"Insipidness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... declared, 'we are all—Scott, Wordsworth, Moore, Campbell, and I—upon a wrong revolutionary poetical system, not worth a damn in itself;' but among these are some leaders of the great nineteenth-century renaissance in English verse; and Byron was foremost in the revolt against unnatural insipidity which has brought us through romance to realism, by his clear apprehension of natural form and colour, and even by the havoc which he made among conventional respectabilities. He dwelt too incessantly upon his own sorrows and sufferings; and in the gloomy ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... intelligent and could meet men on a basis of equality. If I were president of a college, I would certainly have a Chair devoted to Psychic Mixability, or Charm of Manner. Ponderosity, profundity and insipidity may have their place, but the man with Charm of Manner keeps his capital active. His soul is fluid. I have never been in possession of enough of this Social Radium to analyze it, but I know it has the power of dissolving opposition, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... unconsciously revealing her nature to the sagacious matron, who felt the girl, if won, would not become a pretty toy, soon wearying her son by insipidity of character. "I know better," the lady thought, "than to agree with brother and sister that Louise is merely wilful and perverse." Feeling that she was incapable of controlling her son, she would be glad to delegate this task to the one who ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... Italy the cicisbeatura was in its origin partly Gothic and partly Oriental. It combined the chivalry of northern friendship with the refined passion of the South for the seclusion of women. As an experiment in protest against the insipidity which is too often an accompaniment of conjugal intercourse the institution might well seem to deserve a more tolerant and impartial investigation than it has yet received at the hands of our sociologists. A survival so picturesque could hardly ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... the coast, and, internally, exhibit taste in their furniture and ornament. The ladies excite the author's pen into absolute rapture; their sparkling eyes and glossy hair, are, in themselves, sufficient to negative the idea of tameness or insipidity, while their sylph-like figures exhibit fresh graces at every step. This is supported by the more important qualities, of "being by far the more industrious half of the community, and performing their household ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... was as firm as he was puritanical—and obstinately interposed his authority as a husband, to prevent my indulging in my favorite entertainments. This state of affairs continued, my dear, until you attained the age of sixteen, when you began to feel a distaste for the insipidity of a domestic life, and longed for a change.—Our positions were then precisely similar: we both were debarred from the delights of gay society, for which we so ardently longed. One obstacle, and one only, lay in our ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... Dodsley and other collectors will be found numerous attempts at Allegorical Odes: they are almost all nauseous failures—without originality or distinctness of conception; bald in their language, lame in their numbers, and repulsive from their insipidity of ideas. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... there was a worse feature than this limitation indicated. "Mealie-pap" without milk was bad enough; minus sugar it was unthinkable. But the "Law" would not permit us to sweeten the "pap" any more—that is to say, the reduced allowance of sugar was all too little for neutralising the insipidity of black tea. We were also restricted to a fixed complement per unit of tea and coffee—as much as we required in any circumstances, but, ironically enough, a little more than we required of the stimulants in their undiluted ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... position too well to expect that after a while, with the usual interval, he might return to power. He had been Prime Minister, not as the leading politician on either side, not as the king of a party, but,—so he told himself,—as a stop-gap. There could be nothing for him now till the insipidity of life should gradually fade ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... there ensued a long continuance of wet weather; it was a very tearful season). Oddly enough, that same presentiment did not make us particularly melancholy or uncomfortable, but seemed rather to give a zest to our simple pleasures, relieving them from any tinge of sameness or insipidity. When the denouement came we did not exactly see things in the same light certainly, and it took some time to settle thoroughly down into our present theory, that "it was all ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... sometimes, perhaps, exceeded its boundaries, and have fallen into the most hateful of all hateful qualities, affectation. Indeed, it is the peculiar characteristic of men of genius to be afraid of coldness and insipidity, from which they think they never can be too far removed. It particularly happens to these great masters of grace and elegance. They often boldly drive on to the very verge of ridicule; the spectator is alarmed, but at the same time admires ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... and leader to whom he was loyal to the last. The practice of delivering set eulogies to the memory of the departed great is the most difficult that falls to the lot of a Leader on either side of House of Commons. In some hands it has uncontrollable tendency to the artificiality and insipidity of funeral baked meats. DISRAELI was a failure on such occasions; GLADSTONE at his best. PRINCE ARTHUR, usually supreme, did not to-day reach his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various
... safe. He told me, that he had frequently been offered country preferment, if he would consent to take orders[349]; but he could not leave the improved society of the capital, or consent to exchange the exhilarating joys and splendid decorations of publick life, for the obscurity, insipidity, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... small plates for book illustration. The cheap wood-cutting and etching of popular illustrated books have been endlessly mischievous to public taste: they first obtained their power in a general reaction of the public mind from the insipidity of the lower school of line engraving, brought on it by servile persistence in hack work for ignorant publishers. The last dregs of it may still be seen in the sentimental landscapes engraved for cheap ladies' pocket-books. But the woodcut can never, educationally, take the place ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... the French garden conceal at most a few harmless creatures. That is doubtless a misfortune; but, taking it all in all, we like a crocodile better than a frog; we prefer a barbarism of Shakspere to an insipidity of Campistron." But above all things—such is the doctrine of this preface—do not imitate anybody—not Shakspere any more than Racine. "He who imitates a romantic poet becomes thereby a classic, and just because he imitates." In 1823 Hugo had ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of inconsistencies, absurdity, and insipidity, can have been suffered ever to be performed, is a subject at once of wonder and regret. It is surprising, that Garrick never remedied the evil; a man, who had an ardent veneration for Shakspeare, and ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... no honor to Thomas Davidson's memory not to be frank about him. He handled people without gloves, himself, and one has no right to retouch his photograph until its features are softened into insipidity. He had defects and excesses which he wore upon his sleeve, so that everyone could see them. They made him many enemies, and if one liked quarrelling he was an easy man to quarrel with. But his heart and mind held treasures of the ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... a lifetime—or not at all. In the latter case it is natural to doubt the absolute truth of the rumours that the thing exists. The abnormal creature seems a mere freak of nature and may chance to be angel, criminal, total insipidity, virago or enchanter, but let such an one enter a room or appear in the street, and heads must turn, eyes light and follow, souls yearn or envy, or sink under the discouragement of comparison. With the complete ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Paul. And if I had to give [247] instances of these defects, then I should say, that Pope, in common with the age of literature to which he belonged, had too little curiosity, so that there is always a certain insipidity in the effect of his work, exquisite as it is; and, coming down to our own time, that Balzac had an excess of curiosity—curiosity not duly tempered with the ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... that we know as little about politics as pyrotechny—that we are as blissfully ignorant of all that relates to the science of government as that of gastronomy—and have ever since our boyhood preferred the solid consistency of gingerbread to the crisp insipidity of parliament. The candidates of whom we write were no would-be senators—no sprouting Ciceros or embryo Demosthenes'—they were no aspirants for the grand honour of representing the honest and independent stocks and stones of some ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 6, 1841, • Various
