The effect of the growing taste for such frippery was that our gold and silver went abroad, and that much excellent English drapery lay in our warehouses till it was devoured by the moths. Those, it was said, were happy days for the inhabitants both of our pasture ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... demanded, sternly, "but constant requests for money, and the necessity for incessant effort to meet new phases of extravagance? You have not asked what was kind, merciful, and true, but what was the latest style. Few days pass but that I am reminded of you by a bill for some frippery or other; but how often am I reminded of you by acts of filial thoughtfulness, by words of sympathy in my hard battle of life when I am present, or by genial letters when absent? I have spent three hot days in the ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... twice. There were times when, if you asked him to relate a thing afresh, he would interpolate new matter, or alter it so that it was impossible to recognise it. Once upon a time, one of those gentlemen who, like the usurers at our yearly fairs, clutch and beg and steal every sort of frippery, and issue mean little volumes, no thicker than an A B C book, every month, or even every week, wormed this same story out of Thoma Grigorovitch, and the latter completely forgot about it. But that same young gentleman, in the pea-green caftan, came from Poltava, bringing with him ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... inserted in another publication. "It then existed in its pristine state, and was a small square of tall and miserable houses, the very intestines of which seemed turned inside out, to judge from the old garments and frippery that fluttered from every window. It appeared to be a region of washerwomen, and lines were stretched about the little square, on which clothes were dangling ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... sentiment of his nymph or his goddess—so with Burns the fashion of a lady's boddice, the lustre of her satins, or the sparkle of her diamonds, or other finery with which wealth or taste has loaded her, are neglected us idle frippery; while her beauty, her form, or her mind, matters which are of nature and not of fashion, are remembered and praised. He is none of the millinery bards, who deal in scented silks, spider-net laces, rare gems, set ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... wasn't. I soon saw the difference. There had never been a woman's hand in that place. It was the room of a man who had a passion for frippery, who had a perverted taste for soft delicate things. It was the complement to his bluff brutality. I began to see the queer other side to my host, that evil side which gossip had spoken of as not unknown in the German army. The room seemed a horribly unwholesome place, and ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... husband, or a tradesman's son, Who apes a noble, and would pass for one. I hate much water and too little wine, A prosperous villain and a false divine; A niggard lout who sets the dice aside; A flirting girl all frippery and pride; A cloth too narrow, and a board too wide; Him who exalts his handmaid to his wife, And her who makes her groom her lord for life; The man who kills his horse with wanton speed, And him who fails his friend ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... the bit as though he would come back over if the hold was not relaxed, and the fourth effort bringing him to the opposite kerb-stone, he up again with such a bound and impetus that he crashed right through Messrs. Frippery and Flummery's fine plate-glass window, to the terror and astonishment of their elegant young counter-skippers, who were busy arranging their ribbons and finery for the day. Right through the window Hercules went, switching through book muslins and bareges as he would through a bullfinch, and attempting ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... shaped as the slimmest tail of the swallow! My brother, a man of experience, had said: "One must have a dress coat if one wishes to make one's way in the world." And the dear fellow counted much upon this piece of frippery for the advancement of my ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... beget, Fruits of dull heat, and sooterkins of wit. Next o'er his books his eyes began to roll, In pleasing memory of all he stole— How here he sipped, how there he plundered snug, And sucked all o'er like an industrious bug. Here lay poor Fletcher's half-eat scenes, and here The frippery of crucified Moliere; There hapless Shakespeare, yet of Tibbald sore, Wished he had blotted for ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... in view; it was "quaint," it was "charming," it was everything inappropriate. But the amiable woman's prattle deserted her when she found herself in the cold stone hall with the great portraits and the lack of all modern frippery. It was so plainly a man's house, so clearly a place of tradition, that her pert modern speech seemed ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... with a smile upon those days, realizing what a ridiculous sight I must have been, but at the time, their tragedy was for me a very real and living one. Newton had passed some years in London, and had picked up there the graces of the court, as well as much of its frippery gossip, which latter he was fond of retailing, to my great disgust, but to the vast entertainment of the ladies, who found no fault with it, though it was four or five years old. He could tell a story well and ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... to Wit and Parts), than other grouling Mortals know, or battering half-a-dozen fair new Windows in a Morning after their debauch, whilst the dull unjantee Rascal they belong to is fast asleep. But I'll proceed no farther in their character, because that miracle of Wit (in spite of Academick frippery) the mighty Echard hath already done it to my satisfaction; and whoever undertakes a Supplement to anything he hath discourst, had better for their reputation ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... find it wet upon the street and slippery; Never bother if the street is full of ooze; Do not fret that you'll upset, that you will spoil your summer frippery, You may turn about as sharply as you choose. For those myriad claws will grip the road and keep the car from skidding, And your steering gear will hold it fast and true; Every atom of the car will be responsive ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams
... humble dependent; but Mr. Webb would occasionally come and dine with him—and often asked him in return. Mrs. Webb too was civil to his wife and the girls—always lent them the Dublin pattern for their frills, frocks, and other frippery—and seldom drove into Drumsna without calling. The consequence was, that the Counsellor was a man after Tony's own heart. Though they were of different religions, they had, generally speaking, the same political feelings and opinions—the same philanthropical principles—and ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... Bess, and called her mighty extravagant; but beshrew me if she were half as vain or extravagant as our noble King Jamie! It is a marvel he cannot see how ten-fold uglier he makes his ugly person by trapping himself out in all such frippery and gorgeous apparel." ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... into several small churches to see the sepulchres. Not like our Tuscan ones; wretched things, mainly tinsel and shabby frippery. ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... instance, which we reached at nightfall, to meet the river flotilla to which we were to be transferred, I was shown, as the vessel which was to receive the coffin and the staff of the escort, a frightful-looking boat on which a sort of hideous dais had been built, with all the frippery and plumes of the Pompes Funebres, an official catafalque worthy of Carpentras or of Brives-la-Gaillarde. I immediately gave orders for this masterpiece of bad taste to be destroyed, a coat of black paint given to the ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... into the three stages of Theological, Metaphysical, and Positive. This general theorem he completes by particular applications,—to costume among others. In this he distinguishes the three stages of Tattooing (including paint), Frippery, and Clothes. Man has reached the third stage, he says; woman is in the second, and not entirely out ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... Slur upon the Devil himself; and, I say, I shall not dishonour Satan so much as to suppose any thing in it: However, as I must have a care too how I take away the proper Materials of Winter Evening Frippery, and leave the good Wives nothing of the Devil to fright the Children with, I shall carry the weighty Point no farther. No doubt the Devil and Dr. Faustus were very intimate; I should rob you of ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... claps its hands; the nation kneels to bless its gods at all its shrines, and chants its delight in many a choral Te Deum. What, then, do they think is gained? Why, El Dorado! Have they not gained a whole world of gold and silver mines to buy jewelled cloaks and feathers and frippery with? Have they not gained a cornucopia of savages, to support new brigades at home by their enslavement, and new bishoprics abroad by their salvation? Touching, truly, is the childish eagerness and bonhommie with which those Spaniards ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... a black periwig, has a most vinegar-like aspect, and looks with great contempt at the frippery gentlewoman immediately before him. The woman, with a demure countenance, seems very piously considering how she can contrive to pick the embroidered beau's pocket. Two old sybils joining their withered lips in a chaste salute, is nauseous enough, but, being a national custom, must ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... accomplished, did they contemplate their work, and predict the aspect of their tinsel and frippery when duly lighted up. Then, as they dispersed to dress, James ran home, and hastily tapped at ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... lay bare the joints of their scientific armor too confidently to the thrusts of the next new-comer in the field of scientific investigation. Sneers are cheap weapons—the mere side-arms of pretension and frippery—but they never bear so deadly a gibe as when effectually ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... study the useful," said Flora. "The Cleveland set will be sure to deal in frippery, and I have been looking over Mrs. Hoxton's stores, where I see quite enough for mere decoration. There are two splendid vases in potichomanie, in an Etruscan pattern, which are coming ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... which we English and Americans are perhaps the truest types, stands revealed, from beneath its froth, frippery, and vulgar excrescences, sound at core—a world whose implicit motto is: "The good of all humanity." But the herd-life, which is its characteristic, brings many evils, has many dangers; and to preserve a sane mind in a healthy body is the riddle before us. Somehow ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... cry "Great Pan is dead!" And Jove's high palace closed its portal, The fallen gods, before they fled, Sold out their frippery ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... [Fr.]; child's play, kinderspiel. toy, plaything, popgun, paper pellet, gimcrack, gewgaw, bauble, trinket, bagatelle, Rickshaw, knickknack, whim-wham, trifle, trifles light as air; yankee notions [U.S.]