... that seeking for virile energy which too often spoils the most charming qualities. The sentiment is discreet without losing its intensity in order to attract public notice. The painting of Mme. Henriette Browne is at an equal distance from grandeur and insipidity, from power and affectation, and gathers from the just balance of her nature some effects of taste and charm of which a parvenu ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... with dishes cooked a l'anglaise is logical, excusable, almost advisable. Even the most ascetic of men cannot resist the insidiousness of spicy delights, nor can he for any length of time endure the insipidity of plain food sans sauce. Hence the popularity of such sauces amongst people who do not observe the correct culinary principle of seasoning food judiciously, befitting its character, without spoiling but rather in ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... The insipidity of Madame de Moret soon counteracted the spell of her beauty; and although on his return from Sedan the King had appeared to be more fascinated by her extraordinary loveliness than even at the first period of their acquaintance, ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... all I prefer to see "Le Pardon de Ploermel" in Paris than under the shadow of the famous, glorious German oak tree. I must also confess to you that my treading once more German soil did not produce the slightest impression upon me, except in so far as I was astonished at the insipidity and impertinence of the language I had to listen to. Believe me, we have no Fatherland, and if I am "German" it is because I carry my Germany along with me. This is fortunate, because the Mayence garrison has certainly not inspired ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... popular stage pieces of his day. Yet his extravaganzas have no wit but that of violence; his rhyming couplets are without polish, and decorated only by forced and often pointless puns. His sentiment had T.W. Robertson's insipidity without its freshness, and restored an element of vulgarity which his predecessor had laboured to eradicate from theatrical tradition. He could draw a "Cockney" character with some fidelity, but his dramatis personae were usually mere puppets for the utterance of his jests. Byron was also ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... also, to turn it also to good, if I be able. Eulogies, dyslogies, in which one finds no features of one's own natural face, are easily dealt with; easily left unread, as stuff for lighting fires, such is the insipidity, the wearisome nonentity of pabulum like that: but here is another sort of matter! "The beautifulest piece of criticism I have read for many a day," says every one that speaks of it. May the gods forgive you!—I have purchased a copy for three shillings, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... he had consoled himself by marrying a Miss Abercrombie, Miss Dickenson believed. These Romeos always marry a Miss Something; who, owing to the way she comes into the story, is always on the top-rung of the ladder of insipidity. Nobody cares for her; she appears too late to interest us. No doubt there were several Miss Abercrombies on draught, and he selected the tallest or the cleverest or the most musical, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... rigorous measures against certain districts in travail of local liberties, the first bubblings of that religious fermentation which resulted before long, in the south of France, in the crusade against the Albigensians—such were the facts which went to make up with somewhat of insipidity the annals of this reign. So long as Suger lived, the kingship preserved at home the wisdom which it had been accustomed to display, and abroad the respect it had acquired under Louis the Fat; but at the death of Suger it went on languishing and declining, without encountering ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... bed, it sends us there—or would, if it were a trifle longer. For the only thing that is tolerable about the book is its brevity, and a certain rapidity in the action. Macaulay, who confesses its absurdity and insipidity, says that no reader, probably, ever thought it dull. "The story, whatever its value may be, never flags for a single moment. There are no digressions, or unreasonable descriptions, or long speeches. Every sentence carries the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Graham's Magazine at one time showed a certain critical force, but it seemed to perish of this expression of vitality; and there remained Godey's Lady's Book and Peterson's Magazine, publications really incredible in their insipidity. In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal, with the moral principles all standing on their heads in defence of slavery; and in the West there was a feeble and foolish notion that Western talent was repressed by Eastern jealousy. At Boston ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... than Edmund, more judgment than Tom, more talent and taste than Mr. Yates. She did not like him as a man, but she must admit him to be the best actor, and on this point there were not many who differed from her. Mr. Yates, indeed, exclaimed against his tameness and insipidity; and the day came at last, when Mr. Rushworth turned to her with a black look, and said, "Do you think there is anything so very fine in all this? For the life and soul of me, I cannot admire him; and, between ourselves, to see such an undersized, little, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... broken in upon the dreams, had a word or a caress ever become a fact, it is probable she would have looked now upon it all as upon some childish fruit of delight, whose sweetness she had proved and exhausted to insipidity. And this, with no disparagement to her, for the most faithful heart is in youth subject to growth and change, and not free as to the exercise of its ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... The insipidity, the drudgery of it, would kill me. I should lose sight of the fact that I was my own mistress in such genteel slavery. Besides, as a concert singer (and I can sing), I should earn as much in one night, probably, as I should ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... are the consequences of such garrulous biography merely negative. For as insignificant stories can derive no real respectability from the eminence of the person who happens to be the subject of them, but rather an additional deformity of disproportion, they are apt to have their insipidity seasoned by the same bad passions that accompany the habit of gossiping in general: and the misapprehensions of weak men, meeting with the misinterpretations of malignant men, have not seldom formed the ground work of the most grievous calamities. ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... I am for theirs. But I will show the world I can be as mild as he. If they want insipidity, they shall have it. I'll meet this fellow on his own ground and ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... he had become acquainted had bored him by their insipidity or disgusted him by their precocity; but from this one there emanated a kind of charm which rested while it attracted him. It was pleasant to lean back and look at and listen to her; to watch the soft tendrils of dark hair stirred by the ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... Feeling that all extremes meet, and that, if one is not on one's guard, lowered fortunes may lead to baseness of soul, he kept a jealous watch on his pride. Such and such a formality or action, which, in any other situation would have appeared merely a deference to him, now seemed insipidity, and he nerved himself against it. His face wore a sort of severe flush. He was ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... enlarged in the autumnal intermittents as to be perceptible to the touch externally, and are called by the vulgar ague-cakes. As these glands are stimulated into action by the specific pungency of the fluids, which they absorb, the general cause of their quiescence seems to be the too great insipidity of the fluids of the body, co-operating perhaps at the same time with other general causes ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... to eleven our couple don't know what to do, on account of the insipidity of the neighbors, their small ideas, and the questions of self-love which arise out of ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... culture and conventions, crops out so little in manners, in literature, and in social usages. The fear of being unconventional is greater with us than the fear of death. A certain evasiveness, polish, distrust of ourselves, amounting to insipidity and insincerity, is spoken of by observant foreigners. In other words, we are perhaps the least like children of any people in the world. All these things were against Whitman, and will continue to be against him for ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... out in outrageous dresses—trailed the crying bad taste of their toilets over the fresh green sward; while beside them young men postured in their fashion-plate accouterments with light gloves, varnished boots, canes, the size of a thread, and single eye-glasses punctuating the insipidity ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... there is always that prevailing naivete of the age running through their rude eloquence, which interests the reflecting mind. In a word, these sermons were addressed to the multitude; and therefore they show good sense and absurdity; fancy and puerility; satire and insipidity; extravagance ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Ward; Florinda, Mrs. Powell; Valeria, Mrs. Kemble; Lucetta, Miss Tidswell. It is not entirely worthless from a purely technical point of view, but yet very modest and mediocre. As might well be surmised, the raciness and spirit of The Rover entirely evaporate in the insipidity of emasculation. This is the last recorded performance of Mrs. Behn's brilliant comedy ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... however unusual, well became her fair youthful face; "and I am afraid we should have to plead guilty in too many instances. Still, even those who appear the most thoughtless, have their hours of reflection, no doubt, when they feel the utter insipidity of a life of pleasure—false pleasure—and form many resolutions to abandon it; but habit is strong, and example powerful, and once immersed in the gayeties of life, nothing short of strength from above can make them to 'come out from the ...
— Woman As She Should Be - or, Agnes Wiltshire • Mary E. Herbert
... his abode in France, so perfect a knowledge of our morals, and so strong a tincture of our manners, that his style makes us forget his country. This small solecism was perhaps not unintentional. While exposing our follies and vices, he meant, no doubt, to do justice to our merits. Avoiding the insipidity of a direct panegyric, he has more delicately praised us by assuming our own air in ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... a little salt to prevent insipidity and to draw out the flavor of the several ingredients, but a grain too ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... with immediate attention, good-humoured enough to listen with patience to others, with great coolness and self-possession, fluent, communicative, and with a manner equally free from violence and insipidity. Few subjects can be started, on which he is not qualified to appear to advantage as the gentleman and scholar. If there is some tinge of pedantry, it is carried off by great affability of address and variety of amusing and interesting topics. There is scarce an author that ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... enjoy, for a brief space, this untasted pleasure? Ye gods! in our mind's eye we behold the heartless and unfeeling Charon refuse his earnest prayer, and see his languid spirit—diluted by disappointment to insipidity—wandering over the enamelled meads, as flat and shallow as an overflow in the dank ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... to enfeebled health; and yet he remains active and vigorous; he ascribes it to the powerful odors of certain trees which affect his brain. These trees he destroys around him, but his uneasiness continues; he ascribes it to his food, the insipidity of the fish which he has eaten without salt, since his quarter of pork is consumed, and his stores of pickled fish exhausted. In fact, the flesh of fish has for some time given him a nausea, occasioned frequent indigestions; he renounces it; his stomach recovers its tone; but ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... romances) was a better poet than the author of Partenopeus, and I also think that he was a better story-teller; but I do not think that the latter was a bad story-teller; and I can read him with plenty of interest. So I can most of his fellows, no one of whom, I think, ever quite approaches the insipidity of their worst English imitators. The knights do not weary me with their exploits, and I confess that I am hyperbolical enough to like reading and thinking as well as talking of the ladies very much. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... much; but when he did it was to discover in them some quality that he had not observed before. He found imbecility in the manners of Spinks, coarseness and violence in the figures of Mrs. Downey and Miss Bishop, insipidity in the whole person of Miss Flossie Walker. And now, as he looked round the table, he wondered how it was he ever came there. After living for four weeks with Lucia Harden or the thought of her, he had a positive difficulty in recognizing even ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... greasy impasto betray the neighbourhood of the tenebrosi. When, towards the end of the seventeenth century, Gregorio Lazzarini set himself to shake off these influences, he went to the opposite extreme. Although a beautiful designer, he becomes cold and flat in colour, with a coldness and insipidity, indeed, that take us by surprise, appearing in a country where the taste for luminous and brilliant tints was so strongly rooted. The student of Venetian painting, who wishes to fill up the hiatus which lies between the Golden Age and the revival of the eighteenth century, cannot ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... oil formed in the interstices of the cellary tissue. It sometimes agglomerates in animals whom art or nature has so predisposed, such as pigs, fowls, ortolans and snipe. In some of these animals it loses its insipidity and acquires a slight and ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... in stature, yet not so much so as to attract observation on account of superior height. Her complexion was exquisitely fair, but the noble cast of her head and features prevented the insipidity which sometimes attaches to fair beauties. Her clear blue eyes, which sat enshrined beneath a graceful eyebrow of brown, sufficiently marked to give expression to the forehead, seemed capable to kindle as well as to melt, to command as well as to beseech. Her profuse hair, of a color betwixt brown ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... character as developed in our little community; for we had, if we may so speak, the salt, the pepper, and the vinegar of human dispositions, sprinkled throughout the party, which not only took from the cold insipidity of our confinement, but gave to it a rich and pleasant relish. Our host's cellar and larder happened to be well stored, while the house was, in all other respects, an excellent one; so, what with the produce of the former, and the roaring fires kept up by ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... Christina, the insipid Brunswick specimen, backed by Seckendorf and Vienna, proves on consideration the desirable to Friedrich Wilhelm in this matter. But his Son's notions, who as yet knows her only by rumor, do not go that way. Insipidity, triviality; the fear of "CAGOTAGE" and frightful fellows in black supremely unconscious what blockheads they are, haunts him a good deal. And as for any money coming,—her sublime Aunt the Kaiserinn never had much ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... just like him. All originality faded out of the fabric of their lives, and they were only cheap, tawdry and dispirited imitators. That is one of the penalties which Nature exacts when she vouchsafes a great man to earth—all others are condemned to insipidity. They are whipped, dispirited and undone, and spontaneity dies a-borning. No man should try to do another man's work. Note the anatomical inanities of Bernini in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... bread and cheese, is naturally awful, but garlic used as it should be used is the soul, the divine essence, of cookery. The palate delights in it without being able to identify it, and the surest proof of its charm is manifested by the flatness and insipidity which will infallibly characterise any dish usually flavoured with it, if by chance this dish should be prepared without it. The cook who can employ it successfully will be found to possess the delicacy of perception, the accuracy of judgment, ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... results from all this, that while we constantly distrust our guide, while we perpetually refuse the appreciation he offers to us of men and events, we still read on with interest a work which is, at least, relieved from the charge of insipidity or dulness; and indeed, if we had not derived some entertainment from its perusal, we should not have thought of bringing it under the notice of our readers. To have engaged ourselves merely in combating its errors and misrepresentations, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... devotion of Meg Merrilies, the grandeur of her figure, the music of her songs, more than redeem the character of Dirk Hatteraick, even if we hold, with the "Edinburgh" reviewer, that he is "a vulgar bandit of the German school," just as the insipidity and flageolet of the hero are redeemed by the ballad sung in the moment of recognition. "Are these the Links of Forth, she said, Or are they the crooks of Dee, Or the bonnie woods of Warroch Head, That I so fain would see?" "Guy Mannering," according ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the place of the trash now before us. Even in the worst of these productions, there are, no doubt, occasional little traits of delicate feeling and original fancy; but these are quite lost and obscured in the mass of childishness and insipidity with which they are incorporated; nor can any thing give us a more melancholy view of the debasing effects of this miserable theory, than that it has given ordinary men a right to wonder at the folly ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... category of the dilettante, it is precisely this desire for "general improvement" that has encouraged such a curious outpouring from mediocre though sensitive hearts. The absence of strong literary tradition, the lack of deep literary soil, has been responsible for the insipidity of the product. The habit of reference to the taste of the majority has prevented us from taking this product too seriously. Without that instinctive distrust of the merely literary common to all bourgeois communities, we might well be presenting to you as typical ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... owing to the fastidiousness of my caprice than the delicacy of my taste; but I am so often tired, disgusted and hurt with insipidity, affectation, and pride of mankind, that when I meet with a person "after my own heart," I positively feel what an orthodox Protestant would call a species of idolatry, which acts on my fancy like inspiration; and I can no more desist rhyming on the ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... was present. The old man insisted that I should take a seat at the table and join them in a bottle of wine, which I did. It was a family, bearing apparently all the elements within itself of a happiness the most perfect and profound. Particularly an amiable family. Yet there was no insipidity. The father has already been made known; the son should be by this time; the mother was one of those strong-minded, simple women, whose mind may be expressed by its most striking characteristic—independence. She had that most obvious ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... scorn, The love of love Hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness of life I did not know, and I hated to ask If he was half as bad, he would have been too bad to be In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal Incredible in their insipidity Industrial slavery Love of freedom and the hope of justice Man who had so much of the boy in him Met with kindness, if not honor Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps Never paid in anything but hopes of paying Not quite himself till he had made you aware ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of William Dean Howells • David Widger
... for breakfast, oranges brought down the coast, and he was surprised at their sudden insipidity. They were little better than faintly sweetened water. He turned and in the pocket of his flannel coat found one of those he had picked the night before. It was as keen as a knife; the peculiar aroma ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... little stock, unless the meat is exposed; in which case a little boiling water may be added, but only enough to cover it. After six hours' slow and gentle simmering, the stock is done; and it should not be continued on the fire, longer than is necessary, or it will tend to insipidity. ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... can see, the given world is there only for the sake of the operation. At any rate, to operate upon it is our only chance of approaching it; for never can we get a glimpse of it in the unimaginable insipidity of its virgin estate. To bid the man's subjective interests be passive till truth express itself from out the environment, is to bid the sculptor's chisel be passive till the statue express itself from out the stone. Operate we must! and the only choice left us is that between operating to ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... be forgotten, while condemning the meaningless insipidity of Wyatt's work, that it was enthusiastically approved in his own day, and that the public generally were as much ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... one needs a new language, or, at least, a parcel of new adjectives, sparkling with bright and vivid meaning, as crisp and fresh as just-minted bank-notes. They should have no taint of flatness or insipidity. They should show not the faintest trace of wear. With them, one might hope, now and then, to startle the imagination, to set it running in channels which are strange and delightful to it. For there is something new under the sun: aerial adventure; and the most lively and unjaded fancy ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... proper material for nuns and saints, but, to me at all events, not personally so sympathetic as the Norman women, who are no doubt quite as good but never express the fact with the same air of slightly Teutonic insipidity. The men of Normandy I regard as of finer type than the Burgundian men, and this time it is the men who express goodness more than the women. The Burgundian men, with their big moustaches turned up resolutely at the points and their wickedly-sparkling eyes, have ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... or was supposed to pass, in conversation."—Ib., p. 433. "Propriety of pronunciation is giving to every word that sound, which the most polite usage of the language appropriates to it."—Murray's Key, 8vo, p. 200. "To occupy the mind, and prevent our regretting the insipidity of an uniform plain."—Kames, El. of Crit., Vol. ii, p. 329. "There are a hundred ways of any thing happening."—Steele. "Tell me, signor, what was the cause of Antonio's sending Claudio to Venice, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... think of such a thing. She once said I was dusty, and whisked a brush over my face; but that was the only separate mark of interest I ever received from her. I had no reasonable ground of complaint, but I began to grow weary of the insipidity of my life, and to ask myself whether this could be my only destiny. Was I never to be of use to any body? From time to time other toys were carried away. Many a giddy top and lively ball left my side ...
— The Doll and Her Friends - or Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina • Unknown
... all the world, never crosses his imagination. His highest aim (and that only at last) is slavishly to entreat pardon from his brothers-in-law for the mere offence of marrying their sister; and he dies by an improbable accident, the same pious and respectable insipidity which he has lived,—'ne valant pas la peine qui se donne pour lui.' The prison-scenes between the Duchess and her tormentors are painful enough, if to give pain be a dramatic virtue; and she appears in them really noble; and might have appeared far more so, had Webster taken half as ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... it was very plain. She had that rare beauty—a soft eye. I do not mean the grace of insipidity, nor the quality of mere form and colour; but the full lustrous softness that speaks a character strong in the foundations of peace and sweetness. Many an eye can be soft by turns and upon occasion; it is rarely that you see one where sweetness and strength have met ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... Harrington, the gay "godson" of Queen Elizabeth, is not always unlike Ariosto; but when not in good spirits he becomes as dull as if her majesty had frowned on him. Rose was a man of wit, and a scholar; yet he has undoubtedly turned the ease and animation of his original into inversion and insipidity. And Wiffen, though elegant and even poetical, did an unfortunate thing for Tasso, when he gave an additional line and a number of paraphrastic thoughts to a stanza already tending to the superfluous. Fairfax himself, who, upon the whole, and with regard to a ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... Leucippe, wins upon us by her amorous weakness, and the invincible kindness of heart which impels her, even when acquainted with the real state of affairs, to protect the lovers against her husband's malpractices. Leucippe herself goes far to make amends for the general insipidity of the other characters. Though not a heroine of so lofty a stamp as Chariclea, in whom the spirit of her royal birth is all along apparent, she is endowed with a mingled gentleness and firmness, which is strongly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... seldom recovers a disposition to tranquillity. Vivian's good-nature had induced him for some time to submit to restraint; but if, instead of weakly yielding to the fond importunity of his wife—if, instead of tolerating the insipidity of her conversation and the narrowness of her views, he had with real energy employed her capacity upon suitable objects, he might have made her attachment the solace of his life. Whoever possesses the heart of a woman, who has common powers of intellect, may improve ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... the rathe tints of early dawn, cheerful light on shallow streams, the serenity of a simple and untainted nature that has never known the world—many such images occur to the mind while thinking of the sculpture of these men. To charge them with insipidity, immaturity, and monotony, would be to mistake the force of genius and skill displayed by them. We should rather assume that they confined themselves to certain types of tranquil beauty, without caring to realise ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... mean and vulgar did all the others she had known seem by comparison with him—how contemptible the polished insipidity of Walpole, how artificial the neatly-turned epigrams of Atlee. How would either of these have behaved in such a moment of danger as this man's? Every minute he passed there was another peril to his life, and yet he had no thought for himself—his whole anxiety ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... Ayliff; Mrs. Leigh played the nurse—a very poor part after Lady Plyant; Dogget's success as Ben Legend has been noted. Mrs. Bracegirdle's Angelica was doubtless ravishing: a 'virtuous young woman,' as our ancestors phrased it, but quite relieved from insipidity. ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... discussed with each other what were the circumstances that produced it, whether women felt it more than men, and what was the difference between them on that point. Frederick tried to express his opinion, and, at the same time, to avoid anything like coarseness or insipidity. This became at length a species of contest between them, sometimes agreeable and at other ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... Davoust hates Bernadotte, or Lannes and Bessieres, or Ney and Massena. It is all they can do to keep their sabres in they sheaths when they meet. And then he knows our weak points. Savary's thirst for money, Cambaceres's vanity, Duroc's bluntness, Berthier's foolishness, Maret's insipidity, Talleyrand's mania for speculation, they are all so many tools in his hand. I do not know what my own greatest weakness may be, but I am sure that he does, and that he uses ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ales, and other soft drinks were triumphs of insipidity, and their birch beer sickened the thirstiest child. But the making and the marketing and even the drinking of them were matters of high emprise compared to the keeping of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Berlin, which had in the late blessed Nicolai its chief organ, and in the General German Library its arsenal. The most deplorable mediocrity began to show itself more repulsively than ever, and flatness and insipidity blew themselves up like ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... are to be found in his four volumes of Travels in the East, to emblazon, with the brightest colours of the rainbow, forty volumes of ordinary adventure. We long for some repose amidst the constant repetition of dazzling objects; monotony, insipidity, ordinary life, even dulness itself, would often be a relief amidst the ceaseless flow of rousing images. Sir Walter Scott says, in one of his novels—"Be assured that whenever I am particularly dull, it is not without an object;" and Lamartine would ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... of the two forms of poetry is revealed in their respective manners of going wrong. The decline of the old English poetry is shown by an increase of diffuseness and insipidity. The old Norse poetry was attacked by an evil of a different sort, the malady of false wit and over-decoration. The English poetry, when it loses strength and self-control, is prone to monotonous lamentation; the ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... symmetrical the features of a woman are, the more does she approach to the style of beauty and expression and native gifts of a porcelain doll. The mind and the character can be so symmetrical that they will lose all charm and all significance. They descend into simple prettiness, which is simple insipidity. ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... discontented herself, she determined no longer to be the only one insensible to the blessings within her reach, but by projecting and adopting some plan of conduct better suited to her taste and feelings than the frivolous insipidity of her present life, to make at once a more spirited and more worthy use of the affluence, freedom, ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... Douglas Roy plays a somewhat difficult role—that of friend to the husband and undeclared lover to the wife—without losing our respect. He is in many ways a successful hero, and acts his part without either insipidity or priggishness. A genial optimist like Mrs. Forrester, as her old readers may well believe, sacrifices to a hopelessly unhappy marriage no lot which interests us. Disagreeable husbands die at an auspicious moment, and everybody is finally made happy in his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... melancholy contrast to the day we spent in Pompeii. The lingering summer had at last saddened into something like autumnal gloom, and that blue, blue sky of Naples was overcast. So, this second draught of the spirit of the past had not only something of the insipidity of custom, but brought rather a depression than a lightness to our hearts. There was so little of Herculaneum: only a few hundred yards square are exhumed, and we counted the houses easily on the fingers of ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... casada in the British West Indies, or prepared manioc root; and axi in some other parts of this voyage is mentioned as the spice of the West Indies; probably either pimento or capsicum, and used as a condiment to relish the insipidity of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... prefers to call it, 'the art of creating landscape,' pressed forward to perfection; engraving much elevated; and painting, if less perceptibly advanced, still (towards the close of the reign, at any rate) ransomed from insipidity by the genius of Sir Joshua Reynolds. The king himself, it was conceded, had 'little propensity to refined pleasure;' but his consort, Queen Caroline, was credited with a lively anxiety to reward merit and to encourage the exertions ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... experienced than to accept the dishes that are presented, and to drink at your own time the wines which are handed round. A fashionable dinner, on the contrary, seems to presume beforehand on the silence, dulness, and insipidity of the guests, and to have provided little interruptions, like the jerks which the Chaplain gives to the Archbishop to prevent his going to ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... it. The public remained cold, and, what was far worse, I remained cold myself. I thought over this singular result, and wondered how it was that music which, as a part of the operas for which it was written, had seemed so full of soul, now faded into insipidity when transplanted to the soil of other dramatic situations. I found the answer in the question. It was because I had transplanted my music from its native soil, that its beauty had flown. Then it burst upon my mind that the libretto is the father of the opera, the music its mother; and so, if ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... interested, that is a little lacking in our English ideal of young ladies: and we must be on our guard lest any school ideals of study and bookishness should actually increase this deficiency. Any one, mistress or girl, who makes good education to be associated with dulness and boredom and insipidity is again a traitor to the cause of ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... is an excellent specimen of an English woman. Pretty, without vanity or affectation; gentle, without insipidity; and simple, yet highly polished, in mariners. She has, too, a low, "sweet voice, an excellent thing in woman," and, to me, whose ears offer even a more direct road to the heart than do the eyes, is ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... indignant at such a vulgarly conceited remark from him. Without giving her time to speak, he proposed to read the newspaper aloud, and at once began, making a point of selecting the dullest editorials and the flattest items and witticisms, enlivening them with occasional comments of studied insipidity, and one or two stories, of which he carefully left out the "nubs." He was apparently making an unusual effort all the while to be entertaining, and Annie, finding no opening for expressing her vexation, ...