. trumpery, trash, rubbish, stuff, fatras^, frippery; leather or prunello; chaff, drug, froth bubble smoke, cobweb; weed; refuse &c (inutility) 645; scum &c (dirt) 653. joke, jest, snap of the fingers; fudge &c (unmeaning) 517; fiddlestick^, fiddlestick end^; pack of nonsense, mere farce. straw, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... corroborates the Puritan's report about the bad manners of the undergraduates. Yet Oxford, then as now, did not lack her exquisites, and her admirers of the fair. Terrae Filius thus describes a "smart," as these dandies were called—Mr. Frippery: ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... "There, Virginia, if you are bent on being frivolous, is a bit of old lace that your Aunt Helen, or anybody else, would have to hunt a long time to equal. You will find a locket inside which I wore when your father was married. I shall never use such frippery again, and you might as well have them now ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... there a manly sentiment which deserves to be in prose makes its appearance in company with Prometheus and Orpheus, Elysium and Acheron, the plaintive Philomel, the poppies of Morpheus, and all the other frippery which, like a robe tossed by a proud beauty to her waiting-woman, has long been contemptuously abandoned by genius to mediocrity. We hardly know any instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking, and so grotesque, as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... this monstrous beast, bedizened in his general's frippery, in a reeking tavern-room, stand the noble lady of Savenaye and ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... no such frippery, however, that I connected the occasional presence among us of the young member of the cousinship (in this case of the maternal) who most moved me to wistfulness of wonder, though not at all, with his then marked difference of age, by inviting ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... absurd. Tailors, however, can afford to laugh, as well as other people, at their conventional double—or rather ninth, for at least in our own day they have wrought very hard to elevate their calling into a science. The period of lace and frippery of all kinds has passed away, and this is the era of simple form, in which sartorial genius has only cloth to work upon as severely plain as the statuary's marble. It is true, we ourselves do not understand the 'anatomical principles' ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... our varnished and velvet-carpeted civilisation, it is well that we should be brought back to the old essential candours which forever underlie the frills and frippery. It is well that the stark bones of the aboriginal skeleton with its raw "unaccommodated" flesh should peep out through ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... down, Christian thought her vanquished, and to complete his victory he put the finishing touch to the burlesque picture he had drawn of kings in exile. "What a pitiful figure they cut, all these poor princes in partibus, figurants of royalty, who drape themselves in the frippery of the principal characters, and declaim before the empty benches without a farthing of receipts! Would they not be wiser if they held their peace and returned to the obscurity of common life? For those who have money there is some excuse. Their ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... him whimsically, grimly. He felt disagreeably conscious of the contrast between himself in his shabby habit and the gilded frippery of this brilliant young insolence. He speculated with melancholy as to the effect of this contrast on the young girl that witnessed it. "You imp, you deserve to be whipped!" ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... the Italians of today but men tricked out in women's finery, when they should be waiting full-armed to rally at the first signal of revolt? Oh, for the day when a poet shall arise who dares tell them the truth, not disguised in sentimental frippery, not ending in a maudlin reconciliation of love and glory—but the whole truth, naked, cold and fatal as a patriot's blade; a poet who dares show these bedizened courtiers they are no freer than the peasants they oppress, and tell the peasants they are entitled to the same privileges as their ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... was acting his part of arbiter of taste who has seen everything. "We used to deal in Ossianic mists, Malvinas and Fingals and cloudy shapes, and warriors who got out of their tombs with stars above their heads. Nowadays this poetical frippery has been replaced by Jehovah, angels, seistrons, the plumes of seraphim, and all the paraphernalia of paradise freshened up with a few new words such as 'immense, infinite, solitude, intelligence'; you have lakes, and the words of the Almighty, ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... ridiculous nonsense: indeed, it is quite unnecessary; almost every one of the books published on Spain, and their name at present is legion, being crammed with details of this same Majeza—a happy combination of insolence, ignorance, frippery, and folly. The majo or Tomfool struts about the streets dressed something like a merry Andrew with jerkin and tight hose, a faja or girdle of crimson silk round his waist, in which is sometimes stuck a dagger, his neck exposed, and a queer kind of half-peaked hat on his head. He smokes continually, ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... the only material form that they can conceive of. She assumes the simple aspect these poor creatures love, accepting the blue and white robes, the crown and wreaths of roses, the trinkets and garlands and frippery of a ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... comfortably in chairs which were a part of some one else's aesthetic plan. As a matter of fact many of our millionaires would be more at home in an atmosphere concocted from the ingredients of plain pine tables and blanket-covered