— Potts's Painless Cure - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... the beautiful evening over a long dinner of no interest to her. In view of the fact that she had so lately eaten that noble tea, the earlier courses could hardly be expected to interest her; but the sweets to which she had been looking forward proved of a most disappointing, though painstaking, insipidity; and she was indeed glad when the ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... luxuriant wit, rendered the complete dramatic forgetfulness of himself impossible. With this exception, the censure originates only in a fanciless way of thinking, to which everything appears unnatural that does not suit its own tame insipidity. Hence, an idea has been formed of simple and natural pathos, which consists in exclamations destitute of imagery, and nowise elevated above every-day life. But energetical passions electrify the whole of the mental powers, and will, consequently, ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... bones, and his hollow cheeks and shrunken jaws threw his massive forehead into striking prominence. His line of features was absolutely faultless in its statuesque regularity, but his face was saved from the insipidity of too great perfection by the imperious—rather ruthless—lines of his mouth and the penetrating lustre of his deep-set eyes. His dress—a black cassock edged and buttoned with crimson, with a crimson skullcap and biretta, and a pectoral cross of ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... have completely relinquished the hope of achieving such a success. His first attempt was a three-act verse comedy, "Ni el To ni el Sobrino" (1834), written in collaboration with Antonio Ros de Olano. Larra censured it for its insipidity and lack of plan. A more ambitious effort was "Amor venga sus agravios" (1838), written in collaboration with Eugenio Moreno Lpez. This was a five-act costume play, in prose, portraying the life at the court of Philip IV. It was produced ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... ripresa of the Tuscan rispetto, gives an antique force and flavour to these ditties, like that which we appreciate in our own ballads, but which may easily, in the translation, degenerate into weakness and insipidity. The Tuscan rhymester, again, allows himself the utmost licence. It is usual to find mere assonances like bene and piacere, oro and volo, ala and alata, in the place of rhymes; while such remote resemblances of sound as colli and poggi, lascia and piazza, are far ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... rather Bribri Deshoulieres, as we have seen, was beautiful, and simple, and tender—beautiful from the admirable sweetness of her expression—simple, as young girls are simple: that is to say, with a small spice of mischief to relieve the insipidity—and tender, with a smile that seems to open the heart as well as the lips. What struck people in her expression at first, was a shade of sadness over her features—a fatal presentiment, as it were, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... ill-natured view of any one's character, though very far from blind to the foibles of others. It always struck me that his mind could not be even touched by any paltry feeling of vanity, envy, or jealousy. With all this equability of temper and remarkable benevolence, there was no insipidity of character. A man must have been blind not to have perceived that beneath this placid exterior there was a vigorous and determined will. When principle came into play, no power on earth could have ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... undeniable insipidity, the volumes of Contarini Fleming cannot but be read with pleasure. The mixture of Byron and Voltaire is surprising, but it produces some agreeable effects. There is a dash of Shelley in it, too, for the life on the isle ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... was another species of ridicule: her shape was neither good nor bad: her countenance bore the appearance of the greatest insipidity, and her complexion was the same all over; with two little hollow eyes, adorned with white eye-lashes, as long as one's finger. With these attractions she placed herself in ambuscade to surprise unwary hearts; but ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... right sort, whether of four persons or forty; but it is impossible to talk when two or three hundred people are continually coming in and popping out, or nailing themselves to a card table. "Conceive," said she, "of the insipidity of two or three hundred people,—all dressed in the extremity of fashion, painted as red as bacchanals, poisoning the air with perfumes, treading on each other's dresses, not one in ten able to get a ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... garden or the state of health of various neighbours. But the other, the solitary letter, in its threatening whiteness, with its exquisitely penned address—there it would lie awaiting me, destroying the taste of the bacon, reducing the flavour of the tea to insipidity. I might fatuously dally with it, I might pretend not to observe it, but there it lay. Before the morning's exercise began, I knew that it had to be read, and what was worse, that it had to be answered. Useless the effort to conceal from myself what it contained. Like all ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... eye sparkle, till "heart, brain, and soul are all on fire," over the burning words of some Brontean Pythoness, but when you open the last thrilling work of Maggie Marigold, and are immediately submerged "in a weak, washy, everlasting flood" of insipidity, twaddle, bosh, and heart-rending sorrow, you do not shut the book with a jerk. Why not? Because in the dismal distance you dimly descry two figures swimming, floating, struggling towards each other, and a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of the repetition of the same or similar ideas, which ceases to please, and must therefore be excluded from compositions of Taste in painted landscapes, or in ornamented gardens; which is then called formality, monotony, or insipidity. Why the excitation of ideas should give additional pleasure by the facility and distinctness of their production for a certain time, and then cease to give additional pleasure; and gradually to give less pleasure than that, which attends simple exertion of them; is another ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... heart, and very often a want of poetic capacity. Therefore this is not a danger for the sentimental poet, but only for the imitator, who has no vocation; it is therefore often found with platitude, insipidity, and even baseness. Exaggeration of sentiment is not without truth, and must have a real object; as nature inspires it, it admits of simplicity of expression and coming from the heart it goes to the heart. As its object, however, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... I can keep my drawing-room free from insipidity, I am content. As to his walking through our conventionalities, as you term them, let him try it. If he doesn't butt his head against some rather solid walls, I'm mistaken. You don't half know what a bold ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... more amusement than news from the little paper, but as he turned it the headlines caught his eye, and instantly he was deep in the columns. Someone had sprung his mine before he had intended—it had exploded prematurely and with, what seemed to him, as he read on, a futile insipidity. ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... walnut, and it is quite the exception to find among any Persian walnuts growing on the Atlantic Coast or the Pacific Coast or in the middle of the country walnuts that are free from this tendency to astringency, to insipidity, and ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association