mattresses than they are surrounded by the frippery of China and the frivolity of France. If these gentlemen were fortunate enough to enjoy sufficient confidence in their own taste to give it a thorough test it is not safe to think of the extreme burden that would be put on the working capacity of the factories ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... sat for a few minutes watching Aubrey. He perceived with satisfaction that his costume was simple and suitable, entirely devoid of frippery and foppery; that his mind seemed to be taken up with his employment; that he was looking well, and appeared to understand his business. At last the grave and reverend signors had made their choice; Bullinger's Decades, at nine shillings, was selected, and ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... a long veranda-load of gaping, patronizing tourists, and the idiotic flirting females of their species. Think of a lot of over-dressed creatures flouting those severe outlines and deep-toned distances with frippery and garishness. You know how you have been lulled to sleep by that delicious, indefinite, far-off murmur of the canyon at night—think of it being broken by a crazy waltz or a monotonous german—by ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... workgirl. The dresses with trains caused quite a sensation in the house; the Lorilleuxs sneered; Lantier, whose mouth sneered, turned the girl round to sniff at her delicious aroma; the Boches had forbidden Pauline to associate with this baggage in her frippery. And Gervaise was also angered by Nana's exhausted slumber, when after one of her adventures, she slept till noon, with her chignon undone and still full of hair pins, looking so white and breathing so feebly ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... Brunelleschi that profound expressiveness, that intimate impress of an indwelling soul, which is the peculiar fascination of the art of Italy in that century. Their works have been much neglected, and often almost hidden away amid the frippery of modern decoration, and we come with some surprise on the places where their fire still smoulders. One longs to penetrate into the lives of the men who have given expression to so much power and sweetness. But it is part of the reserve, the austere dignity ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... sort of thing," he replied. "Afraid of the place getting frippery. I've heard them talking about it in the car. And as they own every blessed cottage in the place...." He left the deduction to my imagination, and continued with the least touch of bashfulness, "You wouldn't care to come to us, ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... and the question of possibly squeezing out three or four shillings to buy an extra bit of frippery to add to ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... our fashion to speak of the decline of the Drama, to lament not only a decay of morals, manners, and elocution, but the desertion of standard excellence for the frippery which only appeals to the lightest popular taste. But this outcry proceeds mostly from old fogies, and those who only reverence the past, while the halo which gilds the memories of youth is the cause of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... can see them, can feel them—the value of his catch is immediately reduced to something concrete—something he can understand—then we take away the amount of his debt, and if there are still some made beaver remaining, he knows he has something left over to spend for finery and frippery. Rarely does he use these extra skins for the purchase of food or necessary clothing—he contracts a new debt for that. But, wait till spring when the Indians come in, and you will witness the trading for yourself. It is then you will see why it is that the free trader has small chance ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... nature of fal-lal as we say, and for which she had an inborn turn, being of good draper family, and polished above the yeomanry. Nevertheless I could never bear it, partly because I felt it to be out of place in our good farm-house, partly because I hate frippery, partly because it seemed to me to have nothing to do with father, and partly because I never could tell the reason of my hating it. And yet the poor soul had put them on, not to show her hands off (which were above her station) ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... city were too busy now to care for society and its frippery; the new objects of life filled every hour. The anxieties of the war were not yet a twice-told tale, and no artificial excitements were needed to drive them away. The women of Virginia, like her men, were animated with a spirit ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... shadow all the zenith;" and yet again The madness of distrustful friendship gleamed From his fierce eyes, "Oh villain, damned villain, God's murrain on his heart! I know full well He hides what he can hide! He wears no fault Upon the gloss and frippery of his breast! It is not that! It is the hidden things, Unseizable, the things I do not know, Ay, it is these, these, these and these alone That I mistrust." And, as he walked, the skies Grew full of threats, and now enormous clouds Rose mammoth-like ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... and other trappings, on one of those country maidens as hath employed two or three of her father's slaves, for twelve months afterwards, to raise tobacco to pay for. Tis an ungrateful reflexion that all this frippery and effected finery, can only he supported by the sweat of another person's brow, and consequently only by lawful rapine and injustice. If these young females could devote as much time from their amusements, as ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... declared Uncle Thomas. "I'll send the trap home with 'e, an' you can look out the