... nearly eighteen, and during her absence had blossomed into womanhood. She was not as beautiful as her sister, but she had a bright and pleasing expression with enough spice in her temperament to rob her girlish features of insipidity and make her conversation witty, if not brilliant. Yet when Francis Jeffrey turned his attentions from Miss Tuttle and fixed them without reserve, or seeming shame, upon this pretty butterfly, but one term could be found to characterize ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... Anson, related to me the following anecdote of the death of Lord Sc——. His Lordship sent to see Mr. Anson on the Monday preceding his death, and said, "You are the only friend I value in the world, I determined therefore to acquaint you, that I am tired of the insipidity of life, and intend to-morrow to leave it." Mr. Anson said, after much conversation, that he was obliged to leave town till Friday, and added, "As you profess a friendship for me, do me this last favour, I entreat you, live till I return." Lord Sc—— ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... Insipidity, weariness, and dulness marked the commencement of the concluding week of the Home Rule Bill in the House. There was no private business on the Monday, and accordingly for nearly a quarter of an hour—it seemed infinitely longer to the little group of members present—the ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... the foul crimes with which she was charged when living, and which still continue to shade, if not to blacken, her memory. That brow, so truly open and regal—those eyebrows, so regularly graceful, which yet were saved from the charge of regular insipidity by the beautiful effect of the hazel eyes which they overarched, and which seem to utter a thousand histories—the nose, with all its Grecian precision of outline—the mouth, so well proportioned, so sweetly formed, as if designed to speak nothing ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... and then we'll go and snare pheasants in the far plantation!' They explained to me once that being found out and punished added the same zest to their pleasures that cayenne pepper does to their diet; a little too much of it stings, but just the right quantity relieves the insipidity and adds to the interest; and then there is the element of uncertainty, which has a charm of its own: they never know whether they will 'catch it hot' or not! When they are found out they always confess everything with a frankness which is quite provoking, because they so evidently ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... fashion, and elegance disappoint the stranger accustomed to their brilliant combination in a London world. But Alicia had long since sickened in the metropolis at the frivolity of beauty, the heartlessness of fashion, and the insipidity of elegance; and it was a relief to her to turn to the variety of character she found beneath the cloak of simple, eccentric, and ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... her; knowledge of facts absolutely nil, but she is exquisitely intelligent in spite of it. She has a way of evading, escaping, eluding, and then gives you an intoxicating hint of sudden and complete surrender. She is divinely innocent, but roguishness saves her from insipidity. Her looks? She looks as you would imagine a person might look who possessed these graces; and she is worth looking at, though every time I do it I have a rush of love to the head. When you find a girl who ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... themselves, to astonish the reader, and to involve a trivial meaning in the smoke of obscurity and exaggeration. Their prose is soaring to the vicious affectation of poetry: their poetry is sinking below the flatness and insipidity of prose. The tragic, epic, and lyric muses, were silent and inglorious: the bards of Constantinople seldom rose above a riddle or epigram, a panegyric or tale; they forgot even the rules of prosody; and with the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... She is a widow, she has been married. I can't in the least think of her as a woman who has been married. Not that she strikes one exactly as a young girl, either,—she exhibits too plentiful a lack of young-girlish rawness and insipidity,—she 's a woman, she 's a femme faite. But I can't think of her as a woman who has passed through marriage. One feels a freshness, a bloom, a something untouched, intact. One feels the presence of certain inexperiences. And yet—well, by the ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image, Hall's Satires, and Cutwode's Caltha Poetarum; or, The Bumble Bee. The latter is a fantastic poem of 187 stanzas about a bee and a marigold, and deserved the fire rather for its insipidity than for the reasons which justified the cleansing process applied to the others, the youthful productions of men who were destined to attain celebrity in very different ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... plainer "stones" with which the churchyard is crowded, but is by no means distinguished for that artistic character—which it might have received as covering the remains of so great an artist. A small slab, in relief, takes from it, however, the charge of insipidity; it contains a comic mask, an oak branch, pencils and mahl-stick, a book and a scroll, and the palette, marked ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... of sweet insipidity, and a face of engaging paleness; there was a faded look about her, and about the furniture, and about the house. She was reclining on a sofa in such a very unstudied attitude, that she might have been taken for an actress ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... artists and students are exhibited. Were I to judge from the specimens I have seen here and elsewhere, I should say that a cold, glaring, hard tea-tray style prevails in painting, and a still worse taste, if possible, in sculpture. No soul, no grandeur, no simplicity; a meagre insipidity in the conception, a nicety of finish in the detail; affectation instead of grace, distortion instead of power, and prettiness instead of beauty. Yet the artists who execute these works, and those who buy ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... The insipidity of many of the antique Statues may be traced to the false assumption of identity in the corresponding parts. No work wrought by feeling (which, after all, is the ultimate rule of Genius) was ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... of these people, awkwardly contrasted with their personal absurdity and insipidity, at length provoked the serious notice of the two illustrious associates: the result was this German Dunciad; a production of which the plan was, that it should comprise an immense multitude of ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... insipidity; Twistiness, spiciness, and solidity. Hallelujah! I've got through! That is the best ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... you, faithful handful, who have partially apprehended the meaning of My mission, and have caught something of the spirit of My life, you are to be rubbed into that rotting mass to sweeten it, to arrest decomposition, to stay corruption, to give flavour to its insipidity, and to save it from falling to pieces of its own wickedness. Ye are the salt ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... that a child's mind does not want everything explained. They think that simplicity demands this lengthy discussion of every trivial matter. There is such a thing as a conceited simplicity, and there is a technical simplicity, that in its barrenness and insipidity is worthy only of a simpleton. In Jacob Abbott's "Juveniles" especially, by means of this minuteness, a very scanty stock of ideas is made to go a great way. Does simplicity require such ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... everyone knows how this should be done. It may be said that the preparation has a better appearance if the bread is cut very small before the boiling milk is poured on it, and also that the addition of a small pinch of salt takes away the insipidity. Rigid economists sometimes swell the bread with boiling water, then drain this off and pour milk in its place. This, however, is almost a pity, for milk is so very good for children; and though recklessness is seldom to be ...