frippery; an' you might send a nice split bake back-along with it, if you've got the likes of sich a thing gwaine ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... entire stone each. How much better would it have been to replace the statues of the Dii Majorum Gentium which occupied the niches, by statues in marble of the Apostles, instead of the dolls dressed in tawdry colors, and the frippery gilding of the altars on which they stand, which disfigure this noble building. The Pantheon was built by Agrippa as the inscription shews. In the interior are sixteen columns of jaune antique. The bronze that formerly ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... just flown in from the Zoo. "Au Sgarnach," by C.B. PHILLIP. Title difficult to understand. Landscape easy to comprehend. A close study of Nature, admirably painted. A wholesome Phillippic against namby-pamby prettiness. "On the Thames," by G.A. FRIPP, honestly painted, and no frippery about it. Miss CLARA MONTALBA has a large number of pictures of Venice—and Mr. RIDGE comes up and says he is the Keeper. What Keeper? He whispers, he is the Keeper of the Cold Out—What an oridginal remark!—and will I step ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 6, 1890 • Various
... exaggerate. The first burst of the interior, in all its expansive majesty and glory: and, most of all, the looking up into the Dome: is a sensation never to be forgotten. But, there were preparations for a Festa; the pillars of stately marble were swathed in some impertinent frippery of red and yellow; the altar, and entrance to the subterranean chapel: which is before it: in the centre of the church: were like a goldsmith's shop, or one of the opening scenes in a very lavish pantomime. And though I had as high a sense of the ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... fine-dressed sparks, proud of their own personal deformities, which appear the more hideous by the contrast of wearing scarlet and gold, with what they call toupees[1] on their heads, and all the frippery of a modern beau, to make a figure before women; some of them with hump-backs, others hardly five feet high, and every feature of their faces distorted: I have seen many of these insipid pretenders entering into conversation with persons of learning, constantly making the ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... Japan; and the etiquette that accompanies it is wholly irreconcilable with the usages of the Western world. Imagine a mandarin doffing his gaudy cap, gay with tassels, feathers, and ruby button, on meeting a friend, or pushing back his long sleeves to shake hands! Such frippery we have learned to leave to the ladies; and etiquette does not require them to ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... awe. I regarded it myself with interest—it seemed so the tattered remnant of a fashion that had gone out for ever. I thought again of the poor disinherited Pope, wondering whether, when such venerable frippery will no longer bear the carpenter's nails, any more will be provided. It was hard to fancy anything but shreds and patches in that musty tabernacle. Wherever you go in Italy you receive some such intimation as this of the shrunken proportions of Catholicism, and every church ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... the girl, "a little farther to the right, where the sunlight falls upon the trunks behind you; but you mustn't look wooden. That will do. Still, you'll have to take off that jacket. It's frippery." ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... bitterly, "that you understand the frippery taste of this trivial age better than I. A capability to appreciate solid reading, reading that cultivates the understanding while it amends the heart, seems to be with the forgotten learning before the flood. They who pander to this diseased appetite have much to answer for; not," he ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... served by pretty bareheaded girls who ran to and from the restaurants across the way. On both sides flashed and glittered the little shops full of silver, glass, jewelry, terracotta figurines, wood-carvings, and all the idle frippery of watering-place traffic: they suggested Paris, and they suggested Saratoga, and then they were of Carlsbad and of no place else in the world, as the crowd which might have been that of other cities at certain moments could only have ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... generous for that—but she seemed crisp, clean-cut, and wholesome What first struck O'Neil was her effect of boyishness. From the crown of her plain straw "sailor" to the soles of her sensible walking-boots there was no suggestion of feminine frippery. She wore a plain shirtwaist and a tailored skirt, and her hair was arranged simply. The wave in its pale gold was the only concession to mere prettiness. Yet she gave no impression of deliberate masculinity. She struck one as merely not interested in clothes, ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... Stage abound. Though you shou'd change them oftener than your Fashions, There still wou'd be enough for your Occasions: But ours are not so easily supplied, All that cou'd e'er quit cost, we have already tried. Nay, dear sometimes have bought the Frippery stuff. | This, Widows, you—I mean the old and tough— | Will never think, be ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... their rounds, and performing their duties with an ease and facility that promised a speedy termination to their labors, when suddenly they came upon an instrument that, from its external appearance,—solidly rich, yet free from the frippery that was then rather in fashion,—attracted their attention. One of the company opened the case, and carelessly struck a few chords. The others were doing the same with its neighbors, but somehow they ceased ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various |