— Cassell's Vegetarian Cookery - A Manual Of Cheap And Wholesome Diet • A. G. Payne
... of Denmark, Christian VII., was brother-in-law of George III. He visited England; a mere boy in years, and still more a weak boy in insipidity of character. A large dinner-party was given in his honor at the Royal Palace. Franklin was one of the guests. In some way unexplained, he impressed the boy-king with a sense of his inherent and peculiar ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... registry-offices, how little is it to the credit of the mass of the reading public that they peruse such stuff; or would it be perused at all, but for that vulgar love, so prevalent about town, of imitation of the Lady Fannys and Lady Mary Dollymops, their nonchalance, their insipidity, their studied ease, and their affectation ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... she left the stage for good. In our more pious, and far chaster times, These sure no longer are the Muse's crimes! But some complain that, former faults to shun, The reformation to extremes has run. The frantic hero's wild delirium past, Now insipidity succeeds bombast: So slow Melpomene's cold numbers creep, Here dulness seems her drowsy court to keep, And we are scarce awake, whilst you are fast asleep. Thalia, once so ill-behaved and rude, Reform'd, is now become an arrant prude; Retailing ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... believe! Such is the theory of the censors who deal heavily with our Englishwomen of the present day. Our daughters should be educated to be wives, but, forsooth, they should never wish to be wooed! The very idea is but a remnant of the tawdry sentimentality of an age in which the mawkish insipidity of the women was the reaction from the vice of that preceding it. That our girls are in quest of husbands, and know well in what way their lines in life should be laid, is a fact which none can dispute. Let men be taught to recognise the same truth as regards themselves, ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... regarded as null and void, and that the arrested insurgents shall be set free. For repressive purposes, it dispatches a sentimental exhortation to the French people, consisting of twelve pages of literary insipidity, which Florian might have composed for his Estilles and his Nemorins.[3267]—New conflagrations, as an inevitable consequence, kindle around live coals which have been imperfectly extinguished. In the district of Saintes,[3268] M. Dupaty, counselor of the parliament ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... eyelashes were many shades darker than her hair, relieving her face altogether from that charge of insipidity which is so often, and for the most part so truly, brought against fair-haired and fair-featured beauties. The eyes themselves, which those long lashes shrouded, were of the deepest violet blue; so deep, that at first ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... paraphrase the sense is this "But say my opponents, the Stoics and Antiocheans, we desire no better senses than we have." Well you are like the mole, which does not yearn for the light because it does not know what light is. Of course all the ancients thought the mole blind. A glance will show the insipidity of the sense given by Halm's reading. Quererer cum deo: would enter into an altercation with the god. The phrase, like [Greek: loidoresthai tini] as opposed to [Greek: loidorein tina] implies mutual recrimination, cf. Pro Deiotaro 9 querellae cum Deiotaro. The ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... in our moments of utter idleness and insipidity, we turn to the sky as a last resource, which of its phenomena do we speak of? One says, it has been wet; and another, it has been windy; and another, it has been warm. Who, among the whole chattering crowd, ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... he again join any Ministry. At this time there was no idea of another coalition. That is a state of things which cannot come about frequently,—which can only be reproduced by men who have never hitherto felt the mean insipidity of such a condition. But they who had served on the Liberal side in that coalition must again put their shoulders to the wheel. Of course it was in every man's mouth that the Duke must be induced to forget his miseries ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... intervals of the dancing, little trays of tea and of cakes are repeatedly carried round,—astonishing cakes, in every gradation of insipidity, with the oddest names: white poison, nuns' kisses, angels' crops, cats' tails, heavenly bacon, royal eggs, coruscations, cocked hats, and esquecidos, or oblivion cakes, the butter being omitted. It seems an unexpected symbol ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... improvements, to the social enjoyments; and has, though not without flaws of ill-weather,—from the Tobacco-Parliament perhaps rather less than formerly, and from the Finance-quarter perhaps rather more,—a sunny time. His innocent insipidity of a Wife, too, appears to have been happy. She had the charm of youth, of good looks; a wholesome perfect loyalty of character withal; and did not "take to pouting," as was once apprehended of her, but pleasantly gave and received of what was going. This poor Crown-Princess, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... indifference, toward you increases daily; the more I see of you, the more you appear in my eyes an object of contempt.— I feel myself every way disposed and determined to hate you. Believe me, I never had an intention to offer you my hand. Our last conversation has left a tedious insipidity, which has by no means given me the most exalted idea of your character; your temper would make me extremely unhappy, and if we are united, I shall experience nothing but the hatred of my parents, added to their everlasting dis- pleasure in living with ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... thin woman, upright even to formality in her figure, and serious even to sourness in her aspect. Her complexion was sallow, and her features small, without beauty, and naturally without expression; but a lucky contraction of the brow had rescued her countenance from the disgrace of insipidity by giving it the strong characters of pride and ill-nature. She was not a woman of many words; for, unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas; of the few syllables which did escape her, not one fell to the share of Miss ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... occasioned by the embarrassing nature of the sonnet: a form of composition I do not love, and which is almost intolerable in any language but Italian, which furnishes such a profusion of rhymes. To our tongue the sonnet is mortal, and the parent of insipidity. The Mutation in some degree of it was extremely noxious to a true poet, our Spenser; and he was the more injudicious by lengthening his stanza in a language so barren of rhymes as ours, and in which ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole |
